Cocktails were expensive when I was young, too. We just hardly ever drank them. We went to the liquor store and bought the cheapest shit we could that probably had a 50/50 chance of making us go blind.
And yes I know, people could and should be more frugal: I only even drink more than single cocktail at a time 0-3 times a year on average, so my personal financial frustrations lie elsewhere. I guess it's just important because we're comparing lifestyles from different points in history, and in the old days, going out drinking with your pals was a cheaper affair, and it still is the usual activity chosen for socializing where I live.
I'm in one of the largest metros in the US.
Yes, there are plenty of places that will charge $12 for a beer. I don't go there. I can get the same beer cheaper down the street and have a more entertaining crowd.
Things were better pre-COVID, I had a spot I could get $2 pitchers of bud and 50 cents an oyster on Monday nights at a local watering hole. Weekends, not so much, you get overcharged. But, COVID did away with that and now my city is almost as expensive as major metros in California while having absolutely none of the benefits those cities offer.
Who cares what the federal minimum wage is if anyone who walks in to get a job at McDonald's can make twice as much? Who cares if beers are $5-12 at some places if they're much cheaper elsewhere?
The entire point I was making, and the which you are trying to deny by your argument (you may have quoted some factual info, but you're putting it together to make a specific argument to back up your opinion), is that it's actually not that hard to go out and entertain yourself, in person, with friends, for cheap or free.
You need to read more carefully and make less assumptions. My state has no minimum wage. We never gave up slavery, instead becoming a prison state with more prisoners per capita than any single country in the world. We only have an effective minimum wage because of the federal minimum wage. You walk into McDonald's here without experience and you're getting paid $7.25. McDonald's does not do twice that much here.
> The entire point I was making, and the which you are trying to deny by your argument (you may have quoted some factual info, but you're putting it together to make a specific argument to back up your opinion), is that it's actually not that hard to go out and entertain yourself, in person, with friends, for cheap or free.
I'm aware you'd like to make that point, and while focusing on this is moving goalposts/ceding parts of your argument, it's still entirely ignoring everything I explained to you.
I barely drink, and my girlfriend and I do all sorts of things that are cheap or free in addition to things that aren't. But that is not the culture in my state. The entire state suffers from alcoholism, and traditional third spaces are harder and harder to come by. The average person simply does not do anything other than go out and drink and eat. Ask anyone who lives here. It's a seriously depressing state of affairs and for most people, there is not another solution waiting. It's self-reinforcing; I just made plans to catch up with an old high school buddy and the only way I'm going to be able to do that is by meeting him somewhere for some drinks and going to see a movie. And all of his friends are the same, and once most of your friends are at the bar, why wouldn't you be? Almost all of us have been bartenders at one point or another. One of my friends even bought a bar in order to provide a third space to our community (we come from a small town and we all know each other).
My girlfriend and I wanted to go swimming two weekends ago. We tried going to the local community center's swimming pool, but it's now closed indefinitely because some black kids broke in just to swim, but one of them had a weapon on them, presumably for protection (my city floats around the top 5 highest homicide rates in the US[0]) and so the racist community center operators took it as an excuse to close the pool indefinitely and temporarily shut down another of the very few third spaces we have.
Instead, my girlfriend and I had to rent a hotel room just to use their pool for the evening.
The bottom line is you are not from here, you have no idea what it's like living in Louisiana, and you frankly have no idea what you are talking about. Instead, you should listen to what I'm trying to explain to you about an extremely dire, worsening situation that is continuing to erode whatever sense of community we have left here. And it's no accident, this is engineered by an owner class interested in squeezing every last nickel and drop of blood out of our citizenry.
The wealth gap here is just frightening, we're running out of places to go, and the average social pipeline for inner-city youth here typically involves committing crimes and putting yourself in danger. Especially when there are purposefully designed prison funnels intended to bring in profit for the private prison industry and businesses that exploit cheap inmate labor instead of providing those jobs to free citizens.
Consider yourself blessed and privileged to not understand what it's like here.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/murder-ra...
But then given that stuff is actually harder, I think blaming "stuff is just too expensive" is simply easier. Otherwise it forces you to confront the fact that a lot of this stuff is in your control.
Young people don't have space on their houses.
I make $20/h as a cleaner but after bills etc, I don’t have the money for fun events, dining out or socializing beyond hanging out on discord and playing games.
When I was a young person in the mid 90s, I (and most of my friends) made the equivalent or less of what you make now. But we also didn't have discord or Internet multiplayer games, so we were basically forced to go hang out in person and find other cheap stuff to do.
In the eighties I might save up months or even 1-2 years for a nice television set, but my rent/mortgage, food, etc. was relatively inexpensive. Now, I can go buy 15-20 decent televisions a month for the same amount it costs me to pay my rent or mortgage here on a 0-2 bedroom place, and I live in a shithole backwoods state, not San Francisco.
