Apparently, I really don’t wanna fuckin’ scrub the deck.
Nice 12 minute mini-documentary.
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Most of my working career has been in food and more specifically, high-end retail food; think Dean & DeLuca. The customer base has always been educated and financially well-to-do. After a “revelation” in early 2000 I decided that I needed to put my skill set to use in another industry. I found myself working in an office with the masses. Less educated, less well-off and one thing that particularly stands out, no self-respect. How can I possibly respect you when I don’t respect myself? Impossible. YOU don’t stand a chance.
After dealing with this toxic environment for several years I decided to get back into retail food. Out of the frying pan, into the fire! OMG! The masses are now on both sides of the counter. The impact of 44 million people on food stamps, as of September 2013, is hard to imagine if you are not in retail food.
The spike in business beginning on the 3rd of each month is truly astounding. By the 10th of the month the business begins to normalize and by the 22nd the ship is sinking. When there is a holiday in the month we experience a slightly different flow of business. Depending on the nature of the holiday and when it hits the calendar the flow of business changes accordingly. There is always the spike from the 3rd through 7th as the pantry has run dry. But when the holiday rolls around people have saved their position in the soup line in order to “celebrate” the event appropriately. Remember, not only are the working people of this country putting food on the table, we are also funding items like, lottery tickets, cigarettes, alcohol and everything else that is non-food as a lot people are issued a “cash card” in addition to the ticket for the soup line (EBT card). The state of Connecticut has a handy website that spells everything out, in detail, on how to get cash. Awesome
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=gQ-tvNbGy1M
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/american-dependency-the-soup-line-is-open_05082014
I mostly avoid grocery shopping the first half of the month.
Shopping the last week of the month is downright enjoyable.
Office work, ugh. I do it, but no more than I have to. I spent the last two and a half years enduring soul-sucking boredom and saved every cent I could. My condo has been paid off for four years now, and I have no kids and no debt of any kind. So as soon as I felt I had saved up enough money to quit my job, I did. Now I have the summer off.
I can typically make enough money working as a contractor six months of the year that I can support myself the full 12 months, so that is what I’m going to do. I don’t care about saving tens of thousands of dollars for “retirement” because it won’t be worth much by then anyway, and besides why would I care about retirement when I only have to work half the year as it is? The money is worth more to me now, buying my freedom with it six months at a time. I’m happy not to be such a tax donkey, too.
These people are scum, lying sacks of shit. They buy filet mignon, crab legs, lobsters, all the food people that work for a living can no longer afford. Most are obese, stuffing themselves so they can use up their food stamps every month. It’s sickening. Our society is diseased, these people are parasites, absolutely disgusting. They have no shame and no conscious. Pure human filth, time to clean up this country.
Pirate Jo , what are you going to do when you wake up one day old and all alone?No money ,no kids and no family.
@MM – The last two times my wife and I went shopping it was the first week of the month, the place was a fucking nut house.
We don’t have that crazy of food needs, but literally everything is running out. Eggs, bread, juice, coffee creamer….the place is empty.
What produce remains is so picked over that you wouldn’t want to eat it anyway.
The only thing thats not completely empty? Milk from the local dairy, because EBT cards cannot be used to buy items with a deposit.
Crazy shit man.
Feds Spend $1.59 Million Observing Obese Children Walking to School…
Feds Spending $1.5 Million on ‘Bicycle Trains,’ ‘Walking School Buses’ to Get Fat Kids to Lose Weight
BY: Elizabeth Harrington
May 13, 2014 12:27 pm
The federal government is spending more than $1.5 million to research how “bicycle trains” and “walking school buses” can help obese children lose weight.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is currently funding two studies to a researcher at Seattle Children’s Hospital, both of which aim to get more children to stop riding the school bus.
Dr. Jason Mendoza has received $405,835 for a pilot study on “bicycle trains,” or a group of kids who bike to school with adult chaperons. The project is billed as a “low-cost, practical program to reduce risk of obesity for at-risk children.”
The study, which just got underway in two Seattle elementary schools, is focusing on “low-income and ethnic minority children,” who are at the highest risk for obesity, according to the grant.
bb,
I reckon I’ll do the same thing I do when I wake up now. Yawn, give a big stretch, and then make my dog her breakfast and fix some coffee. Except by then, I’ll also be able to look back on several decades of enjoying life (or at least six months a year of it) and smiling when I think of all the dollars I didn’t pay the tax man.
Pirate Jo, I like most of your posts a lot, but I really have to question your retirement “strategy”, if it could be called that. Unless you are planning on dying very young, I’d rejigger your plans a bit and start making provisions now, especially since you’re able to earn in 6 months what it takes most middle income earners to earn in a year, or so you say.
You’re making the very same mistake I made in my younger years, of assuming the future would somehow take care of itself, and justifying my self-indulgence and lack of savings by saying that I’d just be inflated out of them anyway.
Even given the ravages of inflation since the 70s, which have reduced our currency to about 20% of the value it had at that time, if even, I would have had many hundreds of thousands of dollars packed away if I’d saved a third of my pay, and would have no real worries now, as I, too, have a paid-for condo, and a few tens of thousands of dollars, but it is not nearly enough to retire on and I don’t have a lot of time left, thanks to business disasters that financially wrecked me in the 90s.
Therefore, I’ve reconciled myself to having to scramble for work at least till age 70, and possibly beyond, unless some extraordinary luck that I have no reason or right to expect, should befall me.
Better to work full time now while it’s easy and you have earning power, than it is to have to scramble in old age, and it’s WAY better to do “boring” work now for a good income, than it is to have to do dirty, grueling, degrading crap for minimum wage at the age of 68 or thereabouts. Thankfully, I’m not reduced to that- yet. But that’s what there usually is for aged folks who need employment.
Forgive the grammatical lapses in the foregoing post- was going too fast.
Chicago, I already do have low six figures set aside in retirement accounts, the accumulation of past 401Ks. (I’m 44, so have been working for over 20 years.) They grow a little on their own every year. My Lending Club investment returns 7%-8% and is not in a retirement account because of Iowa law, but that’s another egg I am leaving alone to grow.
I will also be able to add a little to them every year, just not as much as if I kept working full-time.
I’ll probably keep working half the year until I’m 70-75, at some point annuitizing all the retirement accounts and reverse mortgaging the condo. It’s just office work – as long as I can still see and sit at a desk all day, I can do it.
It’s precisely that loss of purchasing power that keeps me from wasting my life on dull, pointless work most of my waking hours. For what? Buying “financial products?” The only people who get rich off those are the people who sell them. I’m better off dipping my feet in the work pool six months out of the year, keeping my skills current, and seeing my hourly rate keep up with inflation.
Nobody my age is going to spend 25 years in retirement. Those who end up with a lot of money are only going to have it taken away from them.
And finally, I really don’t care what happens to me when I get past 80. If I am too broke to feed myself at that point I’ll just off myself. I’d rather do that when I’m too old to enjoy life anyway than spend the next 35 years wanting to.
Another thing I’ve thought about – not all the contract work I end up doing will suck. Based on experience, I have about a 1-in-2 or 1-in-3 chance of getting something that ends up being interesting. They usually end up being assignments that last 6-9 months. If it works out that I get something good that ends in, say, November, well there’s no point sitting around all winter when I can’t be out riding my bike. I’ll just take something else to make money until spring, then take NEXT summer off. That’ll leave me with some surplus.
But to put numbers on it, I tend to make anywhere from $30-$40 an hour. At $30 an hour for 1,000 hours, that’s $30K in a year, before taxes, which after taxes is enough to cover the $22K-$24K cash I live on. (Iowa is cheap – my property taxes are only $1,600 a year, for example, and the job market here is better than most other states.) If I’m in the $35-$40 per hour range, I make more in those six months than I need to live on, so I can save the rest, or even just work an extra month.
Or, there’s nothing carved in stone which says I’ll never find the job I want, which would be a controller position with a small, privately owned company. In that case, it would be a game-changer. I’d happily work full-time if it involved doing something that was actually worth doing, instead of corporate busywork. Then my plan would be to buy another place to live, pay it off in 7 years, and use my current place as a source of rental income.
There are a lot of moving parts to it, at any rate. Things will be a lot different when I’m 70 than they are for 70-year-olds now. For one thing, all the Baby Boomers will be dead, and everyone else my age will be working, too. There won’t be the option that if you just did everything right you would end up with a nice long retirement – no one will have that, and there won’t be any Social Security, either, so most people will still be working. I simply expect it.
Chicago, while your advice is sound if the status quo holds, odds are growing higher – by the business day – that all of us savers are going to be slaughtered to help fund the gubment pensions for a little while longer.
Multiple federal departments have already suggested it. Studies done. It is but a matter of time.
My best guess is they “borrow” our savings, and convert them into bonds.
Which wouldn’t be horrible if we can continue the charade/Ponzi for another 30-40 years.
Many of us that passed up today’s gratification for tomorrow’s security may find we got neither.
Up is down, day is night, and the implosion of the empire is going to screw us all. Savers, or not.
PJ,
I tend to agree with you. I have a brother who is a skilled craftsman and home builder. He will take 8 to 10 weeks off throughout the year. He lives on the cheap, always has work as there is always a need for skilled craftsmen at the right price, especially if it is cash. His doom stead is halfway up Maine and cost about nothing, his son has the house next door, up the street. He has traveled extensively and has a very good quality of life, also he likes to drink and his wife is a bartender. He has not bought health insurance in about 40 years thinks its a rip-off and a waste of money. Spends little to no money on car and house insurance. I would estimate he has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars on those expenses alone. It can be done, it is just many of us are trained at an early age that we have to work, next year I will have two college tuitions to try to pay. His son was home schooled and college was not something daddy was ever going to pay for. Some of us are just wired differently.
Bob.