By Jon Berry
What do you get for a car that’s gone the extra mile for you? How about a trip to the car wash and replacing its missing hub cap?
Last week our 1998 Toyota Camry turned 175,000 miles. Fittingly the milestone came on a trip to the grocery store. While this mild-mannered sedan no doubt has daydreamed of lighting out for the frontier for a Blue Highways adventure, its reality has been more George Bailey than William Least Heat Moon.
(If Pixar ever creates a car version of It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey, the hero who never left home, will probably be a Camry.)
There have been a lot of trips to the store in this car. And commutes to work. Drives to school. And to the movies. The odometer may evoke adventure – 175,000 miles is equal to 60 drives across the country. But the furthest West this car has been is trips to my parents’ farm in Indiana.
This has been a family car. It’s been through two kids growing up and going off into the world; two dogs (note the chew marks on the rear-seat seatbelts); family vacations to the beach (sand in the trunk); Christmas trees (pine needles); and trips to college (amazing how much can be crammed into defined spaces).
And it’s done so with minimal repairs – a record that, with all the costs of raising kids, I will be forever grateful for. Which is one reason that, even as the Camry’s sidled into being our second car, driven only a few times a week, I’d have a hard time giving it up.
I bring all this up because I think I’m not alone. It’s not just cars – though my informal research, asking for a show of hands at speaking engagements for those whose cars have gone past the 100k mark suggests quite a few folks are in that category. All things “vintage” are being prized more these days, from clothes, to music, home décor, and recipes.
Staying power is having a star moment. Six in 10 Americans tell GfK Roper Reports® they strongly agree that they buy things that are “built to last.” That’s more than the proportion who tell us they’re “comparing prices and looking for the best price” on everything they buy. And agreement has risen since the start of the recession. Timelessness has become a theme among consumers across the world as well – and marketers have been responding.
I don’t think it’s simply nostalgia. There’s renewed appreciation of day-in, day-out, value-for-the-dollar quality – a value those who grew up in the Depression carried with them, and that, until recently, seemed lost on younger generations. As recession-singed consumers reenter the market, businesses should remind them that buying products built for the long haul will save them money they can spend on other things – even if it costs them a bit more now.
Camrys may not be cool in the way that the round-shouldered Chevys and sharp-finned Caddies of the 1950s and 60s were. But there is something innovative in them that I’d forgotten about until that magical rolling-over of the odometer knocked loose the memory of my then teen-aged son’s rationale for buying the car: “It’s the low-end Lexus.”
That quality of delivering luxury-car quiet, ride, and reliability at a middle-class price was part of a larger wave of innovation in marketing in its day that brought gourmet-quality food (Trader Joe’s, Starbucks), furniture (Ikea), investments (Fidelity, Vanguard), even running shoes (Nike’s “Bowerman” line) to broader audiences. In their way, they were as innovative as the first Fords, the first Chevys, or the first Apples. They’re worth studying for the lessons they offer us now.
We still have a ways to go to catch up with the Depression generation. I am reminded of this every time I travel out to Indiana to visit my Dad, go into my Dad’s barn, and see his two tractors – a shiny red 1940s International Harvester and his “newer” model, a shiny blue early-1960s Ford. Add one more reason to hang onto the 175,000-mile Camry – to see how its story turns out.
