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.

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.

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

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

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.

Storage too

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

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

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.

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 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....

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.

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

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.

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.

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. :-)