No more streaming subscriptions. No more chocolates. No more alcohol. No more decorations.
No dining out unless it’s an occasion. We meal-prep regularly.
I don’t drive anymore. Only public transportation or car-pooling.
Exercising more often so my body remains the same physique (less need for new clothes)
Oil change services for my vehicles. Despite doing tons of my own repairs, I hate dealing with the oil. It always gets on the outside of the container and my recycling locations are always full. The service (including oil) used to be about 50% more than the oil I could buy to do myself. It was worth it to me to spend an extra dinner’s worth of money ~4 times a year. But now a service costs at least twice as much as the oil alone, even at independent shops. Plus, I now get oil in slight bulk, so the service is 3x what I pay in oil. I treated myself to a nice catch pan and dedicated funnels as a compromise, still costing less than a service on my first DIY in a decade.
Used to buy the 12 box from a local chocolatier that is absolutely fantastic. The owner was trained in France and Belgium and her creations are as good or better than anything I’ve eaten.
Six years ago, the price for a 12 piece box was $24. Today it is $36. I used to keep a box around almost constantly. Now it is only for holidays and birthdays.
Personal Computers: As an IT professional, I’ve always been a miser when it comes to computer hardware. I usually buy something 2 or so generations old and refurbish it myself, then use it for several years till it suffers a catastrophic failure. I’m not a serious gamer, so I don’t care if it can run the latest games at trillions of frames per microsecond. Now, even 4 generations back the machines are abhorrently expensive. Costing as much as they did when new, which is ridiculous. The manufacturing burn through due to AI is idiotic. When the investment into AI finally crashes, which I’m shocked hasn’t happened yet, these manufacturers are going to be scrambling to get back into the consumer market.
Razor blades. Much better to go with a single-razor housing, even if occasionally the multi-razor shaves feel like a smoother result.
Netflix (though that was cause of password sharing), PS plus. I upgraded my pc so its better than a PS5 now. Just need to rebuy the Fromsoft catalogue and I be peachy. And emulate Bloodborne. Spotify. Cause its shit now. AI music was what made me quit. Then I went to Tidal. And my god the sound difference.
I’m paying for HIDIVE, but now that I comment I’m sure someone will point out some horrible genocide AMC is responsible for…
Pizza. Getting pizza for the family shouldn’t cost over $70. Hell, eating out and fast food are exorbitantly expensive.
And yet the workers are still making shit wages. It’s absurd.
Welcome to capitalism.
Yet people will pay 10 times the cost of the ingredients to have food delivered to them cold and half-eaten.
Most things except booze. I might have a coping problem.
Name brand potato chips. Doritos over $5 a bag is insane. They were 2 for 5 just a few years ago.
I see them at like 4 bags for about $10.
I think this is their sneaky way of raising prices. They know most people aren’t going to buy 4 bags of Doritos and 5 12-packs of soda to get the lower price on the shelf, and the single unit price is crazy.
Raspberry PIs.
I have a super old model with such old connections it’s not even useful for anything.
Rice Cakes (the circular ones)
They’re regularly $3.49 Canadian now… that’s absurd. It has one ingredient, rice. Rice isn’t that expensive, and it doesn’t even use very much of it.
They’re not even difficult to produce, the machine to make them is only a few thousand dollars and I’m seriously considering buying one from South Korea at this point.
Red meat steak.
It’s over 20 bucks a piece now. It’s ridiculous.
Same here, the price of steak is absolutely ridiculous. I find it hard to believe they sell any at all.
everything but the basic food for survival.
I dropped the only frivolities I used to get during the pandemic, and never picked them up again, which were only eating out once a week, and movies occasionally. I also dropped red meat, and processed foods for health reasons around the same time.
I don’t feel like I’m suffering because I never really engaged with the consumerist culture to begin with.
Quinoa
The ironic part is the people who ate it for millenia got priced out first because it was a fad diet…
Like, before we’d even really hard of it, they were already priced out
Other countries (like the Netherlands) are starting to grow it now because climate change means it’s much harder to grow things like potatoes.
Retro gaming handhelds. I bought the Ayn Thor Pro off Swappa for close to $630, only because it came with the UEFS 4.0 processor prior to the current 3.1 downgrade. With that, my Steam Deck, and my Switch 2, I think I’m good in terms of gaming.
Also, any console or PC that’s priced over three digits. I just got an ASRock Z97 Extreme 4 motherboard from a friend with 16 GB ram that I plan on turning into a Steam Machine of my own.
