never understood this. If you can’t buy it now will you be able to.pay later?! You need groceries every month
If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, it takes one unexpected expense and suddenly you’re hustling to get food on the table. The cycle then repeats itself.
I’ve been there. It’s expensive to be poor with little to no way out.
You need a car to work. Cars are expensive. You get a old clunker.
You work and live check to check. Maybe $50 or $100 left over after taxes and expenses. Not really possible to have an emergency fund.
A single injury or car breaking down and you need to borrow money. From family, friends or some shitty company.Oh and then your yearly raise comes around at $1/hr that barely covers your rent increasing let alone inflation.
Whoops some bill auto-drafted unexpectedly
Your account is negative now, oh and throw a $25 fee on top.
Looks like you’re scrounging for dinner tonight. And the rest of the week. Maybe skip some meals because you have no choice.
Shit sucks ass.
Getting a checking account with no overdraft fees is definitely a plus in those situations
Peanut butter and bread it is!
Food banks are a godsend in these situations. Don’t donate money. Find a local community center that offers assistance and donate foodstuffs. Things like rice, canned beans and mixed veggies are always welcome.
From what I understand food banks would rather your money than those nasty old cans in the back of the pantry
Actually, yes. Donate what food you can, but I promise they have enough cans of beans, bags of rice, etc to last until Jesus comes. Especially because different areas have different people - one local pantry might just need a little bit of everything, while another one on the north side of your city needs a lot of vegetarian and halal options because of the people it serves in that area. Especially, donating money lets that food bank get things that aren’t strictly necessary, but can make life that much more bearable - pastries, cookies, candy, snack foods, etc. Sure, it’s not healthy and I can hear you all sighing from here, but imagine this is your sole source of food for the month. Having a package of shelf-stable Little Debbies or whatever can seriously make your day just a little more bearable, instead of going “oh boy beans and rice for the 23rd time this month.”
Dog and cat foods are good things to donate, also sanitary items.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.
Yep. This tracks.
My issue now with products is planned obsolescence. Any things aren’t made to last like they used to. They also have extra technology in them making them harder to repair. Appliances, cars and more.
I understand the need but you just push the snowball hoping for a miracle.
Some people don’t have the option, and end up relying on these services. It’s similar to the payday loan trap. Being poor is expensive.
Cost of living is too high, put it on credit.
Your alternative is starve now.
Either way, this is about to get a lot more bonkers in roughly the next 30 to 60 days as Just In Time delivery… kinda just, stops working, and grocery stores will have to both raise prices and ration items per customer per week to deal with shortages and try to minimize in-store injuries and deaths.
Go look up a compilations of black friday shopping stampedes.
Imagine that, but for groceries, every time a grocery store restocks… for the forseeable future.
Can you elaborate on this? Just In Time delivery? Is this a US thing?
Edit: okay, I looked it up and I understand it now. The ripple effect already happened though when big box stores told Trump to fuck off with the tariffs, because their shelves are empty.
Yeah, put super simply:
Minimize needed actual storage space and time a thing spends in storage… by relying on very frequent and consistent logistics.
Its very efficient in the sense of minimizing operating costs…
But it is also extremely fragile, a minor perturbation can fuck shit up for weeks or months.
… And we are getting… well basically the most major disruption in the history of JIT as a logistics paradigm.
Really thought we would have learned that JIT is a horrible strategy after covid… That was only a few years ago…
America follows Seinfeld rules:
No hugging.
No learning.
… Larry David is even writing poignant political satire pieces just right in the New York Times now!
There was an episode of Comedians in Cars like a decade ago now, Jerry just muses something like… God, is NYC just gonna be nothing but corporate coffee shops and banks?
Yes. Yep. That is what happened.
That’s probably part of why the capital class want fascism. Because if that happens in a democracy, they would have their capital expropriated.
If you are at the point where you are buying grocoeries in installments, who cares about paying it back. What good is a good credit score if you cant afford to buy anything anyways. Just survive any way you can at that point
Then you’ve never been poor and living paycheck to paycheck.
There are times when it’s either find a loan from someone or not eat for two weeks because something in your house broke and that’s unfortunately a reality for many Americans including myself at one time.
I understnd financing. The problem is financing groceries. So you cover the unexpected and finance groceries. what about next month?! Unless you get a way to make more money to cover the difference you going ro have to finance again plus interests
edit: I’m sorry, I’m not american and I was trying to understand some decision. I get it
Girl, if they don’t eat they won’t make it to next month! This isn’t a financial decision, it’s a survival decision.
Capitalism isn’t paying enough for workers to live off of and they system is papering over it with debt. Problem is debt isn’t a sustainable way to do it since it has to get paid back. We’ve been seeing sketchier and sketchier things happening in finance and when these loans don’t get repaid (and this article is a sign we’re getting close) the whole house or cards comes tumbling down
The idea is that if you are throwing a party or buying something big, then this will be useful for those purchases.
It isn’t a good idea, though.
Probably should not be throwing parties when they are poor
You can’t not live life. You can’t budget your way out of poverty
yes, however you absolutely can budget yourself into it.
Yeah man, fuck people just trying to throw a birthday party for their kid. People need to suffer more
Also living miserly won’t actually get you out of poverty so what’s the point?
I keep on wondering who the fuck has the money to be using things like grubhub. I realize its a non sequitor for this article but I really don’t see how these businesses stay in business.
My neighbor gets everything delivered, but I have no clue what he or his wife do. If my spouse made the same as I do, we could afford to do all that delivery stuff. But it still makes no sense
Same. If my spouse made the same as me and did not have all the medical issues I guess I could but we would not. Likely would just live in a nicer place.
People who don’t really understand credit cards or have a cognitive disconnect between cost and value when fulfilling their sustenance need.
When people get hangry they don’t make good choices.
Roaring 20’s pt 2
I get 5% cash back for using ny credit card to buy groceries. I use the card and pay it off every payday. Free money.
Those benefits are usually your own money + the money of those who fail to make payments since merchants have to increase their prices to compensate for credit card fees.
They indirectly steal from you, launder the funds and present it back to you as a “benefit”, but only if you’ve been a good boy.
This is a similar principle to modern loyalty programs. In exchange for your personal information and your eyes (advertising), you get to pay slightly above the regular price and accumulate ✨points✨ while other schmos get a jacked up price that pays for your points (or the value of your points is built into the price of the items you purchase).
Not exactly. Card benefits come directly from fees charged to merchants, which is why processing fees vary wildly from card to card and the merchant has no clue what their fees are going to be per transaction (though this is starting to change with services like Stripe charging a flat percentage+ transaction fee). Interest and the like are pure profit for CC companies. You as the cardholder receive the benefits even if you carry a balance.
Yes precisely, and merchants increase their prices to account for those unknown processing fees since it varies wildly from card to card.
If you carry a balance, you will pay interest, hence reducing the value of your rewards.
and since you’re paying through the cost of groceries etc whether you get the benefits or not, you may as well get the benefits
I think a lot of people don’t realize what a big piece merchant fees are. This is why so many places just don’t take AmEx.
https://www.bankrate.com/credit-cards/business/why-american-express-isnt-universally-accepted/#why
“Visa and Mastercard tend to charge credit card processing fees between 1.15 percent + $0.05 and 2.5 percent + $0.10 per transaction. American Express charges 1.43 percent + $0.10 to 3.30 percent + $0.10 per transaction. That means if a business sells $10,000 in credit card transactions per week, they could pay around $115 to $250 in Visa and Mastercard fees versus around $143 to $330 in Amex fees.”
Now that CapOne is trying to buy Discover, I have no idea what that will mean…
The people who subsidize rewards are customers paying cash/debit.
The prices are higher to cover the Visa Infinite or whatever premium card merchant fees.
Absolutely, they get shafted the most.
The people in power will soon come to realise we are all just 3 warm meals a day away from anarchy.
What kind of psychopath has three warm meals a day? You cook three times a day? Or do you eat out three times a day? I believe the latter to be more crazy.
I do share the intended sentiment however.I cook 3 times a day. It’s fucking exhausting and I’ve come to hate my kitchen. But it keeps everyone fed and happy for a fair price.
I also work from home though and mostly cook on company time.
Have u tried doing like a week of meal prep at a time? I cook a weeks worth of meals every Sunday then don’t do anything during the week. U can avoid eating the same thing for a week strait if u have multiple sets of meals ready then u can mix and match to get variety. I do generic protein then generic carbs and generic sides then can mix and match those in all sorts of combination to also increase variety.
I actually have a few months ago, I made a bunch of crockpot meals, pre-cooked some fresh veggies, made a few deserts. It was great for a few days.
Then I woke up one morning and my freezer door was wide open. My fridge/freezer is like 25 years old and doesn’t really shut properly so it will open if you bump it too hard, I assume a cat jumped up there and got it open. Everything was thawed out and warm, I tried to save what I could but our compost got a lot of it.
It hasn’t happened since but I’m a little scared to put a bunch of food in there again. I have been pre chopping all of my veggies though and that’s been a huge time saver.
I’m just waiting for one of my fancy friends to get rid of their perfectly good fridge and ask if anyone needs it, then I’ll probably try again.
Putting food on layaway?
So much winning /s
I grow a lot of my food in a fairly small space, and it’s quite easy. There’s also a community garden a few blocks away. Everything else is avoiding corporate supermarkets as they seem to have the worst quality at the highest price for meats, baked goods, etc. So I’m rarely doing a grocery shop and notice my money goes much slower.
If you’re struggling to get groceries, assess your receipt and look for alternatives. Reducing spend while increasing quality is definitely a thing with staples.
Odd to think if you can’t afford food now you could afford it later plus interest.
Right after I got my house I had to basically live on bread and water for the first couple years as the tax situation devolved and resolved. Not above doing it again to keep my home
And people have an issue with dumpster diving. Fools
Literally what russians were doing while being loud on internet about how sanctions don’t work. You can look foward to anti theft tags on bread soon.
As a person of developing countries who have prefer in cash, i still don’t get the idea yet.
Is it like credit card? Credit card existed in my country but only rich pop in offfice use it.
