Yeah, filmore, I think it isn’t necessarily about status though. Not entirely. It’s just something that some ghetto folks really are into. Like hip hop and graffiti and soul food and the blues and all manners of things that may or may not interest you. I like to travel. And not just exotic locals either. I’m talking ghettos in all the big cities in the U.S.
That is a lot of money I spend on traveling to places that offers me no ‘status’ in my community. I don’t get to feel like anyone is looking up to me for visiting ghettos! That travel doesn’t serve as a status symbol for me! It is just ‘money down the drain’. And I mean, a lot of money.
People who DON’T live in the ghetto also like to spend their money on travel. Much more glamorous travel, to France and Italy and such. But does one judge those upper crust jet setters for spending money on things that won’t 'appreciate"? No. They don’t.
Wait. I am posting from work. Can’t focus right now. I will post back later.
But I see this with other stuff too. There are plenty of people here with poor fiscal choices- folks with money problems yet still having the means to be online and with the time to make posts about how poor they are. I dont see how an ipad is so much more practical than rims, being that:
-They are both an example of expensive versions of things that have far cheaper alternatives.
-They are trendy and constantly changing each year
-They have limited appeal ouside their demographic
Or he’s putting it on his credit card and paying the minimum each month; creating a situation where one financial emergency could have him missing utility payments too.
In one marketing class in college, the professor noted that the preference for shininess of a product is inversely proportional to the income or childhood status of the purchaser. Poor people like shiny possessions, he said, because they think it’s what rich people have.
You can see evidence of this in inner city furniture stores, where there’s far more lacquer-style furniture, fabrics with wild prints and/or metallic interweaves, and items with chrome trim than in furniture stores in wealthier areas. The manufacturing costs of cheap shiny furniture aren’t lower than the costs of making cheap matte furniture.
It’s not just a ghetto thing. Flashy Rococo and French Provincial styles are very poplar among the ethnic white working class in the Rust Belt. “Eeyit’s so feeyancy”, Joanne and Rocco of Tonawanda, New York will proudly proclaim about their new living room set.
The preference for “shine” among lower income and status groups extend beyond furniture to other objects such as clothing and cars. Here’s links to two brick-and-mortar men’s stores. about a mile apart from each other, in a city limits of a Rust Belt city. One caters to a very wealthy old-money crowd. The other caters to lower-middle class inner city residents.
I think there’s two questions being discussed here?
Why do people in the low-income areas buy rims? I think this question has been answered pretty well. Every culture has their own status symbols. Rims are a very visible, portable sign of wealth. You take your car where ever you go. I can understand why rims are used as a status symbol in this case.
Why do people in the low-income areas overextend themselves so much to get these status symbols? I don’t think this question has been answered.
If someone buys an iPad, they are getting a very nice device that they will be interacting with a lot. They are buying a useful tool that provides beneficial function. If they buy a big house, it will have more space and probably be in a better neighborhood. If they buy a fancy car, it will be nicer to drive. Even if they overextend to get these things, they are getting direct, tangible benefits from spending the extra money. Rims, on the other hand, are less functional than the original wheels. They purely are for aesthetic purposes. It almost seems like rims are something that the super-rich would get. Essentially, they are saying they have so much money they can spend it on frivolous, impractical purchases.
The use of ‘shiny’ as a lure is probably a big part of college marketing class. Especially if you’re going to be marketing 22" rims or gold front teeth.
People in the tropics trap monkeys by tying a glass jar to a tree. They put a shiny object in the jar. The mouth of the jar is big enough for the monkey to stick his hand in, but too small to get it out with the object in his fist.
I couldn’t focus on this thread like I wanted to at work, but I would like to try again now; hoping it won’t be too repetitive:
We shouldn’t jump to assume that this is strictly a case of trying to show off how much money they have. There are lots of things that contribute to why certain things become valued within certain cultures. A hip hop artist may have a religious epiphany decide to start glorifying gold crucifixes. He works it into his songs, the graffiti artists pick it up and incorporate it into their art and the girls start to get big weave hairstyles that include a crucifix, and it becomes a part of the ghetto landscape. Drug dealers with lots of money wear the gold crucifixes with the diamonds all around it and of course they can afford more ‘shiney’ crosses, but that isn’t why they are wearing the crucifixes in the first place. A lot happened that made it a part of the trends in the hood.
One time this happened with leather medallions. As a matter of fact, the story went just like that. Some very good hip hop artists sparked the trend and everyone ran with it. There was a time in the hood when you couldn’t go five feet without coming across someone rocking a leather medallion around his neck shaped like Africa or something. It just happens sometimes that certain parts of ghetto culture may not be understood by outsiders looking in. I think it is lazy to just guess that big rims are a case of poor, welfare grubbing people trying to look all flashy when they should be squirreling away money to ‘better their condition.’ I’m sure some buy big rims as a status symbol, sure, but on a whole, it is just a part of what they like. They really have created their own little culture of appreciation for that kind of shit.
Just like people who like to spend big bank on travelling to exotic locales, there are people in every social class who make extravagant purchases that don’t appreciate in monetary value. Ghetto folks just happen to be in that convenient position of the bottom rung, where those on the next-to-bottom rung still have someone to look down on.
I don’t think anyone’s arguing they shouldn’t like what they like, or disagreeing about how trends start. The issue is why someone with limited income would spend thousands of dollars on something that offers no more functionality than the equipment that the car came with, but could potentially (and in some cases, does) jeopardize their ability to provide for themselves and their family. It doesn’t take an economist to determine that it’s not the best use of their money.
I just want to say that the notion that people are spending “thousands” on wheels is a bit overblown. There’s a difference between the $2000-a-wheel and $600-a-tire set that XZibit might put on his Escalade, and the shitty chinese-made 22" wheels with worn out tires and flaking chrome that somebody picked up for $600 on Craigslist to put on their 93 Buick. I know a casual observer might just see “big wheels” and think they spent a lot of money, but it’s hardly ever the case that the value of the wheels exceeds the value of the car.
Now, you might still think that someone spending $600 for some crappy wheels isn’t the best idea, and that’s certainly true, but that’s what young people do. You can find giant chrome wheels for under a grand all day on CL, which is certaintly an attainable goal for someone working at Taco Bell to save up for in a few months.
Why do middle-class people spend $3000 on a trip to Hawaii that could potentially jeopardize their financial security if they lose their job the month they come back?
Depends. Is the middle-class person behind on his rent, doesn’t have insurance, his car isn’t inspected, and his roof is leaking? Or does he have his mortgage and insurance covered, his car is working well, and his house is in good shape? In the first case, his life is already in financial chaos and spending $3k will make those troubles worse. In the second, he is in a stable position and spending $3k is appropriate. Losing a job will cause some chaos in anyone’s life, but there’s a difference between being in chaos and making it worse versus some random event that causes some financial issues.
Well, kind of. I think a lot of people think the trend of big rims started soley because poor people want to look like they have money that they don’t. I wanted to show how that isn’t necassarily true.
Spend it while you got it, so you have something to show for it. If you get $3K, it’s better to spend it on something that’s really tangible, like rims, than something you won’t enjoy or have something show for.
If they have too many verifiable assets, it could disqualify them from various safety net benefits; Medicaid, Section 8, food stamps, WIC, etc. The cost of saving can be much higher than the cost of spending when you consider the possible loss of benefits.
We’re assuming that someone can only buy rims if they make sacrifices in other areas. It’s usually not a case of “rims or the electric bill”, but “rims or nice furniture” or “rims or a laptop computer”. Yes, being poor can be expensive (payday loan interest rates, check cashing fees, high utility deposits, furniture and appliance rental, etc), but for those who are working- or lower-middle class, inner city living is cheap, and there’s going to be some disposable income.
Yeah, rims are stupid, and those that have them typically don’t belong to the middle class, but most aren’t starving their kids or living without electricity to pay for a set. Same thing with lowriders in New Mexico, or rednecks with jacked-up pickup trucks in Kentucky.
I think the origin may have had some basis in utility though. My Dad used to drive a very low-slung Jaguar. Anytime we needed to go into downtown Detroit he would rent a car for the trip. The reason was all the speed bumpps and potholes would otherwise scrape the bottom of the car.
Likewise if he encountered a nail or broken glass in the roadway, he didn’t want his $400ea tires to be the ones getting popped by it. (This was before run flat tires were widely available.)
Large rims are the only way to increase your ground clearance. All those jacked up suspensions you see on the country trucks are raising the body of the vehicle, but do nothing to prevent damage to the muffler and undercarriage from scraping against the ground. The only way to incease “pumpkin to ground” clearance is with larger rims.
So I can totally see how somebody who has to hear that horrific metal scrape on a regular basis - knowing that severe damage could happen at any time to his/her only real asset, and desperately needed transportation - might make putting bigger rims on the car their number one priority. If an extra $300 or so will make them into status symbols, so much the better.
So this trend all started because of bad roads in the hood? :dubious:
Wouldn’t said potholes damage those 22" DUBS as well? They typically are less durable than the OE wheels, IMHO. Why wouldn’t everyone in Urban areas drive jeeps or jacked up F-250’s?