Or refuse to buy
Computer memory (RAM)
I bought a laptop when I migrated. EIGHT FUCKING YEARS AGO.
More drives for my NAS - 16tb was about A$250 4 years ago. Same drives are now nearly A$1200.
In 2024, I bought 5 14 terabyte hard drives for about $600 for my NAS.
Thank God I have gotten nowhere near close to filling those up yet.
Just one additional drive is like 350 bucks now.
I’m limping along with one surviving 10tb, it’s twin mirror is dead. All non media data is backed up across smaller drives that still have pools/mirrors, but TB* of media is living on the edge untill something changes.
Edit, T not G
All my media is on a single drive, send help
I’m contemplating actually deleting shit. Or, if not that, storing offsite (deep storage) and then deleting, ready for that mythical time when drives become more affordable.
Did something similar and have 20TB of solid state in a Beelink ME Mini.
Same, Seagate exos x18 18TB drives. Four of them.
Now cost a fortune to replace
I would buy a drive with the expectation of being able to buy another drive twice the size for the same price by the time I could fill it.
A 4TB drive in 2026 costs more than it did in 2016.
I should sell some old 2tb ones I have lying about.
I refuse to purchase anything from Amazon. Bezos is not getting any of my money.
I feel like I should stop buying on eBay.
Actually, I kind of want to see a price fixing lawsuit against eBay now. They are explicitly telling sellers what price to list their items at, raising the prices of goods sold on eBay to the detriment of buyers so that they can get more money out of the commission fees.
The funny thing is my income has risen dramatically in the last few years, but I’m still approximately at the same level of purchasing power that I was six years ago.
If you had told me in 2012 I would be making low-mid six figures and still feel poor, I would have laughed at you.
I just bought some things on ebay to avoid Amazon. They dropshipped Amazon to me, individual packages and all, for nearly 100% markup. I don’t know how to avoid that and find “real” sellers dropshipping non-branded warehoused Chinese goods like the good old days.
aliexpress, get it from the source.
You went to one giant corporation to avoid another giant corporation. Buy directly from sellers, ideally locally. Find their own actual websites. Ask word of mouth for recommendations.
That typically doesn’t work well for hobby and craft supplies. Limited selection at the physical stores, if there’s any at all, and there’s no individuals selling raw supplies.
I went on eBay for the first time in years the other cat looking for a few cookbooks. Holy fuck. No thanks. I’m not paying retail plus shipping on the cheapest USED book. Get the fuck out.
Where are you shopping these days? My area has a Walmart and a dollar general. Love the mega corps…
Did you try ThriftBooks by chance?
That’s where I got one of the ones I was looking for!
Glad to hear it!
I scored the $50 premium hardback of ‘World of Ice and Fire’ for $11 off TB earlier this year. It also has a really cool inscription on the inside cover from the previous owner. I love used books.
Yeah I have a couple I’m still watching over there because they’re still out of my price range (I’m broke lol) but we’ll see 🤞
If you’ve never used SlickDeals, I highly recommend it.
Is SlickDeals only North America? Or do they deliver worldwide?
Hi there!
SlickDeals isn’t actually a retailer, but a community for bargain hunters. Basically someone sees a good deal and posts about it, and the community sees these posts and upvotes the best deals, but the best thing about it is you can create an email alert to yourself and add keywords, so you get an email when someone posts a deal matching that keyword. If you have a regular shopping list you use or staple products you know you’ll need interminably, like toilet paper (or for me, crew neck t shirts) it’s a really great way to get around price gouging or find a good bulk purchase to stock up.
I’m guessing there’s a non US equivalent if it doesn’t work in your country, since price gouging’s happening everywhere, but I can’t say for sure what it might be.
The funny thing is my income has risen dramatically in the last few years, but I’m still approximately at the same level of purchasing power that I was six years ago.
Fucking same. I basically doubled my salary a couple of years ago and it seems like I’m not getting anywhere…
Yep. Same boat, its insane.
I honestly do not know how anybody that is making less than $50,000 a year is even surviving right now.
Making low 5 figure £ and don’t really know what to spend it on. A lot of things people are listing I don’t buy not because I couldn’t afford it, but it doesn’t seem worth it.
I could probably afford most things listed in the comments here, but my main reaction to most of them is why would I want to? Doesn’t seem worth it to me.
Never learnt to drive because I couldn’t afford it. Now I probably could afford it. At a push even around £500/month exploitative loan used by multiple people I know, would only cause minor financial issues. But I don’t want it. My bike is doing fine.
Wtf do you spend money on when you are doing fine and happy as you are with £100s extra a month than you know what to do with, despite earning only a bit over minimum wage?
Only thing I can really think of is save it and eventually pay off the mortgage early then work part time.
RAM! 😭
Also see: SSDs, HDDs, GPUs and CPUs
😢
Streaming services.
Thank god piracy is free and it’s easier than ever.
I love piracy. It’s never let me down.
Exactly. I’ve been pirating content for 20+ years, except for a small period where Netflix was actually good. Now, I regret even paying for that short period; they don’t deserve any of my money.
Drinks in a restaurant. I always order water. One day I was in the mood for tea until I looked down at the $4.99 price. Strangely, soft drinks we’re $3.99. I guess many of you aren’t surprised, but like I said, I never really order drinks with a meal so it had been a while since I had seen the price.
Depends where it is. Wetherspoons still does £1.99 a pint. I also found a place recently that I can abuse their system to get double my drinks order but even with that little cheat its still like £3.50/pint so I don’t go there much. Its mostly a human engineering attack combined with a little bit of knowledge of POS systems.
Anything that comes in pods.
Waste of money and terrrible for the environment.
I agree, nuke the whales!
Gotta nuke something
Video games. Retro video games. All of it.
Sure, we have Steam sales and those are still cheap. But physical games? Gone bonkers since covid.
This is the first time in the history of the world that current Gen consoles have gone UP in price. Games hardly go down in price anymore.
Retro games used to be cheap. Now everyone and their mother knows they’re not just old children’s toys, and think everything is a collectible. And these days, they might not even be wrong! Not to mention thrift stores and sometimes even garage salers are trying to charge eBay prices for everything they have.
I’m just holding onto digital games and Steam sales and such…and, well, piracy of course. (But storage is expensive too…)
I was going to buy an old game that was not very good for nostalgia purposes as a gift. Since COVID it has tripled in price.
It was already not good, and at $150 I’d rather gift an Everdrive with an 8gb card full of the rom than spend that much on a shelf piece.
Was it “notoriously bad” or just lacklustre? That makes a difference! Lol
Edutainment mixed with mid-platforming… Most likely expensive because it didn’t have a wide release. Not “bad” but also not a hidden gem or “actually good despite” anything.
Beef. Beef used to be in the affordable to readily affordable range. Now for a pound of ground beef it’s about half as much for a bag of chicken breasts.
If I was more familiar with it, I’d replicate Bane’s speech from the Dark Knight Rises on being born in the darkness, but replace darkness with poverty.
So, just pretend I did and that it was awesome.
kebabs. i still remembrer they were 4.5€ before covid. now it’s 8€ at best
fuck that
16-25€ here… On the bright side, made me learn how to do them at home. And no, the ingredients don’t cost 25€ a portion!
I surely hope your salary is at least twice mine!
Carne asada. Tacos. Fucking food trucks in Portland want $15 for 3 street tacos. GTFO.
Granola. It’s $5/lb at WinCo!
NA beer. People weren’t buying reg beer so they just figured hey we’ll wreck this market by pricing people out of it too! So I get no alcohol and it’s the same price as regular beer? Piss off.
Also in Portland. Food trucks are no longer the cheap street food thing. Haven’t been for years. Now they’re trendy and commercialized like everything else. I hate it
Morons keep lining up no matter what they charge. The whole point of trucks is you don’t have to pay the restaurant lease, servers or dishwashers.
Yeah, that means they can charge restaurant prices and pocket the difference!
The NA beer bothers me. They don’t have to pay all the various taxes and fees but it costs the same? Or more? There’s a brewery near me that is relatively large and ships internationally and their NA costs nearly 2x what another local much smaller place charges for real beer. That NA doesn’t even taste good in the world of NA beer let alone at their cost.
Going bowling.
I don’t know but in general I’ve just stopped consumering. I get what I need and that’s about it. It’s my way of protesting not just prices but just how shit everything is today.
I buy independent media now, thats still cheap. I can pay the monthly subs for two indie news orgs for the same price I pay for four beers.
Note: I’m Australian, yeah beers a bit expensive here, but come on, value for money!
Dental care
Lisa needs braces
