”Have you stayed with us before?”
The bellman was walking toward the elevator as he asked the question. I said I had; I said it had been several years since I had been in the hotel.
”You probably have noticed our new lobby, then,” he said.
”Yes, it does look different,” I said.
”Completely renovated,” he said. ”The hotel spent $5 million to refurbish the lobby.”
”Yes,” I said. ”Really nice.”
It wasn`t until I got to my room that I thought: five million dollars?
How can a hotel spend $5 million to redecorate its lobby? How can they find ways to spend $5 million in a lobby? It couldn`t have cost all that much more than $5 million to wage World War I.
Yet this is just another example of what is going on all around the country. Any time there is a project that is meant to impress us, the figures are in the multiple-millions of dollars. When you sit down and try to figure out how the money could possibly be spent, you can`t. It may be a plot;
business people realize that if they tell us ”We`ve spent $200,000 on this new project,” the sum will sound paltry. Anything below a couple of million, we don`t trust.
Another case: There is a controversy in New England over an historic lighthouse that some people want to be moved away from the waterline. I have seen pictures of the lighthouse. Very quaint. I have also heard estimates of how much it will cost to move the lighthouse. Nine million dollars.
That`s right. They`re saying that to pick the lighthouse up and move it a few hundred yards will cost $9 million. I believed that figure until the $5 million hotel lobby made me start questioning things. Now…how is it going to cost $9 million to move a lighthouse?
The funny thing is, those monstrous figures don`t bother us at all. We swallow them like coated caplets. In our everyday lives, though, smaller figures-figures that apply to us personally-drive us crazy.
Example: In some cities, movie tickets now cost $7. People have protested this, they have threatened to picket against the price, they have said they will stop going to the movies. Seven bucks is a lot.
The same people who question the $7 movie tickets, however, don`t blink an eye when they read that a new film cost $30 million to produce. Seven dollars they can feel in their wallet; $30 million is so ridiculous that it doesn`t even annoy them. Is $30 million an obscene amount of money to spend on a movie, in this world of hunger and want? If so, no one`s complaining. How about $7? That drives movie-goers nuts.
Sticking with movies: People read that the sequel to ”Ghostbusters”
took in $10 million in one day. No big deal. They read that ”Batman” took in $42 million in its first weekend of distribution. Oh. Forty-two million dollars. No reaction. But if those same people go to their cars after seeing ”Batman” and find out that the parking lot is charging them two bucks more than they had expected to fork out, their blood pressures rise. That
”Batman” can take in $42 million over a weekend does not seem especially surprising. The extra $2 in the parking garage is a much more serious matter. Part of this is readily explainable: The $2 for parking comes out of a person`s own pocket. The $42 million doesn`t.
But much more of it is symbolic. Financial matters have spun so far into the stratosphere that there is virtually no figure with the ability to shock us-unless the figure is below, say, $400. That junk-bond guy with the big salary, for example; did he make $50 million last year? Was it $500 million? Was it $5 billion? Doesn`t much matter. It all sounds the same.
If you go to a fancy restaurant, though, and you get charged $3.50 for a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice-that you`re going to remember for a long time.
On the way out of the hotel, I looked around the lobby. It was nice and clean, but nothing spectacular.
I asked another employee, ”Did they really spend $5 million to redecorate this lobby?”
”Oh, no,” he said. ”I think it was only around $3 million.”
”That makes much more sense,” I said.
It wasn`t until I was in the cab that I thought about it.
Three million dollars?
