The Big Squeeze

I am tired of talking about money. I recognize how that sounds, given that I talk about money for a living. Still, it feels like an inordinate number of conversations I’m involved in lately end up about how much more expensive everything is now (which is true) and how much the economy sucks (which is false). Can you believe how pricey that restaurant was? I’m shocked at the cost of my wedding. Tipping culture is so out of control.

It’s not that these issues aren’t painful, it’s just that they’re also exhausting. Some of them have simple solutions, too, just not fun ones. You can cook at home. A fancy wedding is not compulsory. Tips are optional, and if you’re that upset over giving the barista a dollar or two, there are cheaper alternatives for your morning coffee.

If you haven’t heard it or felt it yourself, people are angry about the state of tipping. Consumers have noticed that they’re being asked to tip more often and for higher amounts than before. They buy their morning coffee and the barista flips around a screen that nudges them to add on a little more, or they go to pick up lunch and they’re prompted to leave an extra $1. In particularly confounding situations, some people have found themselves being asked to tip their dermatologist or an e-commerce website. In the media, story after story has been written, recorded, and televised about the current state of affairs in tip culture in America.

To describe this culture, we’ve coined terms like “tipflation” and “guilt-tipping.” Many of the conversations I find myself in about high prices these days end with someone saying, “And then you’re supposed to tip on top of it.”

Jonathan wants me to guess how often retail workers see someone steal. It’s a challenge he likes to make to friends, who always underestimate it. “It’s multiple times a day, maybe as often as once an hour. And that’s the stuff you can see, like the really blatant ones,” he says. “A lot of people picture a scared kid with a candy bar under their jacket, and you get that, but the majority of it is seasoned shoplifters going out with carts full of beer and liquor and hygiene products and electronics and laundry detergent, etc.”

He recently quit his job at a major retail pharmacy chain over the issue. (Jonathan is not his real name, and he spoke with me on the condition that he be granted anonymity and the company not publicly named. All of the workers I spoke to for this story were given pseudonyms and/or anonymity.) His frustration isn’t so much with the thieves, per se, but instead with how his former company has dealt with them.

The experience of renting a car can give you some trust issues. You’re booking on some travel website, where you start at Price A. Then, by the time you get to the checkout, you’re at a higher Price B that wasn’t the one you saw prominently advertised — maybe it was in small letters, but you didn’t notice. When you go to pick up the car, you’ve got to make a deliberate effort to avoid the even higher Price C, which the guy at the counter is pretty intent on selling you on. Even if Price B sticks, you find yourself staring at your receipt, wondering what in the world all those extra charges are. That’s assuming that the vehicle you intended to rent is even available. That’s assuming any vehicle is available.

We all know flying sucks. Airlines squeeze every penny they can out of us with add-ons and fees, and airports are wildly overpriced. The experience of renting a car often flies under the radar, but it can be similarly terrible.

I am not saying that the next time your boss offers you a bonus, you should tear up the check and throw it back in their face. Money is money, after all. But it might be an opportunity to explain why you would be much happier about that bonus if it were spelled R-A-I-S-E.

It is a pretty decent moment to be a worker in America and has been for the past couple of years. Wages are rising, especially for lower earners, and now faster than inflation. Companies have had to compete to get people in the door and fight to retain those who are already there.

You might not think an Instant Pot would be at the top of your summer shopping list. The sweltering heat doesn’t exactly put people in the mood for a hearty stew. But Amazon has managed to help make it into a hot item to buy among consumers in mid-July each year thanks to Prime Day, its now 48-hour deal extravaganza.

As the saying goes, if you build it, they will come, which in Amazon’s case means poof! inventing a shopping holiday out of thin air.

It’s Amazon’s world, and we’re just living in it. Or Walmart’s. Or really, actually, both.

Many Americans like to think of themselves as conscientious consumers — as the types of people who shop their values, support small businesses, and generally try to do the right thing when they buy. We also all live in reality, where people are busy, our funds are limited, and convenience is really nice. Many of us know that buying shampoo at the local pharmacy would be the better option, but it’s 20 minutes away, and what if, once we get there, it’s locked up? So we place an order on Amazon and move on. We’re well aware we could go to any number of stores for a new bath mat and holiday decorations and back-to-school gear, but we also know we get them all at Walmart for less. We appreciate that; we just don’t appreciate thinking about how little they pay their employees.

If you are a conservative consumer in America right now, shopping is getting weird. You’re not supposed to drink Bud Light or shop at Target or eat at Chick-fil-A or watch Fox News. It’s Pride month, meaning all the companies have gone gay again, despite you trying to make clear that you’d really rather they not. Maybe you’ve signed up for alerts to start getting warnings about allegedly “woke” businesses, and the list of brands there is getting long — Nike, Adidas, Speedo, Lululemon, the LA Dodgers. The alerts also say Bank of America is bad, and some guy on Twitter has included Citi in a list of companies you’re supposed to avoid for the month of June, meaning you need to ... I guess change your bank account?

Boycotting companies that don’t align with your politics is exhausting, which is why most people don’t, at least not for a sustained amount of time. It’s hard enough to exist in the world without worrying whether every purchase you make matches up with your personal views and values. But in recent months, the push for conservative consumers to vote with their dollars — or, rather, downvote by withholding their dollars — has been rampant.

You’d think that when a job is over, it’s over. You quit or you’re fired or laid off and then that’s that. Except that’s not always what happens. A lot of the time, even after you’ve cut ties, your former employer maintains some control over what you can say or do. It’s like a toxic ex you can’t warn anyone about because they might sue you, and who gets a say in who you go out with next.

It’s true that at the current moment, swaths of workers are more in the driver’s seat than they have been in years, thanks to a hot labor market that’s driven wages up, provided some people mobility, and given workers more leverage against their employers. But work hasn’t changed as much as some more optimistic headlines might suggest, and many of the fundamental power dynamics remain.

The “what I’d do if I won the lottery” game is a fun one. You get to make up a little dreamland where you are suddenly awash in unimaginable riches. Your biggest problems become figuring out where to buy your second mansion, picking out your yacht, and finally cutting off that one family member who’s a real leech. It’s a fantasy so good it might even make you buy a ticket.

The exercise can also be a trippy one. You know you’re not going to win. Really. Except maybe there’s a small sliver of hope that you will. I mean, somebody has to win, right? The ugly underbelly here is that sneaking feeling that the lottery, however improbable, may be your only way up. What does it mean when the longest of shots is the only one people feel they’ve got?

There are few things more delicious than a homeowners association horror story. All over the internet, you can find tales of people getting fined for parking their vehicles in their own driveways or having a potted tomato plant on their back porches or leaving a bottle of Gatorade out for one day. In Tennessee, a man returned from vacation to discover his car was missing; he thought it had been stolen, but in reality, his HOA had towed it because it had a flat tire. A Maryland HOA fined a homeowner $40,000 because the fence she built was 8 inches too long. A Missouri HOA threatened a family with jail time because they’d put up a play set that was — gasp! — purple.

It’s easy to laugh at the inanity of so much of it ... until you find yourself peeking through your curtains trying to catch your neighbor putting her trash can out five minutes early because last year she reported you to the HOA for leaving up your Christmas lights past the New Year.

Many of us have been there: sitting in the middle of some beautiful destination on a much-anticipated getaway, on the beach or in the mountains or wherever strikes our fancy, and ... staring at our phones. The little screen so often trumps the giant screen that is real life, even in moments when the intention is to take a break from the little screen and the day-to-day stress it brings with it.

There are plenty of ways our phones make travel easier. We have fast, immediate access to reviews, ratings, and recommendations to help guide our decisions. We snap pictures to capture memories and share them with others. And, of course, there’s GPS — truly, we ask ourselves, how did anyone ever find anything before the existence of Google Maps? The truth is, they did find things, and everything turned out fine.

The thing about buy now, pay later is that the later part always comes. Sometimes, the pay ends up being more than you think you’re signing up for, and often for stuff you shouldn’t have bought in the first place.

The buy now, pay later — or BNPL — trend has been on the rise for years, driven by companies such as Afterpay, Klarna, and Affirm. In March, Apple launched its own BNPL service, Apple Pay Later, in the United States. Practically every time you go to buy something online lately, there’s an offer to pay in installments. It seems simple enough on its face: You make a purchase, and instead of paying for the whole thing upfront, it’s split up into four interest-free payments, usually every two weeks. TikTokers pitch it as a savvy way to buy on a budget, an option for getting the things you want and need even if you don’t quite have enough to foot the entire bill right now. Plus, hey, you’re not dealing with the evil credit card companies.

I’ve been in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for the last month, including through the recent turmoil in the banking industry in the United States and Europe. It’s a coincidence that has, um, given me some things to think about.

For those unfamiliar, the ways people in Argentina navigate the day-to-day economy can sound wild. When you don’t think you can trust the bank, the currency, or anybody in charge, things can get pretty weird pretty fast.

Fortune had it that when George Ball was looking to get a dehumidifier for his Indiana home, the house had one sitting in the basement from the previous owners. So he took it up to the bedroom, plugged it in, and went downstairs for dinner. A while later, he went back upstairs and found that the dehumidifier was on fire, with flames reaching from floor to ceiling. He called 911, and he and his wife, luckily, were able to put the blaze out.

Ball was perplexed when the firefighters who responded to his call pulled the device onto the front lawn and started taking pictures of it. They recognized it because it had been recalled years earlier, for being a fire hazard. “Oh my gosh, it shouldn’t even be in your house,” Ball recalls the fire chief telling him. “I almost burned our house down,” he says. “I had no idea.”

You’ve probably heard about the whole participation trophy thing — the complaint that there’s something deeply wrong with America because a bunch of first-graders got a ribbon for drawing a picture that wasn’t even that good or something. The whole debate, which has persisted for decades at this point, tends to feel pretty ridiculous, largely because it is. Plenty of things are deeply wrong with America today; being nice to 6-year-olds isn’t super one of them. For one thing, if we’re going to be upset about awards, the ones we give to adults are a whole lot weirder when you think about it.

We are constantly inventing subjective rankings across society, culture, and the economy that deem certain people, projects, and companies “best.” We do it in entertainment, in business, in art, and across a variety of professions, from journalism to law and beyond. At the flashiest level, this looks like the Oscars or the Grammys: award shows that perpetually make audiences mad. At a more mundane level, it’s the supposed “best businesses” in Dayton, Ohio, or an arbitrary list of “rising stars” in advertising, or a ranking of the “best places to work” where nobody’s asked a single employee how they feel about anything.

Long before I knew what Ozempic did — or had read the deluge of stories about the drug’s off-label weight loss promise — I knew the Ozempic song. Set to the tune of the ’70s Pilot hit “Magic,” the song from the ad has permanently imprinted the name of the medication in my brain. That’s the point — it’s probably one of the reasons Ozempic, which was originally developed and is still sold nominally as a diabetes drug, has taken center stage in the current cultural debate over weight-loss medications rather than Wegovy, which is the same drug, made by the same company, but approved for weight loss.

If you are not from the United States (or New Zealand, the only other country that allows drugmakers to market their prescription products directly to consumers), the volume of drug ads on television in America can feel jarring. When Oprah Winfrey’s bombshell interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle aired in March 2021, the British tuned in, and many were gobsmacked at the number of drug commercials they saw. “American medical adverts are some real dystopian shit how you gonna tell me I might die,” one person tweeted. “American healthcare truly is a business,” remarked another.

There’s been a breach of the Jonny Boston’s International Facebook page. Jonathan Kiper, the New Hampshire restaurant’s owner, is no longer able to access his personal Facebook account or, in turn, the page for his business, where he once kept customers updated about specials and deals. He’s tried to get back in, going through the online process to report his account as compromised multiple times and sending in a picture of his driver’s license to prove he’s, well, himself. But thus far, his efforts have been to no avail. He always gets tripped up at the last verification step — the one where Facebook sends a test code — because it appears the hacker has changed the account’s phone number.

It’s actually two phone numbers that are at the heart of Kiper’s problem: the hacker’s and Facebook’s, or rather, Facebook’s lack thereof. There’s no working customer service line that Kiper can find to call and explain what’s going on, so he’s out of luck. “There is a business number for Facebook you can call, but it just tells you they have no customer service and to use the website,” he says. Not exactly, you know, helpful when the website option doesn’t work.

In late 2022, Jessica found herself in a predicament that will sound familiar to many job seekers: slogging through an extended interview process with seemingly no end in sight.

She was up for a job as a fundraiser at a major social services organization in New York. Across the span of two months, she took part in six separate interviews with nine people total, multiple of whom she met more than once. She’d pulled one of her first all-nighters in years putting together a dummy presentation on a hypothetical corporate partnership for interview No. 4, which entailed what she describes as a 15-minute “monologue” from her on the matter followed by a 45-minute Q&A with a panel. It wasn’t until the final interview that she got a real one-on-one sit-down with the person who would be her boss.

Back in August, Madison, Wisconsin-based chef Tory Miller asked an exasperated rhetorical question in a Facebook post: “Like how hard is it to be nice?” Miller, who owns two of the city’s restaurants, had just had a front-of-house staff member quit, citing “toxic” guests as their reasoning. “The entire world is short-staffed, and you yelling about your table not being ready the moment you arrive is not making that any different,” Miller wrote.

His lament got picked up by the local news site Madison.com, which followed up with him for an interview. He told the publication that customers seemed to think they could “just be downright mean to whomever is there” when out and about spending money.

There are tweets that can change the world. Then there are tweets that can change the price of beer at the airport, at least a little.

In July 2021, one thirsty traveler named Cooper Lund tweeted out an image of an airport bar menu, which, among other things, included an eye-popping $27.85 beer — Sam Adams Summer Ale Draught, to be specific — in LaGuardia’s Terminal C. It set in motion an investigation by the state’s inspector general, which found that 25 customers were charged “totally indefensible” amounts of $23 to $27 for a beer.

Every now and again I catch an ad for miracle spring water, which promises to cure everything from laryngitis to debt. It’s fairly obviously a scam seeking to separate people from their hard-earned money. Then again, the same goes for the plastic water bottles people buy at the convenience store every day, or the box of water or can of water that promises to be more environmentally friendly but isn’t especially.

If you live in the United States, chances are that the water coming from your faucet is perfectly fine to drink (though there are, of course, some exceptions). The same goes for the glass that’s sitting in your kitchen cabinet to drink it from. So why have we spent decades buying it packaged up?

Frontier Airlines booked more than $900 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2022, about half of which came from fees. In its earnings report, it bragged about being able to squeeze out an extra $75 per passenger in “ancillary” charges, a 33 percent increase from the same quarter pre-pandemic. Its net income was $13 million. Sit for a second on what that math means.

“They’d be hugely unprofitable without the fees,” said George Ferguson, a senior aerospace, defense, and airline analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. On average, he estimates that budget airlines Frontier and Spirit double their base ticket price with fees for baggage, service, and more. “But even Delta’s trying to do that with people,” he added.

Susan Norcross has a real bone to pick with doughnut walls. Not their particular existence, but rather what they represent for her as a wedding planner: a trend she finds some of her clients asking about because they saw it online, and one that they absolutely don’t care about or need to have.

“In 20 years, do you think you’re going to look at your husband and go, ‘We didn’t have the doughnut wall’? No,” Norcross, who owns The Styled Bride in Philadelphia, said. “For the most part, all these little tiny things, these — pardon my French — BS things that people get hung up on, I’m like, that’s really not the point.”

The Polk County Professional Firefighters union is in the throes of its final weeks of bargaining before its current contract expires at the end of the month. The more than 500-member organization in Florida is fighting for one overarching issue: better work hours, and the extent to which its firefighters are being stretched. And so multiple days a week, on its Facebook page, it posts how many of its members are working mandatory overtime. September 15: 24. September 12: 22. September 6: 25.

A lot of the people like the extra money that comes with overtime, explained Jon Hall, vice president of Polk County Professional Firefighters. “There’s people who want overtime anyway, so having openings within our system, it’s not a terrible thing, our guys like to have the opportunity. It just has gotten to a point that it’s so much that it’s unbearable,” he said. “It’s being able to work it versus being forced to work it.”