The journey through adulthood is paved with expensive inconveniences one must perform to be considered a functional, responsible grown-up. These inconveniences include scheduling your own dentist appointments, dropping off your dry cleaning, and the less imperative (but just as annoying) obligation to frame all your art. There is something about displaying home decor with a wooden-and-glass box (as opposed to using thumbtacks or sticky putty) that makes it seem more legitimate and, therefore, more “adult.”

Historically, a frame has been an architectural feature, meant to preserve a work and integrate it into a room. During the 14th and 15th centuries in Europe, frames were mainly commissioned by churches or wealthy families. It wasn’t until the invention of the camera and photography in the 19th century when the demand for frames by the middle-class proliferated, as the nonwealthy now had something to frame. Fast forward to today: Framing is now a service that communicates, “I have my shit together,” and this is partly because it is a notoriously expensive service.

For those who aren’t art aficionados, the price of framing seems inexplicable. Why does an 8 x 10 frame at Target cost $13, but a custom 8 x 10 frame costs upwards of $90? The ascendance of online framing companies like Framebridge, Art.com, and Simply Framed, which offer fixed-priced framing make the already opaque process even more baffling. How can these companies offer the same price for a variety of different-sized pieces, but your local framer can’t?

However, the perception that custom framing is too pricey is also a symptom of a different reality: Millennial consumers — long past their poster-hanging days — have less money than previous generations. Young adults are decorating homes and apartments with more budget-friendly art. And while the price of prints may have dropped, the price of frames has not, leaving shoppers to wonder if they should invest in a frame that’s triple the cost of what it’s preserving.

To demystify the process of framing, I spoke with custom framers — both big box chains and mom-and-pop shops — and found that the seemingly astronomical prices have a bit to do with the price of labor and expertise a local framer can offer, but more than anything, it has to do with options.

Higher pricing is the consequence of frame stores keeping options on hand

According to a 2018 IBISWorld report, there are 9,000 local frame shops in the United States, and if you’ve ever been to one, you know it to be a pretty intimidating experience. You go in knowing you only need one black frame, but are then bombarded with a host of options: There’s matting (a piece of paper or cardboard that goes inside the frame and mounts the print or photo), molding (decorative embellishments on the outside of the frame), glass (referred to as glazing, which can be made of glass or acrylic, and, depending on what you choose, can offer UV protection), and the frames themselves.

According to Mark Klostermeyer, a member of the Professional Picture Frames Association, it’s the sheer amount of mattings, moldings, glazings, and frames a shop provides that drives up prices. The fewer options a business offers, the more able they are to order in bulk, therefore cutting down costs.

Klostermeyer has owned Design Frames, a local custom frame shop in Falls Church, Virginia, for 50 years. “I’m a second generation framer,” he tells me. Klostermeyer offers 2,000 different frames at his shop, along with hundreds of mats and specialty fabric matting options. He also gets custom moldings from eight different vendors.

For a 9 x 12 piece with 2-inch matting, Klostermeyer says Design Frames would charge somewhere in the $150 range, depending on the frame. He says his materials may vary from Framebridge in that he would suggest an anti-acid and anti-lignin matboard, and give glazing options that they don’t offer (which is quite possible as Framebridge only offers one type of glazing). 

Wendee Mai of 567 Framing in Brooklyn says her shop offers between 1,600 and 1,800 frames, hundreds of mats, and she uses molding from four or five different vendors. The shop also offers different kinds of glazing, both glass and acrylic, and the cost of those depends on how much UV protection a customer wants. “When customers come with a standard size artwork, like a 16 x 20 or 24 x 30, we still charge custom framing price,” she says. “We do not sell ready-made frames.”

Mai explains that even if a customer has a standard-sized print, 567 Framing has to special order the wood, which can cost as little as $8 per foot, or upwards of $80 per foot. This is where big box chains like Michael’s have been able to cut costs: They offer fewer, more standardized options.

Michael’s is the biggest framing retailer in the US and offers 450 frame options, 400 mats, and four glazings, both acrylic and glass through in-house framers Aaron Brothers. Although this is less than many local framers, it is still a vast, expensive-to-maintain selection, which is perhaps why they are losing out to online framing services like Art.com, Simply Framed, and Framebridge. Last year, they closed 94 Aaron Brothers standalone stores.

At Framebridge, a service that lets you mail in pieces to be framed for a fixed price, customers can choose from fewer than 60 frames and 20 different mat colors. Once you choose a color, one of their in-house framers will choose the hue that looks best with your piece. (“We have 12 shades of white,” Framebridge CEO Susan Tynan says.) They also only offer one type of glass, and that’s acrylic glazing. “We didn’t want customers to have to understand the ins and outs of acrylic and glass options,” Tynan says.

At Framebridge, all fixed pricing includes matting and shipping. If your piece is “extra small” (up to 5 x 7), it will cost $65 to frame. A small piece (up to 9 x 12) costs $85 and a medium piece (up to 18 x 20) costs $99.

Essentially, the fewer options a company offers, the lower they can make their prices. “It’s kind of mass-produced, or a variation of mass-produced, as opposed to one of a kind,” Klostermeyer says. In other words, if a company orders a product in high volume, it is often able to get said product at a discounted rate. Local framers don’t have this option, as all frames are made to order.

Klostermeyer adds that the cost of labor has gone up over the years, which has impacted operating costs at mom-and-pop framing shops, raising frame prices. Klostermeyer pays his framers $25,000 to $30,000 a year, depending on experience.

Why we don’t care for options

Custom framers, both local and chains, offer a wide variety of materials and in-person expertise which result in one-of-a-kind frames, so why are online framing services able to disrupt the market so significantly? Probably because the generation of consumers buying art right now doesn’t really care whether the frame is one-of-a-kind.

According to a recent study, millennials have lower earnings, fewer assets, and less wealth than baby boomers or Gen Xers had in their 20s and 30s. Millennials are also buying houses later than previous generations. A 2018 survey found that home ownership for millennials ages 25 to 34 is 8 percentage points lower than baby boomers and 8.4 percent lower than Gen Xers at that age. When boomers were 27, they were more likely to be decorating their first home, a place they planned to raise kids and live for the indefinite future, so investing in a quality home decor makes sense. Millennials simply aren’t there yet.

The proliferation of cheap prints may also contribute to the apprehension of buying a pricey frame. Historically, prints have been seen as a lower level of art, as they are reproductions. “They used to call it a gateway drug,” director of Bonhams auction house’s prints and multiples department Deborah Ripley told Bloomberg. “It was where beginners in the art world started collecting, and that would encourage them: They might have been buying works at a lower price point, but they could tell their friends, ‘Yes, I have a work by Warhol.’”

But today, you walk into a young adult’s apartment and all you see are prints, and not Warhol reproductions, but items like a $60 photo of a beach from 20×200, a company which started in 2007 with the motto “Art for Everyone!” And there are tons of companies like this, most of which started in the late aughts and have expansive collections. Pop Chart Lab, a poster company that sells witty, pop culture infographics started in 2010 and grew 50 percent year over year until 2014, according to Fast Company. Society6, which started in 2009, and Minted, which started in 2008, both offer a platform for artists to sell their works, often at a lower price point. All of these options make art more accessible.    

Klostermeyer says that he doesn’t think all things need a one-of-a-kind frame, but it’s worth it to go into a frame shop and check. One day a mom came into his shop, he says, with her son’s Jimi Hendrix poster that had been signed by all the band members. It had been under her son’s bed for years, and she wanted to frame it for him as a surprise.

“She said, ‘I don’t want to spend a lot of money on this, give me the cheapest thing’,” Klostermeyer recalls. “I said, ‘No, you don’t want to be the mom that threw away the baseball cards.’”

She took his advice and bought a pricier frame that would preserve the poster for longer, and if she had gone to a big box chain or used an online service, Klostermeyer isn’t sure she would have gotten the same consultation. “That $20 poster you’re buying now, 20 years from now may be worth less than 20 bucks, or it may be worth thousands,” he says.

Perhaps he’s right. But with my $36 Society6 poster of butts, I’ll take my chances.

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When Rosey Blair witnessed two people flirting in nearby seats on a flight, she decided to document their fledgling romance on Instagram and Twitter. She eavesdropped on their conversation, sharing it with her followers, and even snapped a picture of the two exchanging family photos. Her initial tweet got more than 300,000 retweets, and what could have been a passing observation transformed into a viral sensation — one that was criticized for being invasive and creepy.

But it’s likely that its original draw — why the tweet garnered so much interest in the first place — was partly because it’s the kind of reasonable serendipity that feels not too far-fetched to believe in. At this point, I’ve accepted Matthew McConaughey isn’t going to save me from a runaway dumpster after my heel gets caught in a grate. But an attractive single person sitting in the airplane seat next to me? Now that seems plausible. And a 2018 study, which surveyed 5,000 flyers across 141 countries, did find that one in every 50 people said they met the love of their life on a flight. (Which … seems high, so grain of salt.)

Of course, not everyone boarding a plane has the privilege of anticipating their seatmate in a positive way; many worry about seat size, discrimination, or just plain motion sickness. (Not to mention all the fears brought on by recent events like the Boeing Max crashes.) Flying is undeniably stressful and fraught with inconvenience, so for many people, a hot plane neighbor is pretty low on the list of things they hope for during a flight. But if one does have the luxury of a semi-relaxed trip, fantasizing that someone attractive takes the next seat might not seem so silly.

This expectation is continually reinforced by movies and television, where a character’s life is forever changed by an in-flight experience. In the ’90s sitcom The Nanny, extreme turbulence causes Mr. Sheffield and Fran to express their love for each other for the first time after seasons of anticipation. The airplane scene in Bridesmaids serves as a breaking point in the lead characters’ friendship and a sort of romance for Melissa McCarthy’s character Megan. And in 30 Rock, Liz Lemon hallucinates that she sits next to Oprah and gleans all sorts of advice from a person who turns out to be a preteen. In pop culture, life-altering things happen on planes, and it’s not a far leap from life-altering to love.

This logic also fits with what we’ve come to expect from travel today: a unique, metamorphic experience rather than utility. Thanks to the rise of transformative travel, a vacation is now sold not as a luxury but as a form of therapy, or, at least, a shortcut to contentment.

According to psychologist and founder of Growing Self Lisa Marie Bobby, LMFT, the allure of travel is the thrill of uncertainty paired with the anticipation of novelty. Before a trip, you spend days, possibly weeks, predicting every detail, so it’s no wonder this mindset extends to your flight. “When planning for a vacation, one imagines oneself having incredible experiences — eating the eclair in the cutest outdoor cafe, swimming under the waterfall — it is especially thrilling for singles to imagine that we may find romance along the way,” Bobby says.

Although these fantasies may be inspired by pop culture or the popular notion that travel is a catalyst for romance, the plane crush does serve an important function: to make flying less miserable. Similar to how a work crush adds excitement to everyday obligations, a plane crush can help you cope with what is arguably the worst part of traveling.

Even a plane’s design can lend itself to flirtatious fantasies, as the same factors that cause what is known as “air rage” (small seats, little leg room) can be oddly romantic. This phenomenon is known as the misattribution of arousal theory ( a classic theory, Bobby tells me). In various studies dating back to the 1970s, researchers found that when people are in anxiety-inducing situations, they are more likely to be aroused by those around them. In other words, they may misattribute a feeling of nerves or butterflies to attraction.

Bobby adds that because of the hyperemotional state of flyers, it’s not actually that absurd to believe you could meet someone you like. “Since it’s known that people in an elevated physiological state are more likely to perceive others as more attractive … it is actually more likely that two people would develop an attraction for each other on a plane than in other situations,” she says.  

Laney Gorman, 24, was making her way down the aisle of a flight from San Francisco to Atlanta when she noticed an attractive guy in the seat next to hers. She also heard some squeaking from under the seat and realized he had a puppy.

“He was in his early 20s, a very cute guy,” she tells me. “Not hot, but cute. He had a cute dog, which made him hot to me.”

When she sat down, she considered striking up a conversation, but upon seeing him stuff his baby Australian shepherd under a seat for a five-hour flight, she quickly fell out of infatuation.

And although she didn’t talk to this particular plane crush, Gorman believes that not having the seat next to her filled with an attractive person feels like a missed opportunity sometimes. “You see [a hot person] passing in the aisle, and you’re like, ‘Oh, wait … sit next to me,’” she says.

When I tell her I’ve never had the excitement of sitting next to a hot single person on a plane, she says I may be taking the wrong flights, as all routes are not created equal. “The flight from LA to San Francisco, an intra-Cali flight, is pretty intimidating,” she says. “New York-to-LA flights also are primetime hot-people flights.”

This would ring true for one particularly lucky woman who recently sat next to actor Timothée Chalamet on her flight from New York to Los Angeles. Her tweet thread details the hour-long conversation they had, and she even posted a selfie.

Airlines have picked up on this plane-crush fantasy as well. This year, Delta and Coca-Cola launched a marketing campaign where Delta passengers were given Coke-branded napkins that encouraged them to give out their number on the flight. The napkins said “because you’re on a plane full of interesting people and hey … you never know,” on one side and provided a line to put a name and number on the other, along with some tiny text telling flyers to be a “little old school” and give this to their “plane crush.”

Some were charmed, with one woman tweeting, “I friggin LOVE these napkins. How anybody can find this genuinely creepy is beyond me. I once met a guy on a plane and we ended up in a six-month relationship … and it all started with a smile and a … number … on an airplane napkin.” But other flyers did not appreciate the nudge and found the whole thing “creepy AF.”

Delta and Coca-Cola may have tapped into a collective fantasy, but they didn’t factor in that most people want to feel like it’s fate, not corporations, that brings them together. Even if we know our plane-crush fairy tales are just the product of bad ergonomics or too many rom-coms, it’s nice to think the universe independently conspired to seat us next to a well-adjusted person who could improve our lives, at least for a few hours.

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Benjamin describes White Castle cuisine as “two steps above dog food.” He also says his Valentine’s Day dinner there in 2015 featured some of the best table service he’s ever had.

Benjamin, who asked to be identified by his first name only, is one of thousands of people who attended White Castle’s annual Valentine’s Day Dinner, an event where couples reserve tables to dine-in at the slider-peddling fast food chain, which is decked out with a full wait staff, festive red and pink heart decorations, and tablecloths. “They dimmed the lights so you have this very romantic lighting but you still see all the White Castle branding and stuff,” he says.

The tradition of offering reservations on Valentine’s Day started 28 years ago in St. Louis and Minneapolis, but soon spread to other locations in New York, New Jersey, Detroit, and Chicago. Now, all White Castles accept reservations on Valentine’s Day.

According to White Castle vice president Jamie Richardson, the event has always been popular, but the amount of reservations requests has “grown exponentially” in the past four or five years.

Last year, White Castle partnered with reservation service Open Table and received 30,000 bookings. This year, three weeks out from Valentine’s Day, Richardson says the company has already booked 70 percent of the reservations they did last year — 7 percent more than last year’s bookings at this time. And, because White Castle isn’t “bound by the normal constraints of space and time,” some locations will be extending reservations until February 15.

Richardson believes the event is popular because it’s “one-of-a-kind” and people like “being relaxed and enjoying the nourishment from hot and tasty food.” But a more likely explanation is the generally accepted fact that Valentine’s Day is a joke.

Most holidays today are vessels of capitalism, and we’ve all kind of made peace with that. But Valentine’s Day is extra offensive — the apex of Hallmark holidays even — because it lacks any form of sincerity. Unlike Christmas or even Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day doesn’t inspire warm fuzzies as much as it does anxiety and resentment. Want to show someone you care about them? Buy them flowers, cards, or chocolates on a day that most likely holds no significance for either you or them.

This is all to say, Valentine’s Day is an obligation, not a celebration. You don’t want to participate (read: spend money), but are programmed to believe that not participating communicates that you don’t care. Enter: White Castle Valentine’s Day Dinner. The perfect mix of special, silly, and self-aware. A cheap way to celebrate a holiday that really doesn’t deserve any celebration.

Caleb Warren, an assistant professor of marketing at Arizona University, studies ironic consumption. He says that consumers who choose to spend Valentine’s Day at White Castle are dodging the overwhelming norms the holiday demands, like expensive gifts or fancy dinners. “One way to resist or distance yourself from [Valentine’s Day] baggage is to ironically participate by going on a date at a place that seems categorically low-end or unromantic,” he says.

Warren says that by ironically consuming on the “holiday of love” these dissenters are simultaneously communicating that they don’t buy into Valentine’s Day, don’t take themselves seriously, and that their relationship is so strong they don’t need to do anything expensive. They’re also branding themselves as independent thinkers who, free from the social pressures of the holiday (despite the fact that they are, indeed, at a heavily advertised V-day dinner).

Benjamin and his then-girlfriend used to indulge in fast food frequently, so when one of them suggested making reservations at White Castle, they both were all-in.

Although they made reservations half-jokingly, Benjamin says it ended up being the most fun Valentine’s Day he’d had yet.

“You can do something both ironically and sincerely at the same time,” Benjamin says. “It’s in the same area of culture as professional wrestling and old heavy metal bands. On the one hand, you can be sincerely very into it and committed to the pop culture moment that they have. But at the same time you understand what you’re doing is tacky and stupid.”

White Castle isn’t the only fast-food chain offering tacky nothings on Valentine’s Day. This year, Subway is marketing itself as serving the perfect Valentine’s Day cuisine by having The Bachelor stars Sean Lowe and Catherine Giudici eat one of the chain’s newest products at the hotel The Joule on the special day. Papa John’s and Pizza Hut sold heart-shaped pizzas in 2017, which resulted in some pretty bleak, not-so-heart-shaped pizzas.

It’s projected that Americans will spend $19.6 billion on Valentine’s Day purchases this year. Some will very earnestly buy red roses and giant bears, but some will be eating steamed sliders.

Ironically consuming less-than-romantic cuisine is a sort of light-hearted, still delicious “fuck you” to a holiday we all understand to be the worst.

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Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated where Sean Lowe and Catherine Giudici were eating on Valentine’s Day.

An estimated 800,000 federal workers will miss their second paycheck this week due to the government shutdown. 420,000 are working without pay, and 300,000 of them are furloughed (i.e., not working or being paid). Strapped for money, many are turning to the gig economy — driving for Uber or listing their homes on Airbnb — to make ends meet.  

One of those employees is Cheryl Blum, a contract defense lawyer for Spanish-speaking clients in federal court in Tucson, Arizona. She has listed her room on Airbnb on and off for years, but now it is her sole source of income, she told me. And in an interview with the Associated Press last week, Blum said she was thinking about driving for Uber or Lyft for supplemental income, as well.

Airbnb is also offering help to federal workers with its “A Night on Us” program, where any federal worker who leases their home for three nights between December 18 and March 18 will be paid for an extra night, up to $110, by Airbnb.

Blum still has to work through the shutdown but has no idea when her next paycheck will arrive. Luckily, she says, Tucson is very popular at the time of year, so she’s been getting lots of inquiries about her listing.

“It can’t make up for the income I’m losing, but it provides money for necessities like paying bills and buying groceries,” she says. “Without my regular income, paying the mortgage will be difficult.” Before the shutdown, Blum ordered some renovations to her home, but without steady income, she’s wary about how she’ll pay for that. She knows her family is feeling the pressure as well.

“My teenager went out and bought bread for his own sandwiches the other day,” she says.

As a defense lawyer, Blum says she is always on call and must be able to meet clients in prison at any time. A few days ago, she was supposed to meet with a client for a court-ordered interview in a prison, but because of the shutdown, there was no prison security to accompany her client to the interview room and the meeting couldn’t happen. This, she says, wastes time and isn’t fair to her clients. Blum represents a fair number of immigrants who have been arrested at the border.

“The work is being created because of our policies,” she says. “We are hired because people have constitutional rights. To cut off people’s pay, it’s an extremely unfair situation.”

Blum says most people working in the federal courts are “real purists,” passionate about what they do, but this shutdown has made her rethink where she puts her efforts. Instead of working mostly in the federal court system, she says going forward, she will diversify her workload and take fewer immigration cases.

“I want to make myself shutdown-proof as an attorney,” she told Vox.

Brian Hidden, who works as a biologist for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Springfield, Illinois, is also rethinking his career. When he got out of the military, Hidden says his goal was to work at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. While he still loves his job and doesn’t want to give up on it, this government shutdown is making things harder. “If this continues to happen, I got to put my family above my dream job,” he told Vox.

If Hidden wasn’t furloughed, he would be planning for habitat restoration for federal trust species, like migratory birds and endangered animals, he says. Instead, he’s driving an Uber 40 to 50 hours per week.

According to the State Journal-Register, Hidden started looking into driving for Uber on his way to his family’s winter vacation ski trip, which they had to scale back due to the uncertainty of the shutdown. After a 10-day registration process, Hidden started driving for Uber in January.

Hidden’s Uber wages are about one-third what he was making as a federal employee. Combined with his wife’s job as a nurse practitioner, these wages are helping keep the couple and their two children afloat.

Hidden calls his wife, who is looking for secondary employment on top of her nurse practitioner job; his mom, who has offered to help his family financially; and the family and friends of all furloughed workers the “unsung heroes” of the government shutdown.

“If it weren’t for [my wife], we would definitely not be making all our payments,” he told Vox.

Hidden feels that public perception of federal workers hasn’t been very positive. After his story was published in the paper, he saw lots of comments about how federal government employees should have savings for times like this. But, he says, many federal jobs don’t pay enough to save money to cover two to three months without income.

Lots of the posts he’s seen on his own Facebook have also referred to this time as a “paid vacation.”

“It seems so un-American to not be supportive of other Americans,” he says. “It’s never a good thing when people lose their jobs and lose their paycheck.”

The New York Times reported that Angela Kelley of Milwaukee picked up Uber shifts as her job at the federal Bureau of Land Management is furloughed during the shutdown. Kelley, 51, told the Times she started driving for Uber to earn enough to purchase fruit and pullup diapers for her 3-year-old granddaughter, who is legally in her care.

As a federal employee, she earned $1,100 every two weeks, but on one of her best days driving Uber, she earned $50. While being interviewed by the Times, she waited two hours and then got pinged to complete one ride, from which she made $3.37.

The DC area specifically has seen an uptick in inquiries about temporary jobs. In Rockville, Maryland, hundreds of furloughed workers applied for temporary jobs at the Montgomery County Public Schools. According to WUSA9, there are a ton of positions open including substitute teacher, teacher, school bus driver, and maintenance worker. At the DC Superior Court, Morris Williams is on furlough from his IT contract, but as a contract worker, he is unlikely to get back pay or paid for his work when the shutdown is over.

Fiverr, a site where freelancers can list their services, has seen a 41 percent uptick in services offered in the DC area since the government shut down. According to Fiverr, this spike is especially significant because it took place over the holidays. During the same time last year, there was a 26 percent relative decrease of services listed in the DC area. In the California-Lexington Park area of Maryland, where federal workers make up 16 percent of the population, Fiverr saw a 350 percent increase in services listed.

Neither Hidden nor Blum expressed faith in the government’s ability to resolve the situation, both using the phrase “out of touch” to describe how the administration is currently operating. Blum says she feels as though leaders are “putting a foot on the neck” of the American the public and she doesn’t see an end in sight.

“All I can say is, I feel much worse than when I gave an interview last week,” she says.

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