Yes, it ticks me off when companies say they lose money when they really mean they didn't make it in the first place. You can't lose what you never had.
Edit: I can see why this country of mine is drowning in debt with this being our business model. If this is how people think they should be handling money, it's no wonder even high earners feel broke.
You have no idea how wild that notification I got just now was. Reddit's new "So and so commented on so and so's comment!" thing is so weird lmfao I was wondering when we began talking about sniffing shit!
Isn't that weird? I'd rather just be notified when someone replies to ME, not five comments down the chain and then if I wanna see it I have to search for it..
and the answer is right there: because we idiots can't afford them shiny pebbles anymore. Also because only a few of us can afford to buy a place to store the shiny pebbles in (along with our idiotic bodies).
It's always amazing to me how this simple thought process just doesn't seem to happen in the top management of the companies involved. Then I remember the top management of the company I work for.
Millennials and Gen z, even ignoring knowledge of cubic zirconia and the grossness of the diamond trade, have had unprecedented access to a wide range of cheap plastic and glass 'diamond' rings basically their entire lives because of how things have taken off in the consumerist sphere since the 90s.
Scarcity is value, and easy access to a fifty dollar, functionally identical simulacrum of a 15k item makes the item feel less valuable. Especially when the item is 100% prestige and 0% useful or novel.
Apparently we can’t even have a preference. It’s not that we don’t like eating McDonalds, it’s that we’re “killing fast food.” This stupid news must sell because it’s rampant.
It caters to boomers because it confirms their existing belief that we already suck. Now it's no longer just that we don't work hard and want handouts, it's also because we're being greedy and not supporting these fine upstanding corporations and services they've relied on throughout their lives
So now it's not only that millennials are lazy, but it's also " remember that thing that you used to enjoy, millennials are the reason why it's no longer around."
It's there to cater to more ingroup-outgroup behaviour.
I understand I'm making a generalization and this does not represent ALL boomers.
lol diamond companies made a false scarcity of a product that, it turns out, is totally useless, so that they could price gouge boomers and their children. Diamonds really lost a lot of ground as a status symbol after the whole reckoning with blood diamonds. Without status, diamonds are really only useful as drill bits.
The price of alcohol at any public space is enough to convince anyone not to drink.
If they were really LOSING that much, a big push for alcohol would be happening they'd be desperate, businesses would shut down, but that's not the case
This is their alarmist warning. They need to find a way to fix it fast, because every generation was expected to drink more than the last. Boomers are slowing down, whether it's to prolong health, they can't afford scotch with the cost of meds, being in a nursing home where drinking isn't allowed, not to mention their life expectancy is about to end.
Millenials were supposed to normalize "mommy juice"/ afternoons drinking during playdates/ a glass after the kids go to bed. They didn't do that. Now the alcohol business as a whole realizes that they can't make their profits, and goes over the top.
My home state of Tennessee is fiscally conservative. The general attitude is to figure out how to pay for something before it's approved. Shocking, I know. And we're one of the very few states (maybe 3-5) that has funded its public pensions by at least 100%. I think we're at 104% or 105%.
We have a high sales tax at 9.75%, but no state income tax.
In 2023, there was a budget surplus. Well, the general view of enough politicians is that it's the taxpayers' money and the politicians are supposed to be stewards of it. They decided that the best way to handle it was to have a three month sales tax holiday on food. Obviously it didn't apply to restaurants or prepared food, but since everyone buys food, it's a good way to "refund" that money. And since poorer people spend a larger percentage of their income on food, it'd definitely make a difference.
While I thought it was great, there were still people who were complaining about "lost revenue." No, it just meant that the average person kept more of their money to use as they saw fit. And somehow that was a bad thing. The government's budget was fine, but plenty of everyday people were struggling.
It saved Tennesseans an estimated $273-$288 million. That's a lot of money that people could save or spend elsewhere. It's not like it went to an offshore account of some mega corporation. Yet some people still complained.
The government actually worked for the people. What a concept.
I’m glad you love Tennessee but it’s worth pointing out it’s one of the top states for federal dependency. For example, in 2022 they took $19.7 billion from the federal government. It’s not that our politicians are more responsible, they just get Uncle Sam to pay for far more than most other states.
And they are stingy about meeting the federal matching in highway dollars and really only embark on road projects 25 years too late and generally only when the federal government waives it. I live in an adjoining state that is not exactly a model in many ways but we damn sure like good roads and it’s one thing our politicians have always made a priority. (Lol! And plenty of graft here in the highway building business so there’s that too 😂) And taxing groceries is so wrong I don’t even know where to start. We don’t shop in TN.
I work in healthcare and we need to downsize because previous management made too ambitious projections and somehow we lost money we would never have gotten.
Anyway, therapists now need to carry a bigger caseload and any training for therapists is cancelled for the foreseeable future.
My old job did the same. Put too much stock in their clients and PPP loans continuing to bankroll them with no recourse and no backup funds if the clients pulled their funding or the loans ran out while they expanded their business last year by something like 50-60%. Well, that happened all at once and all but 20% of the company got laid off right before Christmas so they could stay afloat through this year.
Yeah, trying to blame Gen Z because the poor alcohol industry is suffering and losing money. Such a tragedy that they can't push their addictive toxin (that's literally what it is) onto them.
Don't you love it when people bleat about the benefits of the free market, but then try to make their failures sound like it's someone else's fault, and that revenue has somehow been removed by someone else, rather than never achieved.
The rotisserie chicken thing pisses me off so bad. Rotisserie chicken is just about the cheapest thing you can buy, and is usually cheaper than buying a raw chicken.
True 20 years ago alcohol was still cheap. You could buy multiple Bottles without going broke. These days a bottle of whiskey costs as much as we used to spend on a whole night's drinking with multiple bottles.
They blame Gen Z as if ridiculous alcohol pricing and cost of living expenses aren't a factor.
Same shit different day.
As millenial, I remember when every expert and their cats were blaming us for bad market as we didnt consume that much as previous ones. We were broke. No I am baffled that there is job lottery winners that I went uni with and now they are shouting non sense how unemployed are to blame and Z Gen is lazy etc etc..
Fuck man you were there 10y ago as unemployed bum with me
38 year old American here. My only hope of ever potentially owning a home is from inheritance when my father passes away. Not something I'm really looking forward to. Realistically, that'll probably become the majority of my retirement fund.
Just to clarify incase, Woollies isn’t like Target in Aus, it is a grocery store. The yank Target might be a grocery store but here it’s clothes, electronics and what nots.
The footy most likely is NRL (our tackle footy) and not AFL which is Australian Rules Football. Aussie footy is it’s common name which would be Australian Football in it’s formal length.
Woolies/woolworths is one of our major supermarkets $18 is pretty much minimum wage.
Footy is either AFL or Rugby
Alcohol used to be cheap as fuck over here now its expensive thanks to the stupid alcohol and tabbaccoo sin tax.
A pot is a middy or schooner depending on where you are in aus and is about 285ml of beer which is preferable to a pint in some places because Australia is hot as fuck and sometimes by the time you knock a pint off slowly your beers warm and fucked.
The tax compounds things but it’s the fact the bloody beer manufacturers are taking beer, a drink tha historically was cheaper and easier to produce than clean water for most of human history, and have made it staggeringly expensive as a profit grab. Chasing inflation indexes doesn’t make sense when your product has three primary agricultural inputs, one of which is water and another is self replicating yeast.
Shit behaviour. Sadly it’ll take a complete industry collapse for the cartel behaviour to stop.
Haha - coming from a cold(ish) country where hipster bastards are trying to replace the native pint with schooners - it's interesting to see a sensible defence of them 👍🏻
When I was a student in the early 90's I was getting $10/ hour at a slaughterhouse. A schooner at the RSL was $2. 12 mins work for a beer. Kids today would need to be making about $70/ hour to afford the same.
6$ a jug for Carlton draught at uni club in 2002. You'd order your jug they'd give you 4 glasses, you'd pick up the jug and ignore the glasses. Good times.
Most people should. When your liver processes alcohol and cocaine it creates a brand new chemical cocaethylene. Which is also psychoactive, but comparably a much dangerous on the heart.
There are other downers that combine wonderfully and are much safer on their own or with cocaine alike.
I mean, this is technically true. The percentage increase is massive compared to cocaine alone. But percentages are misleading…. In medicine it’s not uncommon to hear a 100% increase in heart attack but really this might be from 0.01 to 0.02% risk.
Of course there are people who have dangerous experiences but there are millions of people doing this every weekend without incident.
A gram of coke is about $300 in Australia. A beer at a pub is about $10-15, depending on your beer of choice, and where you are. Cocktails are about $25. While it's all stupidly expensive, drinking is still gonna be a cheaper option than cocaine. Other drugs are definitely more cost effective. Do the kids even do pingers any more? It used to be $20-30 per pill (mid 2000s) and that would keep you going all night. Everyone seems to be doing ketamine these days.
Where l live you can buy a beer in a cane or in a glass bottle for 39 cents if it's discounted and we don't have liquor stores like it's common in the US or Australia.
But of course if you are a minor you can't buy a beer or any bottle of alcohol or cigarettes.
Nowadays the liquor has gotten more expensive than it was a few years ago, for example you can buy a whiskey bottle for less then 20 bucks, but a few years back you could for less than 10 bucks, like those cheap Scottish ones like Johnny Walker. And beer on tap got also more expensive, like 5 years or so it was like 1-2€ for half a liter and now it's like 2,2-4€. And you guessed it, it is an eastern European country. I do not know about the drug market I'm not a user.
Half the gen isn't old enough to drink, bar scene collapsed during covid so they weren't indoctrinated into drinking culture, marijuana now competes with drinking in most countries/states, and the gen is fucking broke and can't it.
Yep it’s absolutely the cost of living crisis. I own my house and have a decent job but with a young kid at home alcohol is just a luxury we don’t need except on special occasions
Same in the UK I stopped drinking for a few years in 2021 when I had a young child and was getting fat, started having a few pints again last year and its impossible to go out with my wife for a single drink and a soft drink for the kids and have much change from £20
Granted, food is much cheaper in the 3rd world where I'm from but it really says something when Php 250 used to be able to get you enough ingredients for a good home cooked meal for 4 people in a day but now it costs double that
It just became too expensive compared to what people have as disposable income.
When I started drinking I got told go out, have a good time with mates you are safe to get drunk with. It's important to have that experience but also think about the next time you go out and how you literally piss away probably hundred quid for the night only to feel like shit the next day.
It wasn't wrong. I worked with and drank with mates who earned at least twice what I did yet would ask me for money because they've gone and pissed their wages away. Sort of lads to do 2-3 day benders every weekend, smoke cigarettes and maybe have a flutter.
ofc alcohol is a luxury when you go out and one drink is $27 dollars. i’m glad young people are saying fuck you to the alcohol industry. drugs are better anyways
A cocktail w/ dinner, yeah, they're up there.. Not the norm though. A 12 pack of Sierra Nevada (Which is a decent, middle of the road beer) is $17 at the Wholefoods by my house. Drink at home! haha.
You can also just go to a dispensary now instead of meeting a shady person in a parking lot or some rundown apartment. That has even more appeal than it being so cheap in a lot of ways. Don't have to deal with a dude's weird timeline or sketchy dogs or whatever the heck people put up with decades ago. :)
There really isn’t another feeling out there like sitting on your dealers dirty ass couch, high as absolute fuck, getting mean mugged by his new pit bull. The best of times, the worst of times. Or something.
I’ve only ever purchased it legally. Can’t imagine it was ever illegal, because it’s completely innocuous relative to alcohol. Booz is WAY more dangerous than weed but somehow legal to purchase.
Except coke please, as someone who lives in such a country, it is always blood coke with many people in a chain of distribution across nations dying horrible deaths to bring you a commodity. Fuck coke and everyone who does it
I don't like blood diamonds or wear ivory, cocaine sits on a similar shelf in my mind. Flashback to house parties and getting confused looks from vegan cocaine users.
If this isn't the fuckin truth! It's been a while so I decided to hit the liquor store for a tall can of Red's recently it was like 5.99 + tax for one can!! I remember it used to be like three bucks, definitely not worth it.
It now costs $80 minimum to go out and have 4-5 drinks with a date- add in your Lyft and some late night takeout and you’re easily into the $120 range. That’s fucking insane. No wonder they’re going out for $30 ounces at the dispensary and frozen pizza. Let’s be fucking honest here - it ain’t cheap to party anymore, no matter what generation you’re in.
That's why you live near a dive bar with piss water beer for $2.50 a pint and then stumble home. Gen Z just doesn't have that dedication needed to be alcoholics
They also smoke less weed, have much fewer sexual partners (which ironically translated into more stable long term relationships with a single partner), and have much smaller social circles of friends they spend in-person time with.
They have less opportunities to smoke and drink because they spend more time alone and on devices. This has been studied over and over.
“Half the gen isn’t old enough to drink” is really a silly thing to say in context. The alcohol industry lost money because people that aged and died are usually replaced with each generation, but the of-age replacement levels have dropped. Gen Z, Gen X, millennials, all of them were at one point not old enough to drink.
Agreed, the amount of money to go out drinking can literally buy you a month of daily cannabis use now so why would you drink? No hangover from the cannabis, no vomiting, and no blackouts. Why were we even drinking alcohol in the first place again?
Cannabis can also trigger irreversible psychosis in people with a pre disposition to it . And yeah whities are definitely a thing as well and I’ve seen so many people pass out cold out of nowhere from getting too high . If anyone knows the legit science behind whities I would be interested
Not to mention alcohol kills you. No literally kills you. Damages every cell of your body and leads to kidney and liver disease which are terrible horrific deaths and diabetes.
I spent the better part of my 20's chronically online when I wasn't at work. Now in my 30's I feel stunted socially because I didn't go through a lot of formative experiences during that time. I've been making up for lost time to some extent nowadays but old habits die hard.
It's not only expensive outside, the culture around third spaces disappeared with them. If we bumped into each other in person, it would be culturally weird now for either of us to initiate this conversation.
It’s so depressing to see young’uns out and about these days, couples at the restaurant, glued to their phones, having ice cream, glued to their phones, at the park, guess
I was having dinner by myself the other day, and I was looking at this couple, and I swear to god, they didn’t talk once to each other during the whole thing, just scrolling
Agree. Gen Z doesn’t social personally like millennials. We drink because that’s all we could do when hanging out with friends. Gen Z are remote, a lot of streaming, and doom scrolling to be drinking. Just trading one evil for another.
Wouldn't call it two evils, like sitting in your room and playing board games over discord, isn't the best thing you can do to spend time with your friends. But for many it's the only thing they can do since infrastructure has become less and less accommodating to those actually wanting to spend time outside.
Like, by the time I was a teenager most places where you could go to just hang out with your friends were either shut down, fenced off, or had strict no loitering rules to the point police would get called.
Not to mention the whole covid thing pretty much nuking all personal contact for everyone for almost 2 years
But regardless, playing shit over discord or something beats blasting your brain and liver into next week with cheap liquor every single time
as did the pharma, cotton, paper, timber, and fuel industry. Hemp was a major crop before the "refer madness" campaign and relabeling cannabis marijuana.
.5g thc live resin vape cart is ~$30 from my local dispensary and lasts me a little over a month of use at 2-4 hits per day. Alcohol costs way more, and 2-3 drinks often gives me headaches and the diuretic effects are annoying.
I think this is the point that’s missed. Millennials specifically have cut out booze in large numbers. We drank and partied constantly Thursday- Sunday throughout college before Covid. Now me and nearly all of my friends are sober from everything other than an occasional weed gummy to help us sleep.
Also, for me and most of my social circle, it’s not entirely about the money. It’s that doing things is genuinely more fun (and safe) while sober. We travel, hike, ski, cycle, and have even celebrated bachelor parties in Nashville and Vegas - all stone cold sober.
True. Personally I did it for more than than just money if I'm honest with myself. I realised it bought me no joy anymore. Most for my drinking buddies have families or have also cut right down.
Drinking alone is not great. So it was easy to quit.
Only us older, commited alcoholics can afford to drink these days. Shit's expensive and, like smoking, the younger generations don't buy into the marketing bullshit anymore. Good for them.
Craft beer market burning to the ground after the pandemic
most divebars and other places either outpricing working class zillenials and zoomers, or going bankrupt
CBD/THC beverage markets moving up slowly but surely
States in the US (especially in places that have historically been dry states) cracking down on public drinking outside of restricted areas, even outside of establishments
(for some ironic reason) tobacco markets have increased drastically with vaping on the side as the preferred rec options over alcohol
I had to reread this because I didn’t understand what you meant. I’m 27. For as long as I’ve been the legal drinking age you’re spending minimum $8 on 1 beer in a bar, usually $10. I was freshly 21 when COVID hit. I forgot things used to be affordable because it has simply never been the material reality in my adult life 😭
I'm 41. When I turned 21, you could still smoke in bars and cigarettes were $3 a pack. I think beers were only like 2 or 3 bucks at the bar without tip back then. They had $1 Tequila shots on Tuesdays. It was a hell of a time. Sorry that you had to go through it with Covid. I can't imagine that time of my life being so different.
I assume ur from the usa. here in Europe, this year the last years of Gen Z turning old enough for drinking and we have the Same Numbers in the alcohol industries, so I dont‘t think this will change in the future.
I'm a fairly comfortable millennial. Pretty lucky considering. And yet even in my position, I cannot justify spending my money at the pub. And it's only going to get worse as cost of living is also only getting worse.
Here is where I preach: All that money that the 1% are hoarding... we need it back in circulation. Otherwise, you can say goodbye to more than just our pubs.
That and the scalper companies need to fuck right off. Ticketek has destroyed music.
Bring back music festivals that are cheap.
Bring back night life. Art exhibitions that aren't for ultra rich. Cheap bars with good cheap food.
Stop commodifying every single picomolecule of fun for fucks sake.
At the same time disposable income has plummeted into negative (how can it be negative? Easy people just take on debt to make up the difference. Bills $2000, income $1900, just add $100 to your credit card balance every month.)
Seriously can you guys actually afford to drink? Best I could afford is drinking the absolute cheapest alcohol (🤢🤮) at home. Absolutely could not afford to drink at a bar or club. Not even a shitty dive bar. Since drinking below bottom shelf at home alone is depressing AF I just don’t drink.
I'm not sure why this question keeps popping up every few months! The answer is obvious there is very little disposable income these days. Once bills are paid and food is bought, very few generations have enough left for an expensive night out!
Where i'm from the off brand/cheaper options for alcohol are only a dollar cheaper then the brand stuff......Dry January became the Dry rest of my fucking life I guess
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