Since the election, you have probably heard a lot about FAFO (“f--- around and find out”). It’s the idea that voting is a choice and voters must face the consequences of their choices. If you are, say, a poor person, you shouldn’t have voted for Donald Trump or any Republican, because in the end, th...
I hadn’t paid that much attention to their grocery carts, but I still think the economic anxiety argument holds weight. They look at their grocery carts and rising prices and they get anxious, because they know how tenuous their hold on their economic status is. They didn’t want to lose that status, because they know how badly the next lower rungs are treated and they didn’t want that for their family
We voted for Kamala and we’re well enough off to not have to worry about any reasonable grocery costs. Unless you’re talking really luxury goods like expensive cuts of meat, sea food, wine, etc. We don’t make crazy money, just a couple, each with a background and career in engineering. But we’re fortunate enough that as long as we’re talking reasonable foods, anything down out the local WinCo is within our budget. We don’t have a weekly grocery budget, as long as we’re reasonable about it, we can afford the ingredients for pretty much any recipe we want to make.
And yet, we also got hit by grocery prices the same as everyone else. We weren’t posting videos complaining about it, but it definitely showed up at the end of the month. We decreased our meat consumption a bit, but otherwise our habits spending habits have been mostly unchanged through the inflation crisis. (At least so far.)
But the thing is, when I see the grocery prices, I’m not really worried about us. We weren’t handed wealth. We each started broke right out of college and have lived pretty rather frugally in comparison to most of our peers of similar income. We started are careers at the rice and beans level and built our way up. And we went through every level of income between there and here. I know what it’s like to have a tight budget and have to live on nothing, because I’ve been there before. And my real thoughts and concern were not for myself, but for the people who were living at the rice and beans level before the crisis hit.
That is what has me concerned about the grocery and other price inflation. Even if you yourself can afford nice things today, unless you’re some trust fund kid, you probably clawed your way up the economic ladder to get where you are. You know what it is like to live at lower income levels, because you have done so. And if you can feel the impact of inflation on your budget, anyone with an iota of empathy will immediately think back to an earlier stage in their own life, and how a 50%+ inflation crisis would have affected them then.
This is it in my experience. The fact that said treatment is largely the fault of them and people like them is often lost on them however.