If you pay close attention to your surroundings, you’ll notice a few changes. Peppermint mochas have replaced pumpkin spice lattes. Crazy suburbanite women everywhere are having aneurysms just looking at Macy’s advertisements.
These signs can only mean one thing — it’s Christmas season.
Oprah Winfrey, perfect human and supreme leader of all things jolly, released her annual “Favorite Things” list just in time for Christmas shopping. Some of this year’s “Favorite Things” aren’t out of the ordinary — a nail polish set, a sweater and even a copy of her own book made the list.
What is out of the ordinary is how much this list will run you.
If you were to buy every item on the list, it would cost $13,054. While the list is fairly long (there are 77 “Favorite Things”) most of the entries have price tags that will make the average American shopper gasp.
The first item on the list is one of the priciest. Oprah recommends a pair of golden Beats headphones with their equally overpriced companion, the gold Pill speaker. This duo is a whopping $700. Hmm, should I save up to buy textbooks for next semester or buy headphones and speakers that audiophiles say have “extraordinarily bad” audio quality?
One of the more ridiculous recommendations on Oprah’s list is a loaf of bread (insert joke about the double meaning of the word “dough” here). The Eli Zabar Happy Holiday Loaf costs $150, weighs 15 pounds, and measures 2 feet around. Sorry, but I’ll just stick to my $2 loaf of Bunny bread.
It’s lists like these, which often come around Christmas time, that show just how out of touch the media is with reality.
According to the Catalyst Knowledge Center, the median annual income of full-time working women was only $37,791 in 2012. And even though many married women share incomes with their higher-earning husbands, I highly doubt the average American woman will spend over one-third of her yearly income on all 77 of Oprah’s favorite things.
I used to read quite a few women’s magazines before coming to college. When I was younger, I’d read Seventeen magazine and dream of the day I’d become an independent working woman who could buy all of the crap they were being paid to peddle. Once I graduated to other magazines like Glamour and Allure, I was older, wiser, and aware that spending nearly $100 on one cosmetic item was not going to be something I’d be able to do in this economy.
I understand many Oprah fans will simply glance over this list and maybe jot down an item or two to consider buying for Christmas. Although it certainly seems like she has the power to do so, Oprah isn’t mandating everyone purchase all 77 items.
Earlier this year, New York Magazine published a listicle called, “White Album,” in which they named the best women’s white T-shirts. One of their top picks was a $250 Escada T-shirt, the price of which made my eyes bulge out of my skull.
They do, however, include a basic pack of Hanes T-shirts on their list — which range at about $8 for a pack of two — but they give it the snarkiest review I’ve ever seen. I really didn’t think a white T-shirt could warrant such a mean-spirited evaluation , but I guess rich people are looking for that kind of stuff in New York Magazine.
Because I work at The Daily Reveille, I realize that my target audience is college kids. The demographic that Oprah panders to, however, is the average middle-class American woman.
And just like I would never advise a broke LSU student to bring red wine to a keg party in Tigerland, Oprah shouldn’t be peddling $700 headphones to her middle-class fans.
SidneyRose Reynen is a 19-year-old film and media arts sophomore from New Orleans, Louisiana. You can reach her on Twitter @sidneyrose_TDR.