Cost Is Not the Whole Story

Who isn’t glad to hear that a new general store is coming to Station Place?

The news reminded me of a time, many years ago, when I was living in Tokyo and a man named Edward Luttwak published an essay about gasoline. He had just traveled from Japan to the United State and concluded that gasoline was of two kinds. His thesis went as follows.

In Tokyo one drives into a filling station, and two, three, or even four young guys come out to greet you. They smile and bow and hold the door as you get out, then pump your gas, scour your ashtray and dashboard, vacuum up briefly, before moving on to the windshield, headlights, hubcaps and tires. I drove a little BMW at the time, and filling it up cost me well over $100 in today’s dollars.

One leaves a Tokyo gas station and drives into a town or city of thriving shops on immaculately maintained roads and into a full-employment economy with low crime, a more or less drug-free environment, and a minimal welfare system. One’s taxes (which are high) are used to promote all of these.

Luttwak called this “cheaply expensive gasoline.”

Now to an American filling station. There is usually no attendant to pump gas or tidy up anything; often one transacts without any human contact at all. There are many variations, America being a large and unequal society, but it is common enough to drive off on potholed roads with weedy verges into a high-unemployment, high-crime, drug-ridden environment with failing retailers and a necessarily immense welfare system.

Even now one can fill a car for less than $50. This Luttwak called “expensively cheap gasoline.”

The tale of two gasolines stayed with me as I made the same journey from Tokyo to New York every year or two. Luttwak’s point seemed pithier each time I traveled in either direction.

Forward to Norfolk in 1995, just after I moved here with Caroline, my English companion. Norfolk had a hardware store then, run by a Portuguese couple from near Hartford. I needed a hammer, and there was one costing $12 in the shop where our new general store is to be. Caroline said, “At Wal-Mart, I saw a bin the size of a dumpster full of hammers. They’re $3 each.”

I thought about Luttwak’s gasoline thesis and said, “Caro, there are cheaply expensive hammers and expensively cheap hammers. I like having a hardware store in our new town.”

I bought the $12 hammer. (And still swing it.) But too few of us in Norfolk were buying either the hammers sold in Station Place or any variant of Luttwak’s thought. You know the end of the story well enough. My hammer turned out to be expensively expensive.

Our new general store will mark an important moment in the Norfolk story. The very honorable efforts of those who have made it possible mean we begin a new chapter. The store will not be there to meet the great bustle of local demand. It will be there because we, most of us, want it there. This suggests that we are beginning to think differently. Market value is not the only value. There are others, having to do with the kind of place we want to live in, that supersede it. No one wants to “museumize” Norfolk, but maintaining certain of a small town’s features, in this case a tiny commercial district, now becomes a shared undertaking.

I have no idea how our new store owner will price his goods, but whenever I do business with him, which I intend to be often, I will think of Edward Luttwak’s gasoline, and my paint-splattered hammer, and what makes a thing truly expensive or truly cheap.

—Patrick Lawrence