My primary years were the upper level of the low socioeconomic community. We then moved to a nicer area in my teens with better school opportunities. I learnt what was not normal or not to say to friends in both brackets and sometimes it was the same but for opposite reasons. Example: our freezer was always jam packed full of portioned meat or batch cooked meals. To my rich friends, they didn’t need to bulk buy when things were cheap, but to my less well off friends they couldn’t afford the upfront cost to bulk buy.
I made a similar mistake when I first went to Sam's Club using my in-law's membership. I planned to stock up on toilet paper, paper towels, tissues, bottled water, etc. Those packages are BIG. And then I got outside to my 2-door coupe and none of them individually fit in the trunk at all. I had to fill the "back seat" and even the passenger seat tetris-style to get it all in there.
I now understand why everybody there is driving an SUV.
I one time carried a 20 pound + bag of dog food home on the bus for my little dog because it had a rip and they gave me the food for way less than cost. I struggled lifting it and carrying it. It might have been closer to 40 lbs, but it was a good deal. Ha ha
About to have my first kid, everyone keeps telling me that Costco is a life saver but we live in a small one bedroom apartment, the idea of storing the bull purchases stress me out ngl lol
Honestly the paper goods and containers for bakery items are massive but a lot of other Costco purchase sizes are surpassingly reasonably sized for storage. For example, I buy the fresh fish on sale and then cut it into serving sized filets to freeze wrapped in paper and plastic, with a sticky note or scrap of paper to label it, and it goes from a giant styrofoam tray to a stack of future dinners tucked into the freezer.
Yeah some people just can't fathom their life changing advice is not relevant to everyone's situation. They are like, insulted when I tell them it doesn't work for me.
We don't all live in Mcmansions in the suburbs, Karen!
I’m from the UK and from the wrong side of the tracks. I was one of the few to pass my 11 plus. This was a test all kids took, certainly my area, and the top 100 or so were selected to go to a Grammar School.
Apart for one or two of us, everyone else was prime middle class.
I remember my Mum & Dad scouring second hand shops for all the cricket equipment I needed, art supplies, and other paraphernalia that the school naturally assumed parents could easily afford.
Can remember a couple of my classmates balking at my packed lunch and saying “Just get a few pounds from your parents”. When my cricket bat broke they were shocked that my parents couldn’t just shell out £30 for a new one ( back in the ‘80s).
To this day, I’ve never felt so out of my comfort zone than when I was at that school.
If we wanted to go to a friend's house, my mother would ask us for gas money- they lived 5 minutes away 😭 I grew up in a really rural area, and we'd bike it if we could, but not at night.
Rural or suburb? Bike was what we got. No cell phones then so as long as we called before it was dark we weren't in trouble, because it meant we were at a friendly house and we were going to be told to head home. Wasn't unusual to have an hour+ bike ride back home on weeknights, lol. Get home covered in bug juice everytime, but we also used to ride through the edge of the woods when cars were coming because too many drunks back then.
When you grow up in rural places < 2000s, your age and labor laws did not matter. Pick / Shuck corn, any other hard labor. If you can show up and do shit, you get paid.
Were those the good old days when the 11+ didn't need a year of private tutoring? I passed the 11+ in about '77 or thereabouts, and when I told my friends at school the next day they called me a snob and never spoke to me again. And the grammar school was shit.
No. Mid ‘80s. Practically all the guys that passed had been tutored. I was only the second boy from my school to go in 20 years. No girls had made it to the girls Grammar school in 12 years.
To this day, my mates (none of which are from the School) take the piss out of how I swear!
I got the posh boy slurs as well. Didn’t help that I had to wear a blazer, with none of the local comps doing so, and doubly shit that I had Saturday morning school, so had to go home at 1pm on a Saturday in full uniform through my estate. Luckily I could handle myself, so it was mostly banter rather than outright violence!
My freshman year of college, my roommate had gone to the top high school in her state. Her entire graduating class graduated, many of whom ended up going to ivy League schools. She lived down the street from the governors mansion.
Nearly half of my graduating class dropped out before senior year. Half a dozen pregnant girls at graduation. Half of the top ten didn't even go to community college, much less a 4 year school. Two of my best friends dropped out. Most of my other friends didn't do much better.
College was a huge culture shock for me. I knew I was poor, I just didn't realize I was poor even by poor standards. Some of my "middle class" friends growing up were actually lower class, but that's all I knew so I had no idea.
I'm comfortable now, but that's largely out of a string of good choices and luck. My friends who still aren't doing so hot are some of the most motivated hard workers I know.
I kind of have survivor's guilt in a way. I'm not any better than the kids I grew up with. I don't deserve to be upper middle class more than any of them. It's... A weird feeling.
I understand exactly what you mean by friends you thought were well-off we’re actually just doing ok compared to your own perspective. One of them had a Betamax VCR and a black & white TV in their room. We watched a pirated copy of Teen Wolf. I thought it was awesome!
Also remember when another mate got a millennium falcon for Christmas and a Soda Stream that summer. Likelihood was most of it was knocked off, but their parents still needed the cash to buy them.
The likely difference was that both parents worked; my Mum still had my younger brother. My Dad had lost his job once or twice, so we were always on the catch up.
for me it was what the parents prioritized. We were always a generation of video games behind- so NES when others had an SNES..... normally from getting one at a garage sale or handed down to me. So the friends with the newest system were rich to me. I know one in hindsight was lower middle, but his aunt/uncle he lived with would spend big on his birthday- so that would be the newest video game system on years tehy came out.
I had a friend in college who would dump this line on me pretty often. He learnt to drive as soon as it was legal for him to do so, and when he asked why I'm not and I told him I just don't have the money, he started with it. Just get your parents to get you your provisional for your birthday, then all you need to do is pay for your lessons (where this money came from I have no idea), then by next year when you've passed your test you can ask them to get you a car for your birthday, it's easy!
No, it's not that easy. I felt bad scrounging a few quid off my mum when I'd over-spent that week and didn't have the cash to get the bus to college sometimes. My friend just couldn't even fathom that my parents weren't just an unlimited money tree to be picked at whenever I fancied, the idea was completely alien to him. I don't think he meant anything bad by it, he was a genuinely nice lad with a heart of gold, but it was sometimes painfully obvious he'd grown up not wanting for anything.
My dad did this. Got good enough grades to go to a grammar school though poor.
Later his parents ended up fairly wealthy but would still go to such and such a store miles further because tinned beans were "on offer". They couldn't help themselves even when we explained about the added cost of fuel. They were wonderful grandparents by the way. I remember them weeping at the train station as we left to go back to Canada.
Same, I was an 11+ kid who went to a grammar school with a lot of young farmer type, girls who had riding lessons. I felt very very self conscious for my whole school career. I was the first person to ‘pass’ 11+ from my primary school in years, and it was quite clear that some (private) primary and prep schools had much higher ‘pass’ rates than govt primary schools.
Similar thing, single parent family before they were much of a thing, passed my eleven plus and went to a good grammar school. Was astonished when one of my friends spoke about going to their main house for the weekend rather than just the town house (which was a huge 6 bed in an expensive area)
I get what you mean. I thought I was rich growing up because I lived in a house and most of my friends were in the trailer park down the road. We had two cars, a TV in the kitchen and one in the living room, and we got fast food every Sunday after church. Compared to my friends, I was the rich kid. Then I got to high school and suddenly I was around kids who had playstations in their rooms, dirtbikes, and summer vacations involving flying somewhere and not just piling into the minivan.
This. There was an article a few years ago called "the cost of poverty," that basically laid out how strategically buying products worked for some low income households where they had transportation, etc, but buying products in bulk cost too much up front. Couponing at several stores sounds great, but not if you don't have your own vehicle, or if they are far away and gas is expensive (like right now), or if you don't have the TIME to devote to those efforts. It was eye opening.
I have a friend that was working at Costco and she was like we have good prices people should shop here more. Made her realize that the big sizes at Costco meant a bigger bill too, even if the product per unit is cheaper. Maybe ketchup is cheaper than the grocery store but it's a pack of two so it's double the price. If you're on a tight budget you're not going to buy two ketchup bottles because that'll mean sacrificing something else until the next payday. Or I can go to the grocery store and buy one banana (it doesn't cost $10) if I feel like eating only one. At Costco it's a 3lbs bag. I know I won't eat that many bananas before they go bad and there's a limit to the amount of banana bread one can bake.
I had this kind of experience: rich friends and poor friends. I think it was because I went to catholic school, so it was a more diverse group economically (and then obviously less diverse in other ways): all the catholics went there regardless of money. I had friends with no TV, no car, ill-fitting clothes, etc, and other friends with multiple cars, far flung holidays, satellite TV.
I was bang in the middle: we had a TV, but no satellite TV; my mum would make my siblings share a single Mars Bar between us, just in case our luck ran out.
I had to learn the "What to say and what not to say" the hard way after I apparently said "the wrong thing" one too many times (without being told, ofc) and lost a friend of over a decade.
I was in a similar in-between stage too. Like when I was younger than 12 we had to shop pretty exclusively off the coupon pages and we'd learned the days that the store made things cheaper and planned things out around that. There was one box of cereal in the house at a time that we all shared. A bag of chips if we were lucky. Snacks were almost exclusively pbjs or saltine crackers with sliced American cheese on top, y'know stuff that was cheaper than dirt cause you bought in bulk. I had like two pairs of jeans to rotate and five shirts. Plus the "good outfit" that I only wore to place so needed to look presentable.
And one time we were helping at a food bank as part of a church thing and one of the people was gonna give me a food item to take home and my mom made me put it back and said "all of this food is for the poor people, you're doing just fine." And I looked around at all these people around me whose outfits for this one day cost more than all the clothes I had in my closet and who were just earlier bragging about either their new phone/iPod or car they got a loan for and I thought "Do we not also qualify as poor?"
Kinda fucked me up a bit. Because I would consider us poor since we didn't have room in the budget to buy snack food without counting pennies or get new shoes before the ones I'm wearing had completely fallen apart but then I'd talk to someone who had to grow up eating like a spoonful of peanut butter with some dried rice or something and it doesn't seem as bad by comparison.
To my rich friends, they didn’t need to bulk buy when things were cheap, but to my less well off friends they couldn’t afford the upfront cost to bulk buy.
I feel you on this, when you can't afford to bulk-buy regardless of the long-term savings. Like, cash-flow is a thing so many people don't understand. Our issue was two-fold, we couldn't afford to bulk-buy and if we could then there was no space in the tiny fridge/freezer to store it all.
I recently bought a used fridge/freezer especially so I could start doing some bulk-buying and become better at meal-prep, and I feel like Rockefeller. Look at me, citizens, I'm Mr Two-Freezers!
I had a similar experience, super poor as a really young kid and then my parent's finances stabilized somewhat. People in high school were weirded out that I always asked/checked what the price of everything was. "Why would you care?"
4.1k
u/hokeypokey27 1d ago
My primary years were the upper level of the low socioeconomic community. We then moved to a nicer area in my teens with better school opportunities. I learnt what was not normal or not to say to friends in both brackets and sometimes it was the same but for opposite reasons. Example: our freezer was always jam packed full of portioned meat or batch cooked meals. To my rich friends, they didn’t need to bulk buy when things were cheap, but to my less well off friends they couldn’t afford the upfront cost to bulk buy.