My favourite aunt in law married a card carrying conservative guy. He is, like many of them, a wonderfully nice person when you’re a member of the in group and I actually do like him as a person.But his politics… Now, I have decided that I will not discuss politics with him until he’s back in the workforce. You see, the current conservative motto here is that people unjustifiably have a life and don’t work enough. There are plans to abolish the 8 hour work day for more “flexibility”, i.e. 12 hour shifts. They keep telling us that not only do we need to retire later, we also need to keep working once we are retired.
My conservative uncle? After he worked very hard to inherit money from his aunt, he decided at 63 that he has now worked enough and can live off his savings, especially since he’ll accomplish another great achievement by inheriting more money from his dad. So in short, he’s the perfect example of preaching water and drinking wine. There’s no use trying to argue with him, so I tried to steer clear of political topics at my cousin in law’s wedding last weekend, until…
Well, it wasn’t even a discussion, it was the perfect example of an old white man being completely unable to even consider that other people’s lives might be different from his. Somebody mentioned that food has gotten terribly expensive, as every statistic you care to look at will show, and while all other people in the group sighed and agreed, he told us that THEY hadn’t increased their food budget in three years. As a couple each of them contributes a fixed amount to their food budget, and while this isn’t how want to run a family budget, that’s none of my business. Anyway, he then explained that they achieve this by combing through the special offers, making a shopping list with the things they need and the places where they’re cheapest and then just go from one place to the other. I said: “Yeah, that’s good and well, but the two of you are both retired, you do have the time, us, we both work full time”, something that everybody should easily agree with, right? Oh no, I was informed that this had nothing to do with retirement. This was just a matter of planning and priorities! You see, looking for the offers just takes 10-20 minutes! A lie, if I ever saw one. It takes about 20 minutes for us to make a normal shopping list and that’s with us having a whiteboard on the cupboard where we write down what we need already. Comparing different supermarket brochures to find the best offers and combinations would surely take at least twice as long, if not longer. And of course it’s then just 2 to 3, maximum 4 different shops! All across town, of course…
I kindly informed him that I’m so busy, if he tells me that I have to spend just one more hour on shopping a week, I will cry. That was met with baffled silence. Again, he’s not a bad guy. If you told him “I need you here” he’d drop everything and come running. But he is completely unable to even recognise his own privilege. If he can do it, so can everybody else! I’m pretty sure that he’d pout if I even mentioned the word “privilege”, and I think he’s the poster boy of the kind of old white men who will be literally literally the death of us.
Don’t forget the cost of gasoline/diesel/electricity for traveling to those different stores.
fusilier
James 2:24
Amateur. Mom was a full time housewife with 5 kids and a husband. The grocery ads for the three major grocery chains in our area came on Wednesdays. She sat down with the ads and her list of known needs, and made shopping lists organized by store, and by aisle. Then we went shopping -- any accompanying kids were charged with grabbing things off the shelves as we proceeded down the aisles, list in hand. Quick, organized, and still took most of a day to do weekly shopping for 7 people.
Many people who bet in casinos in the USA claim that they usually make a profit, even though casino reports prove that on average the gamblers don’t win as much. I think the most likely explanation is that it is human nature to remember the wins but not all of the losses.
Your uncle in law might also be incorrectly calculating his time and or his expenses vs purchases.
In short, it seems very likely that you are right and that he is not right.
I don’t think they don’t think of others as people. I don’t think it’s even that they can’t understand that not everyone is exactly like them. They know full well that there are literally hundreds of people who aren’t exactly like them. It’s just that, y’know, the fact of them being different is why it’s OK to hate them. The more different, the more intense the hatred and the more justified it is.
Oh, you worship at a different church? Well, bless your heart.
Oh, you worship a different god? Burn in hell when you die, heretic.
Oh, you’re gay? Stay right there boy, I’mma get ma gun.
And so on.
I can vouch for the method of becoming financially comfortable by inheriting money from dead relatives.
It works even better if you are not married an have no offspring.
Anyone who says that they “hadn’t increased their food budget in three years” is LYING.
Sadly there are an awful lot of guys around like your uncle-in-law, and while i agree conservatives tend to be worse too many white left wingers don’t realise they are living life on the ‘easy’ setting (to mangle John Scalzi’s phrase). Although it is usually possible to get the left-wingers to understand that, at least if they aren’t too caught up with showing how jolly right-on they are, and it does come down to the level of empathy they have. Who they see as people really. It does make me wonder how we can ever make permanent progress when there are so many people who don’t seen most of the rest of the human race as real people.
We do the white board lists too, lists for the different shops too because we can’t get everything at one shop, but we don’t go to each every time we shop. There is a handy Co-op about ten minutes walk away where we get most of our milk, eggs, and varying other things, a bit more expensive, but handy. There is a relatively local supermarket that you can walk to, but if I’m shopping there I usually take the car because I’ll be buying too much to carry by myself, apart from anything else dog food is heavy! There is the pharmacy and greengrocer at the little local shopping centre which again can be walked to, which I try to do as otherwise I can get a bit over enthusiastic and by far more veg than we can use before it starts to go off, however if I need things from the pharmacy too that can tip the trip into ‘too much to carry back’ territory. Finally there is the posh supermarket which is definitely a car trip. I go to the Co-op most often, the local shopping centre and local supermarket less often, but about the same amount as each other, then the posh supermarket about once every six weeks. there are also a couple of specialist shops, and Indian one and a Chinese one, but they only get visited about once every six months or so.The smaller shop lists are not surprisingly smaller and I usually just photo them as they are off the whiteboard. The supermarket lists I write out again in the order of the aisles while checking on how much we have left anything I remember we might be getting short of and asking Mr J if he remembers we need anything, that tends to take about the same twenty minutes as you take. Worth it because we don’t usually both forget we need something neither of us has already written on the list, and because it really does save me time as well as mental bandwidth once I go to do the shop.
rwiess
Yeah, that’s another point. People tend to “gloss over” the fact that by now most women participate in the workforce. Sure, a lot of conservatives would like us to stop doing that and one of the ways to do that is making it impossible to work via lack of childcare, public transportation, etc. The other way is to making working not worth it. Germany has crazy tax incentives for women to stay at home or to just work part time.
The other conservatives (and many “liberal” and even “leftist” men) would like us to keep working but please not demand that they lift a finger at home or politically. My grandma was a housewife and her job was to make the money last. So there was a lot of sewing, canning, baking, walking an extra mile involved. Her spending days and days in August harvesting, cleaning, freezing, canning, pickling wasn’t some idyll, it was an economic necessity.
Jazzlet
We mostly just go to Lidl for the main shopping, once a month to a drugstore to get hygiene products, and occasionally to the brand name store on the way back from Lidl when there’s something we didn’t get there, like vegan cream. Sure I check out the offers before and the stock the larder. Another way in which economic privilege makes life cheaper: I have the space and the money to stock up on staples when they’re on offer, especially since these last years the cheap supermarkets do have supply chain issues.
I wonder, too, if your aunt-in-law would tell the same story. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she was spending a lot more time and effort on the grocery shopping. And who’s doing the meal planning? Are there a lot more generic/discount items instead of fancy/name brand? A lot more nights where it’s pasta instead of steak?