Yeah when taco bell is $40 for two of us and going to the sit down Mexican restaurant is $40, I'm going to pick food that gives me leftovers every time.

I remember $0.39 cheeseburgers at McDonalds and $0.79 bean burritos at Taco Bell.

But this was when gas was $0.89/g and we didn’t live under fascism.

I stopped most fast food years ago. It's basically only an option in the rare situation that I need food "fast" and wont be home to eat it, and even then I avoid them more and more.

If I'm going home, I'll order delivery or take out from a real restaurant. More-better food for same-less money.

That's not even considering that I meal prep and cook at home even more, but even what little bit I still want to not cook myself... It's not going to be restaurant prices for worse food.

I spontaneously went through a mcdonald’s drive through yesterday to pick up breakfast while i was in a hurry. I ordered one sausage biscuit with egg and cheese. $7.50

I was shocked and checked the receipt. The default sandwich was 5-something (which is ridiculous by itself) and the “cheese” was $1.50.

I think i’m just done with McDonald’s as an occasional thing.

You have to use there apps and points and shit to get it cheap, but it can be cheap. They're basically in the business of wasting poor people's time and collecting their data these days

Just food in general.

I could conceivably budget for beef, but the price pisses me off so much I'll go for a pork steak instead.

I get burgers to go from sit down places cause they're better, full on burgers and not some slice of meat and filler measurable in the millimeters for the same price if not cheaper. I get a mushroom Swiss from IHOP for like $12 plus tip(yes typing culture sucks, but it's the system we live in and I'm not going to stiff a kid cause I don't agree with someone they have little control over). And I get legit big onion rings to boot!

Theres a perfectly good bbq resturant near me thats typically cheaper than mcdonalds.

I've found some places are still affordable, like small local establishements or even A&W, their trio of the day is still like only 10$CAD

Storage too

I bought 64 gigabytes of ram in 2019 on a laptop.

I bought a laptop when I migrated. EIGHT FUCKING YEARS AGO.

In 2024, I bought 5 14 terabyte hard drives for about $600 for my NAS.

Thank God I have gotten nowhere near close to filling those up yet.

Just one additional drive is like 350 bucks now.

Same, Seagate exos x18 18TB drives. Four of them.

Now cost a fortune to replace

I would buy a drive with the expectation of being able to buy another drive twice the size for the same price by the time I could fill it.

A 4TB drive in 2026 costs more than it did in 2016.

I just bought some things on ebay to avoid Amazon. They dropshipped Amazon to me, individual packages and all, for nearly 100% markup. I don't know how to avoid that and find "real" sellers dropshipping non-branded warehoused Chinese goods like the good old days.

I went on eBay for the first time in years the other cat looking for a few cookbooks. Holy fuck. No thanks. I'm not paying retail plus shipping on the cheapest USED book. Get the fuck out.

Where are you shopping these days? My area has a Walmart and a dollar general. Love the mega corps...

The funny thing is my income has risen dramatically in the last few years, but I'm still approximately at the same level of purchasing power that I was six years ago.

Fucking same. I basically doubled my salary a couple of years ago and it seems like I'm not getting anywhere....

If you've never used SlickDeals, I highly recommend it.

I'm in the same boat with Amazon. Doubly irritating that sometimes I'll buy an item from eBay and it's just drop shipped Amazon shit. Also I can't count the amount of times I've ordered something that is advertised as "fast 2-4 day shipping" and the seller immediately creates a label only for the status to sit at "label created" for 6 days.

Making low 5 figure £ and don't really know what to spend it on. A lot of things people are listing I don't buy not because I couldn't afford it, but it doesn't seem worth it.

I could probably afford most things listed in the comments here, but my main reaction to most of them is why would I want to? Doesn't seem worth it to me.

Never learnt to drive because I couldn't afford it. Now I probably could afford it. At a push even around £500/month exploitative loan used by multiple people I know, would only cause minor financial issues. But I don't want it. My bike is doing fine.

Wtf do you spend money on when you are doing fine and happy as you are with £100s extra a month than you know what to do with, despite earning only a bit over minimum wage?

Only thing I can really think of is save it and eventually pay off the mortgage early then work part time.

There's no more middle class :( can't afford a house, can't afford "affordable" entertainment, can't afford shit

Yeah the applebeees-tier really has a lot of fuckin nerve these days. Especially since it’s not like they’re paying their waitstaff much (or any?) more than they did in the late 90s.

✅✅✅✅✅ yep!

Somehow camping had seen airbnb price increases without the amenities. And its just nature.

Also see: SSDs, HDDs, GPUs and CPUs

😢

Especially Crucial RAM, since Micron stopped selling to consumers in favour of datacentres.

Who goes to Subway? Is it 2002?

You have to use the app. A footlong is like $7.

Thank god piracy is free and it's easier than ever.

And don't even get me started on RAM

I agree, nuke the whales!

i assume you mean things like coffe pods, those are terrible. and the machine even generic ones are annoying to maintain.

I honestly just finds it absurd that soda is usually as expensive as water. Or water is a few cents cheaper. I mean i drink water anyway, but still.

Depends where it is. Wetherspoons still does £1.99 a pint. I also found a place recently that I can abuse their system to get double my drinks order but even with that little cheat its still like £3.50/pint so I don't go there much. Its mostly a human engineering attack combined with a little bit of knowledge of POS systems.

This was me and soda. The off-brand soda I'd started buying was unavailable for three weeks last summer, and Coke, RC Cola, and Pepsi were all price-fixed at the same price... so I said fuck those guys and just weaned myself off it with what I had left.

Some prices just piss a consumer off.

I remember 1 cent wings. I am old.

Honestly! You gotta pull out a mortgage these days to eat at wild wing!

McDonald's prices are insane!

people still want nolstagia of soda, but its overpriced now. even "diet coke" even the ones sweetened by a natural sweetner(not aspartame)

Yeah, I sure could use some cheap SD cards now. I feel like a lot of the more privacy conscious gadgets use SD cards to save you from the menace of manufacturer-controlled cloud storage, rightly so!

I remember USB thumb drives hitting crazy lows at one point too, to the point where I was getting some decently sized drives as promo items. I think I paid $40 or so for my very first 250MB USB stick, maybe it was even smaller than that. I also distinctly remember buying a 128GB USB stick for a very similar price in the last decade or two and seeing them even cheaper than that. You do notice a build quality difference between them when you hold them side by side. The old Sandisk feels solid, the led, the cap, the enclosure are all solid and feel super sturdy and like they're one single piece. The newer 128GB PNY is cheap, rattly, trashy plastic wrapped around a circuit board with a goofy retractable usb connector, but obviously outperforms the old one by miles. Would love to have cheap and quality. :-)

Man, everything is a collectable now. I swear I can big some random cheap old tech and in a few years it will be double the price

I was going to buy an old game that was not very good for nostalgia purposes as a gift. Since COVID it has tripled in price.

It was already not good, and at $150 I'd rather gift an Everdrive with an 8gb card full of the rom than spend that much on a shelf piece.

Oh, you think poverty is your ally? You merely adopted it. I was born in it. Molded by it. I didn't see wealth until I was already a man, and by then, it was nothing to me but sickening. The bargains betray you, because they belong to me. I will show you where I have made my home, whilst preparing to bring taxation. Your precious hoard, gratefully accepted. We will need it. Ah yes, I was wondering what would break first. Your spirit, or your property.

Not perfect, but is that what you wanted?

As a Dutchie, 20$ for pizza already sounds very expensive to me, 48$ is a crime xD over here it costs about 10-15€ which is almost the same in $

I was in NY and my friend is a real pizza nut and wanted me to try this super trendy pizza, Ceres. We went mid afternoon and avoided the 4 hour line. A 20" pie was $68 before tax.

Glad in back home where I can cry into my $5 Digorno when I need a night off.

Also in Portland. Food trucks are no longer the cheap street food thing. Haven't been for years. Now they're trendy and commercialized like everything else. I hate it

The NA beer bothers me. They don’t have to pay all the various taxes and fees but it costs the same? Or more? There’s a brewery near me that is relatively large and ships internationally and their NA costs nearly 2x what another local much smaller place charges for real beer. That NA doesn’t even taste good in the world of NA beer let alone at their cost.

bulk granola, made in person seems quite expensive, rather than buying the pre-packaged from brand names.

Give Old Milwaukee NA a try. I can go the fancy beer route, like Athletica, but on a hot day, doing yardwork, a cold OM is quite nice.
Current local price is about 80 cents/can.

I hate bowling now. Every alley looks like the same shitty club. Darkness, neon lights, pounding music, and screens all over the place trying to sell you a $10 plate of nachos with a $12 beer.

Meat prices about to force me to be a vegetarian (not a bad thing).

I buy independent media now, thats still cheap. I can pay the monthly subs for two indie news orgs for the same price I pay for four beers.

Note: I'm Australian, yeah beers a bit expensive here, but come on, value for money!

I've also been postponing my dental checkups, but It's a bad place to try to save money, because it ends up being more expensive when I eventually have to go there to get things done.

For instance if I lose a filling in one side, I'll just end up chewing more with the other side and then it break something there too. It's also bad for other things. I usually catch the flu more often when my teeth have issues. Maybe the immune system is overloaded or something.

Lisa needs braces

i think it was always expensive, i shop around for the cheapest yet decent quality dental experience. university dental care, if you can tolerate the wait time, some emergency services are more immediate.

one nears me, upcharges everything comparatively to other dentist like 100-200% more than other dentist around.

16-25€ here.. On the bright side, made me learn how to do them at home. And no, the ingredients don't cost 25€ a portion!

Steaks at home are always better

Nonalcoholic beverages are gaining popularity.

Mysteriously, they cost the same even though they miss several layers of taxes.

That's why I learned to mix drinks. A dollar a drink and vastly better than most bars in town.

Yeah, I've started learning to make my own cocktails.

Silver linings: I'm consuming less garbage now because I simply can't afford it.

I'm still consuming it, of course.

Just less of it.

Was there for a week early in the summer. Wonderful little city, but even for the Nordics expensive as well.

Then again, you have a lot of very wealthy shipping executives living there.

You considered $400 cheap?!

When I lived in PA i would grab a really good $5 hoagie from Wawa and a free coffee after school, now its like $8+ and coffees are only free if you buy enough...

Find a good, local deli and you can get sandwiches like that.

Though I'm sure this varies depending where you live and how many delis are around you.

Going by the way my brother describes his company’s products …. They start by defining the labor costs and profit: those don’t really change regardless of the product quality. The price is already mostly defined. Ingredients are dirt cheap, so they’ll add just enough ingredients of just enough quality so you’ll buy it

In fairness, the five dollar footlongs were not sustainable for them - corporate pushed it because they made money while the franchisees didn't, but they didn't care.

i think coffee was always expensive if you want the good stuff(in the states) the cheap brands are cheap for a reason. i think because coffee requires such a intensive and specific environment to grow. thats why the customers are often well off, and almost no "middle class or poorer buys them"

Not much better in the states. A can of cheap coffee (~686g) now costs about $13 here, and the better stuff can ring up at $20 or more at the same size.

Just over a year before that, the cheap stuff was half the price (!)

Assuming you're from Finland, Hieno Mokka in LIDL costs 5€ a pack and is indistinguishable from Juhla Mokka.

For this specific one, I put them in water after I cut the tops off and grow them more for a while. I get about 3x the total amount before they stop doing well.

You can still buy them at Costco cheap when they’re in season, like 200 for a couple bucks.

it make sense helium is pretty hard to capture(they also escape earths atmosphere), i think you get it from radioactive decay,and you cant really extract from the air cheaply. and there are only a few places in the world where helium has a reservce.

Big beef recall recently

I didn't stop buying ramen because it got expensive, I stopped buying it because I make better ramen than restaurants in my region now.

like...instant ramen or actual ramen? Isn't a bag of top ramen still like 50 cents?

My partner says that trying specialty beans have ruined normal coffee.

soy yogurt?, i think any yogurt that isnt milk base has always been expensive. at least in the wf i go to, all the dairy free ones are significantly overpriced. i think people go for chobani for the milk based ones or fage.

I haven't checked lately, is the price still on the can, though?

Coffee is most certainly not, by me. Prices on the grocery store shelves have gone up quite a bit.