Our Quality of Life is Declining

[Ramone45]

Everything is cheap. I went past a strip mall where the original stores were all replaced by Dollar General, Aldi, Save-A-Lot, etc. People only care about how much something costs; the quality of the item is not a consideration. Kohl's Stein Mart, Wal-Mart. All cheap crap. It is undeniable and it has been going on for 30 yrs. The disparity between haves and have-nots has to be corrected. We were lower middle class and we could afford to shop at nice department stores.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Those aren't really the same problem you know.

 

[ms_ann_thrope]

Everything is cheap. I went past a strip mall where the original stores were all replaced by Dollar General, Aldi, Save-A-Lot, etc. People only care about how much something costs; the quality of the item is not a consideration. Kohl's Stein Mart, Wal-Mart. All cheap crap. It is undeniable and it has been going on for 30 yrs. The disparity between haves and have-nots has to be corrected. We were lower middle class and we could afford to shop at nice department stores.

You should move to Greece.

 

[Super-Surprise]

 

[bronzeage]

Everything is cheap. I went past a strip mall where the original stores were all replaced by Dollar General, Aldi, Save-A-Lot, etc. People only care about how much something costs; the quality of the item is not a consideration. Kohl's Stein Mart, Wal-Mart. All cheap crap. It is undeniable and it has been going on for 30 yrs. The disparity between haves and have-nots has to be corrected. We were lower middle class and we could afford to shop at nice department stores.

What did a cell phone cost 30 years ago?

 

[warrior queen]

Everything is cheap. I went past a strip mall where the original stores were all replaced by Dollar General, Aldi, Save-A-Lot, etc. People only care about how much something costs; the quality of the item is not a consideration. Kohl's Stein Mart, Wal-Mart. All cheap crap. It is undeniable and it has been going on for 30 yrs. The disparity between haves and have-nots has to be corrected. We were lower middle class and we could afford to shop at nice department stores.

What does 'stuff' have to do with quality of life?
I measure my quality of life within the perameters of health, general happiness, and my ability to appreciate each day.

 

[islandman]

Everything is cheap. I went past a strip mall where the original stores were all replaced by Dollar General, Aldi, Save-A-Lot, etc. People only care about how much something costs; the quality of the item is not a consideration. Kohl's Stein Mart, Wal-Mart. All cheap crap. It is undeniable and it has been going on for 30 yrs. The disparity between haves and have-nots has to be corrected. We were lower middle class and we could afford to shop at nice department stores.

I wouldn't worry about it too much as if you're old enough to have previously shopped in nice department stores, you're probably going to be dead of old age very soon.

And, as they say, you can't take it with you.

 

[KingOrfeo]

We were lower middle class . . .

Well, you know, there really isn't one, any more.

From Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (originally published 1983), by Paul Fussell:

My researches have persuaded me that there are nine classes in this country, as follows:

Top out-of-sight
Upper
Upper middle
------------------------
Middle
High proletarian
Mid-proletarian
Low proletarian
------------------------
Destitute
Bottom out-of-sight

One thing to get clear at the outset is this: it's not riches alone that define these classes. . . . "Economically, no doubt, there are only two classes, the rich and the poor," says George Orwell, "but socially there is a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned by each class in childhood are not only very different but -- this is the essential point -- generally persist from birth to death. . . . It is . . . very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into which you have been born." When John Fitzgerald Kennedy, watching Richard Nixon on television, turned to his friends and, horror-struck, said, "The guy has no class," he was not talking about money.

<snip>

We now come to the upper-middle class. It may possess virtually as much as the two classes above it. The difference is that it has earned most of it, in law, medicine, oil, shipping, real estate, or even the more honorific kinds of trade, like buying and selling works of art. Although they may enjoy some inherited money and use inherited "things" (silver, Oriental rugs), the upper-middles suffer from a bourgeois sense of shame, a conviction that to live on the earnings of others, even forebears, is not nice.

Caste marks of the upper-middles would include living in a house with more rooms than you need, except perhaps when a lot of "overnight guests" are present to help you imitate upper-class style. . . . This class is also the most "role-reversed" of all: men think nothing of cooking and doing housework, women of working out of the house in journalism, theater, or real estate. (If the wife stays home all the time, the family's middle-class only.) Upper-middles like to show off their costly educations by naming their cats Spinoza, Clytemnestra, and Candide, which means, as you'll have inferred already, that it's in large part the class depicted by Lisa Birnbach and others' Official Preppy Handbook, that significantly popular artifact of 1980.

<snip>

. . . The middle class is distinguishable more by its earnestness and psychic insecurity than by its middle income. I have known some very rich people who remain stubbornly middle-class, which is to say they remain terrified at what others think of them, and to avoid criticism are obsessed with doing everything right. . . .

"Status panic": that's the affliction of the middle class, according to C. Wright Mills, author of White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956). Hence the middles' need to accumulate credit cards and take in The New Yorker, which it imagines registers upper-middle taste. . . .

If the audience for that sort of thing used to seem the most deeply rooted in time and place, today it seems the class that's the most rootless. Members of the middle class are not only the sort of people who buy their own heirlooms, silver, etc. They're also the people who do most of the moving long-distance (generally to very unstylish places), commanded every few years to pull up stakes by the corporations they're in bondage to. They are the geologist employed by the oil company, the computer programmer, the aeronautical engineer, the salesman assigned to a new territory, and the "marketing" (formerly sales) manager deputed to keep an eye on him. . . . IBM and DuPont hire these people from second-rate colleges and teach them that they are nothing if not members of the team. Virtually no latitude is permitted to individuality or the milder forms of eccentricity, and these employees soon learn to avoid all ideological statements. . . . Terrified of losing their jobs, these people grow passive, their humanity diminished as they perceive themselves mere parts of an infinitely larger structure. Interchangeable parts, too. "The training makes our men interchangeable," an IBM executive was once heard to say.

<snip>

. . . Oddity, introversion, and love of privacy are the big enemies, a total reversal of the values of the secure upper orders. Among the middles there's a convention that erecting a fence or even a tall hedge is an affront. And there's also a convention that you may drop in on neighbors and friends without a telephone inquiry first. . . .

<snip>


. . . Proceeding downward, we would normally expect to meet next the lower-middle class. But it doesn't exist as such any longer, having been pauperized by the inflation of the 1960s and 1970s and transformed into the high-proletarian class. What's the difference? A further lack of freedom and self-respect. Our former lower-middle class, the new high proles, now head "the masses," and even if they are positioned at the top of the proletarian classes, still they are identifiable as people things are done to. They are in bondage -- to monetary policy, rip-off advertising, crazes and delusions, mass low culture, fast food, consumer schlock. Back in the 1940s there was still a real lower-middle class in this country, whose solid high-school education and addiction to "saving" and "planning" maintained it in a position -- often precarious, to be sure -- above the working class. . . . These former low-white-collar people are now simply working machines, and the wife usually works as well as the husband.

The kind of work performed and the sort of anxiety that besets one as a result of work are ways to divide the working class into its three strata. The high proles are the skilled workers, crafstmen, like printers. The mid-proles are operators, like Ralph Kramden, the bus driver. The low proles are unskilled labor, like longshoremen. The special anxiety of high proles is fear about loss or reduction of status: you're proud to be a master carpenter, and you want the world to understand clearly the difference between you and a laborer. The special anxiety of the mid-proles is fear of losing the job. And of the low proles, the gnawing perception that you're probably never going to make enough or earn enough freedom to have and do the things you want.

 

[Joeybagadonuts]

Everything is cheap. I went past a strip mall where the original stores were all replaced by Dollar General, Aldi, Save-A-Lot, etc. People only care about how much something costs; the quality of the item is not a consideration. Kohl's Stein Mart, Wal-Mart. All cheap crap. It is undeniable and it has been going on for 30 yrs. The disparity between haves and have-nots has to be corrected. We were lower middle class and we could afford to shop at nice department stores.

you're right.

 

[KingOrfeo]

What does 'stuff' have to do with quality of life?
I measure my quality of life within the perameters of health, general happiness, and my ability to appreciate each day.

Yes, but a lot of that -- not all, but a lot -- does depend on "stuff."

 

[warrior queen]

Yes, but a lot of that -- not all, but a lot -- does depend on "stuff."

In what way?
I am just as happy eating my dinner off a cheap plastic plate as I would be eating it off fine bone china ...... so long as I actually have some dinner!
And my steak is still the same as it was years ago, if not BETTER quality!

So, please explain how 'stuff' makes the quality of my life better?

 

[Sean Renaud]

In what way?
I am just as happy eating my dinner off a cheap plastic plate as I would be eating it off fine bone china ...... so long as I actually have some dinner!
And my steak is still the same as it was years ago, if not BETTER quality!

So, please explain how 'stuff' makes the quality of my life better?

I swear everytime I see this question posed I'm stuck between honest disbelief and knowing I must be dealing with a troll.

 

[KingOrfeo]

In what way?
I am just as happy eating my dinner off a cheap plastic plate as I would be eating it off fine bone china ...... so long as I actually have some dinner!

And that depends on "stuff." Food is stuff.

 

[warrior queen]

I swear everytime I see this question posed I'm stuck between honest disbelief and knowing I must be dealing with a troll.

The very best quality I ever had was when I was 22 - living in a 2-man tent in the middle of nowhere Northern Territory. No electricity, no running water, no people.
Up with the dawn, to bed at dusk.
It was peaceful, serene, uncomplicated.
I owned nothing much except my clothes, the tent, a beat-up old truck and my dog.
Pure bliss

 

[Sean Renaud]

The very best quality I ever had was when I was 22 - living in a 2-man tent in the middle of nowhere Northern Territory. No electricity, no running water, no people.
Up with the dawn, to bed at dusk.
It was peaceful, serene, uncomplicated.
I owned nothing much except my clothes, the tent, a beat-up old truck and my dog.
Pure bliss

That's all stuff. And unless you're a lot older than I think you were never more than a few hours away from that stuff if and when you wanted or needed it.

 

[warrior queen]

That's all stuff. And unless you're a lot older than I think you were never more than a few hours away from that stuff if and when you wanted or needed it.

Yeah.... I was only a four hour drive away from 'stuff'.
My point was I lived quite happily with bugger-all stuff!

 

[thirty]

How hard is it for you to buy something expensive?

 

[warrior queen]

How hard is it for you to buy something expensive?

For a lot of people here, it seems extremely difficult.
I would much rather buy one or two good quality items than 20 cheap ones..... but I'm just as happy if the xheap ones are all that's available so long as they do the job *shrugs*

 

[knot_sweet]

How hard is it for you to buy something expensive?

How do you define expensive?

Are we talking small luxuries like $150 face cream, cos no way would I pay that kind of money for something to stick on my face when it's been proven that the cheaper stuff does just as good a job.

I also wouldn't pay squat for a white diamond, no matter how good it was simply because I don't find them appealing.

On the other hand, I will happily pay over $1000 for a custom, digital print splashback for my kitchen, even if I do have to save up for a year to get it.

My point is that "expensive" is a relative concept.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Looking for an icepick I see that the prices for the same thing vary from one dollar to 20 dollars. The qualitative differences are miniscule, that is, a plastic handle isn't functionally better than a walnut handle. A Jaguar is a Ford.

I like Oreo's. Oreo brand is $2.99 a bag, SAVE-A-LOT sells a comparable cookie for $1.99. And WALMART sells the same for 99 cents.

My ego doesn't need expensive stroking.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Everything is cheap. I went past a strip mall where the original stores were all replaced by Dollar General, Aldi, Save-A-Lot, etc. People only care about how much something costs; the quality of the item is not a consideration. Kohl's Stein Mart, Wal-Mart. All cheap crap. It is undeniable and it has been going on for 30 yrs. The disparity between haves and have-nots has to be corrected. We were lower middle class and we could afford to shop at nice department stores.

That cheapness creates Capital. If you wish to by more expensive stuff, you should and you can, but then your life requires more judicious choice and sacrifice. The strip mall is an unrelated phenomena. Their demise is location, location, location, higher prices, and all too often, too many bored 'Utes...'

 

[John Doe]

Hilarious!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

What is declining is our overall purchasing power. Between inflation for the upper class' benefit, open borders putting a squeeze on wage mobility, the Federal incentive to part-time workers and the taxation required for economic relief (which can never, ever be purchased) the Middle Class is stagnating finding lower mobility much more likely than upward mobility.

 

[John Doe]

How hard is it for you to buy something expensive?

Is this the part now where you remember again you're supposed to be Chinese and explain in slightly broken english the glories of Socialism?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Is this the part now where you remember again you're supposed to be Chinese and explain in slightly broken english the glories of Socialism?

lol


I don't care who you are, DAT's FUNNY!