When the future becomes unaffordable and saving money is pointless, a $30 poke bowl makes complete sense
The great baseball legend and jokester Yogi Berra once quipped that a restaurant had become so crowded that nobody goes there anymore. Here’s a version for today: young people in America have such dismal economic prospects that they spend more money than ever.
A Reddit thread appeared recently in which a man posed the question of where kids in America are getting the money to live a DoorDash lifestyle. DoorDash is one of several smartphone apps in the US that deliver restaurant meals to your door for a steep premium. The thread went viral but was subsequently deleted for reasons that are unclear to me, though many screenshots exist.
The post was from a 44-year-old man with no kids: “[I] own and operate a fast casual restaurant with four locations. I’m intimately familiar with the insane amount of money it costs to have food to your front door. At my own restaurant; a $16 poke bowl, delivered, with tip is gonna run you close to $30. For someone making six figures? Sure, have at it. But trust me when I tell you, almost every high school aged kid these days seems to use DoorDash multiple times a week.”
This thread got ping-ponged around on X and one user jumped in with an explanation that caught my eye. “They’re behaving like people living in a post-middle-class economy…where ownership is unattainable, savings are pointless, buying a home is impossible, and upward mobility is gone. So what happens? They shift to a present-maximization mindset. If the future is unaffordable anyway, why not buy the burrito now? Younger people are not reckless. They are rational inside a broken incentive system.”
Luke Gromen, one of today’s most incisive financial analysts, chimed in: “Watch the movie ‘Cabaret’ – the youth in Weimar Germany behaved similarly.”
For most of the post-war period, saving money made sense. A young person or family would convert savings into a down payment and pay it off gradually thanks to a stable and reliable job. There was a direct connection between the ability to save and prospects for future prosperity. The value of money was proportional to the middle-class goodies that one sought. This rewarded discipline and delayed gratification, and it also attested to people’s optimistic view of the prospects for stability.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: rt.com
