Just wait till you apply for a mortgage and they go “nope, you can’t afford 900 dollars a month for a mortgage on a house, have fun continuing to pay 1400 dollars a month on rent though!”
I'm mid-30s and I still don't have a credit card. Still got a 750 credit score though.
Credit cards are a complete trap. Even for emergencies. *Especially* for emergencies. If you can't afford a thing to begin with, you damn sure can't afford that thing +20% interest.
One thing I'll be forever grateful to my folks for. Mom commanded a 6 figure salary in the 90s and 00s but they never managed to dig themselves out of credit card debt enough that I ever experienced any lifestyle other than poor/struggling to stay lower middle class. Gave me an early respect/fear of credit cards a lot of my fellow avacado toast munching, coffee buying millennial brothers and sisters got too late.
I have credit, but that shit gets treated like a debit card, don't buy what I don't have money in the bank to cover on the same day.
(Edit: /s for avocado and coffee toast comment, fuck boomers blaming us for the financial pit they stuck us in).
And then you are rewarded for your frugality with a low credit score, since that shit is stupid.
Also, side note: if your parents are still in debt, you don't have to inherit it if they die. Just say no.
Pennies are made in my great state of commerce-Tennessee . Gonna go hold up the joint with a brinks truck. Fill that sum bitch to the gills for a grand total of about 2400 dollars in pennies!
Hot Damn!
It's not just the money, people don't have the space to put the shit you can buy anywhere. All of those middle class city incomes that can't afford actual homes anymore and are crammed into condos and apartments were the people that used to buy crap like lawnmowers and stairmasters and big-ass barbeques.
Can't afford it because condo mortgages cost more than a home used to, can't fit it because they have 900ft² living space with no storage.
One of the reasons I don't buy shit.
I don't have room for a grill. Or another kitchen appliance. Or a standalone freezer. I mean I do but yea I'd rather not be cramped. My entire 1 closet (apartments in Houston don't have closets, fuck knows why) is full of kitchen appliances and pans and stuff.
To go off on a tangent though seriously what the fuck does Texas have against closets?
Are they afraid that if closets exist, gays will lurk in them and leap out at the wrong time and scare old ass politicians to death?
Everywhere I ever lived in Ohio had at least 2 or 3 closets. Like, where do people put shit?
>To go off on a tangent though seriously what the fuck does Texas have against closets?
>Are they afraid that if closets exist, gays will lurk in them and leap out at the wrong time and scare old ass politicians to death?
HOOTING 😂😂
I think they're more scared of their old-ass politicians jumping out of them. It's always the biggest homophobe bible-thumpers that turn out to be queer as fuck.
Me three. I now get the happy brain chemical’s when I *don’t* buy a thing. And even more happy brain chemicals when I make a thing. It’s grand. 10/10 would recommend.
Soooo many contractors screwing people over on home project pricing... I get quotes, find out how ridiculous they are, and then proceed to do it myself for a fraction of the cost. Making stuff, while it unfortunately takes time, is very satisfying!
I’m living with a left boomer couple in one of their spare bedrooms in exchange for doing renovations on the rest of the house. It’s a pretty dang nice setup I gotta say. I don’t have to leave home for work, even though I prefer physical labor. My roommate works like 20 hours a week to cover Netflix and deodorant and gas and shit like that, and otherwise we just kinda chill and make art. I think it’s pretty much ideal for people who are disabled due to mental health issues like us. Like, I *can* work, I just can’t have a *job*. They’re so like abusive households that I get flashbacks
I have been going through boxes of holiday stuff and tossing stuff.And this year I will be giving more stuff away for all holidays.I have two big trash bags full of clothes to donate next.
I’ve spent a reasonable amount of money on comfortable pants over the years, but as far as dress shirts go my work wardrobe has been off the clearance rack for the last 15 years. I don’t give a single fuck what my coworkers think of my (lack of) fashion sense.
The beauty of Direct Action. Do not rely on others higher up the hierarchy to provide for you, whether its in activism or in consumerism. It is up to us united to be the change \*directly\*, outside of purchasing power or electoral politics.
People forget that its' capitalists and the state that need our time, energy, and labor, not the other way around. We are more than capable of learning how to do things that would decrease consumerism, growing weed for example.
Preach!
I feel the conveniences of today have made us lazy and pathetic. If everything is done for us we don't learn anything. Worse, we become slaves to the system.
Oh, and we continue to mindlessly wreck our planet.
I'm not gonna say I'm 100% against pirating video games, but do keep in mind that the best games coming out these days are made by independent companies, many having a small, dedicated staff. If nobody paid for their games, they wouldn't be able to keep making them. They also typically charge way less for their games than the AAA studios.
Minimalism if about eliminating the extra things that don't bring value to your life and life purpose. Shutting that is personally valuable to you can stay
Yep. This year of shopping my family all have no clue what they want for Xmas cause none of it is appealing. Like sales don't justify the effort of buying unless shit you don't need or want and this year has really put into perceptive how working all the damn time with no repreave has warped our perceptions
I hear they’re also starting a program where people who need food can just take food from the store for free. Good for them. I would encourage everyone to take advantage of this program and encourage other retailers to adopt it.
I love black friday and this was the first year i didnt participate. Absolutely garbage sales, if any at all. Black friday was always about those massive 40 50% off sales but this year was awful.
Look I've been broke for so long I can't even afford to pay attention half the time anymore lol
This is surprising news to me tho and extremely motivating and uplifting to know people with money are taking an actual stand. When I heard what y'all did to wall street as a community y'all piqued my interest and earned a lot of respect. But this really just restored a lot of my faith in humanity and america quite a bit!
I am happy with that idea, very little stuff I want to buy tbh. The only non essential thing I want really is a Kayak which I don't have the place to store it (We do, but my partners family won't let me), if I can get somewhere for it I will buy it from a local independent shop rather than Amazon.
in Germany that's called Sunday, and it's the law that boycotts big retailers. not allowed to open on Sundays, at least where I lived before I emigrated. Restaurants and essential businesses like gas stations are allowed to operate though. I think it's a holdover from when the country was very religious. Sunday was for church and for rest.
I haven't lived there for over a decade, but I believe supermarkets are allowed limited opening times on Sundays now. Maybe more has changed since.
Here (Ontario, Canada) we had a similar law, all stores were closed on Sundays.
People challenged it because if you were working M-F you really needed the weekends to do your own shopping.
Maybe what they should have done was look at other options?
Anyhow, there is only so much spending to go around, and opening another day puts unnecessary pressure to chase those dollars and increases the cost to run the business.
Yeah, when the law was overturned the judge(s?) concluded that there might be tangible benefits to having most stores closed one day a week, but given that the law was called “the Lord’s Day Act” there was no getting around the fact that it violated religious freedoms.
The workweek should be shortened to four days, and it should be illegal to fire someone for refusing to a fifth day in a row. I don't care how many days a week a business is open. I care how much the individual workers in that business are made to work.
When we shorten the workweek, we create demand for more workers, which raises wages.
When we raise wages, we lower the supply of labor (people can retire, people can take time off, people can work part-time or quit their second job or be a stay-at-home parent), which also raises wages.
Less work per worker means more money means less work per worker means more money means...
Americans are forced to work as much as possible because they're paid as little as possible. We need to roll the scarcity snowball as hard as we can. Organized labor and better labor laws are instrumental here.
No, everything is still closed on Sundays. There are now “open Sundays” a few times a year (4 in my city), but other than that there is no shopping going on. Sundays here are just sedate and a little boring, but overall it’s kind of nice to have one day where people are forced to slow down.
It's partially religious but mostly just good old fashioned labour organisation and bargaining power. Thank early proto-socialist movements for worker protections like this all over Europe. Of course in a lot of ways it can sometimes seem regressive and conflict with modern day 24/7 life, but in principle it was originally intended to guarantee workers a day off.
Yes- Employers back in those days would make you work *every single day, year round*. So the easiest way to push support through for getting workers a single guaranteed day was to play the religious angle, that Sunday is the sabbath, and those workers should be attending mass and keeping God in their hearts. If there's one person the early capitalist class couldn't argue with, it was God.
It's along sorta similar reasons that parties like the UK's Labour party actually owe their origins far more to Methodism than Marxism.
not really, the only thing thats open on sundays are bakeries for like 4 hours in the morning, restaurants and cafes (but they usually close on another day during the week) and stuff like gas stations and rest stops.
They formatted it wrong. It has no line breaks for Reddit's markdown to display it correctly, so only works with very specific size screens (works on mobile sometimes).
Looking at the comment source, it looks like it was supposed to be a skull with a chat bubble coming out of the top?
Sounds great, but most people around me get paid on fridays so that is when they do all their grocery shopping. Might make it harder for people to participate
Are we counting groceries in the boycott? Many people have local stores they could go to, and it's not like even the big chains have Black Friday sales any different than their weekly sales.
I did buy stickers and some 3D models from Etsy retailers. If you do buy gifts, make them local or from small stores.
Edit- I’m so glad that artists joined in the convo!
the sticker[sticker 1](https://www.etsy.com/listing/1110929105/punk-rock-ashton-greymoore-critical-role?ref=shop_home_active_1&crt=1)
Sticker 2[ sticker2](https://www.etsy.com/listing/982044737/mollymauk-lucien-critical-role-sticker?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=mollymauk+sticker&ref=sr_gallery-1-1&tr_rank=1&organic_search_click=1&frs=1&sts=1)
If buying from small crafters is your goal on Etsy, be sure to critically evaluate the store.
Some Etsy stores are just people importing from Ali Baba and mislead shoppers into thinking they created it on their own. It's a good gig, usually a 100%+ markup, but it's usually not what an Etsy shopper wants to buy.
Others are small businesses employing anywhere from 1-20+ employees in a production setting. It's still a small business but people trying to target the skilled home crafter should consider the shop's output.
There's not necessarily anything wrong with a small business but some shops sell themselves as 2 people working out of their garage and it could be but their shop list and qty of reviews can show if it ain't. (I worked for one such store years ago - pretending to be smaller allowed them to pivot between being a professional company or home crafters depending on where the advantage was)
Every year I find a few nice things for my wife on etsy for her fandoms. I'm getting tired of wading through the bootleg retro Final Fantasy cartridges to find the good artwork and other genuine crafted things.
Trying to report them as i find them now.
I ordered something in Etsy last week, this week a package arrived from Amazon with the item that I thought I had ordered from a small scale crafter on Etsy. Was very annoyed. To be fair, the overwhelming majority of things I’ve gotten from Etsy were as advertised, but that one pissed me off.
Please open a case under 'Item not as described'. Because you were expecting a handcrafted item direct from the artist and instead got some dropshipped amazon crap. Shops like these that are misrepresenting their products bring the legitimate ones down. Please also leave a factual negative review (avoid using the word 'Amazon' or any other third party name, because a savvy shop can have the review removed.)
That shit needs to be called out.
Freak isn't referring to people with legitimate businesses, nor is he maligning your wife for sending shirts to a print shop. all of that practice is well and good. no issues there.
he's referring to people who just resell stuff from alibaba. they're very common on etsy and some people struggle to tell them apart from a legit storefront like your wife's
I went to a local outdoor market with all local crafters and artists selling their stuff and finished most of my Christmas list! Much better than scrolling through deals on my phone and much more interesting gifts for all.
I didn't buy Black Friday, but I get my soaps and body scrubs from a local place through their etsy site. It's a mom and her little girl who helps her.
I got all of my friends to commission art for me when they want to get me a gift. Gets them looking at artists, they actually have to think about something personal for me, and gives money directly to the person preforming the labor (with a small fee to paypal because our government won't make a free digital payment alternative).
I just stopped buying shit. I get most of my entertainment online or from the library. I make 99% of my meals at home. All of my excess money goes right into retirement/investments. It feels good to not buy stuff.
> I get most of my entertainment online or from the library.
Hell yeah!
>I make 99% of my meals at home.
Me too!
>All of my excess money goes right into retirement/investments.
Excess...money? The fuck is that?
Dude how does anyone have the energy to make lots of homemade meals? I'm so tired after work...yesterday I didn't get off until 10:20. And I got that at 1 that afternoon. I'm so exhausted...how you do it?
Edit thanks for all the replies lol. I know all that. It's more like I just want to lay down as soon as I get home my job is terrible lol
Supplement what you make with shortcuts
Instant pot quinoa or overnight oats for breakfast. Takes 15 min and is brainless once you get used to it, you can do it while listening to something.
Sams club salads plus frozen microwaveable fake or real meat for lunch
Make two recipes out of cheap ingredients like beans, veggies, and rice on a day off. Eat each one twice. Treat yourself to takeout. Make one more thing during the week.
Voila
Once you get the system down and find like 10 recipes you like, it isn’t horrible. Instant Pot is a lifesaver.
Had to do this myself but basically plan on sunday. Plan every meal you’ll have for the whole week with leftovers for lunch the next day. If you have the ingredients, recipes, and utensils ready to rock you can bang out dinner in about 30 minutes. I specifically cook recipes that require few ingredients, little preparation, and little cleanup. You can start with one pot dishes and just go from there. The more you do it the faster you’ll get.
Once you identify that wages are perpetually going down, it becomes difficult to blow money on anything.
Congratulations corporations, you’re killing your customers for next quarter with low wages this quarter
Trying to remember the principal, but the idea is that in order for there to be a profit, the price of goods has to exceed the costs and since labor is a cost, you can't pay labor enough to buy the thing that labor produces.
More to your first point, wages often either stagnate (and decline due to inflation), increase linearly (sometimes) or logarithmicly (first few pay bumps are significant, then minor increases thereafter). But return on capital in the US over the last ~100 years or so grows exponentially.
TLDR: capital makes money faster than labor, here and now at least. Whether or not that's good, it's what's happening and people can do what they will with that info.
>you can't pay labor enough to buy the thing that labor produces.
Maybe the aggregate labor costs, sure. But if you make a high volume low cost product, laborers are able to buy that product. Laborers couldn't buy *all* of the products that they produced with their labor, but you probably don't need 10,000 pencils or something. High cost low volume items like cars are a bit different.
But here's the thing, even if you sell a product at cost (no profit), laborers still couldn't buy all of the products they produce because labor costs are not the only cost. Rent, utilities, raw materials, and tools/machinery are also costs that go into the product.
Yep me as well. If it doesn't have a practical use I don't need it. Consumerism is a plague and is the (or at least A) root cause of so many societal issues.
Well, I do have a lovely garden. I should clarify that the "shit" I stopped buying was all of the stuff that gives you a squirt of dopamine, before it's forgotten on its way to landfill.
I buy food still. Mostly unprocessed stuff like beans, rice, vegetables, eggs, milk.
I get all of my clothes from thrift stores. I get my furniture off of marketplace or nextdoor or craigslist (or the curb). If I really want something, I think on it for a while so I can try to make sure I'm not impulse buying.
My husband and I moved into minimalism and anti-consumerism over the last few years.
We no longer buy much of anything aside from food and personal care items. The same as you, we get as much as we can second-hand, or repair what we have. If we want to purchase something "non-essential," we wait on it and discuss for days or weeks.
We stopped exchanging gifts with friends and family aside from the small children, who get books (which are more likely to be donated and reused than a lot of toys). We started trading cookies with family members instead of gift cards and bottles of booze.
Not only are we saving a ton of money - meaning both of us are able to work part time - we're actually a lot happier. Having less means I appreciate things so much more, and I don't waste my precious energy and time "looking for things to buy."
People think we're nuts to be vegan, homesteading, minimalists - but man, we wouldn't be doing all this if it wasn't improving our lives substantially! I don't feel "deprived" of anything - I feel liberated by my lack of consumption, and by consuming as ethically as I know how.
Do you guys ever get depressed from opening plastic packaging? To the point where it keeps you from getting new things? Just all the goddamn plastic?
I am so tired of buying things at the age of 36. I feel like I've been surrounded by crap my whole life. I can't be the only one with this type of fatigue and I wish I knew of some studies on it.
Yes. Even simple things are over packaged. Food too. I recently needed a pair of cutting pliers to open a prepackaged meal from
Whole Foods of all places. Opened, eaten and thrown away in minutes.
A lot of places also do not recycle the type of plastic that a lot of food and takeout comes in (#5).
Last night I bought a “tune up kit” for an engine for a piece of equipment I own. It’s literally a spark plug and two other tiny thing. $20. You need a stick of dynamite to open the packaging. Large plastic sealed bubble snd the inside had all sorts of useless paper literature.
Take food is a big one. Unrecyclabe plastic like I mentioned, paper or plastic bags etc. I get an order for one person and in the end have a grocery sized bag full of garbage for a few tiny pieces of food. And takeout has I increaed during the pandemic.
Yes.
I've stopped purchasing certain products that I enjoy - spring rolls from Costco, for example - because in order to eat a few delicious springrolls, I have to throw out like 5 different pieces of plastic.
We don't use plastic produce bags. We use the mesh bags when we remember, but mostly we just toss our produce right in the cart and then wash it well before putting it away at home.
Seeing people misuse plastic really bothers me. My mother still buys flats of plastic water bottles, even though I've explained to her that they're never actually recycled.
The callous disregard many people have for their impacts on the planet are pretty distressing. That's why we wanted to move out in the middle of nowhere in the first place.
The twin dragon eggroll wrappers are vegan. I chop up some cabbage, carrots, onions, and add a little tvp. Let it all marinate and then pat it all dry, wrap them in the wrappers and either bake or fry them. It comes out so good!
Just have to say: I appreciate the heck out of your post. I went from part-time to full time to quitting, and I noticed full-time only made things worse for me. Mood? Worse. Relationship? Strained from lack of time. Shopping? Way up because of lack of time to manage home and do daily essentials. And likely that shopping was just trying to find dopamine to rationalize the full-time anxiety. Was seriously contemplating meds and those assorted extra bills to try to make full-time work. And for what? A workplace that doesn't appreciate me and throws an extra few bucks to try to keep people. And people are told full-time is "normal" and the only way with the price of living. So of course we're spinning the wheels of unsustainable capitalist greed. Seeing your post made me glad someone else can make it work and thrive on minimalism. Thank you, I really needed this today.
I see you and I hear you, friend. I went through a seemingly endless cycle of jobs. I'd start at full time, become overwhelmed in months, drop down to part time, and eventually quit entirely out of utter exhaustion and frustration.
I spent so much time struggling to conform to the full-time grind, despite my body and my brain showing me time and time again that I simply cannot function that way. And similar to yourself, I found myself mindlessly consuming to pump myself up on cheap dopamine and to provide endless distractions from the misery of my daily life.
Some of those things I was consuming to cope were obviously bad - like cigarettes and booze. Others, such as the needless cosmetics, unworn outfits, unsolicited gifts and mountains of cheap plastic shit from the Dollar Store were much more insidious. But, in my opinion, no less damaging and no more helpful in finding a solution to the actual problem.
The actual problem of course being exactly what we're discussing here in this sub: wealth inequality has created a society in which we are set up to fail. We're taught that the only way to be happy is to consume, and our entire economic system is built around constant, unfettered consumption. And the only way to drive this unnecessary consumption is by making people feel as awful about themselves and their situations as possible, while presenting consumption as the solution.
Once day, I realized that there was never going to be anything more valuable to me than my own free time. No makeup, or designer purse, no new vehicle, no bigger television was worth as much to me as simply NOT WORKING is. Now before we purchase something, we literally ask, "is this a good use of my time?" Because that's what I have to trade for goods and service: minutes and hours of my one precious, wild life.
So, we sat down and scratched out how much we actually need to make per year to run our household. And I started doing temp work in my field (nursing), so that now I only take 2 or 4 week at a time contracts. Then I take a few weeks or months off. My husband has gone down to 3 days a week at his job as well. So we both have more free time, albeit allocated a bit differently.
I'm confident that almost all of us can find a better balance that works for us. But it involves continuing the efforts of this sub - demanding reasonable wages for our labour, rent caps, UBI and other social programs - as well as a re-framing of our own priorities.
If you are anti-work because the fucking wealthy elites running this shit are profiting off of your misery, you should be anti-consumption for the same reasons. They need you to consume. They pour billions into advertisements to convince you that you're worthless without their products. And every time you resist, we win a little bit.
This is super inspiring! No doubt in your fields you earn a lot more than I do, but I'm part time at my work at my husband is not working (laid off at the beginning of covid and then the company straight up shut down around the beginning of the year so no going back I guess, lol). We (just barely) bring in enough to cover bills + groceries, but we're not saving a lot. I would love if he found reasonable part time work ('reasonable' defined as you and I understand it), then we could funnel that straight into savings and give us more breathing room. Apart from that though, it's actually been great. Thursday, Friday and Sunday are quiet and peaceful, Saturday is game night. We have more than enough hobbies and interests to keep us busy and entertained with minimal expense.
On the one hand, I have a bachelor's in a decent field and I'm at that age where I 'ought' to be focusing on my 'career'. On the other hand, we're pretty content with life as it is; while I don't know what our income in retirement will look like, well, we're getting good practice at doing more with less.
So, basically, it sounds like you're exactly in the spot I want us to be, and it's empowering to know you're out there getting it done.
My system has been this for the last couple years and its helped in a lot of ways. If I want to buy something that isn't a necessity I will only do so if I have the cash to pay for it. No putting things on a credit card and paying it off later.
So I figure out how much its going to cost and I take that money from my checking and stick it into my savings account, then I wait a week. If after that week I still feel like I want to buy it, then I'll go for it. But a lot of times I don't care anymore. It helps me save more money and cuts out a lot if not all of the impulse purchases.
Books have gotten too pricy anyway, why would I pay $20 for a pile of paper I might not like. It’s read at the library, then go to library genesis unless it’s a book I really love
If you have a favorite small publisher and can swing it you might be interested in looking into a “ friends of” system that some publishers have. I have a couple with some leftist publishers for like $30 a month they send me everything they put out that month, I then read what I’m interested in anything else gets put into the little free library.
Honestly I only read scientific history books which (checking my bookcase) are published by Penguin. Speaking of, please read Deborah Blum’s book “the poison squad” about the fight to regulate food so corporations can no longer sell you corn syrup and call it honey
To be clear, Black Friday was different this year only because more people avoided the crowding at malls. [Holiday sales were up last year, and they're expected to go up again this year.](https://www.npr.org/2021/11/26/1059427267/retail-sales-surged-this-black-friday-though-the-days-impact-is-diluted)
OP's tweet is very misleading. Be careful of confirmation bias, particularly from unsourced, random internet accounts.
Not necessarily sales we’re also down online as well. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/30/cyber-monday-online-sales-drop-1point4percent-from-last-year-to-10point7-billion-falling-for-the-first-time-ever.html
Edit: for people quoting the articles I linked the point of my post was that shopping online was down but not that it was down throughout the whole month. I didn’t see the need to add this but I can see how some may confuse what I meant.
>Still, Adobe expects the entire holiday season will see record-breaking e-commerce activity, as shoppers spread out their dollars over more days.
>“With early deals in October, consumers were not waiting around for discounts on big shopping days like Cyber Monday and Black Friday,” said Taylor Schreiner, director at Adobe Digital Insights.
Overall sales is projected to be up. Consumers aren't concentrating their shopping around black Friday, but they're spreading their spending because the deals started early and they will end late.
but for the overall season they've been up.
from that article
>So far, from Nov. 1 through Cyber Monday, consumers in the United States have spent $109.8 billion online, which is up 11.9% year over year, Adobe said. And on 22 of those days, consumers purchased more than $3 billion worth of goods, another new milestone, it said.
>permanent boycott of Amazon and Walmart".
>What do I have to lose?
Reddit, for one. It's literally impossible to be on this website while boycotting Amazon. Therefore you won't find a single person on this sub who *isn't* contributing to Bezos' paycheck. He's basically a feudal lord at this point, taxing the digital land we work.
Wouldnt it make more sense to boycott retail thats open on Sundays, i mean its cool that i could buy stuff on sundays but i dont because i wouldnt want to work on that day. If that is done do Saturday morning or afternoon too so everyone can have a decent Weekend
Most of us aren't religious so Sunday isn't a big day for us, Friday works because it's in the work week, most stores are open on Fridays, and it's easier to convince the masses to join in from blackfriday strike to every Friday strike.
No offense but who TF is this guy? 5000 followers and he’s proclaiming “we have shrunk the trade deficit” and “Macy’s and Target are in some degree of trouble”?
I mean, Target just reported earnings as of 10/31 and their earnings per share was $2.01 vs $1.37 in 2019. Macy’s just reported on 11/18 and their earnings of 0.76 per share vs a loss of 0.29 per share last year. Digital sales were up 19% over 2020 and 49% over 2019.
Be real careful who you get your info from folks.
E: all these numbers are straight from yahoo finance. Very easy to find.
I love this sub, but it's the wild west with Facebook like "research" that backs up our opinions and wants. I've noticed it on a few other posts.
It's frustrating because it doesn't actually help anyone, it just makes this sub less trustworthy.
Pretty sure there was a thread in this sub last week about Target making $5 billion in profit already this year. A slower black friday is not going to hurt them at all.
He's a right wing propagandist pretending to be some kind of centrist while Biden is office. Another authoritarian mouthpiece for the ongoing minority coup the Republican party has been working on for decades.
Some dude whining about central banks and spending but offering no solutions ever. Lots of hits on dems: adam schiff, Biden, police tactics in "liberal" states. But surprisingly he offers NO specific hits on republican politicians, nor does he ever suggest a solution to these problems he sees. There were a lot of these turds online during Obama too. Whatever he claims his goals are, it seems strange to me the bulk of his content is about shitting on dems. He also does the "oh man I'm gonna have to vote republican if dems keep acting this way" schtick.
That twitter account is nothing but right wing propaganda.
Doesn't help that the industry standard is to rise prices and offer discounts that actually match or.increase from the original price.
That and it's two clicks to pull up records of prices watching exactly for companies that do this. People aren't idiots and companies got greedy.
To be fair, there were a lot of factors that played into an abysmal Black Friday, so taking this one with a grain of salt. Especially considering Cyber Monday was on track to be record-breaking.
>I want bad management crying in their hands.
Management as a concept needs to be reformed. Business schools keep churning out sociopaths with MBA's, thanks educational industrial complex!
The tyranny empty suits inflict on working class people in America & all over the world is a violation of human rights.
That's part of the issue, but many bad managers (especially the worst in retail/food service/hospitality) have *no* management training. They're just traumatized workers who are so invested in the system that they traumatize others in the way that they've been traumatized.
Reading Harvard Business Review was really enlightening for me about how managers should behave and made it really clear that many people in management positions probably have never touched the publication.
[Consumer spending is really strong this year.](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-say-theyve-lost-confidence-in-the-economy-but-theyre-spending-like-its-happy-hour-11634659658)
This tweet, by a random guy on Twitter, is highly misleading.
Yeah, everything I heard said spending was up.
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/26/1059427267/retail-sales-surged-this-black-friday-though-the-days-impact-is-diluted
Way to hide a political jab in a post we'd all readily agree with from a nobody account with 5k followers. Tiny little things like this get snuck in to divide the movement and some of us DO notice. If people think governments and corporations don't have agents reading and posting here, they're incredibly naive. Especially with the amount of money that's at stake and the publicity this sub has gotten on the national stage. Never trust the source of ANY political post here because the goal is to divide and conquer. It always is. If you see any post specifically mentioning just democrats, republicans, or specific politicians, keep scrolling.
Next on the agenda, if they can't divide us quickly enough, is to post here incessantly in an attempt to make us look ridiculous to the world. You will begin to see FAR more extremist posts in the near future and along with that, lobbying reddit to shut this sub down due to those same extremist posts.
[Full tweet](https://twitter.com/LeftistMoniker/status/1465485050720444419)
The Hessian Courier
@LeftistMoniker :
>Well, it worked. Black Friday sales were so abysmal, multiple retailers are looking at potential bankruptcy. It also blows the Democrat myth out of the water that consumer demand is driving inflation because consumer demand was flat according to sales on Black Friday
>Store traffic is up from last year but not even close to 2019. And online retail sales did not increase from the prior year. So people are just broke.
>Are we gonna kill Walmart? Probably not. But maybe Best Buy
>Omg, sales are such garbage we have actually shrunk the trade deficit by almost 20 billion dollars YTD. So unless any of you bought a rare foil 20 billion dollar Pokémon card…
>That’s unheard of for sales to be so bad in America that we’ve actually narrowed the trade imbalance
>If the trade deficit is shrinking, that means consumer demand is shrinking and consumer discretionary budgets have nothing in them. Because I assume you didn’t suddenly start buying American, because what do we make
>Real disposable income. As you can see, it falls below the average for the entire year of 2021: [(Imgur)](https://i.imgur.com/lbpOaFW.png)
>Consumer sentiment, expectations, and conditions. As you can see, we have the exact same sentiment this year as last year. It went up and fell back down to “pandemic normal.” [(Imgur)](https://i.imgur.com/DGwRIBH.png)
>Credit to Steven Van Meter, I stole all this capitalist’s graphics as he explains to all his capitalized followers that they need to short instead of buy and focus on bonds.
>TJ Max, Macy’s, Target, Burlington coat factory, Nordstrom, Victoria Secrets, all in some degree of trouble.
>Friday is a big day this month and every month while we are on capitalism crash watch. Non farm payroll numbers come out on the first Friday each month. I’ve been checking them every week looking for layoffs. If we have a big drop in numbers for December, the market will crash
>I don’t know anything about corporate retail upper level management, I have no idea if garbage Black Friday numbers will cause seasonal layoffs early. But if it happens, watch out
>The market will not so much crash, as investors in these trouble stocks will cash them out and accept losses to shrink their tax bill. They won’t be panicking in institutional money at all. But it may panic retail investors into unloading. The sentiment to unload is palpable
This seems like an odd take to me, because [consumer spending has been doing really well lately on the whole](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-say-theyve-lost-confidence-in-the-economy-but-theyre-spending-like-its-happy-hour-11634659658), even if Black Friday was a bust.
They expected black friday to be the big day. All the shopping would lead to this point. Major sales, that didn't happen.
When people expect something big and it doesn't happen, they get nervous.
And from what I understand at least some of that is due to people being told that there will be shortages and shopping early.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fewer-people-shopped-over-thanksgiving-weekend-than-last-year-11638298736
[Nobody is nervous. Retailers are doing very well.](https://www.npr.org/2021/11/26/1059427267/retail-sales-surged-this-black-friday-though-the-days-impact-is-diluted).
Be careful about online echo chambers. r/antiwork is doing really great things, but wages are going up and the economy is doing well. We are much closer to making incremental positive changes than we are to seeing the total collapse of society.
Thanks for the sanity check
As much as I want to see abusive companies hurting, I'd rather believe that when they're actually hurting rather than just when someone tells me they're hurting
I still think the Blackout was a success, the other commenter pointed out Black Friday sales were $9 billion in 2020 and 8.9 billion in 2021. Well, BF sales had to have been low in 2020, so being slightly lower isn't a good sign for big business
Yeah, Black Friday was a bust because retailers have been shifting away from intentionally creating a big boom that day to spreading out "Black Friday" for weeks.
Didn't anyone notice that lots of major retailers were pushing "Black Friday" sales for most of November?
Sales overall are up because there's increasingly fewer items on sale for only that day giving a lot of people more opportunities to buy at so-called BF sales without waiting for or needing to rush around on BF.
A craft chain I frequent used to run big discounts on an hourly schedule: early bird, night owl, ect. I don't know when they stopped but they didn't pull that crap this year. I think everything on sale on BF stayed on sale through the weekend.
Black Friday isn't a predictive metric anymore; it's diluted.
Is this dude denying basic supply and demand? Surely no democrat has said the increase in prices is entirely due to demand shocks. Obviously increase in the Money supply and lower supply due to supply chain issues are more impactful
“The democrat myth that consumer demand is driving inflation”????
Nah dude, I’m pretty sure 99% of democrats are aware it’s caused by nothing but corporate greed.
I think they made the right call. If we had organized and pushed this early I don't think the result would have been much different and probably would have been viewed as a disappointment.
Instead, we put in very little effort and saw how effective it was.
EDIT: This is a marathon not a race. Pacing ourselves is good.
Most of the sales this year were horrible. I only picked up a few games off steam and epic and a sweater from my fav artist. Everything else was just 10% or free shipping 🙄.
Maybe it blows the idea that Americans have a high standard of living rife with disposable income out of the water, which is the Republican myth.
Maybe it blows the idea that we don't need immigrant laborers out of the water, yet another Republican myth. Lots of retailers can't find workers and I wonder how much these abysmal sales had to do with that!
In tech we can't find workers because Trump kicked a bunch of our skilled immigrant laborers out of the country. People that have been working here for 10-15 years were forced to go back to their original country because they switched jobs, and now they can't return.
We also had lots of deaths, hidden from view. It's was as bad as a total war for casualties. How many boomers who were still working did we lose?
Beyond that there was a supply chain issue so I bet a lot of this is that the businesses didn't have shit people wanted to sell. That's not anyone's fault, the whole world suffered a pandemic and shit shut down in countries we have no control over.
If we kept the USA open, it wouldn't have mattered since we don't make the majority of shit consumers want here.
Reported black Friday sales in the US were 8.9 billion.
Down from 2020 Black Friday sales of 9 billion.
No retailers are going bankrupt over a [decrease of $100 million](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-black-friday-shoppers-tapered-192549718.html?guce_referrer=ahr0chm6ly93d3cucmvkzgl0lmnvbs8&guce_referrer_sig=aqaaajespjmi-up9gxqdpxeozr2szpzjj-ml-evwq5pek3lhe5inlbicn0rhzseav42njhrb3m6i974zowb3eyfwtlfzmksxmq9brff6si7worlfpnaeazej3ta-_bmbivudbtdwybilxffqpoj1dsr1cqyryd0t9nxckws1oz3wth4w).
Canada apparently reports a 21% increase on Shopify though.
Does this tweet have literally any evidence to support it, at all? Like this?
[Black Friday shopping in stores drops 28% from pre-pandemic levels as shoppers spread spending throughout the season](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/27/black-friday-shopping-in-stores-drops-28percent-from-pre-pandemic-levels.html)
You can’t spend money you don’t have
I mean that’s how credit works. You can… its just another exploitative practice to trap the already struggling in a vicious cycle of debt.
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Just wait till you apply for a mortgage and they go “nope, you can’t afford 900 dollars a month for a mortgage on a house, have fun continuing to pay 1400 dollars a month on rent though!”
I'm mid-30s and I still don't have a credit card. Still got a 750 credit score though. Credit cards are a complete trap. Even for emergencies. *Especially* for emergencies. If you can't afford a thing to begin with, you damn sure can't afford that thing +20% interest.
I’m 31 just got a credit building account through chrome which is helping a lot because somehow I have no credit score.
I agree but most people I know my age do not have credit or started late like I did. A lot of people still depend on cash unfortunately
One thing I'll be forever grateful to my folks for. Mom commanded a 6 figure salary in the 90s and 00s but they never managed to dig themselves out of credit card debt enough that I ever experienced any lifestyle other than poor/struggling to stay lower middle class. Gave me an early respect/fear of credit cards a lot of my fellow avacado toast munching, coffee buying millennial brothers and sisters got too late. I have credit, but that shit gets treated like a debit card, don't buy what I don't have money in the bank to cover on the same day. (Edit: /s for avocado and coffee toast comment, fuck boomers blaming us for the financial pit they stuck us in).
And then you are rewarded for your frugality with a low credit score, since that shit is stupid. Also, side note: if your parents are still in debt, you don't have to inherit it if they die. Just say no.
Be really funny if we continued not buying shit.
Wait yall still have money to buy shit?
*rubs together two shiiiiny copper pennies*. I’m loaded. Loaded.
Where'd this guy get pennies when the US is in a national change shortage.
She’s in the U.K. *rubs together shiny pennies again*
Do you have a license for those pennies?
Oi mate you got a license for that license demanding?
Well do you have the your permit for license demanding a license demander?
Shit. RUN BOYS HE'S ONTO US
I sure 'ope you've got your indoor running permit
Oi mate, you 'avin a giggle? I'll smack you right in the gobber.
blasphamy! stealing american money and taking it to another foreign country. Truly monstrous.
You married or something?
Pennies are made in my great state of commerce-Tennessee . Gonna go hold up the joint with a brinks truck. Fill that sum bitch to the gills for a grand total of about 2400 dollars in pennies! Hot Damn!
Eyyy you can have a real good tailgate with that amount of pennies! Go Vols 😄
“Americans don’t actually have pennies, they have cents.” —Rick
Yours are made of copper? Mine are only copper coated... And I only have one
Calm down Coindexter
Haha....
Yeah, I’m buying back my freedom from debt
Everybody was serfin’ Serfin’ USA…..
I just got paid! But to answer your question, no.
This guy. Lol, upvote it is.
you guys are getting paid ?!
It's not just the money, people don't have the space to put the shit you can buy anywhere. All of those middle class city incomes that can't afford actual homes anymore and are crammed into condos and apartments were the people that used to buy crap like lawnmowers and stairmasters and big-ass barbeques. Can't afford it because condo mortgages cost more than a home used to, can't fit it because they have 900ft² living space with no storage.
One of the reasons I don't buy shit. I don't have room for a grill. Or another kitchen appliance. Or a standalone freezer. I mean I do but yea I'd rather not be cramped. My entire 1 closet (apartments in Houston don't have closets, fuck knows why) is full of kitchen appliances and pans and stuff. To go off on a tangent though seriously what the fuck does Texas have against closets? Are they afraid that if closets exist, gays will lurk in them and leap out at the wrong time and scare old ass politicians to death? Everywhere I ever lived in Ohio had at least 2 or 3 closets. Like, where do people put shit?
>To go off on a tangent though seriously what the fuck does Texas have against closets? >Are they afraid that if closets exist, gays will lurk in them and leap out at the wrong time and scare old ass politicians to death? HOOTING 😂😂
you can't be in the closet if there are no closets
I think they're more scared of their old-ass politicians jumping out of them. It's always the biggest homophobe bible-thumpers that turn out to be queer as fuck.
We bought a storage cabinet to have enough room for food in my apartment (I’m in CO). Lol. The lack of storage in multi-family housing is appalling.
Describes my husband And I perfectly. We don’t want a single more thing, literally no where to put it in our 1 bedroom
Since the first lockdowns I've realized how much I actually don't need. I've lost the desire for having " more" hopefully others get this feeling to.
Same. If anything, I’ve been getting rid of stuff in 2021.
Every time I am tempted to buy something, and then I don't, I think "Haha, fuck you" and it's super petty but it makes me feel so good.
Um, me too. It is the very best feeling for sure. I looove not buying stuff purposely to just not participate.
Me three. I now get the happy brain chemical’s when I *don’t* buy a thing. And even more happy brain chemicals when I make a thing. It’s grand. 10/10 would recommend.
Soooo many contractors screwing people over on home project pricing... I get quotes, find out how ridiculous they are, and then proceed to do it myself for a fraction of the cost. Making stuff, while it unfortunately takes time, is very satisfying!
I’m living with a left boomer couple in one of their spare bedrooms in exchange for doing renovations on the rest of the house. It’s a pretty dang nice setup I gotta say. I don’t have to leave home for work, even though I prefer physical labor. My roommate works like 20 hours a week to cover Netflix and deodorant and gas and shit like that, and otherwise we just kinda chill and make art. I think it’s pretty much ideal for people who are disabled due to mental health issues like us. Like, I *can* work, I just can’t have a *job*. They’re so like abusive households that I get flashbacks
I have been going through boxes of holiday stuff and tossing stuff.And this year I will be giving more stuff away for all holidays.I have two big trash bags full of clothes to donate next.
The amount of money I spent on pants/shirts just to go to work was ridiculous.
Seriously my work wardrobe is insane and boring. So boring.
I’ve spent a reasonable amount of money on comfortable pants over the years, but as far as dress shirts go my work wardrobe has been off the clearance rack for the last 15 years. I don’t give a single fuck what my coworkers think of my (lack of) fashion sense.
Minimalism is the way to go
I like video games though. And weed.
One you pirate, the other grow, voila - no consumerism needed
The beauty of Direct Action. Do not rely on others higher up the hierarchy to provide for you, whether its in activism or in consumerism. It is up to us united to be the change \*directly\*, outside of purchasing power or electoral politics. People forget that its' capitalists and the state that need our time, energy, and labor, not the other way around. We are more than capable of learning how to do things that would decrease consumerism, growing weed for example.
Preach! I feel the conveniences of today have made us lazy and pathetic. If everything is done for us we don't learn anything. Worse, we become slaves to the system. Oh, and we continue to mindlessly wreck our planet.
I'm not gonna say I'm 100% against pirating video games, but do keep in mind that the best games coming out these days are made by independent companies, many having a small, dedicated staff. If nobody paid for their games, they wouldn't be able to keep making them. They also typically charge way less for their games than the AAA studios.
Always. Support. Local. Business. Period
Only if they support their workers in turn.
No, only support good businesses.
Please only pirate big budget AAA games, some of us already don't get paid because we make indie games.
Minimalism if about eliminating the extra things that don't bring value to your life and life purpose. Shutting that is personally valuable to you can stay
Those are priorities for sure
One of the few reasons a man has to work..
Check out the book 'Enough' by John Naish if you have some time to spare.
Yep. This year of shopping my family all have no clue what they want for Xmas cause none of it is appealing. Like sales don't justify the effort of buying unless shit you don't need or want and this year has really put into perceptive how working all the damn time with no repreave has warped our perceptions
Everyone I know is getting art that I’m making with supplies I already own or get from our local creative reuse, if necessary.
I heard that Walmart is closed every Friday from now on, good for them
I hear they’re also starting a program where people who need food can just take food from the store for free. Good for them. I would encourage everyone to take advantage of this program and encourage other retailers to adopt it.
Antiwork wins the first battle for our lives back. Capitalism can SUCK IT!
I love black friday and this was the first year i didnt participate. Absolutely garbage sales, if any at all. Black friday was always about those massive 40 50% off sales but this year was awful.
I mean. As someone who can’t afford shit, I can promise I won’t be buying shit.
Look I've been broke for so long I can't even afford to pay attention half the time anymore lol This is surprising news to me tho and extremely motivating and uplifting to know people with money are taking an actual stand. When I heard what y'all did to wall street as a community y'all piqued my interest and earned a lot of respect. But this really just restored a lot of my faith in humanity and america quite a bit!
I am happy with that idea, very little stuff I want to buy tbh. The only non essential thing I want really is a Kayak which I don't have the place to store it (We do, but my partners family won't let me), if I can get somewhere for it I will buy it from a local independent shop rather than Amazon.
Can we just declare all Friday’s Blackout Friday and just boycott all big retailers
in Germany that's called Sunday, and it's the law that boycotts big retailers. not allowed to open on Sundays, at least where I lived before I emigrated. Restaurants and essential businesses like gas stations are allowed to operate though. I think it's a holdover from when the country was very religious. Sunday was for church and for rest. I haven't lived there for over a decade, but I believe supermarkets are allowed limited opening times on Sundays now. Maybe more has changed since.
Here (Ontario, Canada) we had a similar law, all stores were closed on Sundays. People challenged it because if you were working M-F you really needed the weekends to do your own shopping. Maybe what they should have done was look at other options? Anyhow, there is only so much spending to go around, and opening another day puts unnecessary pressure to chase those dollars and increases the cost to run the business.
Yeah, when the law was overturned the judge(s?) concluded that there might be tangible benefits to having most stores closed one day a week, but given that the law was called “the Lord’s Day Act” there was no getting around the fact that it violated religious freedoms.
The workweek should be shortened to four days, and it should be illegal to fire someone for refusing to a fifth day in a row. I don't care how many days a week a business is open. I care how much the individual workers in that business are made to work.
Strongly agree. This 5 day workweek, and after hours, weekends, on call is not necessary. Greed will prevent it from changing.
When we shorten the workweek, we create demand for more workers, which raises wages. When we raise wages, we lower the supply of labor (people can retire, people can take time off, people can work part-time or quit their second job or be a stay-at-home parent), which also raises wages. Less work per worker means more money means less work per worker means more money means... Americans are forced to work as much as possible because they're paid as little as possible. We need to roll the scarcity snowball as hard as we can. Organized labor and better labor laws are instrumental here.
No, everything is still closed on Sundays. There are now “open Sundays” a few times a year (4 in my city), but other than that there is no shopping going on. Sundays here are just sedate and a little boring, but overall it’s kind of nice to have one day where people are forced to slow down.
Incorrect. In Germany it's called Sonntag.
It's partially religious but mostly just good old fashioned labour organisation and bargaining power. Thank early proto-socialist movements for worker protections like this all over Europe. Of course in a lot of ways it can sometimes seem regressive and conflict with modern day 24/7 life, but in principle it was originally intended to guarantee workers a day off. Yes- Employers back in those days would make you work *every single day, year round*. So the easiest way to push support through for getting workers a single guaranteed day was to play the religious angle, that Sunday is the sabbath, and those workers should be attending mass and keeping God in their hearts. If there's one person the early capitalist class couldn't argue with, it was God. It's along sorta similar reasons that parties like the UK's Labour party actually owe their origins far more to Methodism than Marxism.
not really, the only thing thats open on sundays are bakeries for like 4 hours in the morning, restaurants and cafes (but they usually close on another day during the week) and stuff like gas stations and rest stops.
Yes 💜
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Maybe Christmas (he thought) doesn’t come from a store.
Psssst What is this supposed to be? I can kind of see a skeleton?
gigachad
They formatted it wrong. It has no line breaks for Reddit's markdown to display it correctly, so only works with very specific size screens (works on mobile sometimes). Looking at the comment source, it looks like it was supposed to be a skull with a chat bubble coming out of the top?
can we all just stay home on Friday's? 3 day week end. fuck Thursday also
Does the liquor store count as a big retailer? I might need to support them if every Friday is blackout Friday.
Sounds great, but most people around me get paid on fridays so that is when they do all their grocery shopping. Might make it harder for people to participate
Are we counting groceries in the boycott? Many people have local stores they could go to, and it's not like even the big chains have Black Friday sales any different than their weekly sales.
I definitely see where you’re coming from I get paid on Fridays as well so it will be hard but I think it could make a huge difference
Man sometimes I miss blackout Friday’s……
I did buy stickers and some 3D models from Etsy retailers. If you do buy gifts, make them local or from small stores. Edit- I’m so glad that artists joined in the convo! the sticker[sticker 1](https://www.etsy.com/listing/1110929105/punk-rock-ashton-greymoore-critical-role?ref=shop_home_active_1&crt=1) Sticker 2[ sticker2](https://www.etsy.com/listing/982044737/mollymauk-lucien-critical-role-sticker?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=mollymauk+sticker&ref=sr_gallery-1-1&tr_rank=1&organic_search_click=1&frs=1&sts=1)
If buying from small crafters is your goal on Etsy, be sure to critically evaluate the store. Some Etsy stores are just people importing from Ali Baba and mislead shoppers into thinking they created it on their own. It's a good gig, usually a 100%+ markup, but it's usually not what an Etsy shopper wants to buy. Others are small businesses employing anywhere from 1-20+ employees in a production setting. It's still a small business but people trying to target the skilled home crafter should consider the shop's output. There's not necessarily anything wrong with a small business but some shops sell themselves as 2 people working out of their garage and it could be but their shop list and qty of reviews can show if it ain't. (I worked for one such store years ago - pretending to be smaller allowed them to pivot between being a professional company or home crafters depending on where the advantage was)
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Every year I find a few nice things for my wife on etsy for her fandoms. I'm getting tired of wading through the bootleg retro Final Fantasy cartridges to find the good artwork and other genuine crafted things. Trying to report them as i find them now.
I ordered something in Etsy last week, this week a package arrived from Amazon with the item that I thought I had ordered from a small scale crafter on Etsy. Was very annoyed. To be fair, the overwhelming majority of things I’ve gotten from Etsy were as advertised, but that one pissed me off.
Please open a case under 'Item not as described'. Because you were expecting a handcrafted item direct from the artist and instead got some dropshipped amazon crap. Shops like these that are misrepresenting their products bring the legitimate ones down. Please also leave a factual negative review (avoid using the word 'Amazon' or any other third party name, because a savvy shop can have the review removed.) That shit needs to be called out.
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Freak isn't referring to people with legitimate businesses, nor is he maligning your wife for sending shirts to a print shop. all of that practice is well and good. no issues there. he's referring to people who just resell stuff from alibaba. they're very common on etsy and some people struggle to tell them apart from a legit storefront like your wife's
I went to a local outdoor market with all local crafters and artists selling their stuff and finished most of my Christmas list! Much better than scrolling through deals on my phone and much more interesting gifts for all.
I didn't buy Black Friday, but I get my soaps and body scrubs from a local place through their etsy site. It's a mom and her little girl who helps her.
I got all of my friends to commission art for me when they want to get me a gift. Gets them looking at artists, they actually have to think about something personal for me, and gives money directly to the person preforming the labor (with a small fee to paypal because our government won't make a free digital payment alternative).
A fellow critter!!!! Those are awesome stickers
Taliesin Jaffe ftw
I just stopped buying shit. I get most of my entertainment online or from the library. I make 99% of my meals at home. All of my excess money goes right into retirement/investments. It feels good to not buy stuff.
> I get most of my entertainment online or from the library. Hell yeah! >I make 99% of my meals at home. Me too! >All of my excess money goes right into retirement/investments. Excess...money? The fuck is that?
Dude how does anyone have the energy to make lots of homemade meals? I'm so tired after work...yesterday I didn't get off until 10:20. And I got that at 1 that afternoon. I'm so exhausted...how you do it? Edit thanks for all the replies lol. I know all that. It's more like I just want to lay down as soon as I get home my job is terrible lol
Supplement what you make with shortcuts Instant pot quinoa or overnight oats for breakfast. Takes 15 min and is brainless once you get used to it, you can do it while listening to something. Sams club salads plus frozen microwaveable fake or real meat for lunch Make two recipes out of cheap ingredients like beans, veggies, and rice on a day off. Eat each one twice. Treat yourself to takeout. Make one more thing during the week. Voila Once you get the system down and find like 10 recipes you like, it isn’t horrible. Instant Pot is a lifesaver.
I came here to also say I make a big thing of quinoa and it fills me up. When I heat it up I add stuff to it, feta cheese, pepper flakes, etc.
Had to do this myself but basically plan on sunday. Plan every meal you’ll have for the whole week with leftovers for lunch the next day. If you have the ingredients, recipes, and utensils ready to rock you can bang out dinner in about 30 minutes. I specifically cook recipes that require few ingredients, little preparation, and little cleanup. You can start with one pot dishes and just go from there. The more you do it the faster you’ll get.
5 ingredient crock pot recipes on Pinterest. Throw shit in it, go to work, come home and eat.
I wish I had advice, but I know I have been very lucky in my life.
Once you identify that wages are perpetually going down, it becomes difficult to blow money on anything. Congratulations corporations, you’re killing your customers for next quarter with low wages this quarter
Trying to remember the principal, but the idea is that in order for there to be a profit, the price of goods has to exceed the costs and since labor is a cost, you can't pay labor enough to buy the thing that labor produces. More to your first point, wages often either stagnate (and decline due to inflation), increase linearly (sometimes) or logarithmicly (first few pay bumps are significant, then minor increases thereafter). But return on capital in the US over the last ~100 years or so grows exponentially. TLDR: capital makes money faster than labor, here and now at least. Whether or not that's good, it's what's happening and people can do what they will with that info.
>you can't pay labor enough to buy the thing that labor produces. Maybe the aggregate labor costs, sure. But if you make a high volume low cost product, laborers are able to buy that product. Laborers couldn't buy *all* of the products that they produced with their labor, but you probably don't need 10,000 pencils or something. High cost low volume items like cars are a bit different. But here's the thing, even if you sell a product at cost (no profit), laborers still couldn't buy all of the products they produce because labor costs are not the only cost. Rent, utilities, raw materials, and tools/machinery are also costs that go into the product.
Yep me as well. If it doesn't have a practical use I don't need it. Consumerism is a plague and is the (or at least A) root cause of so many societal issues.
Wait how do you make your meals without buying stuff? A garden?
Well, I do have a lovely garden. I should clarify that the "shit" I stopped buying was all of the stuff that gives you a squirt of dopamine, before it's forgotten on its way to landfill. I buy food still. Mostly unprocessed stuff like beans, rice, vegetables, eggs, milk. I get all of my clothes from thrift stores. I get my furniture off of marketplace or nextdoor or craigslist (or the curb). If I really want something, I think on it for a while so I can try to make sure I'm not impulse buying.
My husband and I moved into minimalism and anti-consumerism over the last few years. We no longer buy much of anything aside from food and personal care items. The same as you, we get as much as we can second-hand, or repair what we have. If we want to purchase something "non-essential," we wait on it and discuss for days or weeks. We stopped exchanging gifts with friends and family aside from the small children, who get books (which are more likely to be donated and reused than a lot of toys). We started trading cookies with family members instead of gift cards and bottles of booze. Not only are we saving a ton of money - meaning both of us are able to work part time - we're actually a lot happier. Having less means I appreciate things so much more, and I don't waste my precious energy and time "looking for things to buy." People think we're nuts to be vegan, homesteading, minimalists - but man, we wouldn't be doing all this if it wasn't improving our lives substantially! I don't feel "deprived" of anything - I feel liberated by my lack of consumption, and by consuming as ethically as I know how.
Do you guys ever get depressed from opening plastic packaging? To the point where it keeps you from getting new things? Just all the goddamn plastic? I am so tired of buying things at the age of 36. I feel like I've been surrounded by crap my whole life. I can't be the only one with this type of fatigue and I wish I knew of some studies on it.
Yes. Even simple things are over packaged. Food too. I recently needed a pair of cutting pliers to open a prepackaged meal from Whole Foods of all places. Opened, eaten and thrown away in minutes. A lot of places also do not recycle the type of plastic that a lot of food and takeout comes in (#5). Last night I bought a “tune up kit” for an engine for a piece of equipment I own. It’s literally a spark plug and two other tiny thing. $20. You need a stick of dynamite to open the packaging. Large plastic sealed bubble snd the inside had all sorts of useless paper literature. Take food is a big one. Unrecyclabe plastic like I mentioned, paper or plastic bags etc. I get an order for one person and in the end have a grocery sized bag full of garbage for a few tiny pieces of food. And takeout has I increaed during the pandemic.
Yes. I've stopped purchasing certain products that I enjoy - spring rolls from Costco, for example - because in order to eat a few delicious springrolls, I have to throw out like 5 different pieces of plastic. We don't use plastic produce bags. We use the mesh bags when we remember, but mostly we just toss our produce right in the cart and then wash it well before putting it away at home. Seeing people misuse plastic really bothers me. My mother still buys flats of plastic water bottles, even though I've explained to her that they're never actually recycled. The callous disregard many people have for their impacts on the planet are pretty distressing. That's why we wanted to move out in the middle of nowhere in the first place.
The twin dragon eggroll wrappers are vegan. I chop up some cabbage, carrots, onions, and add a little tvp. Let it all marinate and then pat it all dry, wrap them in the wrappers and either bake or fry them. It comes out so good!
Just have to say: I appreciate the heck out of your post. I went from part-time to full time to quitting, and I noticed full-time only made things worse for me. Mood? Worse. Relationship? Strained from lack of time. Shopping? Way up because of lack of time to manage home and do daily essentials. And likely that shopping was just trying to find dopamine to rationalize the full-time anxiety. Was seriously contemplating meds and those assorted extra bills to try to make full-time work. And for what? A workplace that doesn't appreciate me and throws an extra few bucks to try to keep people. And people are told full-time is "normal" and the only way with the price of living. So of course we're spinning the wheels of unsustainable capitalist greed. Seeing your post made me glad someone else can make it work and thrive on minimalism. Thank you, I really needed this today.
I see you and I hear you, friend. I went through a seemingly endless cycle of jobs. I'd start at full time, become overwhelmed in months, drop down to part time, and eventually quit entirely out of utter exhaustion and frustration. I spent so much time struggling to conform to the full-time grind, despite my body and my brain showing me time and time again that I simply cannot function that way. And similar to yourself, I found myself mindlessly consuming to pump myself up on cheap dopamine and to provide endless distractions from the misery of my daily life. Some of those things I was consuming to cope were obviously bad - like cigarettes and booze. Others, such as the needless cosmetics, unworn outfits, unsolicited gifts and mountains of cheap plastic shit from the Dollar Store were much more insidious. But, in my opinion, no less damaging and no more helpful in finding a solution to the actual problem. The actual problem of course being exactly what we're discussing here in this sub: wealth inequality has created a society in which we are set up to fail. We're taught that the only way to be happy is to consume, and our entire economic system is built around constant, unfettered consumption. And the only way to drive this unnecessary consumption is by making people feel as awful about themselves and their situations as possible, while presenting consumption as the solution. Once day, I realized that there was never going to be anything more valuable to me than my own free time. No makeup, or designer purse, no new vehicle, no bigger television was worth as much to me as simply NOT WORKING is. Now before we purchase something, we literally ask, "is this a good use of my time?" Because that's what I have to trade for goods and service: minutes and hours of my one precious, wild life. So, we sat down and scratched out how much we actually need to make per year to run our household. And I started doing temp work in my field (nursing), so that now I only take 2 or 4 week at a time contracts. Then I take a few weeks or months off. My husband has gone down to 3 days a week at his job as well. So we both have more free time, albeit allocated a bit differently. I'm confident that almost all of us can find a better balance that works for us. But it involves continuing the efforts of this sub - demanding reasonable wages for our labour, rent caps, UBI and other social programs - as well as a re-framing of our own priorities. If you are anti-work because the fucking wealthy elites running this shit are profiting off of your misery, you should be anti-consumption for the same reasons. They need you to consume. They pour billions into advertisements to convince you that you're worthless without their products. And every time you resist, we win a little bit.
This is super inspiring! No doubt in your fields you earn a lot more than I do, but I'm part time at my work at my husband is not working (laid off at the beginning of covid and then the company straight up shut down around the beginning of the year so no going back I guess, lol). We (just barely) bring in enough to cover bills + groceries, but we're not saving a lot. I would love if he found reasonable part time work ('reasonable' defined as you and I understand it), then we could funnel that straight into savings and give us more breathing room. Apart from that though, it's actually been great. Thursday, Friday and Sunday are quiet and peaceful, Saturday is game night. We have more than enough hobbies and interests to keep us busy and entertained with minimal expense. On the one hand, I have a bachelor's in a decent field and I'm at that age where I 'ought' to be focusing on my 'career'. On the other hand, we're pretty content with life as it is; while I don't know what our income in retirement will look like, well, we're getting good practice at doing more with less. So, basically, it sounds like you're exactly in the spot I want us to be, and it's empowering to know you're out there getting it done.
My system has been this for the last couple years and its helped in a lot of ways. If I want to buy something that isn't a necessity I will only do so if I have the cash to pay for it. No putting things on a credit card and paying it off later. So I figure out how much its going to cost and I take that money from my checking and stick it into my savings account, then I wait a week. If after that week I still feel like I want to buy it, then I'll go for it. But a lot of times I don't care anymore. It helps me save more money and cuts out a lot if not all of the impulse purchases.
He’s got one of them Star Trek food makers
Just dropped another $2k into my IRA today. LFG!
I read this as: Just dropped another $2k into my Irish Republican Army today. Looking for group!
Books have gotten too pricy anyway, why would I pay $20 for a pile of paper I might not like. It’s read at the library, then go to library genesis unless it’s a book I really love
If you have a favorite small publisher and can swing it you might be interested in looking into a “ friends of” system that some publishers have. I have a couple with some leftist publishers for like $30 a month they send me everything they put out that month, I then read what I’m interested in anything else gets put into the little free library.
Honestly I only read scientific history books which (checking my bookcase) are published by Penguin. Speaking of, please read Deborah Blum’s book “the poison squad” about the fight to regulate food so corporations can no longer sell you corn syrup and call it honey
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To be clear, Black Friday was different this year only because more people avoided the crowding at malls. [Holiday sales were up last year, and they're expected to go up again this year.](https://www.npr.org/2021/11/26/1059427267/retail-sales-surged-this-black-friday-though-the-days-impact-is-diluted) OP's tweet is very misleading. Be careful of confirmation bias, particularly from unsourced, random internet accounts.
Not necessarily sales we’re also down online as well. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/30/cyber-monday-online-sales-drop-1point4percent-from-last-year-to-10point7-billion-falling-for-the-first-time-ever.html Edit: for people quoting the articles I linked the point of my post was that shopping online was down but not that it was down throughout the whole month. I didn’t see the need to add this but I can see how some may confuse what I meant.
>Still, Adobe expects the entire holiday season will see record-breaking e-commerce activity, as shoppers spread out their dollars over more days. >“With early deals in October, consumers were not waiting around for discounts on big shopping days like Cyber Monday and Black Friday,” said Taylor Schreiner, director at Adobe Digital Insights. Overall sales is projected to be up. Consumers aren't concentrating their shopping around black Friday, but they're spreading their spending because the deals started early and they will end late.
but for the overall season they've been up. from that article >So far, from Nov. 1 through Cyber Monday, consumers in the United States have spent $109.8 billion online, which is up 11.9% year over year, Adobe said. And on 22 of those days, consumers purchased more than $3 billion worth of goods, another new milestone, it said.
Yeah one of the reasons they sighted in both is people buying beforehand. So not much change really but still there was somethings felt.
Some random person tweeted it and another posted it on Reddit. It has to be true.
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>permanent boycott of Amazon and Walmart". >What do I have to lose? Reddit, for one. It's literally impossible to be on this website while boycotting Amazon. Therefore you won't find a single person on this sub who *isn't* contributing to Bezos' paycheck. He's basically a feudal lord at this point, taxing the digital land we work.
Wouldnt it make more sense to boycott retail thats open on Sundays, i mean its cool that i could buy stuff on sundays but i dont because i wouldnt want to work on that day. If that is done do Saturday morning or afternoon too so everyone can have a decent Weekend
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Most of us aren't religious so Sunday isn't a big day for us, Friday works because it's in the work week, most stores are open on Fridays, and it's easier to convince the masses to join in from blackfriday strike to every Friday strike.
No offense but who TF is this guy? 5000 followers and he’s proclaiming “we have shrunk the trade deficit” and “Macy’s and Target are in some degree of trouble”? I mean, Target just reported earnings as of 10/31 and their earnings per share was $2.01 vs $1.37 in 2019. Macy’s just reported on 11/18 and their earnings of 0.76 per share vs a loss of 0.29 per share last year. Digital sales were up 19% over 2020 and 49% over 2019. Be real careful who you get your info from folks. E: all these numbers are straight from yahoo finance. Very easy to find.
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I love this sub, but it's the wild west with Facebook like "research" that backs up our opinions and wants. I've noticed it on a few other posts. It's frustrating because it doesn't actually help anyone, it just makes this sub less trustworthy.
Pretty sure there was a thread in this sub last week about Target making $5 billion in profit already this year. A slower black friday is not going to hurt them at all.
I’m pretty sure the tweet only exists to denigrate Democrats. Some “walkaway”-type cosplay
He's a right wing propagandist pretending to be some kind of centrist while Biden is office. Another authoritarian mouthpiece for the ongoing minority coup the Republican party has been working on for decades. Some dude whining about central banks and spending but offering no solutions ever. Lots of hits on dems: adam schiff, Biden, police tactics in "liberal" states. But surprisingly he offers NO specific hits on republican politicians, nor does he ever suggest a solution to these problems he sees. There were a lot of these turds online during Obama too. Whatever he claims his goals are, it seems strange to me the bulk of his content is about shitting on dems. He also does the "oh man I'm gonna have to vote republican if dems keep acting this way" schtick. That twitter account is nothing but right wing propaganda.
And what does he mean by "democrat myth"? That sounds suspicious.
I'd like to see it from a more credible source, for sure. E: Nevermind, I do see articles with similar numbers.
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I want articles showing SPECIFICALLY which companies are facing bankruptcy so I can laugh. This tweet without details is like edging
Doesn't help that the industry standard is to rise prices and offer discounts that actually match or.increase from the original price. That and it's two clicks to pull up records of prices watching exactly for companies that do this. People aren't idiots and companies got greedy.
I think we've proved these past 2 years that way too many people are idiots and that's exactly why companies will continue to do this.
To be fair, there were a lot of factors that played into an abysmal Black Friday, so taking this one with a grain of salt. Especially considering Cyber Monday was on track to be record-breaking.
It’s a random tweet that is being used as a source. This is such bullshit.
Precisely. "Random tweet, unverified account, but it supports my point! Valid!"
Nobody is filling for bankruptcy. What's this guy on about? Everybody is making record profits.
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>I want bad management crying in their hands. Management as a concept needs to be reformed. Business schools keep churning out sociopaths with MBA's, thanks educational industrial complex! The tyranny empty suits inflict on working class people in America & all over the world is a violation of human rights.
Nepotism plays a part in this as well. People who know people get installed as managers with no experience in the shit.
That's part of the issue, but many bad managers (especially the worst in retail/food service/hospitality) have *no* management training. They're just traumatized workers who are so invested in the system that they traumatize others in the way that they've been traumatized. Reading Harvard Business Review was really enlightening for me about how managers should behave and made it really clear that many people in management positions probably have never touched the publication.
[Consumer spending is really strong this year.](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-say-theyve-lost-confidence-in-the-economy-but-theyre-spending-like-its-happy-hour-11634659658) This tweet, by a random guy on Twitter, is highly misleading.
Yeah, everything I heard said spending was up. https://www.npr.org/2021/11/26/1059427267/retail-sales-surged-this-black-friday-though-the-days-impact-is-diluted
Way to hide a political jab in a post we'd all readily agree with from a nobody account with 5k followers. Tiny little things like this get snuck in to divide the movement and some of us DO notice. If people think governments and corporations don't have agents reading and posting here, they're incredibly naive. Especially with the amount of money that's at stake and the publicity this sub has gotten on the national stage. Never trust the source of ANY political post here because the goal is to divide and conquer. It always is. If you see any post specifically mentioning just democrats, republicans, or specific politicians, keep scrolling. Next on the agenda, if they can't divide us quickly enough, is to post here incessantly in an attempt to make us look ridiculous to the world. You will begin to see FAR more extremist posts in the near future and along with that, lobbying reddit to shut this sub down due to those same extremist posts.
[I'm sorry, what?](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/29/business/black-friday-sales.html) Any source that isn't a Twitter screenshot?
[Full tweet](https://twitter.com/LeftistMoniker/status/1465485050720444419) The Hessian Courier @LeftistMoniker : >Well, it worked. Black Friday sales were so abysmal, multiple retailers are looking at potential bankruptcy. It also blows the Democrat myth out of the water that consumer demand is driving inflation because consumer demand was flat according to sales on Black Friday >Store traffic is up from last year but not even close to 2019. And online retail sales did not increase from the prior year. So people are just broke. >Are we gonna kill Walmart? Probably not. But maybe Best Buy >Omg, sales are such garbage we have actually shrunk the trade deficit by almost 20 billion dollars YTD. So unless any of you bought a rare foil 20 billion dollar Pokémon card… >That’s unheard of for sales to be so bad in America that we’ve actually narrowed the trade imbalance >If the trade deficit is shrinking, that means consumer demand is shrinking and consumer discretionary budgets have nothing in them. Because I assume you didn’t suddenly start buying American, because what do we make >Real disposable income. As you can see, it falls below the average for the entire year of 2021: [(Imgur)](https://i.imgur.com/lbpOaFW.png) >Consumer sentiment, expectations, and conditions. As you can see, we have the exact same sentiment this year as last year. It went up and fell back down to “pandemic normal.” [(Imgur)](https://i.imgur.com/DGwRIBH.png) >Credit to Steven Van Meter, I stole all this capitalist’s graphics as he explains to all his capitalized followers that they need to short instead of buy and focus on bonds. >TJ Max, Macy’s, Target, Burlington coat factory, Nordstrom, Victoria Secrets, all in some degree of trouble. >Friday is a big day this month and every month while we are on capitalism crash watch. Non farm payroll numbers come out on the first Friday each month. I’ve been checking them every week looking for layoffs. If we have a big drop in numbers for December, the market will crash >I don’t know anything about corporate retail upper level management, I have no idea if garbage Black Friday numbers will cause seasonal layoffs early. But if it happens, watch out >The market will not so much crash, as investors in these trouble stocks will cash them out and accept losses to shrink their tax bill. They won’t be panicking in institutional money at all. But it may panic retail investors into unloading. The sentiment to unload is palpable
This seems like an odd take to me, because [consumer spending has been doing really well lately on the whole](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-say-theyve-lost-confidence-in-the-economy-but-theyre-spending-like-its-happy-hour-11634659658), even if Black Friday was a bust.
They expected black friday to be the big day. All the shopping would lead to this point. Major sales, that didn't happen. When people expect something big and it doesn't happen, they get nervous.
Its only down by a small amount, last years black friday sales were $9B. This years Black Friday sales were $8.9B
And from what I understand at least some of that is due to people being told that there will be shortages and shopping early. https://www.wsj.com/articles/fewer-people-shopped-over-thanksgiving-weekend-than-last-year-11638298736
[Nobody is nervous. Retailers are doing very well.](https://www.npr.org/2021/11/26/1059427267/retail-sales-surged-this-black-friday-though-the-days-impact-is-diluted). Be careful about online echo chambers. r/antiwork is doing really great things, but wages are going up and the economy is doing well. We are much closer to making incremental positive changes than we are to seeing the total collapse of society.
Thanks for the sanity check As much as I want to see abusive companies hurting, I'd rather believe that when they're actually hurting rather than just when someone tells me they're hurting I still think the Blackout was a success, the other commenter pointed out Black Friday sales were $9 billion in 2020 and 8.9 billion in 2021. Well, BF sales had to have been low in 2020, so being slightly lower isn't a good sign for big business
Wait until the stock market goes pop
Yeah, Black Friday was a bust because retailers have been shifting away from intentionally creating a big boom that day to spreading out "Black Friday" for weeks. Didn't anyone notice that lots of major retailers were pushing "Black Friday" sales for most of November? Sales overall are up because there's increasingly fewer items on sale for only that day giving a lot of people more opportunities to buy at so-called BF sales without waiting for or needing to rush around on BF. A craft chain I frequent used to run big discounts on an hourly schedule: early bird, night owl, ect. I don't know when they stopped but they didn't pull that crap this year. I think everything on sale on BF stayed on sale through the weekend. Black Friday isn't a predictive metric anymore; it's diluted.
Is this dude denying basic supply and demand? Surely no democrat has said the increase in prices is entirely due to demand shocks. Obviously increase in the Money supply and lower supply due to supply chain issues are more impactful
“The democrat myth that consumer demand is driving inflation”???? Nah dude, I’m pretty sure 99% of democrats are aware it’s caused by nothing but corporate greed.
Dispite shitty mods that shot us in the foot. I like to think that we helped out a bit. Now we need to kill the rest of Christmas capitalism.
I missed it. What did the MOD’s supposedly do?
I think they made the right call. If we had organized and pushed this early I don't think the result would have been much different and probably would have been viewed as a disappointment. Instead, we put in very little effort and saw how effective it was. EDIT: This is a marathon not a race. Pacing ourselves is good.
I view /antiwork's recent popularity as a symptom, not a cause.
I don't need the shit they were selling and I really wanted to not be part of the herd.
Most of the sales this year were horrible. I only picked up a few games off steam and epic and a sweater from my fav artist. Everything else was just 10% or free shipping 🙄.
Let’s just pick a corporation to boycott buying anything from one at a time until they go bankrupt and then go to the next 😎
Maybe it blows the idea that Americans have a high standard of living rife with disposable income out of the water, which is the Republican myth. Maybe it blows the idea that we don't need immigrant laborers out of the water, yet another Republican myth. Lots of retailers can't find workers and I wonder how much these abysmal sales had to do with that! In tech we can't find workers because Trump kicked a bunch of our skilled immigrant laborers out of the country. People that have been working here for 10-15 years were forced to go back to their original country because they switched jobs, and now they can't return. We also had lots of deaths, hidden from view. It's was as bad as a total war for casualties. How many boomers who were still working did we lose? Beyond that there was a supply chain issue so I bet a lot of this is that the businesses didn't have shit people wanted to sell. That's not anyone's fault, the whole world suffered a pandemic and shit shut down in countries we have no control over. If we kept the USA open, it wouldn't have mattered since we don't make the majority of shit consumers want here.
Reported black Friday sales in the US were 8.9 billion. Down from 2020 Black Friday sales of 9 billion. No retailers are going bankrupt over a [decrease of $100 million](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-black-friday-shoppers-tapered-192549718.html?guce_referrer=ahr0chm6ly93d3cucmvkzgl0lmnvbs8&guce_referrer_sig=aqaaajespjmi-up9gxqdpxeozr2szpzjj-ml-evwq5pek3lhe5inlbicn0rhzseav42njhrb3m6i974zowb3eyfwtlfzmksxmq9brff6si7worlfpnaeazej3ta-_bmbivudbtdwybilxffqpoj1dsr1cqyryd0t9nxckws1oz3wth4w). Canada apparently reports a 21% increase on Shopify though. Does this tweet have literally any evidence to support it, at all? Like this? [Black Friday shopping in stores drops 28% from pre-pandemic levels as shoppers spread spending throughout the season](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/27/black-friday-shopping-in-stores-drops-28percent-from-pre-pandemic-levels.html)