Expensiveness

1743, John Wesley, An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, London: G. Whitfield, 1796, A Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, Part II, III.1, p. 212, https://books.google.ca/books?id=A6FgAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false Surely you cannot be ignorant, that the sinfulness of fine apparel lies chiefly in the expensiveness. In that it is robbing God and the Poor; it is defrauding the fatherless and the widow; it is wasting the food of the hungry, and with-holding his raiment from the naked, to consume it on our own lusts.

1922, Emily Post, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, Chapter 14: Formal Dinners, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14314/14314-h/14314-h.htm Enchanting dining-rooms and tables have been achieved with an outlay amounting to comparatively nothing. ¶ There is a dining-room in a certain small New York house that is quite as inviting as it is lacking in expensiveness.

Apart from the expensiveness of everything, there were recurrent shortages of this and that, which, of course, always hit the poor rather than the rich.