I'm exactly at the same point in social class structure now as I was growing up. It's very calming.
Also, I'm old. Walmart wasn't something I ever heard of until I was an adult.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will try listening to that.
I think I'm kind of oblivious to a lot of that, because my father was a professor and my mother was raised by socialists in a foreign country.
This is something I think about a lot, because I've kind of been mentally and emotionally deformed by my class transformation. On the point of feeling guilty about buying fancy products as an adult, though: In my case at least, the gap between my parents and myself is complicated by the fact that my parents were immigrants,* so they just did things differently altogether. (Like, why buy juice boxes for lunch when you could send your kid to school with a rinsed jar filled with water or Tang? It took them a minute to realize this was abusive parenting.) Also, in the 80s/90s, people didn't know anything and there was a lot less consumer choice, so I think it was normal for everyone, even well-off people, to eat things like tub margarine and cancer apples.
tub margarine and cancer apples.
Well, not that long ago margarine was supposed to be healthier than butter.
As for apples, organic apples were unheard of when I was young. I think I still eat cancer apples sometimes.
We didn't even have non-cancer apples and a doctor said we had to use margarine.
5: Yes, that was my point! (See, the first part of the sentence from which you excerpt.) I meant it in response to the point in the OP about how you grew up thinking product x was fine, when you wouldn't touch it now -- the change is to some extent culture-wide, not individually class-based.
4: reusing a jar is abuse but buying a Stanley is not? Norms are weird.
We grew up middle class but kind of broke and the main thing it's left me with is a hatred of cheap shoes. I don't care that they're better now than the Kmart shit of the 80s.
Is Moby the only one here who experienced rural retail before Wal-Mart?
Teo, maybe? On the one hand, young Teo despite current markers that may suggest otherwise; on the other, Mr Sam took his time going out west.
Anyway, wow, it sucked. I was a college kid in rural Tennessee, so my perspective was different, but still. Why did we drive 60 miles to Chattanooga or 90 miles to Nashville to get fairly basic things? (Stadium cups, for example.) Because you couldn't get them downtown in the county seat! I mean maybe, we didn't have to go quite that far -- Tullahoma had a comics store, after all -- but how many hours were we going to tool around the greater Franklin County area to find out?
Anyway anyway, a high school friend wasted a lot of words over on FB this week trying to tell me she was working class and virtuous when she owns 19 rental units but I wasn't because I use complicated sentences or something. Also because I wouldn't admit that the Democrats and Republicans were both branches of the Marxist Uniparty that only Trump was fighting, while Biden was, and I quote, directly responsible for opening a slave market on the southern border. It's been a weird fuckin' week, it has.
Maybe it's location, not era. There's still no Walmart near where I grew up.
I wasn't rural at all (dense pre-car city in a metro area of 400k), but we didn't get a Walmart until I was in high school. (We had a Kmart of course.)
You probably can't get an organic apple there either.
Internet says it opened sometime in 1993.
My dad, whose dad was a camera shop owner, was very concerned about Walmart killing all the other businesses. Which certainly happened to some extent.
8 is right off course. Food has trends and fashions even leaving aside the health stuff.
15: I remember being stunned when I heard"sriracha" in a Denny's commercial.
Remember the arugula flap in I think the 2004 campaign? Even then it was bullshit, you could get arugula in most of the country, but the connection between cultural signifiers of snootiness and what people actually buy has only widened.
I had no idea WTF a Stanley was until they were in the news for selling out for some reason. Is it related to the Stanley tool company and they started making industrial mugs or something?
No, different company. They've always sold Stanley mugs and stuff, mostly for construction workers and such. The trendiness is new and I only heard about it in the past couple of weeks.
A $65,000 pickup truck means you get to say you are working class
The iconic green thermos with a steel cup is Stanley.
If I'm remembering correctly, back when I was a kid it was normal practice not to pack any drink with lunch, and you just bought one of those little milk cartons to drink with your lunch. Maybe history will call that time The Age of Dehydration.
We had to have 15 cents for milk every day.
Of course, you could get lose cigarettes for a nickle.
There was a whole thing with government funding and the milk was sacred and had to be in a locked fridge and only certain staff at school had The Milk Key.
A billionaire just followed me on Twitter, even though I don't post there any more and only read when there's some specific event I'm trying to get info about. So I guess I've got it made now.
Eh now that I checked he's a slut, follows 22k people.
On whether these are societal changes or class changes, the bullet point about Walmart X should be taken in context of, "and then when you go back home, you feel uncomfortable that the people you grew up with may think you think you're too good for Walmart X." It's definitely about items that are still widespread in their community of origin, that they now find kinda shitty but also feel weird about that.
The thing is, many of the people I grew up with have gone to shit. Not the ones I keep in touch with.
Walmart existed when I was a kid but hadn't reached quite as far, and we were on the supply side of rural retail which gave us a bit of a different perspective. The closest one when I was little was 120 miles away in Flagstaff; we were far enough away that we weren't in direct regular competition with it the way closer stores were. There's now one in Page that competes more directly with the few remaining trading posts.
Podcast sounds great, thanks.
I just finished Netflix's Beef which takes a nodding interest in social class, thoughtfully so. Ending chapter has paraphrases of the Diamond Sutra in the dialogue, nice touch.
I liked the visual sense of place a lot, couldn't be flimed on a soundstage. Parasite had that also.
This is the first place I worked, from 1977 when I was 11.
I got "Beef" confused with "The Bear." I've never watched either, but if I tear off a piece of tape to write the expiration date of the eggs on it before I put the eggs in the holder, my wife says "We're tearing the tape like assholes." So, I have to find the scissors.
Anger is IME a corrosive habit, unless it motivates some real and short-term goal. Not sure how to square that with the colossal waste and selfishness of a society that values cashmere socks and worse, also the dumpster fire of this year's US and global politics, both of which are legitimately enraging.
For whatever it's worth, there's a recent translation of the Diamond Sutra I like a lot, avoids the direct contradiction statements of many others:
https://urbandharma.org/pdf11/diamond_sutra.pdf
I had no clue Stanley mugs were a thing until Stata sent one out to me as the yearly swag. I thought the winged bear with a crown was their new mascot or something and was sooper puzzled.
Stata is great, but now I only have SAS and SPSS.
I've gotten, but don't remember, swag from SAS or SPSS.
I don't have any swag from any of them.
I don't shop at Walmart because of their labor policies, but I don't see that as a class thing exactly. My mother's best friend is a Middlebury/Dartmouth/Brandeis alum who led a middle class to upper middle class life with some family that is upper-upper middle class. Her daughter is a doctor etc. She's also a frugal Yankee, and *she* shops at Walmart, because that's where you can go to buy a scale or a flashlight in the small town in Maine she retired to. She probably wouldn't buy clothes there other than underwear, but that's because they wouldn't last. She also picks apples from the Apple tree next to the Shaws supermarket. They aren't pretty but they taste delicious in pies.
Not seeing a class thing as a class thing is a class thing.
upper-upper middle class
Color me confused. The wealth thresholds for top 10%:1% of households in the US are about 2M:10M. What is the point of using the word middle if it includes almost everyone? Instead of lower, people say what, ratchet? or Ghetto as a pejorative description of personal style?
I started Reservation Dogs. I was told that the heart and light touch balance out the depictions of grinding poverty. So far that's true, but barely. The four main character kids are adorable, though.
I don't want to see that because of the scene where Mr. Pink tortures the guy.
39: Well, a friend of mine worked there and got fired, because he bought a soda from a machine, two came out, and he took both of them. He doesn't shop there either. He's just barely middle class.
40: that's a big range though. If you have 2 million at retirement, a chunk if which is in your house, and no pension, then you have 80k income a year which i view as middle class basically vs 350-400k annually.
In America, class consciousness means knowing which class to claim as one's own when it suits you. Or if you're rich enough, to claim that class doesn't matter (except maybe in your childhood if you can find a thread to hang a middle and/or working class identity onto, if appropriate.)
What I meant to say is that you don't have to be working class to buy things at Walmart.
I feel like I listened to the queen for a day episode. Quite the thing, iirc.
Class has always been a little odd for me. I've spent much of my life in squandering mode, and it's not like we ever had epic wealth. We lived pretty well, and maybe pretended a bit as Yankees in Texas. We were always around people with a lot more wealth
My mom's dad and both her grandfathers spent their adult lives in the Army. Two were major generals, and her maternal grandfather retired a colonel. So my mom and both her parents grew up in a socialist paradise, although none would have called it that. They did ok -- not getting killed is a pretty good result all around -- and retired decently well.
My dad was orphaned at 7, and raised by an aunt and uncle, who took in all three Carp kids, for 6 altogether. The uncle worked his way up the ranks at an insurance company, but was salaried, not an owner. My dad's grandfather had dropped out of school when his father died of wounds from the Civil War, but did pretty well in the costume jewelry business. Then my grandfather got the Spanish flu, and died a young widower, my grandmother having already died at 33. Her father had made a lot of money as a cotton broker (00s to 20s), but all that wealth got destroyed in the early 30s (details are sketchy).
My dad always regretted that his grandfather had had to sell the vacation home he'd build in North Falmouth, because at the end of his life there was no one who could take it on. (My dad was 10-12 at the time). He wanted things to play out differently in his own life, but when he was dying of cancer in 2015, none of his 4 kids was really positioned to take on the vacation home in British Columbia, so I had to close it up for sale. If I was a different kind of person, maybe I could have used my time and energy differently, and would be writing this from there.
42 reminds me that the Gilbert and Sullivan Society put that on as a musical while I was at university and alas I cannot remember any of the lyrics except
So I shot the fucker
Put him in a hearse an' all
Don't worry motherfucker
Wasn't nothing personal.
And the title, which was "Lend Me Your Ears".
47: Rhyming fucker and motherfucker is kind of lazy.
Rhyming in English is hard. That's why they had to make an easier sonnet.
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Our circumstances for our stay in Santa Fe--we're in a more upscale neighborhood than our usual haunts plus Santa Fe old white people culture in general--has us being a bit more aware of "class*" than usual. For me the primary trigger is the assumptions that people make, or often more specifically in this case how they react to assumptions that I often do *not* make about them. Of course they've been to/are familiar with xyz, are a bit insulted I even asked. I guess I should quit saying: "My favorite upper middle class old white people place, you probably haven't heard of it."
*Both socioeconomic and educational.
49: as far as I remember each successive verse included more "fucks" than the previous one, until the final verse which was just a constant stream of obscenity during which it became comically obvious that the singer had lost the thread of the story he was trying to tell.
4: "In my case at least, the gap between my parents and myself is complicated by the fact that my parents were immigrants,* so they just did things differently altogether."
I was going to say, after reading the comments from the bottom up, as it were, that I feel like a lot of my experience of social class was heavily colored by the fact that my 2nd generation immigrant grandparents here in Minneapolis were so tightly connected to a working class/poor farming community heritage. My grandmother was a housekeeper for rich people in California in her youth, and my grandfather was a disabled intellectual who wound up running a small trucking company before it went bankrupt, but I don't feel like that aspect of their experiences of class politics and mores was nearly as important as the fact that they still spoke Danish to each other and their friends and relatives and fellow parishioners at a Danish Lutheran Church. I went through the winters of my early youth wearing hand-knit mittens with a cord connecting them because my grandmother liked making things like that for her family, even though we certainly could have afforded storebought mittens, though there were plenty of other things to spend the money on, like season tickets for the children's theater. It just all added up to a culture of thriftiness, non-ostentatiousness, respect for high culture intellectual product and family interconnectedness that seemed seamless with their Danish immigrant community identity.
We had never heard of Walmart growing up of course, but there was a HUGE amount of class-policing done on the school bus around who was declasse enough to shop at the crummy Lake St Kmart that we drove by on our way to majority white inner city elementary schools.
Minneapolis is going to be really cold. Hope you can stay warm.
The Lake St Kmart, that monument to blighted urban renewal projects that was the shame of South Minneapolis for five decades, has finally been torn down after being vacant for several years and catching on fire last year. Probably too late to make an immediate difference in Nicollet Ave. retail prospects, post-pandemic and post-George Floyd, but I'm mostly happy to see it gone, all the same.
55: Just learned today that there is a pilot project "deep winter greenhouse" about a block from my house that features a hammock, so maybe I can talk my way in and have a warm, humid respite from this crazy dry winter.
Yeah. The dryness is the worst part of the cold for me. I'm always itchy.
Anyway, I appreciate all efforts to make Minnesota habitable.
Anyway, it's been about ten years since I've faced the north wind across the plains on a below zero day. And decades since I lived somewhere where that wind was a regular event. I can't say I miss it, but listening to it blow against the windows while you sat inside reading was a big feels.
Went out to the corner store and even for MN in January it was *dead*. We didn't have a really cold night like this at the beginning of the winter, so this is clearly the one night each winter where all bets are off and nobody who doesn't have to go out is going to be on the street. Sucks for our neighbors without housing. There's usually scores of them that die every winter from exposure, and the government and nonprofit response is uncoordinated and haphazard.
Promoting global warming has been uncoordinated and haphazard, but still quite effective.
AIUI a human produces about as much heat as a 40watt incandescent bulb, so hanging out in a greenhouse might reduce its heating bill. Someone can calculate heat loss per entry/exit to figure out how long you have to spend in the hammock to be a net warmer.
56: That was a really shitty K-mart.
OT, but I just had a look at the ADL list of killings by US domestic extremists, per year, and it's disappointing news for everyone except people who are opposed to murder. No, Trump's election did not lead to a wave of bloodshed by embittered extremists of the left or emboldened extremists of the right. Nor did his defeat, mutatis mutandis.
(Quite a few people here were convinced that there would be a new wave of right-wing extremist killings once Trump got into power, and there wasn't.)
2012: 33
2013: 27
2014: 36
2015: 71 (several mass shootings)
2016: 78 (the Pulse nightclub shooting)
2017: 45
2018: 55
2019: 46
2020: 23
2021: 29
2022: 25
The number of right-wing "terror incidents" has been rising for a while https://www.adl.org/resources/report/right-wing-extremist-terrorism-united-states but this hasn't resulted in any particular increase in deaths.
There was a slight increase in attempted coups. Just a statistical blip in a long run that includes a civil war, though.
A fifth of the 2018 total took place within walking distance of my house. The ADL can go fuck itself for trying to support Netanyahu and cozying up to the likes of Musk by worrying more about criticism of Israel than American Jews getting shot in the U.S.
