Your toaster dies the second you unbox it. Pants rip on day one. The quality of everything is trash now. This is what bigheaded people call enshittification. Companies deliberately design products to break right after the warranty. This is due to the so-called “Hunt for Infinite growth.” Steady profits ain’t enough. They need MORE, so they skimp, shrink packages, and shove everything behind subscriptions. Infinite growth is a plague, and it hurts your personal finance.
Disclaimer: This video is satirical commentary and for entertainment purposes only. It does not constitute financial, legal, or investment advice.
That’s the thing, though. People in the good old days often couldn’t afford expensive appliances right away either. They budgeted and saved until they could, or relied on it being given as a gift (small appliances were a common wedding present)
But the brainwashing for rampant consumerism has largely made that a thing of the past. People won’t just toast their bread on a skillet for a few months until they can afford a quality toaster.
The cost of living for basic stuff has far surpassed the wage growth though, so this isn’t just a budgeting problem (though there is some of that).
And I hate how individuals are blamed for their poor choices when the corpos are spending billions to try and distillate how to make people spend their hard earned money on them.
Our society is anti-humans and individuals are blamed because they succumb to the harsh pressure put on them everyday.
Yes there are shitty people that are outright dumb, but the number of people barely scraping by is rising and they are blamed personally for a system designed to crush them.
Paying $5 for a new tshirt in America does make you at least responsible, though. Think of how many resources goes into that. Someone has to cut and sew that shit. It’s slave labor to receive a product that’s garbage and won’t fit after a wash. If you’re doing things like this you shouldn’t wonder why your own labor is worth so little.
Increasingly more people can’t pay for basics like rent and food, is it far fetched that they won’t pay 25-30$ for a t-shirt when they are indebting themselves more each month?
If you can afford ethically sourced clothes and you buy crap on Amazon, you are definitely a problem.
But if you just scrape by, you shouldn’t be blamed for buying a 5$ t-shirt.
Thrifting is a great way to ethically buy clothes. You can often find brand new $50+ shirts with tags for ~$5. I have a full closet of higher end apparel that cost me < $200.
Although it is a time investment, which is another thing poor people are often short on.