Sunk Costs... and Bread
Wherein I really overuse the word “bread”
The French are not a particularly practical people. That is not an insult. Practical people don’t invent the Citroën DS, much less replace it with the SM. Neither do practical people retrofit metro lines to use Dr. Seuss-esque rubber-treaded trains solely because they’re fond of a particular tire company, a tire company that moonlights as the world’s premier restaurant critic. So, it’s ironic that France is the best place in the world for bread for a very practical reason. They’re not the best because they have the best bread – the US has the best – but because they have really good bread you don’t have to jump through hoops to get.
In Paris, you’re never more than a few blocks from a bakery. If the closest one is middling, you go to the next, adding two minutes to your travel time. Also, the hours are reasonable such that you can get a decent loaf anytime between, say, 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. give or take. Oh! And a baguette will run you $2.
In the US, the closest option is usually a grocery store. There, you may buy sliced bread in plastic bags. Typically, you should remove the bread from the bag before eating it, but the taste will be the same either way. Or, the grocery store will have an in-house bakery where the bread looks pretty but is tasteless, and dry, and never expires.
Alternatively, you may opt for a bakery, but you’ll regret it if you don’t do some research. Take Levain of yuppie chocolate chip cookie fame. It looks the part, reads “bakery” on the door, and has good looking bread. If you give them ten American dollars for said bread, you’ll find it has the taste and texture of plasterboard. Then there are places like Balthazar or Daily Provisions, which once had good bread, expanded after people liked the good bread, and now sell bread-shaped fiberglass insulation. Even worse are places like Modern Bread and Bagel that look like bakeries, have “foodstuffs” that really look the part, but then bury the lede by not having “we don’t use wheat flour because we’re paranoid about gluten, the most necessary component of bread” written on the front door. You’ll learn that a rice flour roll just disintegrates in your mouth and will catch fire before it toasts.
Other times you find amazing bread, such as at Claude, then learn that they do not sell it. You get a slice or two with your meal and that’s it. It’s as if the only way to get peanuts were to take a flight to LA.
Yet, if you wade through a sea of pretenders, you’ll eventually be rewarded. You’ll land on really good places like Sullivan St. Bakery, top notch ones like Fabrique, and home runs like Alf1 and Seylou. Now, these will be some of the best bread you’ll find anywhere but 1) you’ve had to search far and wide for them meaning a sourdough entails a subway transfer and 2) they’re often the most obnoxious places in the world. They’re shuttered random days of the week, close stupidly early as though they can’t fathom anyone wanting bread after 8 a.m., often run out of bread before closing time anyway but never learn to make more, generally are a magnet for stupid customers in the, “what does the apricot tart taste like?” vein, and never seem to mind when people bring their filthy dogs into a commercial kitchen. Oh, and the bread is $15.
But, it is really good. That and the alternatives suck. So you’ll put up with all of it and beg them to take your money.
Anyway… sunk costs, I’m meant to be writing about sunk costs. Once upon a time, I found myself waiting at Seylou in DC. I was third or fourth in line so figured I’d be there an hour as the customers at the register inquired as to the provenance of the flour. But since I didn’t really care about who the farmer was, or whether he still played fiddle on weekends, or how he never missed an alimony payment, or how he was recovering from his (presumably unrelated) bout of secondary syphilis, I debated whether or not to get a pastry. Now the bread at this place is some of the best in the world but the pastries are hit or miss. They had canelés2 though, so I decided to go for it. Some indeterminant amount of time later, had you been at the Baptist church across the street that plays sermons on a loudspeaker as a form of torture, you’d’ve seen a man exit a bakery, take one bite from a pretentious dessert, then immediately chuck the rest of it in the nearest trash can. The canelé was a colossal ash-tasting miss. Continuing to eat it would have been a perfect example of the sunk cost fallacy. This brings us to an important distinction:
A sunk cost is not the same thing as the sunk cost fallacy.
“Sunk” does not mean “bad”. A sunk cost is merely any price you’ve paid (in money, time, effort, etc.) that is unrecoverable. For instance, time spent building friendships is sunk; you can’t get younger; but, it isn’t wasted.3 Money spent purchasing a house is not sunk; you can resell the house. Money spent adding giant Corinthian columns to the house is sunk since, if anything, you’ve destroyed part of the house’s value, unless you live on Staten Island, in which case it's a sound investment and will net you a large premium when you sell.
The sunk cost fallacy has to do with sunk costs, but it’s not the same thing. Roughly, the sunk cost fallacy is letting the fact that you’ve already invested sunk costs into something influence your behavior going forward. Had I kept eating the canelé, I would have been succumbing to the fallacy. I didn’t like it. It’s a pastry so eating it is actively bad for your health. I wasn’t particularly hungry. Taking a second bite of it would have made me worse off; the fact that I had already paid for it is immaterial. What if it had been a bad tasting apple? Well, then it gets interesting. It’s still a sunk cost and tastes bad, but, since it’s still an apple, it’s good for your health. It you eat the apple despite the taste because it’s good for you, you’re not falling prey to the fallacy; if you don’t give a damn about your health and eat it solely because you spent money on it, you are.
You know those cretins that wait in 15 hour lines for a phone or concert tickets? They’ll always say things at the outset like, “five hours is my limit.” Five hours later, it’s, “well, I waited this long, might as well do 10 more hours.” But when the justification for “might as well” is that they’re having fun with their friends in the line, it’s a festive atmosphere, what have you, then they’re making forward looking decisions. Maybe they wouldn’t have come in the first place if they knew it would go 15 hours, but they’re deciding to stay put because it’s fun.4 They’re behaving perfectly rationally here.
Most people understand this, but they, wrongly, assume that economists do not. We are socially inept in general but not wrong here. If you can get one to make eye contact long enough for a conversation, any economist will tell you that plenty of sunk costs are worth it and there are often reasons to finish things you regret starting. Only, sometimes, when there’s nothing in it for you or anyone else, you shouldn’t finish things just because you started them. The world would be a happier place if more people left the occasional restaurant meal half eaten, walked out of a concert or two at intermission, or threw Catcher in the Rye in a waste basket after two chapters. If you’ve read this far though, you’ve learned nothing.
Really wish they’d licensed actual Alf for the logo. That and it being in Chelsea Market means that, for the privilege of your $6-$10 baguette, you have to wade through a sea of Google Employees feigning autism to make a good impression on their bosses (weekdays) and tourists saying things like “I don’t reckon they sell rendered wallaby here” (weekends).
These are a fiendishly difficult to make pastry where you’ll need specialized copper molds, beeswax, and an oven capable of nearly 600 degrees.
I assume anyway. I like most of my friends but your milage may vary.
For them… I hate lines, which makes it all the more remarkable that I’ll put up with one for a loaf of bread.