Or refuse to buy
RAM! 😭
Carne asada. Tacos. Fucking food trucks in Portland want $15 for 3 street tacos. GTFO.
Granola. It’s $5/lb at WinCo!
NA beer. People weren’t buying reg beer so they just figured hey we’ll wreck this market by pricing people out of it too! So I get no alcohol and it’s the same price as regular beer? Piss off.
Brisket
Fast food
Fast casual food
Applebee’s-tier restaurants
Japanese cars
Used cars, motorcycles, ATVs, boats
Camping
Skiing
Taxi rides
Corn mazes
Pumpkin patches
Escape rooms
Concerts
Bars/Clubs
Retro video games and consoles
Thrift stores
Storage units
Apartments in the bad part of town
There’s no more middle class :( can’t afford a house, can’t afford “affordable” entertainment, can’t afford shit
✅✅✅✅✅ yep!
Pizza. Pizza used to be about $20 delivered. This past weekend we had a large meatlovers delivered…it was $48 before tip.
I was in NY and my friend is a real pizza nut and wanted me to try this super trendy pizza, Ceres. We went mid afternoon and avoided the 4 hour line. A 20" pie was $68 before tax.
Glad in back home where I can cry into my $5 Digorno when I need a night off.
Fast Food. Used to be 1€ for a burger now its pretty much the same as regular restaurant but it tastes like paper at best.
Bitcoin.
Whiskey and beer. Though I’ve replaced them with specialty coffee which is getting more and more expensive so I’m not sure that was the wisest financial decision…
My partner says that trying specialty beans have ruined normal coffee.
Basically any fast food. Within my lifetime fast food went from cheap end of week treat, to being a complete ripoff that’s almost never worth shelling out for…
Which is weird cause the price of actual restaurants hasn’t gone up as much during that time, so it now oftentimes makes more sense to just go to an actual restaurant where you’ll (usually) get better food in better portions
I remember $0.39 cheeseburgers at McDonalds and $0.79 bean burritos at Taco Bell.
But this was when gas was $0.89/g and we didn’t live under fascism.
You have to use there apps and points and shit to get it cheap, but it can be cheap. They’re basically in the business of wasting poor people’s time and collecting their data these days
Yeah when taco bell is $40 for two of us and going to the sit down Mexican restaurant is $40, I’m going to pick food that gives me leftovers every time.
Taco Bell being cost-prohibitive is so wild to me. I remember going there so many times in high school in the 90’s and being able to get a veritable feast for $5.
I remember the taco bell challenge, order 10 dollars of food and try to finish it all. Now you can’t get a meal for that price…
I can still get my bean burritos and a drink for like $8. That being said I haven’t been to one in months
I figure it this way too, but then after I’ve eaten at the sit-down place the bill turns out to be $80.
My wife and I went out this year and the bill was $200 for a sit down Italian in our suburban town. I don’t even like Italian.
We did a tiki lounge more recently in the city and it was $150.
These are nicer ish places but like, that’s a lot.
I stopped most fast food years ago. It’s basically only an option in the rare situation that I need food “fast” and wont be home to eat it, and even then I avoid them more and more.
If I’m going home, I’ll order delivery or take out from a real restaurant. More-better food for same-less money.
That’s not even considering that I meal prep and cook at home even more, but even what little bit I still want to not cook myself… It’s not going to be restaurant prices for worse food.
I get burgers to go from sit down places cause they’re better, full on burgers and not some slice of meat and filler measurable in the millimeters for the same price if not cheaper. I get a mushroom Swiss from IHOP for like $12 plus tip(yes typing culture sucks, but it’s the system we live in and I’m not going to stiff a kid cause I don’t agree with someone they have little control over). And I get legit big onion rings to boot!
Just food in general.
I could conceivably budget for beef, but the price pisses me off so much I’ll go for a pork steak instead.
Theres a perfectly good bbq resturant near me thats typically cheaper than mcdonalds.
Computer memory (RAM)
I bought 64 gigabytes of ram in 2019 on a laptop.
Storage too
I bought a laptop when I migrated. EIGHT FUCKING YEARS AGO.
I refuse to purchase anything from Amazon. Bezos is not getting any of my money.
I feel like I should stop buying on eBay.
Actually, I kind of want to see a price fixing lawsuit against eBay now. They are explicitly telling sellers what price to list their items at, raising the prices of goods sold on eBay to the detriment of buyers so that they can get more money out of the commission fees.
The funny thing is my income has risen dramatically in the last few years, but I’m still approximately at the same level of purchasing power that I was six years ago.
If you had told me in 2012 I would be making low-mid six figures and still feel poor, I would have laughed at you.
I just bought some things on ebay to avoid Amazon. They dropshipped Amazon to me, individual packages and all, for nearly 100% markup. I don’t know how to avoid that and find “real” sellers dropshipping non-branded warehoused Chinese goods like the good old days.
- sponsored posts are usually drop shippers
- free returns are usually drop shippers
- check reviews and search for amazon or usps or post office to see if anyone mentions how they ship
- be wary of sellers with tens of thousands of feedback
If you get drop shipped, report a problem say it’s damaged or whatever, and don’t let them send you the Amazon return - use the eBay generated label. Then they have to pay for it and returns absolutely destroy drop shippers. Then leave feedback saying they just drop ship from Amazon
aliexpress, get it from the source.
You went to one giant corporation to avoid another giant corporation. Buy directly from sellers, ideally locally. Find their own actual websites. Ask word of mouth for recommendations.
This only works if you don’t live in the middle of fucking nowhere. Buying directly from a local seller for me means Walmart or Dollar General. After a 25-minute one-way drive, I can choose from a few more big chain stores. If I’m lucky, there’s a private business that sells what I need 9a-4p, Mon-Fri for 1.5x the price anywhere else IF it’s in stock.
Recently, I needed a network switch. Walmart didn’t have any in stock, but I could order ome online and have it in 5-7 business days and pay $15 for shipping. Best Buy said they could order one and have it for me in 7-10 business days, then I could make the 50-minute round trip to pick it up. There are no other stores within a two-hour drive that might even have one in stock. Amazon had it for $10 less than WM and BB and had free shipping in 2-3 days without Prime.
I needed a switch. I can’t build one. I can’t do my job without it. I can’t afford to wait for one to appear on Craigslist. I don’t want to support any of those companies; they’re all union busters and Trump donors. What’s a person to do in that situation?
newegg or something other than Amazon / Walmart. at least that’s what I try to do. find a company whose leadership is furthest away from being oligarchic shitheads (even if that’s what they aspire to be)
If you’ve never used SlickDeals, I highly recommend it.
Is SlickDeals only North America? Or do they deliver worldwide?
I went on eBay for the first time in years the other cat looking for a few cookbooks. Holy fuck. No thanks. I’m not paying retail plus shipping on the cheapest USED book. Get the fuck out.
Where are you shopping these days? My area has a Walmart and a dollar general. Love the mega corps…
Did you try ThriftBooks by chance?
More drives for my NAS - 16tb was about A$250 4 years ago. Same drives are now nearly A$1200.
In 2024, I bought 5 14 terabyte hard drives for about $600 for my NAS.
Thank God I have gotten nowhere near close to filling those up yet.
Just one additional drive is like 350 bucks now.
I’m limping along with one surviving 10tb, it’s twin mirror is dead. All non media data is backed up across smaller drives that still have pools/mirrors, but 5gb of media is living on the edge untill something changes.
I’m contemplating actually deleting shit. Or, if not that, storing offsite (deep storage) and then deleting, ready for that mythical time when drives become more affordable.
Did something similar and have 20TB of solid state in a Beelink ME Mini.
Same, Seagate exos x18 18TB drives. Four of them.
Now cost a fortune to replace
Fast food for sure.
Anything that comes in pods.
Waste of money and terrrible for the environment.
I agree, nuke the whales!
Gotta nuke something
chicken wings!
I remember 1 cent wings. I am old.
Honestly! You gotta pull out a mortgage these days to eat at wild wing!
And their shit is so bland compared to what it used to be.
Beer! I can still afford it, I just won’t so I quit.
This was me and soda. The off-brand soda I’d started buying was unavailable for three weeks last summer, and Coke, RC Cola, and Pepsi were all price-fixed at the same price… so I said fuck those guys and just weaned myself off it with what I had left.
Some prices just piss a consumer off.
