The Hundred-Dollar Hamburger

Note: This is the third in a series of non-political post-election posts. You can view the previous two here and here. The Toteboard will return to election analysis and political commentary soon, once it has had a chance to heal a little bit more.

Would you pay a hundred dollars for a hamburger?

That was the subject that a pair of boys in their early teens debated some fifty-five years ago.

It has been lost to history exactly why they chose that particular topic for discussion. It may have been that one of them had recently eaten at an extravagant restaurant with wildly inflated prices, or perhaps they had seen a comical skit on some television show. Or maybe they were simply trying to find something that they could ponder – the suburbs weren’t exactly the most exciting places back in those days, especially for a couple of guys who hadn’t yet discovered dope, damsels, or the Dead. 

To get a sense of how over-the-top this prospect was at the time, one need not look very far to find a little bit of context. In 1970, a hamburger at McDonald’s was going for 18 cents, one at a no-frills family restaurant like Friendly’s went for 40 cents (of course, a “big beef” commanded a whopping 60 cents), and one at a drugstore or bowling alley lunch counter usually fell somewhere in between. The national minimum wage had just gone up to $1.45 an hour, which means that even before FICA and various withholding taxes, someone flipping burgers for a living would need to work almost two solid weeks to afford just one of those gold-plated patties. Indeed, when the guys breezed into this sizzling conversation, it was a pretty outrageous thought experiment.

Be that as it may, Boy #1 argued that no hamburger, regardless of the quality, regardless of the frills or fancy décor or stuffy maître d'hôtel, could be worth that cost. “I’d never spend that much on a hamburger,” he stated simply. Period, end of sentence.

But Boy #2 had a different perspective. He argued that if one were so wealthy that one could make just about any mundane expenditure without feeling significant effects in day-to-life, there was no reason not to purchase the very best hamburger (or anything else) that money could buy. In other words, if one didn’t have to worry in the slightest about budgeting, about managing cash flow or making ends meet, about whether all one’s heirs would still be independently wealthy – then one could be free to purchase whatever he or she wanted, whenever he or she wanted it, regardless of the inflatedness of the price. The implications of this could be quite dramatic: if the hundred-dollar hamburger were even a tiny bit better in quality than, say, the eleven-dollar hamburger, one might as well just go for the gusto.

In retrospect, and using the second-order analytical skills that were not readily available to either of our fine young lads at the time, we can see now that they really were talking past each other, that they had framed the question in two completely different ways and answered it with two different sets of criteria. Boy #1 was clearly talking about value, about whether any hamburger could justify a price tag that high, while Boy #2 was talking about affordability, and implicitly about how one’s means could play into such a decision. There were two different paradigms at work, and we almost certainly can observe people today who are guided by combinations of those or similar paradigms.

Also in retrospect, one can imagine that there are probably other principled arguments on either side of the debate. But we’ll leave those aside.

In any event, the Toteboard right now is, for lack of a better word, stuck. Five decades later, it is still profoundly disturbed by the attitude articulated by Boy #2, and by the habits that no doubt follow from it. But it is really not enough to say that something simply offends one’s sensibilities, at least if one values intellectual honesty and critical self-reflection. And so, the Toteboard feels obligated to unpack and explain exactly why it finds this all so disconcerting and, by implication, why others should as well.

At first glance, it is tempting to take the basic position that engaging in this practice both violates the virtue of frugality and flaunts the sin of wastefulness. This is, of course, a somewhat Puritanical attitude, though the Toteboard must admit that it does have certain sympathies with it. Regardless, this argument is essentially tautological, in that it really does little more than assert that one shouldn’t pay a hundred dollars for a hamburger because, well, you should be paying less for it (i.e., frugality) and/or that you shouldn’t be paying that much for it (i.e., wastefulness). This hardly qualifies as compelling moral exhortation.

OK, let’s see if the Toteboard can dig a little deeper.

One obvious problem with the hundred-dollar hamburger is that the “extraneous” money spent there could do an awful lot of good elsewhere. Again, thinking back to 1970, if you paid even five bucks for the sandwich, that would leave ninety-five dollars to cover a half-dozen CARE packages. Or hundreds of school lunches.  Or nearly a thousand smallpox vaccines. When confronted with these alternatives, it seems hard to justify a one-shot hamburger, no matter how good it is.

But perhaps this is an unfair, or misleading set of alternatives. There will always be social and economic inequality, and to enjoy an occasional indulgence is not synonymous with indifference toward those who are suffering. One can almost imagine someone bristling indignantly at what may come across here as priggish and preachy: “Look, I donate ninety percent of my income to philanthropic organizations, I endowed a massive charitable trust in my will, and I spend fifteen hours a week delivering meals on wheels and working in a food pantry. Now will the Toteboard let me enjoy my fucking hundred-dollar hamburger in peace?”

But truth be told, the Toteboard’s beef here isn’t with the occasional indulgence. It’s with the attitude that such choices aren’t “indulgences” at all, but rather that they are the assumed and expected components of “ordinary” living for someone who enjoys extra-ordinary wealth. And as the Toteboard tends to subscribe to a Confucian theory of the mutually resonant relationship between outward ethical conduct and inward character and conscience, it would not be surprised were it to learn that those who routinely consume the contemporary version of hundred-dollar hamburgers are, in fact, less generous to others, less civically minded, and less sensitive to the natural world in which we all dwell.   

The simple fact is that one’s financial resources are just that, i.e., resources. And all resources – financial, emotional, social, medical, environmental – are ultimately finite. And to lay claim to the finite as though it were infinite, to demand access to the limited as though it were limitless – these are acts of profound arrogance, acts of profound self-absorption. "Let them eat cake."

In a word, this attitude of entitlement and the concomitant conduct strike the Toteboard as not simply disturbing or troublesome, but as utterly obscene. That is, of course, a highly loaded term, and as the late and wonderful Tom Lehrer noted, its meaning and the perception of it lie principally “in the mind of the beholder.” In fact, the Toteboard is actually perfectly comfortable thinking of “obscenity” as something that flouts and is antithetical to basic human decency – as long as it is understood that this is not the “decency” employed as a bludgeon by outfits like the notorious Legion of Decency, but decency as employed by people like Joseph Nye Welch when he called out Senator McCarthy for the latter’s apparent lack of that quality. And yes, if one is willing to engage habitually in untethered, untempered, wildly excessive spending for the same reason that dogs lick their genitals – i.e., simply because they can – then the Toteboard does indeed find that indecent.

When Boy #1 and Boy #2 debated the propriety of the hundred-dollar hamburger, they did raise a couple of important concerns that are probably applicable when most of us make financial decisions today. Is this particular something worth it? Is it affordable? But there was one other important question that neither of them considered at the time, and that one wouldn’t have expected a pair of young teens to come up with on their own: Is this the way one really wants to spend one’s money? More concretely, is it wise? Is it responsible? Is it compassionate? And yes, wisdom, responsibility, and compassion may extend to self-care as well as to altruism. If one can really deliberate on these questions in good faith and answer them all affirmatively, well, then the Toteboard will step back and extend sincere wishes for that person to enjoy a very happy meal.