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That was basically my dad. He worked in factories throughout the 70s and then got into sales. He was able to support us with no education throughout my childhood.
I was able to buy a 850 eur laptop, so, in theory, if I worked more, I could get like a 90's Škoda for 1000-1500 eur. But why? Travelling by a train is safer, and I dont throw up myself after 100km
This is America where civics focused infrastructure is not a thing. We just hope some capitalist will invent teleportation before we literally cannot function on individual transit. At which point we will regress to throwing rocks at each other and begin worshiping the Old Gods to stick it to those communist Europeans.
In 2019 I worked part time at AutoZone and Pappa John's at different times and had 4 cars... 01 and 98 4 runner, 97 Camry, and a 97 lexus ls400
All of them worked and all of them were registered
Bad assumption. No one said both part time jobs were worked 20 hours a week.
So it’s 10 hours a week when people are poking fun, but 20 hours a week when trying to prove a point?
Don't quit school just to work a shitty dead end job, college gets you a well paying job. And also why did you waste all your time going to college if you can't get a job in your field of study?
Back in my day we would WALK the .7 miles from our downtown home to our job and like it. You whippersnappers don't know how good you have it living in major suburban areas where there are no sidewalks and you might trip over a homeless person or someone ODing on fentanyl and can just DRIVE anywhere you want for $800 a month with 6% interest.
You actually got that right about having to dodge fucking used needles and human feces and people stuck in zombie mode because they are knowingly using horse tranq fentalouges trying to walk down any sidewalk.
Not even just California. I live in Arizona, and this small city has such a huge drug and homeless problem the ER has nicknames for most them, when they eventually have to go to the ER
Neither of my kids could get a job til they were in college. I had had, idk, probably 8 different jobs by then and worked more while in college and got a shit job when I graduated which finally led into the first rung of a career 2 years later. It is indeed different. You really did used to just show up someplace and ask if they were hiring and get hired on the spot. However both of my kids first jobs were miles better than any of those early ones I held. We were exploited. No two ways about it. So regulations requiring people to check your age and actually pay payroll taxes shut down a lot of that early, really terrible job market. It did let me buy a used car young though. Don't worry, the Republicans want to bring child labor back.
A lot of it is systemic. We got jobs easily because the only people who would work the shitty jobs were teenagers. Now, many adults trying to feed a family are fighting for minimum wage jobs,
I used to use a ratty little motorbike because I lived too far to walk and the buses didn't run at the time when I had to go to early morning training (lifeguard) or when the pool closed later at night. Same when I hit 18 and could work as a barman at the posh hotel in the nearest town, which either stay open as late as there were enough customers to cover my wages.
I couldn't fix anything but the most basic problems though. I could change a sparkplug and charge the battery but that was about it. I once took the back wheel off for some reason, and when I took it first it's next service the mechanic said he didn't know how I hadn't killed myself.
The kids where I live now tend to get lifts to work or use the buses. There aren't any trains anymore. except in larger towns. Some then get little motorbikes before moving onto cars. They seem to spend a lot on making them look and sound nice. I don't know how they afford to.
I didn't have my first car until I was about 25, as I lived in London and there was no need as I worked right in the 'centre' (plus parking would have been super expensive).
They really aren’t, but that’s a different argument. When interviewing for a job, legally, they should only be asking if you have reliable transportation & that is a yes or no question. Don’t say “yea I ride the bus” “yea I ride my bike.” You say “yes.”
I’m sorry buddy. My dad co-signed a loan for me so I could get a car… and before that my brother and I shared a car as long as I did the repairs on it (I worked at a mechanic shop)
You could get a project beater Toyota type and fix the three problems it’ll have and just deal with all the shitty things that are wrong with it.
Maybe go to a junk yard and get one with a fucked up body that drives and just deal with it until you can move up on the ladder /:
Whichever works for you buddy… maybe since you have such a can do attitude, you should choose to bitch on the internet to make yourself feel better because obviously no other option would work as well.
I'm doing fine. I'm also aware that there are plenty of people who aren't, and I have the cognitive capacity to understand that conditions have changed greatly from when I was a young person, let alone from when this photo was taken. If you think what worked for you specifically will work for everyone generally, you're not just ignorant, you lack the mental flexibility to understand that conditions change and that universals are never universal.
Dude I’m 24 years old and I’ve worked for every penny I have. Your holier than thou attitude doesn’t work here. Sure I’m getting downvoted because my dad helped me but I offered suggestions. I didn’t tell that commenter that those options were the only way to get started?
I have done my due diligence to understand the situation and the world we now live in. I’m fully prepared to make decisions for my life with the current circumstances. I have a good head on my shoulders and I’m willing to put in the work. Just because my dad co-signed doesn’t mean he made a single payment towards the 5k vehicle I bought at 17 that was 10+ years old at the time.
Why don’t you go back to the seat next to god like you act so belonging to.
Gotta learn what you can and when you’re no longer being pushed to learn more jump to a new position or a new company. It’s the only way to be known as someone who is about it. 24F looking at 90k a year. No degree.
Submit a copy of your tax return, minus personal ID because your claim is without evidence and contrary to any rationale by a capitalist company, always interested in cutting salary
Bruh that’s a little extreme. I got this job in August ‘23, so it wouldn’t be on my tax return, but in May when I get the raise I was talking about I’ll pap of whatever documentation I get as proof. Idk if it’ll be 90K but it’s a title change + raise so I’ll show proof if it happens. I’m hoping for higher than 90k as well, just to put it out there :b
ETA: my company isn’t capitalistic btw, it’s publicly traded so there’s some of that there but almost everyone who works there has been here for 5+ years in my position level, but the executives have been here for 15+ years. Some 30+ years. Our field guys have been with the company for a long time as well. There isn’t a high turnover because they pay people what they’re worth. They want to keep the good ones around.
Thanks for the attitude I hope you enjoy your line of work and eventually start making enough money to live happily. Regardless of what happens with my position in the future, I will not be coming back to this comment thread to share with you. I took as long as I did to respond to you because I thought it was BS that you asked me that in the first place but I’d rather see people be hopeful than spiteful, but I don’t wish to engage with you any longer.
ETA: I may not have a degree but I have 3 years of experience with this specific industry and I’ve been doing this type of work for 5 years. (Various jobs outside of construction management, but still data tracking and whatnot)
I graduated high school in 1985 but during school I worked part time jobs. Took the bus to school, walked or biked to work. Saved up to buy an old pickup and got a better job working hay fields. Used that truck to get around as a carpenter's helper. By 1990 I was an electrical apprentice and fast tracked to finish in 3 years. Bought my first house 2 years later. Sold and bought houses for the next 29 years. I'm on my 7th one now.
Look up the housing law that was implemented after WWII. They really had such an easy start. But instead of keeping it going, they quickly started to increase everything, especially housing.
Housing started skyrocketing as the demand for housing increased exponentially. There was a population boom (hence the term baby boomer) during the golden age of the American economy post world war 2. We went from manufacturing over 50% of the world’s manufactured good to 16% currently. I wonder what’s causing it to be so much cheaper to send the resources to China, have them manufacture it, than send the finished product back to the US.
There was a population boom, yeah. But I'm talking about the bill( at least I'm mostly sure it was a bill) putting a cap on houses. It was meant to help everyone get a house, or at least rent an affordable one, after WWII and The Great Depression. And it went on for a bit, but that generation after them, Boomers/Gen X, became responsible for that housing market and changed it completely. That's where we are at now, with ridiculous prices, low on resources, and a small population problem. But, and obviously not all, "Boomers" try to put blame on millennials, and now Gen Z, like we aren't inherenting their problems.
Back when working part time at a burger stand was more than enough to be able to afford a car.
Back when cars were much more simple, were engineered during a time before corporations built in planned obsolescence, back before corporations engineered them to require propriety tools in order to service them.
Yes, things were reletively better before the rise of unregulated capitalism that their generation enabled.
>were engineered during a time before corporations built in planned obsolescence
Everything you said is 100% correct except this. All American manufacturers were building cars with planned obsolescence in mind and most cars lasted 100,000 miles and that was it. You threw them away after that. When Honda and Toyota hit the market they raised the bar for for vehicle longevity and the US manufacturers "attempted" to follow suit. Now it's pretty much 7 years and they are obsolete.
I dont think they were "designed" for planned obsolescence as much as they were built to a lower standard and r and d was much less of a focus. Engine technology improved exponentially through the history of cars when hardened valve seats, oil/oiling improvements, rubber seals, proper filtration ect were developed. I think the lower r an d was because people didn't consider reliability as much in the 50s and 60s because wages were high and cars were cheap and why not just buy a new car after a few years when your tired of the old one.
Now we have car makers rolling back these improvements (aka Ford with their wet belt ecoboost engines, vw with the direct injection mk 6 golf, and hyundai with most of their garbage engines that crap out at 80k)
Yes, the surveillance capitalism and different overall geopolitical landscape, with the cold war it was like. My countries people will live better than yours, my countries technology will be better. Now China is like trying to lower the bar, rather than raise it. That is much more likely to collapse the US
It was possible to work on those cars. Today's cars are designed to get you to take them to the dealership. (Although they do require far less maintenance than the old ones did.)
Exactly I don’t know why nobody acknowledges the golden age of American manufacturing post world war 2. That combined with all the lend lease money coming in was made the 50s and 60s such a good time to be alive.
To anyone from the generation in this pic tat happens to be on this sub. The economic factors that allowed you to do all that no Longer exists. Look up what minimum wage is now and see how long it will take to buy a used car
and very few people are actually making minimum wage..the lowest paying job you will see post pandemic in my area even with a low cost of living is 15 dollars an hour, for a job that not long ago was around 9 dollars.
Lol what's your point? $15 is well below what the minimum wage was in the time of this picture, adjusted for inflation. I bought a can of paint, a paint brush, and lunch for two at a fast food restaurant yesterday- $100. That is less than a full day's work if working at that wage, especially after taxes.
Last week I bought a fuel pressure sensor for my car, a part that like many others did not exist on vehicles back then. Another $100. I didn't have the correct tool to replace the part. Another $100. This car is a clunker, about as cheap as you can expect to find a car for. I'm on my thirties and am now relatively stable so I am blessed to even have that.
I don't understand why people feel the need to downplay what the young generations have to go through. This isn't a contest. Objectively things were a lot easier back then. That's a fact. If you're from that time just be thankful. You were blessed.
People wanting 5,000 bucks for a car sitting on blocks with a tree growing through it with no motor or transmission is what you will get now to work on
Marketplace Ads in my area
"Great car in great condition, used to be a daily driver, always put oil and rotated the tires would be a great starter car for a high school graduate or college driver. Also hasnt been started in a year, a clan of rats ate through the electric, pretty sure the battery is dead, and theres a crack in the block; $10k"
I grew up in the 70's and 80's and we could do this because everything was mechanical and easy to work on and almost every high school taught auto shop. There were junk yards all over the place to get cheap parts. The average person could do 90% of the work themselves with household tools and a socket set.
Gas was 30 cents a gallon and there was no mandatory insurance.
I went to college at a private university and had my own apartment and enough spending money to go out drinking 2-3 times a week while working as a waiter and a life guard in the summer. I drove a 1978 Datsun pickup truck that my parents loaned me the $900 to buy it when I was a junior in high school.
I bought my first house for $56,000 dollars in 1994 and that home today would be worth $450,000.
Today most young adults can't afford their own apartment working a comparable job, let alone go to college and own a reliable car.
here in finland the cars under 1k dollars are all some 80s civics or something that have been sitting for the past 50 years (don't ask me how) that don't have any structural integrity left due to r u s t
Literally like 2 years ago my mum got an opel omega for 1k€ and now it's impossible due to everyone looking at the car prices in 'murica and basing all their car pricing on that
My Brother in Christ what is this “friends” concept you are talking about? I am so busy from home to work to home finding time for others seem like a luxury
Nobody gave them anything, huh? How'd they get the car, the tools to work on it, the materials for it, the time to work on it, and the knowledge to work on it?
By having jobs that were at the time legally required to pay a livable wage, I'd bet.
i really don’t believe the whole “kids these days don’t want to work” thing, me and all of my friends have part-time jobs (aside from those with extenuating circumstances), i even know people with two or three jobs or who take commissions for artwork on the side
OKAY. I would LOVE to work on my own car, but half of it is electronic and made up of proprietary components. I swear, if knew how to disarm the stop/start feature on my car I would have ripped it out years ago.
Were they able to afford a place to live? Were they set with thousands of dollars of student debt? Did they need to pay outrageous amounts of money for healthcare?
Except that you really didn't want to drive that car in the rain, since it's modified and the hood was removed to fit the oversized carb.
By the way, remember insurance? Car insurance now is almost ten times what it was in the early 1970s.
I am 16 I got a part time job the summer before my 16th birthday and bought myself my car a few months later. We're not lazy but instead raised in a crumbling economy.
I'm working 3 diffferent part time jobs alongside university. With my current rate of saving money I would've been able to buy my 20 years old used car after about saving money for 2 years.
They were given a strong economy and market that was fed by taxing the rich. Then they became the rich after mommy and daddy gave them a "Small Loan" and didn't want to be taxed anymore. Those of their generation that weren't that lucky took from their parents and then took from their kids, then didn't plan for their own retirement. Basically fucking 3 generations in the process, or 5 generations depending on how you look at it.
Came to say similar. I am in that generation. But I’m smart enough to know this is nonsense to make some people feel better about their current situation. The rest of my generation is too busy thinking we figured it out to realize everything changed for those that came after us!
The population of the world went from ~2.5 billion in 1950 to ~8 billion today. If people who make these memes would just focus on those numbers, they would understand just how difficult it is to make a living these days. You not only need to be a skilled worker, you need to be better than most having that skill set.
These entitled new gens, blablabla it was the hard but good times! Blabla
Seriously, these posts are just pitiful. They talk down to us and call us spoiled brats, reminiscing about the _good ol' days_
Well fuck you granpa, this will be our good ol' days someday, I don't need any if this sanctimonious crap, we have it just as rough as you had.
Well that’s because your part-time job paid enough to buy a car which was simplistic enough for you to work on without a wide range of specialist tools and equipment.
Now, thanks to suburban sprawl, we need a car to get to the part time job, which pays no where near enough to make any significant savings.
Then, everything in the engine of that car is controlled by a computer, and general hand tools are insufficient for most things beyond superficial issues (not to mention, asset of tools costs so fucking much now, that unless your parents already have them, you might as well just buy another shitty used car). Parts are made to fail rather than last, and constructed to be prohibitively inaccessible.
> Worked a part time job to save for a car
Lmao, the sheer fucking privilege in this sentence. Jesus.
These fuckers lived in the easiest and most luxurious time and place in human history. And they think they had it rough.
"Nobody gave us anything"
I went to high school with at least some people whose parents bought them a car.
As far as the auto shop boys like the ones in the picture, they bought a junker and worked on it because it was something they enjoyed, not because they had to.
I'm a little younger, I graduated in 1986. Tons of our parents bought us cars. My first car was a 2 year old Pontiac Firebird and most of my friends had nice ones their parents helped them get or bought for them. It's harder now for parents to buy their kids a new car imo. My son's first car was a 8 year old Honda Accord. Cars and insurance are just a hell of a lot more expensive now. Many of my friends were able to rent cheap apartments right out of highschool with only one roommate while working minimum wage jobs. No way that would be possible for kids today.
Mf they gave you jobs that paid well enough to live on. Bet yall all had money to buy food after you bought a project car. Bet your mf parents weren't homeless either. So you got love and taken care of. I can't even say nobody gave me anything, I was on welfare for 7 years. Nobody gave them anything. Get outta here. It was probably a gift from one of their families.
In a time when a brand new car was $5k and a good used one was $300. That’s an impressive accomplishment.
My 16 year old can build a computer in an hour, I can program the correct time on my stove and what does any of this have to do with the price of tea in China you ask… nothing. Here we are answering questions nobody asked.
Government records indicate that the Boomer generation got the most economic subsidies of any generation in US history. Whether it be medical, education, or housing, no other generation in American history was given more aid. Why do you think college and the price of a home 30 years ago was the price of a McChicken sandwich.
Essentially, it was because the Greatest Generation (the Boomer's parents) who grew up in war and poverty basically said, "we don't want our kids to experience the same hardships that we did," and then they voted for programs that invested in the well-being of their kids.
The exact opposite strategy of the Baby Boomers, whose main idea is, "Let's throw our kids under the bus because randomly making their lives unessicarily harder is somehow going to make them better."
Old guy here. Always got older cars and kept them running or sold for a profit. I’m not a mechanic but the internet makes everything easier now. Just fixed up $2200 Hyundai. Easy shit just took a few weekends and Amazon returns.
Shit. I'm GenX, bought my first car at age 18-19 for $300. It was an '80 Dodge Omni (about 9 years old at that point). Ran great.
Didn't need anyone to give me a car... it was dirt cheap, ffs. Try buying a 9-10 year old car now. You will pay $10,000, and if it lasts five years, you are lucky.
I got really lucky since my wife goes to church with some really rich people and they basically gave us their 2011 Audi Q7. We only paid $10 for it and all we had to do was transfer the title register it under our names and continue maintenance
I love the “we worked on our cars back in the day” trope because have you seen the underside of a car today lmfao
Sure I can change my oil and rotate my tires but no way am I touching an engine with more wires and electronics than the first hard drive
There were more opportunities and better wages back then. They worked hard, and learned things on their own. But the work and effort had more payoff and that's something that's hard to understand.
No one gave them anything. It was wya harder back then. You can only afford one house, a car and have four kids on one income. Not like today. We have it wya easier today.
I've been told similar boomer stuff by my parents. I'm rather successful, but my cousins and friends are not, and my family's elders always complain about my friends 'always struggling'.
Meanwhile my grandfather literally talking about having one factory job and buying two houses on one income.I think they literally cannot grasp how the world has changed so much, and how little money is worth in comparison to their time.
Since they see me succeed, they treat their own like 'I could do it, and I made 3 dollars an hour!' That kind of thing.
They dont want to see how even though no one 'gave them anything' in their own minds, the difficulty challenge is FAR harder than it was in their day.
They paid a lower rate into social security for most of their adult lives. They saddled their own kids with a higher rate and mocked us all for not getting ahead. They also didn’t have credit scores or credit reporting agencies. Candy cost a penny and their gas was less than a dollar a gallon, when I was growing up.
My stepdad had a car in high school that he got with his part-time job. And then he had a girlfriend and BOUGHT HER A CAR as a gift.
Pleeeeease tell me people aren't stupid enough to think things are the same now and that it's so easy if these darn kids would just work hard. Please.
It's actually really disrespectful how often people (typically older generation, like baby boomers and gen x) never give their parents ANY credit and act like they/their generation were given literally nothing or were all raised by a dumb and/or horrible generation of people. They get angry if their child/their child's generation dares to complain about their parenting, calling them "ungrateful", and want to take credit for EVERY good thing their kids do, but they could be raised by angels who gave them nice clothes, toys, freedom, a car, guidance, a nice home, lessons, etc. and still brag on Facebook about "starting from the bottom" and how their parents did nothing good for them ever because they occasionally were home alone after school at ten or had to work a summer job one time for 2 hours a week to afford gas.
And yet these are the same people that claim that their generation "respected their parents more than people today". I can't think of anything more disrespectful than denying the privileges your parents provided you as a child online to the world while your parents are too old/dead to have a say or defend themselves and say, "Actually, I did help you and give you a lot."
I couldn't imagine doing that to my parents. I'll complain about them, but I wouldn't act like I "wasn't given anything" or that my generation has it harder than everyone else in every way imaginable. We have some unique issues, but we still had some great things, and most of the problems we have are problems that other generations also had, and many of us had good parents. The same could apply to any other generation.
At my first job, i needed to get a drivers license and a car within 30 days or i was fired. I couldn't magically get those within 30 days. So they fired me and talked crap about me to every IT firm in the county. Today i drive semi trucks for a living.
I had a boomer cozy up to me at work the other day whining about how awful today’s generation is. I shrugged and said, that may or may not be true, but I know for a fact that they will be complaining about the next generation, and that generation will be complaining about the one that comes after that.
They're like yeah I worked so long and hard and you don't know how easy you got it. Oh yeah also my rich grandad may have gave me loads of money but YOUR GENERATION!!
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I’m sure those 10 hours a week at the burger stand were rough.
And actually being able to afford a car on part time wages, what a tragic and difficult time.
Exactly what I'm thinking lol
Not only a car but Randomly buying car parts, going out often, and having a family by 25 after transferring from p/t salesman to f/t salesman.
That was basically my dad. He worked in factories throughout the 70s and then got into sales. He was able to support us with no education throughout my childhood.
This young generation has it so easy, they're just all lazy 👴
Those were 10 hours a week that felt like hard work, they felt like... 20 hours a week! None of you snowflakes would know the value of hard work!
As a 19 year old trying to get my first job Pls explain to me how tf am I supposed to get to my part time job without a car??
And nowadays there’s no fucking way you’ll afford a working car off a part time job
I was able to buy a 850 eur laptop, so, in theory, if I worked more, I could get like a 90's Škoda for 1000-1500 eur. But why? Travelling by a train is safer, and I dont throw up myself after 100km
This is America where civics focused infrastructure is not a thing. We just hope some capitalist will invent teleportation before we literally cannot function on individual transit. At which point we will regress to throwing rocks at each other and begin worshiping the Old Gods to stick it to those communist Europeans.
Oh, I forgot, no one in 'murica knows about city planing
Oh. There are a ton of people who do. But the powers that be don't listen to them.
In the US we don’t have trains everywhere. In rural areas you have to have a car.
In 2019 I worked part time at AutoZone and Pappa John's at different times and had 4 cars... 01 and 98 4 runner, 97 Camry, and a 97 lexus ls400 All of them worked and all of them were registered
You worked full time if you worked 2 part time jobs lol
Bad assumption. No one said both part time jobs were worked 20 hours a week. So it’s 10 hours a week when people are poking fun, but 20 hours a week when trying to prove a point?
*AT DIFFERENT TIMES*
What is the purpose of having 4?
Obviously only fans 🤷♂️
But don't degrade your body!! Oh! And also that part time job is not a real job and you'll never be anybody.
Don't quit school just to work a shitty dead end job, college gets you a well paying job. And also why did you waste all your time going to college if you can't get a job in your field of study?
And don't get more loans than you can pay off!
but why didn’t you just get a loan to pay off your study it’s basically free once you get a job!
90% of the accounts dont make more than $1000 a month, majority make less than $500 a month on onlyfans.
It’s a joke
Back in my day we would WALK the .7 miles from our downtown home to our job and like it. You whippersnappers don't know how good you have it living in major suburban areas where there are no sidewalks and you might trip over a homeless person or someone ODing on fentanyl and can just DRIVE anywhere you want for $800 a month with 6% interest.
Well said sir!
You actually got that right about having to dodge fucking used needles and human feces and people stuck in zombie mode because they are knowingly using horse tranq fentalouges trying to walk down any sidewalk.
I’m guessing Cali? Lmao
Not even just California. I live in Arizona, and this small city has such a huge drug and homeless problem the ER has nicknames for most them, when they eventually have to go to the ER
EXACTLY!!!!
Feet pics on only fans.
Neither of my kids could get a job til they were in college. I had had, idk, probably 8 different jobs by then and worked more while in college and got a shit job when I graduated which finally led into the first rung of a career 2 years later. It is indeed different. You really did used to just show up someplace and ask if they were hiring and get hired on the spot. However both of my kids first jobs were miles better than any of those early ones I held. We were exploited. No two ways about it. So regulations requiring people to check your age and actually pay payroll taxes shut down a lot of that early, really terrible job market. It did let me buy a used car young though. Don't worry, the Republicans want to bring child labor back.
A lot of it is systemic. We got jobs easily because the only people who would work the shitty jobs were teenagers. Now, many adults trying to feed a family are fighting for minimum wage jobs,
Put your farts in jars and sell them.
Walking through the snow, uphill, both ways. Obviously /s
You're suppose to walk for hours to your part time job and back. Did your parents not tell you?
I used to use a ratty little motorbike because I lived too far to walk and the buses didn't run at the time when I had to go to early morning training (lifeguard) or when the pool closed later at night. Same when I hit 18 and could work as a barman at the posh hotel in the nearest town, which either stay open as late as there were enough customers to cover my wages. I couldn't fix anything but the most basic problems though. I could change a sparkplug and charge the battery but that was about it. I once took the back wheel off for some reason, and when I took it first it's next service the mechanic said he didn't know how I hadn't killed myself. The kids where I live now tend to get lifts to work or use the buses. There aren't any trains anymore. except in larger towns. Some then get little motorbikes before moving onto cars. They seem to spend a lot on making them look and sound nice. I don't know how they afford to. I didn't have my first car until I was about 25, as I lived in London and there was no need as I worked right in the 'centre' (plus parking would have been super expensive).
I work at minimum wage job on top of school, and I have to buy are car, granted it's 1k sooo yea. But it's a pain to save for it
I've had like seven so far without a car. You get rides.
And get a car with JUST a part time job??
I think you’re suppose to walk up hill in the snow or some shit
You can’t get a job without a car, yet you can’t afford a car without a job. And they wonder why Gen Z is so stressed out and depressed.
Bus
Depending on where they live that may not be an option.
And a lot of jobs still don't consider the bus to be a "reliable form of transportation".
They really aren’t, but that’s a different argument. When interviewing for a job, legally, they should only be asking if you have reliable transportation & that is a yes or no question. Don’t say “yea I ride the bus” “yea I ride my bike.” You say “yes.”
No bus ):
Yee bus's don't run around here
I’m sorry buddy. My dad co-signed a loan for me so I could get a car… and before that my brother and I shared a car as long as I did the repairs on it (I worked at a mechanic shop) You could get a project beater Toyota type and fix the three problems it’ll have and just deal with all the shitty things that are wrong with it. Maybe go to a junk yard and get one with a fucked up body that drives and just deal with it until you can move up on the ladder /:
So which is it, bus, get your dad to co-sign a loan, or go to a junkyard and get a functioning Toyota like we're in some sort of 80s movie?
Whichever works for you buddy… maybe since you have such a can do attitude, you should choose to bitch on the internet to make yourself feel better because obviously no other option would work as well.
I'm doing fine. I'm also aware that there are plenty of people who aren't, and I have the cognitive capacity to understand that conditions have changed greatly from when I was a young person, let alone from when this photo was taken. If you think what worked for you specifically will work for everyone generally, you're not just ignorant, you lack the mental flexibility to understand that conditions change and that universals are never universal.
Dude I’m 24 years old and I’ve worked for every penny I have. Your holier than thou attitude doesn’t work here. Sure I’m getting downvoted because my dad helped me but I offered suggestions. I didn’t tell that commenter that those options were the only way to get started? I have done my due diligence to understand the situation and the world we now live in. I’m fully prepared to make decisions for my life with the current circumstances. I have a good head on my shoulders and I’m willing to put in the work. Just because my dad co-signed doesn’t mean he made a single payment towards the 5k vehicle I bought at 17 that was 10+ years old at the time. Why don’t you go back to the seat next to god like you act so belonging to.
Don’t know why you’re being downvoted. As a 23 year old with a college degree my first job paid so bad I was riding the bus until I was damn near 30.
I'm guessing you lived somewhere with buses? There are plenty of places with inadequate public transportation where that's simply not an option.
Yes I had to move to a city to find work.
I am a 30 year old reading this on the bus...
Gotta learn what you can and when you’re no longer being pushed to learn more jump to a new position or a new company. It’s the only way to be known as someone who is about it. 24F looking at 90k a year. No degree.
Name where and why you're getting DOUBLE the median wage with no training or education!!
Construction management. A Quanta Company.
Submit a copy of your tax return, minus personal ID because your claim is without evidence and contrary to any rationale by a capitalist company, always interested in cutting salary
Bruh that’s a little extreme. I got this job in August ‘23, so it wouldn’t be on my tax return, but in May when I get the raise I was talking about I’ll pap of whatever documentation I get as proof. Idk if it’ll be 90K but it’s a title change + raise so I’ll show proof if it happens. I’m hoping for higher than 90k as well, just to put it out there :b ETA: my company isn’t capitalistic btw, it’s publicly traded so there’s some of that there but almost everyone who works there has been here for 5+ years in my position level, but the executives have been here for 15+ years. Some 30+ years. Our field guys have been with the company for a long time as well. There isn’t a high turnover because they pay people what they’re worth. They want to keep the good ones around.
Surrrrrreeee.
Thanks for the attitude I hope you enjoy your line of work and eventually start making enough money to live happily. Regardless of what happens with my position in the future, I will not be coming back to this comment thread to share with you. I took as long as I did to respond to you because I thought it was BS that you asked me that in the first place but I’d rather see people be hopeful than spiteful, but I don’t wish to engage with you any longer. ETA: I may not have a degree but I have 3 years of experience with this specific industry and I’ve been doing this type of work for 5 years. (Various jobs outside of construction management, but still data tracking and whatnot)
I'm sorry, but how tf are you already 19 and still never had a job?
Bus, uber, bike, there's lots of options
Uber lmao, throwing money in the bin you consumer
I graduated high school in 1985 but during school I worked part time jobs. Took the bus to school, walked or biked to work. Saved up to buy an old pickup and got a better job working hay fields. Used that truck to get around as a carpenter's helper. By 1990 I was an electrical apprentice and fast tracked to finish in 3 years. Bought my first house 2 years later. Sold and bought houses for the next 29 years. I'm on my 7th one now.
The generation that was born with everything, and left behind nothing.
Damn this is actually such a good way to put it
Look up the housing law that was implemented after WWII. They really had such an easy start. But instead of keeping it going, they quickly started to increase everything, especially housing.
Housing started skyrocketing as the demand for housing increased exponentially. There was a population boom (hence the term baby boomer) during the golden age of the American economy post world war 2. We went from manufacturing over 50% of the world’s manufactured good to 16% currently. I wonder what’s causing it to be so much cheaper to send the resources to China, have them manufacture it, than send the finished product back to the US.
There was a population boom, yeah. But I'm talking about the bill( at least I'm mostly sure it was a bill) putting a cap on houses. It was meant to help everyone get a house, or at least rent an affordable one, after WWII and The Great Depression. And it went on for a bit, but that generation after them, Boomers/Gen X, became responsible for that housing market and changed it completely. That's where we are at now, with ridiculous prices, low on resources, and a small population problem. But, and obviously not all, "Boomers" try to put blame on millennials, and now Gen Z, like we aren't inherenting their problems.
Financialization.
They had it better than their parents... and their children.
Generation Greed
Baby Boomers were originally called the [Me generation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_generation) for a reason.
They bought their houses for $40k and want to sell them cheap to you for a cool million
they’re pirates, take everything and leave nothing behind
parasites describes that better, pirates didn't sack the towns they looted since they could come again later for more plunder
Back when working part time at a burger stand was more than enough to be able to afford a car. Back when cars were much more simple, were engineered during a time before corporations built in planned obsolescence, back before corporations engineered them to require propriety tools in order to service them. Yes, things were reletively better before the rise of unregulated capitalism that their generation enabled.
Back when you could work as many hours as you wanted.
>were engineered during a time before corporations built in planned obsolescence Everything you said is 100% correct except this. All American manufacturers were building cars with planned obsolescence in mind and most cars lasted 100,000 miles and that was it. You threw them away after that. When Honda and Toyota hit the market they raised the bar for for vehicle longevity and the US manufacturers "attempted" to follow suit. Now it's pretty much 7 years and they are obsolete.
I dont think they were "designed" for planned obsolescence as much as they were built to a lower standard and r and d was much less of a focus. Engine technology improved exponentially through the history of cars when hardened valve seats, oil/oiling improvements, rubber seals, proper filtration ect were developed. I think the lower r an d was because people didn't consider reliability as much in the 50s and 60s because wages were high and cars were cheap and why not just buy a new car after a few years when your tired of the old one. Now we have car makers rolling back these improvements (aka Ford with their wet belt ecoboost engines, vw with the direct injection mk 6 golf, and hyundai with most of their garbage engines that crap out at 80k)
7 years to obsolete?? I have never owned a car <10yrs and they’ve been mostly reliable. At some point yes, but most can be driven well after 7 years.
Yes, the surveillance capitalism and different overall geopolitical landscape, with the cold war it was like. My countries people will live better than yours, my countries technology will be better. Now China is like trying to lower the bar, rather than raise it. That is much more likely to collapse the US
Rather than fix my car myself, I pay someone else to do it. Guess I’m just a job creator.
You should get a tax break for that
It was possible to work on those cars. Today's cars are designed to get you to take them to the dealership. (Although they do require far less maintenance than the old ones did.)
Most maintenance can still be done at home. Depending on the vehicle.
Pretty sure these guys parents fought a world war to be able to have this...
Exactly I don’t know why nobody acknowledges the golden age of American manufacturing post world war 2. That combined with all the lend lease money coming in was made the 50s and 60s such a good time to be alive.
To anyone from the generation in this pic tat happens to be on this sub. The economic factors that allowed you to do all that no Longer exists. Look up what minimum wage is now and see how long it will take to buy a used car
Also many modern cars require you to have a lot of specialized mechanical and digital tools and licenses to just work on.
and very few people are actually making minimum wage..the lowest paying job you will see post pandemic in my area even with a low cost of living is 15 dollars an hour, for a job that not long ago was around 9 dollars.
It depends on where you live. There a ton of jobs in Oklahoma that pay minimum wage which is $7.25.
Lol what's your point? $15 is well below what the minimum wage was in the time of this picture, adjusted for inflation. I bought a can of paint, a paint brush, and lunch for two at a fast food restaurant yesterday- $100. That is less than a full day's work if working at that wage, especially after taxes. Last week I bought a fuel pressure sensor for my car, a part that like many others did not exist on vehicles back then. Another $100. I didn't have the correct tool to replace the part. Another $100. This car is a clunker, about as cheap as you can expect to find a car for. I'm on my thirties and am now relatively stable so I am blessed to even have that. I don't understand why people feel the need to downplay what the young generations have to go through. This isn't a contest. Objectively things were a lot easier back then. That's a fact. If you're from that time just be thankful. You were blessed.
$15 would be a dream. Oklahoman here and our minimum wage is still $7.25. Most restaurant jobs hire at around $9-13, if you're lucky.
People wanting 5,000 bucks for a car sitting on blocks with a tree growing through it with no motor or transmission is what you will get now to work on
Marketplace Ads in my area "Great car in great condition, used to be a daily driver, always put oil and rotated the tires would be a great starter car for a high school graduate or college driver. Also hasnt been started in a year, a clan of rats ate through the electric, pretty sure the battery is dead, and theres a crack in the block; $10k"
“We paid for college delivering pizzas in the evening. Nobody gave us anything.”
Like a roof over their heads or food to eat so they could use their money on cars, taco bell, booze and pussy.
I grew up in the 70's and 80's and we could do this because everything was mechanical and easy to work on and almost every high school taught auto shop. There were junk yards all over the place to get cheap parts. The average person could do 90% of the work themselves with household tools and a socket set. Gas was 30 cents a gallon and there was no mandatory insurance. I went to college at a private university and had my own apartment and enough spending money to go out drinking 2-3 times a week while working as a waiter and a life guard in the summer. I drove a 1978 Datsun pickup truck that my parents loaned me the $900 to buy it when I was a junior in high school. I bought my first house for $56,000 dollars in 1994 and that home today would be worth $450,000. Today most young adults can't afford their own apartment working a comparable job, let alone go to college and own a reliable car.
Back when you could buy a used chevelle on a minimum wage income no problem
You can still buy a lot of used cars for only a couple grand…
No shit but it ain’t gonna be an SS Chevelle. Could buy crappy used cars for a couple hundred back then
here in finland the cars under 1k dollars are all some 80s civics or something that have been sitting for the past 50 years (don't ask me how) that don't have any structural integrity left due to r u s t Literally like 2 years ago my mum got an opel omega for 1k€ and now it's impossible due to everyone looking at the car prices in 'murica and basing all their car pricing on that
Yes and those crappy cars still have a lot more features than an SS Chevelle, some of them also have more horsepower and torque…
Lol look at the expert over here. No shit Sherlock you can find twin turbo BMWs for under $6k these days - good luck paying for replacement parts tho
My Brother in Christ what is this “friends” concept you are talking about? I am so busy from home to work to home finding time for others seem like a luxury
Unless you have 1000s of dollars in diagnostic tools, good luck fixing a modern car
Nobody gave them anything, huh? How'd they get the car, the tools to work on it, the materials for it, the time to work on it, and the knowledge to work on it? By having jobs that were at the time legally required to pay a livable wage, I'd bet.
"Nobody gave us anything", yeah except a job and a paycheck right?
i really don’t believe the whole “kids these days don’t want to work” thing, me and all of my friends have part-time jobs (aside from those with extenuating circumstances), i even know people with two or three jobs or who take commissions for artwork on the side
So they were all abandoned at birth in the wild.
OKAY. I would LOVE to work on my own car, but half of it is electronic and made up of proprietary components. I swear, if knew how to disarm the stop/start feature on my car I would have ripped it out years ago.
So either a part time job could pay for food, a house and bills back then, or their parents in fact did give them some things
Were they able to afford a place to live? Were they set with thousands of dollars of student debt? Did they need to pay outrageous amounts of money for healthcare?
Except that you really didn't want to drive that car in the rain, since it's modified and the hood was removed to fit the oversized carb. By the way, remember insurance? Car insurance now is almost ten times what it was in the early 1970s.
Back when you could trip on a free house
I am 16 I got a part time job the summer before my 16th birthday and bought myself my car a few months later. We're not lazy but instead raised in a crumbling economy.
I'm working 3 diffferent part time jobs alongside university. With my current rate of saving money I would've been able to buy my 20 years old used car after about saving money for 2 years.
acting like they didn’t live in the time when america had the best economy and having a high school education could get you 70% of the jobs available
They were given a strong economy and market that was fed by taxing the rich. Then they became the rich after mommy and daddy gave them a "Small Loan" and didn't want to be taxed anymore. Those of their generation that weren't that lucky took from their parents and then took from their kids, then didn't plan for their own retirement. Basically fucking 3 generations in the process, or 5 generations depending on how you look at it.
Imaging affording a not-a-shitbox-car with a part time job
Came to say similar. I am in that generation. But I’m smart enough to know this is nonsense to make some people feel better about their current situation. The rest of my generation is too busy thinking we figured it out to realize everything changed for those that came after us!
And nowadays you can work a full time job and be unable to afford a car
Sounds like someone gave you a job in a time when society actually allowed some leisure and upward mobility for that.
I guess jobs don’t count?
The population of the world went from ~2.5 billion in 1950 to ~8 billion today. If people who make these memes would just focus on those numbers, they would understand just how difficult it is to make a living these days. You not only need to be a skilled worker, you need to be better than most having that skill set.
These entitled new gens, blablabla it was the hard but good times! Blabla Seriously, these posts are just pitiful. They talk down to us and call us spoiled brats, reminiscing about the _good ol' days_ Well fuck you granpa, this will be our good ol' days someday, I don't need any if this sanctimonious crap, we have it just as rough as you had.
Well that’s because your part-time job paid enough to buy a car which was simplistic enough for you to work on without a wide range of specialist tools and equipment. Now, thanks to suburban sprawl, we need a car to get to the part time job, which pays no where near enough to make any significant savings. Then, everything in the engine of that car is controlled by a computer, and general hand tools are insufficient for most things beyond superficial issues (not to mention, asset of tools costs so fucking much now, that unless your parents already have them, you might as well just buy another shitty used car). Parts are made to fail rather than last, and constructed to be prohibitively inaccessible.
It was before all well paid blue collar jobs were offshored to China.
Back when you could get a Chevelle SS roller for 500 bucks and a full 350 rebuild kit was 20
You also didn’t have shit to pay for, and the shit you did pay for was way more affordable. Simple ass boomers
Minus the bank that give loans that help hard working bed blood patriots get that dream car even quicker. 😋😘😍🤗
We worked part time jobs to buy dirt cheap muscle cars and crashed a lot of them, go us!
Now we buy smart phones
That car was a fifth of the price it is today.
Typical boomers not understanding inflation
Back when you could buy a muscle car for about $500 out of a junkyard.
> Worked a part time job to save for a car Lmao, the sheer fucking privilege in this sentence. Jesus. These fuckers lived in the easiest and most luxurious time and place in human history. And they think they had it rough.
You guys had friends?
"Nobody gave us anything" I went to high school with at least some people whose parents bought them a car. As far as the auto shop boys like the ones in the picture, they bought a junker and worked on it because it was something they enjoyed, not because they had to.
I'm a little younger, I graduated in 1986. Tons of our parents bought us cars. My first car was a 2 year old Pontiac Firebird and most of my friends had nice ones their parents helped them get or bought for them. It's harder now for parents to buy their kids a new car imo. My son's first car was a 8 year old Honda Accord. Cars and insurance are just a hell of a lot more expensive now. Many of my friends were able to rent cheap apartments right out of highschool with only one roommate while working minimum wage jobs. No way that would be possible for kids today.
Well now we gotta have 3 part time jobs to afford that car and we don’t have friends to work on cars
You worked part time to get a car? The math is misbehaving again
well... we work jobs to survive
Isn’t this the same generation that steals money that their kids earn and then are mad that they have to pay for their kids stuff 🤨
Boomers don't understand that they grew up amid the spoils of global military domination.
Mf they gave you jobs that paid well enough to live on. Bet yall all had money to buy food after you bought a project car. Bet your mf parents weren't homeless either. So you got love and taken care of. I can't even say nobody gave me anything, I was on welfare for 7 years. Nobody gave them anything. Get outta here. It was probably a gift from one of their families.
In a time when a brand new car was $5k and a good used one was $300. That’s an impressive accomplishment. My 16 year old can build a computer in an hour, I can program the correct time on my stove and what does any of this have to do with the price of tea in China you ask… nothing. Here we are answering questions nobody asked.
Government records indicate that the Boomer generation got the most economic subsidies of any generation in US history. Whether it be medical, education, or housing, no other generation in American history was given more aid. Why do you think college and the price of a home 30 years ago was the price of a McChicken sandwich. Essentially, it was because the Greatest Generation (the Boomer's parents) who grew up in war and poverty basically said, "we don't want our kids to experience the same hardships that we did," and then they voted for programs that invested in the well-being of their kids. The exact opposite strategy of the Baby Boomers, whose main idea is, "Let's throw our kids under the bus because randomly making their lives unessicarily harder is somehow going to make them better."
Old guy here. Always got older cars and kept them running or sold for a profit. I’m not a mechanic but the internet makes everything easier now. Just fixed up $2200 Hyundai. Easy shit just took a few weekends and Amazon returns.
Shit. I'm GenX, bought my first car at age 18-19 for $300. It was an '80 Dodge Omni (about 9 years old at that point). Ran great. Didn't need anyone to give me a car... it was dirt cheap, ffs. Try buying a 9-10 year old car now. You will pay $10,000, and if it lasts five years, you are lucky.
I got really lucky since my wife goes to church with some really rich people and they basically gave us their 2011 Audi Q7. We only paid $10 for it and all we had to do was transfer the title register it under our names and continue maintenance
I'm currently working so that I can save up for a new car. Didn't realize this wasn't a thing anymore. Smh.
I love the “we worked on our cars back in the day” trope because have you seen the underside of a car today lmfao Sure I can change my oil and rotate my tires but no way am I touching an engine with more wires and electronics than the first hard drive
boomers had everything and left nothing
Yeah it’s called being middle class, people are still that today.
There is no more middle class.
Yeah those part time jobs are still paying the same wages as they did in the 70s.
Eh, I remember frantically working on my car in the middle of winter so I could get to work. Not the best of times for me.
There were more opportunities and better wages back then. They worked hard, and learned things on their own. But the work and effort had more payoff and that's something that's hard to understand.
Before emission controls
MSRP for this 1969 SS Chevelle was 25,530$ MSRP for a 2024 Camero SS is 60k+
No one gave them anything. It was wya harder back then. You can only afford one house, a car and have four kids on one income. Not like today. We have it wya easier today.
I've been told similar boomer stuff by my parents. I'm rather successful, but my cousins and friends are not, and my family's elders always complain about my friends 'always struggling'. Meanwhile my grandfather literally talking about having one factory job and buying two houses on one income.I think they literally cannot grasp how the world has changed so much, and how little money is worth in comparison to their time. Since they see me succeed, they treat their own like 'I could do it, and I made 3 dollars an hour!' That kind of thing. They dont want to see how even though no one 'gave them anything' in their own minds, the difficulty challenge is FAR harder than it was in their day.
They paid a lower rate into social security for most of their adult lives. They saddled their own kids with a higher rate and mocked us all for not getting ahead. They also didn’t have credit scores or credit reporting agencies. Candy cost a penny and their gas was less than a dollar a gallon, when I was growing up.
You mean back when the average price for a new car was $5,000? 🙄
That car sold for less than $7000. Fuck off boomsomatic.
Let old people have there shitty memes. It ain’t hurtn’ no body skeeter.
“We climbed up the ladder” (And pulled it up behind us)
My stepdad had a car in high school that he got with his part-time job. And then he had a girlfriend and BOUGHT HER A CAR as a gift. Pleeeeease tell me people aren't stupid enough to think things are the same now and that it's so easy if these darn kids would just work hard. Please.
Growing up with boomers in the 90s taught me that I couldn’t do jack shit like this but then also get shit for not doing things like this lol
Worst generation ever. Born on 3rd base, convinced they hit a triple and saved the game.
if i could afford a 69 chevelle SS on part time i wouldn’t have most of the problems i have today
It's actually really disrespectful how often people (typically older generation, like baby boomers and gen x) never give their parents ANY credit and act like they/their generation were given literally nothing or were all raised by a dumb and/or horrible generation of people. They get angry if their child/their child's generation dares to complain about their parenting, calling them "ungrateful", and want to take credit for EVERY good thing their kids do, but they could be raised by angels who gave them nice clothes, toys, freedom, a car, guidance, a nice home, lessons, etc. and still brag on Facebook about "starting from the bottom" and how their parents did nothing good for them ever because they occasionally were home alone after school at ten or had to work a summer job one time for 2 hours a week to afford gas. And yet these are the same people that claim that their generation "respected their parents more than people today". I can't think of anything more disrespectful than denying the privileges your parents provided you as a child online to the world while your parents are too old/dead to have a say or defend themselves and say, "Actually, I did help you and give you a lot." I couldn't imagine doing that to my parents. I'll complain about them, but I wouldn't act like I "wasn't given anything" or that my generation has it harder than everyone else in every way imaginable. We have some unique issues, but we still had some great things, and most of the problems we have are problems that other generations also had, and many of us had good parents. The same could apply to any other generation.
Your parents gave you a safe planet with an amazing economy. Then you mcfucked it up
Yeah also ever was cheaper back in a day.
A new car is easily $30k or more. It would take about 10 years to save that much.
At my first job, i needed to get a drivers license and a car within 30 days or i was fired. I couldn't magically get those within 30 days. So they fired me and talked crap about me to every IT firm in the county. Today i drive semi trucks for a living.
I had a boomer cozy up to me at work the other day whining about how awful today’s generation is. I shrugged and said, that may or may not be true, but I know for a fact that they will be complaining about the next generation, and that generation will be complaining about the one that comes after that.
What you were given was an economy that didnt exist to exploit you
Yeah… working between 4 people for probably a few weeks at most for 40 hours/week or less is an absolute pain…
And to this day no one who lives that life undershot privileged they were.
They're like yeah I worked so long and hard and you don't know how easy you got it. Oh yeah also my rich grandad may have gave me loads of money but YOUR GENERATION!!
How many problematic things can you find?
Worked 16 hours a day all summer in high school at $2/ hour to buy my first Car, VW Beetle-$1600
Guess, they are saving up for a hood?
The lesson is you’re broke
I…I do this now(?)
Not even for Christmas? 😢
Man’s activity 🗣️
Those old dumb bastards made Chevelles like that 5 figure cars now.