Sagebrush posted:

i saw a really good article somewhere talking about middle class purchasing power in the 50s vs. today. in the 1950s, something like a pair of work boots would cost the equivalent of three hundred bucks today. just good leather boots. you can buy the same three hundred dollar boots today and they'll be just as good or better and they'll last forever.

OR you can buy boots for 59.99 from china. and they'll be pieces of crap and fall apart after a year. but your purchasing power has gone up five times! and the same goes for basically every consumer good -- clothes, electronics, furniture, etc. even though real wages haven't increased (or have greatly fallen) since the 50s, you can now be living at the poverty line and have a closet full of clothes and a decent sized tv because we exploit the hell out of east asia, so people can point to this as "hey look quality of life just keeps getting better"

tl;dr basically the good quality stuff still exists -- wal-mart has just simultaneously skewed everyone's ideas of how much something actually costs and how long it should last

Sagebrush posted:

i saw a really good article somewhere talking about middle class purchasing power in the 50s vs. today. in the 1950s, something like a pair of work boots would cost the equivalent of three hundred bucks today. just good leather boots. you can buy the same three hundred dollar boots today and they'll be just as good or better and they'll last forever.

OR you can buy boots for 59.99 from china. and they'll be pieces of crap and fall apart after a year. but your purchasing power has gone up five times! and the same goes for basically every consumer good -- clothes, electronics, furniture, etc. even though real wages haven't increased (or have greatly fallen) since the 50s, you can now be living at the poverty line and have a closet full of clothes and a decent sized tv because we exploit the hell out of east asia, so people can point to this as "hey look quality of life just keeps getting better"

tl;dr basically the good quality stuff still exists -- wal-mart has just simultaneously skewed everyone's ideas of how much something actually costs and how long it should last

Sagebrush posted:

i saw a really good article somewhere talking about middle class purchasing power in the 50s vs. today. in the 1950s, something like a pair of work boots would cost the equivalent of three hundred bucks today. just good leather boots. you can buy the same three hundred dollar boots today and they'll be just as good or better and they'll last forever. there wasn't another option in the 50s -- you got the boots from the cobbler in your hometown or maybe you drove to the big city for a day to go to the fancy store.

today have another option: you can buy boots for 59.99 from china. and they'll be pieces of crap and fall apart after a year. but your purchasing power has gone up five times! and the same goes for basically every consumer good -- clothes, electronics, furniture, etc. even though real wages haven't increased (or have greatly fallen) since the 50s, you can now be living at the poverty line and have a closet full of clothes and a decent sized tv because we exploit the hell out of east asia, so people can point to this as "hey look quality of life just keeps getting better"

tl;dr basically the good quality stuff still exists -- wal-mart has just simultaneously skewed everyone's ideas of how much something actually costs and how long it should last

hobbesmaster posted:

the largest local mall has 3 department stores on the periphery, a jc pennys, dillards and macys. between the two wings of the mall was the sears; if you wanted to go to more than one store you usually had to go through the sears

it was the most depressing thing ever. like they had an absolutely enormous amount of foot traffic, but there were rarely things for sale close to the main path, lighting was dim, it looked like it had never been cleaned, displays were ancient and so forth. the store was packed from people trying to get from one end to the other end of the mall and nobody ever stopped and bought anything because they were actively trying to get people to not buy stuff I guess?

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

i can't believe that wealth disparity boots parable came out of a discworld book

hobbesmaster posted:

you can get some pretty good workboots for $150 - the cost of good, durable goods has come down but as you said not dramatically

Sagebrush posted:

huh?

quote:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

uncurable mlady posted:

my wife along with every non-native Kentuckian I have ever met thinks Fayette Mall is the weirdest loving thing because of the Sears being in the middle like that

although I guess that Sears is gone now

A Wheezy Steampunk posted:

Sagebrush posted:

i saw a really good article somewhere talking about middle class purchasing power in the 50s vs. today. in the 1950s, something like a pair of work boots would cost the equivalent of three hundred bucks today. just good leather boots. you can buy the same three hundred dollar boots today and they'll be just as good or better and they'll last forever. there wasn't another option in the 50s -- you got the boots from the cobbler in your hometown or maybe you drove to the big city for a day to go to the fancy store.

today have another option: you can buy boots for 59.99 from china. and they'll be pieces of crap and fall apart after a year. but your purchasing power has gone up five times! and the same goes for basically every consumer good -- clothes, electronics, furniture, etc. even though real wages haven't increased (or have greatly fallen) since the 50s, you can now be living at the poverty line and have a closet full of clothes and a decent sized tv because we exploit the hell out of east asia, so people can point to this as "hey look quality of life just keeps getting better"

tl;dr basically the good quality stuff still exists -- wal-mart has just simultaneously skewed everyone's ideas of how much something actually costs and how long it should last

hobbesmaster posted:

they're replacing it with a cheesecake factory

seriously

there is a new sears in lexington though; it replaces a space that was formerly occupied by a blockbuster video which i find loving hilarious (specifically man o war/saron drive; near tates creek/man'o'war across from the kroger)

uncurable mlady posted:

I guess my dad will be happy that he can still go buy craftsman tools somewhere

uncurable mlady posted:

their CEO is a libertarian numbskull who is running a real-world version of 'why libertarianism doesn't work' with sears and kmart

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys_his_empire_partner/

The Mad Archivist posted:

god dammit amazon why do you make it so hard to despise you

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

shaggar how do you feel about germany's government making almost every business close all day sundays

or all of france closing up for the entire month of august

A Wheezy Steampunk posted:

people love craftsman brand tools for some unfathomable reason

hobbesmaster posted:

every time i've gone it was far easier to deal with than any private utility company

rotor posted:

usually beats harbor freight

rotor posted:

usually beats harbor freight

Citizen Tayne posted:

It's a sad state of affairs when this is the baseline.

hobbesmaster posted:

what do you have against pittsburgh?

Sagebrush posted:

that said, it is outright hilarious how bad some of the imported chinese tools you can get at mega discount are. talking like screwdrivers with shafts that you can bend by pushing on them with your thumb, or wrenches that snap in half the first time you haul on them

rotor posted:

I bought an hf arbor press and when I opened it it was the filthiest piece of machinery I had ever seen. it's like it was coated in used grease and rolled in cinders

Beast of Bourbon posted:

wtf is a right angle screwdriver

Citizen Tayne posted:

I stopped a harbor freight to buy a right angle screwdriver to do some tight area work and they had none. Who the gently caress doesn't have those

Citizen Tayne posted:

I stopped a harbor freight to buy a right angle screwdriver to do some tight area work and they had none. Who the gently caress doesn't have those

Sagebrush posted:

a company that sells low-grade leftovers? if the product isn't sold in high enough numbers to fill a shipping crate with the production line rejects, harbor freight won't carry it. right angle screwdrivers aren't super common, i don't think we have a single one in our shop for instance (admittedly students do walk off with the tools they think are "neat")

rotor posted:

the ace hardware up the street

Socracheese posted:

i went into lowes today looking for a weird thing and every employee looked like they were actively craving death, then i remembered what working retail was like and i figured i was underestimating their death cravings. i didn't find it and just left and bought it on mcmaster-carr

Citizen Tayne posted:

Don't buy poo poo from Lowes. They are the worst. When I went to buy my ill-fated chest freezer, they scheduled delivery three times and never delivered a single day. They "lost" it every time.