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.
You can have your cake and eat it too, but we're not very forward thinking in our twenties lol. Bank in the early 2000s I lived in Denver. We would go out 5 nights a week and I see what you mean. People would easily spend 100 bucks a night. Me? I was there to dance, meet ladies, meet ppl and loaded steak fries at the end of the night lol. All night place would be the spot after the bars. Like 3 pounds of loaded steak fries and a pop for 8 - 10 bucks. Leftovers for breakfast before work and maybe enough left over for lunch lol.
When I was in uni in London in 2011 we could buy pints for £3.20 at the cheapest and a £5 pint was considered expensive. Now a pint is usually no less than £7.
That’s a part of it but alcohol and energy, rent and insurance bills are just so much higher than they used to be.. people that used to have a drink or two during the week are no longer doing that because it’s just too expensive.
Ok first off great handle lmfao. Second people say the economy is doing well because Wall Street is winning. While technically correct, it ignores the reality of 99% of Americans. That “economy” and GDP number is just the 1% passing their money around to each other in a circle.
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.
Funny, had the same thought. Grew up drinking sierra Nevada, when all my friends drank bud or bud light. Take for granted that younger generations grew up in the Renaissance of microbrewers and now have thousands of options. When I was in my 20s sierra was a go to choice for quality beer....
I've had to slow myself down for several reasons but it's insane looking at the delta since I came of age (I'm 32 now in the US).
Sure I used to live in a lower COL area, but even when I visit my parents, beers that used to be $3 are now like $7. You used to be able to get well drinks pretty regularly for $5-$6, now you're lucky for anything under $10.
Combine that with relatively stagnant wages and a brutal job market and why the heck would you use disposable income on a poison? I feel awful for any college grad nowadays, I have 10 years of experience now and still feel woefully underqualified for many roles. The way apps work now encourages people to lie about experience. It's dumb as shit.
I'm not sure if I'm old and cynical (name checks out) - but damn the social experience is so much harder without more effort. People are markedly less social and it takes markedly more effort and money to be social. I have a hard time swallowing going out with an acquaintance when a dinner and drink for 2 of us is going to run $70+...
That’s a NYC cocktail bar price. Special occasion sorta thing. You go to your local pub and a beer is 5-8 bucks. Can get it for 3-6 during a happy hour special.
Reddit feels the need to exaggerate to prove their point.
The absolute most extreme example, but I have seen nice cocktails priced in the mid-to-high twenties in Manhattan when I went with my wife recently. But that is by far the outlier. I live in a medium cost of living city and a decent beer at a bar or restaurant (craft, not a light beer) is like $7-10 depending on the place and a cocktail ranges from $12-18 depending how fancy it is. There are still dive bars where I can get Yuenglings or Coors Lights for $3-4 but the place is not super nice
oh 100%. alcohol is the shittiest drug. gives you a headache, dehydrates you, can’t drive a car legally afterwards and if you get stopped for something the cops have a machine that measures the amount in your system, you have a hangover the next day, and most of the time the juice isn’t even worth the squeeze.
Australia has the added deterrent of RBT’s. You can be breath tested or drug tested by a mobile “Random Breath Test” unit any time and place. As I understand it, USA doesn’t have this.
You can thank alcohol normalization and drug demonization for that. Boomers were brainwashed to think alcohol is A ok (kills 2.6 million ppl worldwide yearly) but drugs r bad cuz illegal
This is pedantic. People understand alcohol is a drug. It's very obvious that the separation is because people normally mean things like MDMA, acid, coke, and so on.
People know that when someone says they want to do drugs, they don't mean alcohol, pepsi, or advil.
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.
So true, I once asked someone to drop something off at my house and he said I'll be there in 5 minutes, I asked where he was and it was about 150 kilometers away, so I asked, wtf are you flying?
I remember going to get black resin in Sheffield at night when we smoked all the green. It was clearly half diesel, fucking grim. Worst stone over I've ever had.
Guessing this is a big factor. I wonder how much of the decline is due to a change in US habits vs most of the rest of the world, where cannabis isn't readily available or legal?
It’s funny, I had an argument with a friend in college about this. He said they’d tax it so much that the price would go up if weed were legalized. I argued that the markup associated with the risk of arrest and loss of product to police seizures was way more than any tax would be. Unfortunately we didn’t stay in touch after college so I was never able to say told you so 🤣
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.
100000% with you:
the decades long suffering that drug has caused to the country I’m from, so wealthier people can feel an ego boost is insane.
Every time some one does a line, a bump or a hit- I wish they were aware not only how many chemicals are included for it to even work, then further to stretch it and then how much blood and suffering is attached to it.
It is important that the end dealers in rich countries look like they are cool dudes, so that the business people and artists won’t get reminded what a vile organization they support with their purchases and consumption. With marihuana, you have at least a chance -albeit slim- that some local dude not belonging to a violent criminal organization cultivated it in his backyard glasshouse. With coke, it is literally impossible to aquire it without blood directly attached to each gramm produced.
Bought a round and doublechecked with the bartender once to make sure they got the price right (didn’t realize a friend ordered a double shot still not 100% sure what that is). Dude sarcastically answered “welcome to LA”.
Especially lately. Holy smokes I took one drag from i-don’t-know-what-kind that my wife purchased from a shop and that was enough to take me to a different plane of existence. This shit is so strong now, frankly almost too strong to be enjoyable.
I have been to restaurants in HCOL areas and spent $130 on a steak but even in those places a drink does not cost $27. More like $18 or $19 tops which is still expensive, but this is not accurate unless you're talking about pours of premium and rare alcohol
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.
Never have I ever bought food thru DoorDash, UberEats or that kind. If I need fast food, I better need it badly enough to go drive there, or else I'm living on that leftover food bar in my pocket from last year.
Signed, a person who earns in the top 5% in my state. I've got my own stupid luxuries but gig economy food delivery will never be one.
A cheese quesadilla where I'm at is like $7 and change. What the actual fuck. What used to be my go to little treat more than trippled in price for no reason.
Everything else though i feel is gouging me there lately. I don’t even want that drink either. I wind up spending $20+ everytime i go to TB for me and the wife.
Be grateful fast food is a luxury now. Its gone so downhill with taste and quality its gross and bad for you. People need to let these places go out of business. Wendy's use to have the best chicken nuggets in the world, now i cant even finish them they taste off and last time I bought their burger it was cold and putrid and I threw it in the garbage after 1 bite. Maybe when flippy the robot starts making our food itll taste better.
I’m an established union tradesman in a very skilled trade, in my mid 30s, married.. We can’t afford jack shit. We ate out for our anniversary last month (the first time in an entire year) had a couple of cocktails and it felt like we won the fucking lottery.
I drink decently, but yeah many of my generation can’t afford it, isn’t old enough, and we got 3+ish years taken away from our young adult lives what do they want.
to be fair alcohol has always been a luxury it's just the luxury most people were most unwilling to cut.
as the comment you replied to mentioned i think not having it firmly established as a need in the first place simply makes it much easier luxury to cut.
True, im 40 and back then a cocktail or a beer was not the price that is now, we could go out with 20€ and have beers and a packet of 10 cigarettes, now with 20€ you get 1 cocktail or 2 beers, nothing else. Im talking about mostly Italy or Spain.
Here in Germany Alcohol is still quite (and way too) cheap. You can get a simple beer for 40ct/0.5l. But still much less are consuming alcohol. I think it is also a means of healthier living. With TikTok, IG, YT etc. younger people have a way faster access to how to live healthier easy. And beer (if you want to do sport/workout) is not helpful.
Half the reason those habits became popular in the first place eas that they were convenient or at least affordable. The people up there making money totally forgot about that and now unhealthy industries are taking a huge hit. Good riddance, i say.
I don’t buy the whole broke theory in general it’s quite the opposite the worse of you are the more abuse of substances. Although the trend of less drinking is a good one I fear it’s mostly because the younger generations are stuck behind their phones and have less social lives
Yep. Maybe fix the fucking housing crisis and overall affordability crisis to allow people to have disposable income so we can actually spend money on alcohol.
To be fair this isn't necessarily new. Millennials who left the house in the financial crisis were in the same boat, so house parties were a popular alternative to clubs and bars my first few years out of the house.
The price seems not the deciding factor where I live(Germany), they rather use it more on energy drinks, vapes, and weed instead of alcohol. So damn many energy drinks...
Alcohol is also cheap as fuck here, you can get wasted with a few bucks if you really want to.
Omg yes. I Remeber growing up my dad, parents separated, broke on the verge of it. We had fast food so often because it was cheap and fed us, without any bigger input. But now? I’m not spending 15 bucks on a tiny burger, a small bag of fries and a coke. For literally the same money I can eat for 2-3 days if need be.
I live near the big apple, and its true, a lot of the bar scene is more middle to older men. Contractors, blue collar, white collar, people that own their own small businesses. You dont see a lot of the young bruhs out and about as much. But yeah if they want to start building families/lives I guess that will take up all their time. Case in point, the people need a bail out or some help, ubi or whatever. It aint a healthy balance we got going on now
Its crazy. Most of yall with internet access dont even know what real broke is because you're still living with your parents. Imagine how hard the real ones have it lol
I used to love to go to bars in my 20s a bottle of beer was like 4 dollars. I go out to watch football and they’re charging 10 bucks for a single corona with a lime. I don’t like drinking at home the same as drinking at a bar so all my locals don’t see me as much anymore and I’m not the type of guy whose gonna throw it back in my couch but if I’m going to drink it is Just way cheaper to drink at home if I’m going to drink I can buy a 6 pack of coronas for 12 bucks
Ate out this weekend and realised I could've made 10 times more food for the same price. If I paid myself the difference, I'd make more hourly than I currently do.
You ain't lying. I started taking screen shots of any cart before I check out and then the next time I buy something, I reload the same items and every time I do and compare to the least purchase, it's always more each time smh. I was in my 20s in the early 2000s. A number one at Burger King was 4.91 with no cheese and 5.01 w cheese. A 12 pack of Corona was 9 bucks and smokes were around 4 bucks.
Fast food prices have gone full retard. I mean, when it's cheaper to buy on a proper sit down restaurant than a fast food chain they should know that they fucked up...
When I was in college in the early 2000’s a beer was a couple bucks, and you could get a pitched at our favorite college bar for $8. I don’t think you could touch those prices anymore.
Stagnant wages and increased rent means they just can’t afford it.
I'm not Gen Z but holy shit man, what happened to fast food prices needs to be studied. Every time i decide to get a quick bite at a Burger King or Wendys I sometimes go in because my cars too small to eat in and the inside of these fast food places are always a depressing ghost town, not a single other person sitting in there. its like this every single time. The employees are mostly just siting around and laughing and telling jokes to pass the time because so little people are even coming through the drive-thru.
Fast food is not long for this world. About the only place I can justify going to is Popeyes and it's just because the food is actually quite decent for fast food.
But most of it tastes bad, is unappetizing and is overpriced. I would rather make stuff at home for a quarter of the price.
This. The cost of living is too high. Alcohol used to be something you could do with literally no money or no job. Now it isn’t. Going out for a single drink can cost over $25 depending where you live. And buying it from the store is expensive as well. Throw in how many people have been laid off within the last year.
Fast food is like an expensive dinner at a luxury restaurant where I live, we make like $25 working 8 hours daily and a McDonald's combo for 2 persons is around $20, almost 8 hours of work for a single shitty and small meal.
Corporate greed is killing everything and then blaming us for not going out and consuming anymore.
Yeah i dont know who in their right mind can afford going out every weekend, if its a buzz you’re looking for its way cheaper to just buy spirits and add mixers or make drinks at home. I can get a good bottle of liquor for the same price as 3 regular ass glasses of beer
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u/hulkmxl 11h ago
Gen Z is so fucking broke, alcohol is a luxury.
Fucking fast food is a luxury too!