Which Costs More ~ Keeping Cool or Keeping Warm
By Gregory Clark, July 31, 1926.
Which costs more – keeping cool or keeping warm?
Here we are shoveling out hard cash at furious rate in the vain effort to keep cool. In another fourteen weeks or so, we shall be shoveling coal.
Is winter more costly than summer? Heat costs money, whether we are trying to get it or trying to escape it.
“Ah, it’s lovely,” says Mrs. Fatt, as she fans herself in the discreet shadow of her verandah awning, “the money we save this time of year. No coal, no expensive winter clothing, no large winter dinners to prepare.”
“Yes,” says Mrs. Thynne. “It must be cheap living in Florida and other parts of the tropics.”
“I fancy,” says Mrs. Fatt, who is one of those straightforward talkers, “we must save a good deal from May to October.”
“I’m sure we do,” says Mrs. Thynne.
The ladies, of course, remember the furnace but forget the ice box. They remember the roast beef but forget the fruits in season. They recall the fur coats but overlook the dimity1.
Starting with the man on the street, his summer clothes are cheap. A light suit costs around $302. His light shoes can be as low as $4 or $5. His underwear is a cotton garment that can be got for $1. His straw hat is a good one for $2.
The same man in winter rig-out wears an overcoat that ran him not much less than $40. His suit is heavy worsted at $40, his boots are heavier, his felt hat ran him $5, his underwear was a bargain at $12 the suit. Then he has goloshes, neck scarf, two or three handkerchiefs in place of the purely ornamental doiley he wears in his breast pocket in summer; gloves. A man in winter carries around over a hundred and twenty-five dollars worth of clothes on him all the time, while in summer, less than fifty dollars covers him amply.
A dollar a day it takes to feed the furnace in the average eight-roomed house in winter. In summer, the cellar is the coolest place in the house. That is poetic justice. A ton of coal at $16 will last roughly two weeks. Ice, which costs from 15 to 25 cents a day, for those who have too much pride to keep their perishable foods, in the cool cellar, is no offset for the coal bill. For there are nearly six months that you have to burn some coal in the furnace, while there are only two and a half to three months that ice is absolutely an essential -though some folks keep their refrigerators iced all the year round.
On the other hand, the gas bill increases from May onward, after the furnace goes out, supplying hot water. The Consumers Gas Company says that the average bill would mount about $1.25 to $2 a month for the heating of water by gas after the end of the furnace season.
Eat More in Winter
Food, according to the dominion and provincial government Labor department figures on cost of living, does not vary greatly through the year. Eggs and butter swoop up and down across the seasons, but the staples, bread, meat, and vegetables, remain constant enough to keep the grocery bill pretty stationary fifty-two weeks of the year. We eat more in winter, unquestionably. All the restaurants say so.
“We cut our solid food dishes more than in half when summer comes,” says the manager of one of the city’s busiest dining places. “But the light stuff we prepare costs just as much as the solid food. So the check will be about the same year round.”
But if we eat more in winter, the cost of eating grows greater in summer because of the demand for fancy foods, fruit, salad, vegetables and fancy comestibles of all sorts. Ice cream, for example. Cantaloupe for two examples. The good old routine of beef and potatoes from November to April suddenly gives way to the maddest irregularity of exotic foods from afar, until by mid-summer, a man never knows what he is coming home to for supper. It may be a gorgeous salad containing head lettuce, radishes, cress, pepper grass, pimentoes, celery and fruit or it may be something soggy out of a can.
Fuel and clothing are two great departments of the family budget which demand many times the outlay in winter that they do in summer.
“Take a fur coat,” said the manager of the apparel department of one of Toronto’s big stores. “We have nothing to correspond in expense to the fur coat in our summer sales. Dresses run all the way from a couple of dollars for a little print frock to $300 for our most exclusive French creations. But there are thousands of $300 fur coats sold in winter for one $300 frock sold in summer. But there is this about it. A girl will be content with a very limited variety of costume in winter. She wears the one coat, the one suit and one or two dresses from November to Easter. Bu summer demands a great variety, three or four little dresses, with accompanying slips; blazers, sweaters, smocks, sport skirts, two or three pairs of shoes of different kinds, pumps, white shoes, formal shoes. Stockings can be limited in winter, but summer calls for half a dozen different pairs in varied shades.
“So you see, the summer clothing bill can creep up, almost imperceptibly.”
Creeping up imperceptibly is a beautiful phrase to describe the insidious spirit of spending which characterizes the summer season.
The summer vacation may be a two week one or it may be a summer cottage proposition. The house rent and expenses in the city keep right on while $200 to $300 has to be whacked out for rent of a very modest little summer cottage indeed. No end of cottages nowadays in Muskoka go as high as $700 and $800 for the summer.
While the family is nominally consuming its normal food supplies and wearing out summer clothes at the $300 summer cottages, Dad is home using the gas heater for his bath, electric light, paying either rent or mortgage interest on the city house, and eating downtown at a cost that cannot be less than $1.50 to $2.50 a day, unless he is one of those men of conscience who starve themselves that their dear ones may frolic into the great open spaces.
If the vacation is a two week family affair, then it takes the form either of a visit to a summer hotel or resort or motor trips. Either way, it costs money. It is a rare summer hotel that does not charge $30 a week per person. For two weeks, for a couple, bang goes $120, without a single mention of a single incidental. Railway fares, side trips, boat hire, would fetch the cost of the two weeks closer to $200.
Motor tripping looks cheap. All you have to do is put a lot of baggage on the running board and away we go. Gas, however, costs forty cents a gallon not far from the main highway. Hotels are no cheaper on rainy days than on fair, and the bill is the same even if you sneak up to a hotel in a motor car.
“The best part of a motor trip, anyway,” says a member of The Star Weekly staff, “is not the going but the stopping. And it is the stops, look you, that cost the money when you are moving.”
Does anybody spend $300 on Christmas? Yet there are tens of thousands of people in Ontario who pay $200 up for a summer cottage.
Do they give motor tires or grind your valves for Christmas? That’s the kind of present a fellow likes in August.
Doctor’s bills are much higher in winter than summer. But the visits of people to the corner drug store for bathing caps, face powder, ice cream and phonograph records are more numerous in summer than they are for pills in winter.
At first glance, the high cost of keeping warm appears to be greater than the cost of keeping cool. But the more you study the question, the greater the doubt that rises in your mind.
“I don’t think it is possible,” said an official of a government department whose job it is to compile colossal statistics, “to ever get to the bottom of such a question as this. There is a funny thing about budgets. If you study them, you will find that they never itemize human nature. They have fuel, clothing, food, etc., but they leave out the most important ingredient of all budgets.
“I think the truth of the matter is, human nature makes all the seasons kin. The average man spends all he has and a little more besides, whether it is January or August.”
Is it hot jinx – or cold?
Editor’s Note:
- Dimity is a sheer cotton fabric of plain weave in checks or stripes. I’m not sure of the context for the summer, perhaps for awnings that are placed on windows to reduce the heat? ↩︎
- I won’t bother calculating all of the prices in the article to modern values, but suffice it to say that $10 in 1926 is the equivalent of $178 in 2025. ↩︎
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