The French philosopher René Guénon denounced the present era as “the reign of quantity”—a time when all values are merely quantitative: quality is unnoticed and unappreciated.
Largely, he is right. As an example, we might take current discussions about the cost of a wife.
This is not about wife purchase in some antiquated sense. It is about estimating the value of the services of a wife—or, to put it more neutrally, a stay-at-home parent.
In 2019, Salary.com estimated this to be a handsome $178,201. See this source for a snapshot of the average American household income.
This figure comes from computing the hourly value of all the tasks performed by a typical stay-at-home parent: for example, laundry (it costs $1-2 per pound to have it washed professionally) or cooking. A professional chef would get paid $50 an hour, so if you estimate three hours a day at meal preparation, that comes to $1,050 a week. And so on.
Here’s one from Investopedia that’s particularly relevant to retail grocery: “A homemaker must drive to the supermarket, purchase the food and unpack it at home. Let’s say grocery delivery services charge a delivery fee of $20, and homemaker shops twice a week. It would equal $160 a month spent simply getting groceries to and from the store into a home, let alone cooking them three meals a day.”
I doubt that this discussion is completely serious. Nobody except the spouse of someone very rich makes $180,000 a year just for being a spouse. It is, rather, an attempt to highlight how much labor from (chiefly) wives and mothers is really worth.
Blogger Vader Diem comments, “It is charming to see such an effort toward appreciating their value, but misguided, turning the labors of motherhood into a marketable asset—into capital.”
What’s wrong with that? As Guénon understood, we view everything else that way.
This whole question is particularly interesting at present, with what many term the Great Resignation—people simply walking off their jobs.
How many of these people are spouses who realize that they are not earning enough to pay for the services they then have to outsource? More than one American mother has realized that she is not making enough to pay for day care, much less anything else.
How, you may ask, is this relevant to the produce industry? If enough people dump their jobs for these reasons, the trend toward eating at home may long outlast the pandemic. All else being equal, this would mean a bigger market for retail produce and a reduced market for foodservice produce (assuming people who eat at home don’t eat out as much).
Business decisions can be divided into two types.
Microdecisions deal with day-to-day matters: “That guy stiffed me for two truckloads of lettuce, so that’s the end of him as far as I’m concerned”; or “That distributor keeps wanting more and more parsnips, so I’m going to have to plan for that.”
Macrodecisions are not only larger but vaguer. The United States is entering into a long-term shift in the balance between work life and home life, and it seems likely that many people will be putting more emphasis on the latter. It’s probably best to avoid the snap reaction of trying to decide whether this is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing and see how it might play out for one’s own business in the long run.
