Truly spoken like someone with too much disposable.
More and more people can’t afford the wine or the fancy coffee, or the gasoline to get to the fancy restaurant, or the time to eat out after working their two jobs, or the 4000-lb SUV to pour the gasoline into, because they need their old banger and the gasoline to haul their ass to work to earn enough to pay rent, utilities and a bit more gasoline to stay on the hamster wheel for one more month - month after month.
This. And the other consideration they aren’t factoring in is that the cost of gasoline makes everything else more expensive, too.
Based on what I know of wine, a $9/glass varietal is on the lower end of quality today, but that was about average a few years ago. My recollection is that a cheap wine would have gone for $5/glass in 2010. The Two Buck Chuck that we bought by the case in college now costs almost $5.
The wine hasn’t gotten any better. But it costs more to move that wine by truck to the store, so the price goes up. It costs more to manufacture the bottles and power the equipment they use to process the grapes. It costs more to harvest and transport the grapes in the first place. It’s a chain of price increases down the line that all add up with the cost of gas.
Wages haven’t meaningfully increased at a comparable rate either. Even if you’re earning a bit more now on paper than you were 5-10 years ago, everyone’s purchasing power has dropped significantly. Even if prices of certain goods haven’t gone up that much, I have to think a lot more about my spending today than I used to.
Truly spoken like someone with too much disposable.
More and more people can’t afford the wine or the fancy coffee, or the gasoline to get to the fancy restaurant, or the time to eat out after working their two jobs, or the 4000-lb SUV to pour the gasoline into, because they need their old banger and the gasoline to haul their ass to work to earn enough to pay rent, utilities and a bit more gasoline to stay on the hamster wheel for one more month - month after month.
This. And the other consideration they aren’t factoring in is that the cost of gasoline makes everything else more expensive, too.
Based on what I know of wine, a $9/glass varietal is on the lower end of quality today, but that was about average a few years ago. My recollection is that a cheap wine would have gone for $5/glass in 2010. The Two Buck Chuck that we bought by the case in college now costs almost $5.
The wine hasn’t gotten any better. But it costs more to move that wine by truck to the store, so the price goes up. It costs more to manufacture the bottles and power the equipment they use to process the grapes. It costs more to harvest and transport the grapes in the first place. It’s a chain of price increases down the line that all add up with the cost of gas.
Wages haven’t meaningfully increased at a comparable rate either. Even if you’re earning a bit more now on paper than you were 5-10 years ago, everyone’s purchasing power has dropped significantly. Even if prices of certain goods haven’t gone up that much, I have to think a lot more about my spending today than I used to.