I was at a festival in a wealthy suburb. There was a Ford SUV on display…$85,000!
When you talk about affordability, sure people can afford it if they chose to by giving up something else. That’s the problem with car prices, the payments are consuming ever greater amounts of disposable income.
Shelter
Food
Car
Everything else
People will not give up 1 & 2 for #3, they give up on #4.
I know the owner of a consignment shop. They have to turn away all but the very best consignment items as the store is stuffed with inventory. They tell me June sales were 40% below June 2023.
#1, #2 and #3 are consuming the bulk of people’s income.
Last numbers I came across, ~8% of car loans are delinquent; that’s 1 in 12 have stopped paying.
Of course there was but there are vehicles that are affordable new . There are vehicles that are much more than that 85000.00 so a blanket statement means nothing.
The “purpose” of that statement is the people there could afford it; but they they’d definitely have to give up something else…the whole point of my post.
Some people could afford a Corolla, if they gave up something else!
This is what is going on, disposable income is being consumed by #1,2 and 3.
Sure! I delivered newspapers 7 days a week from age 10 to 16 on my bike. Riding in the snow $ucks! Like Mike, I’d never do it now!
Fortunately it doesn’t snow where I live. But it isn’t smart to ride in 95 degrees and 75% humidity either so early morning is the time to ride.
I have bike paths from my house to the grocery, barber, a number of eating establishments and most (but not all) of my doctors. It was a selling point when we bought the house.
But my volunteer gig is 42 miles away and I like to do home projects big enough to need a truck. Maybe I don’t need 3 vehicles… but I can afford them.
Haven’t seen “paper delivery” in a long time. I never had a route, but I helped a friend on Sundays occasionally…he really hated collecting payment…remember the payment books with tear off receipts?
Pretty sure not a single house on this street reads a printed newspaper. It’s crazy expensive, internet access is cheaper. Surprised that media hasn’t totally folded.
Flashback to 1955, Series 75 Cadillac vs a Chevy, Plymouth, or Ford.
As far as your consignment shop anecdote: sellers at consignment shops often over price their items then shop owner may tack on a fee.
Some thrift stores are just as bad. I know of two operating for the same charity, but managed by different people. One is cluttered with unsold, overpriced items, the other has reasonable prices and discards any junk items donated.
I had a paper route, back in my pre-teen years, and I was so naive that I thought that I kept “just missing” a few people when it came time for them to pay each week. Their newspapers were always taken in, but… somehow… they never seemed to answer the door when I came to collect.
I casually mentioned this situation to my father, and he had to “school” me about the reality of deadbeats who didn’t seem to think that there was anything wrong with robbing money from a kid. I finally gave up trying to collect from those folks after ~5 weeks of non-payment.
Never used those… But collecting was a PIA. Imagine the people who try and stiff an 11 year old kid for a lousy $2.
When I moved into this house in 2013, there was a paper vending box at the end of my street. It was taken out about 2 years later. My hometown had 2 when I was in my first apartment and dropped to one a few years later.
Considering every article was “old” by the time I got my last newspaper in 2008, I dropped it. Since I could read the articles for free on the internet before I got the paper, I decided I didn’t need it anymore.
Newspapers never fully understood how to monetize the internet plus they seemed to focus on breaking news they could not report before the internet made it old news. They refused to focus on long-form in-depth reporting of the details which may have kept them relevant.
Their 1st mistake was ignoring Craigslist; and they quickly lost their classified ad revenue for car sales. I remember an entire, thick, section of the paper was just for cars.
Mistake #2 was ignoring the threat posed by eBay; and they quickly lost the rest of their classified ads $$$$.
The solution to those threats was to lower rates and improve service (took them forever to allow you to list via the internet)…they refused and instead raised rates as listings dropped…I’m sure the CEO walked with millions for this brilliant move.
Sadly, this seems like an awfully low number. Around here (southern AZ), I see the unmarked tow trucks circling around like vultures, just about everywhere I go. Even in wealthier neighborhoods. There is not a single day that I am out on the road, without seeing several repo trucks seizing and/or towing someone’s vehicle. I see them in my neighborhood just about every day now. Good thing all of our cars are old and paid-for, so we are not a target.
I actually read the total number, including those late by a day and likely to pay, was 23%, but could not find the webpage…so I went with what appears to be the accepted number of 8% that are considered “not going to pay”.
With $1.5T in outstanding auto loans, that’s $120 billion in default.
I didn’t have a route either but had to cover the kids route when he couldn’t make it. Hopped on his bike, at 5am, rain, snow, ice, whatever. The papers must go through.
As a kid I bought a separate winter bike so I could put my three speed on blocks for the winter. Negotiating the price I still remember the old guy saying if it is worth anything it’s worth $15. So I guess I had the fat bike winter special before all the yuppies got into it. Somewhere around 1959.
Maybe my local paper is still in business because they do provide in depth coverage of local news as well as national news. They always bought national news from AP and Reuters. They continue that and supplement with national news from the Washington Post and New York Times. Their national news desk is almost nonexistent now but used to be large. I read it online but it is available for others in print if they want it.
More then once. I still have a paper delivered. And we pay 3 months at a time IN ADVANCE. No more do I see kids delivering papers. I live in a rural setting, so our paper gets delivered by a guy in a car/suv at about 5am. There are still kids delivering papers in some cities.
Same here. Unfortunately for him, I just switched to all-digital. The daily print version just kept getting thinner and thinner, then the Saturday edition was terminated.
For the last few weeks, the Sunday edition was ridiculously skimpy. When I saw that, I decided to go all-digital, which saves me a bit more than $30 per month.
I can breeze through our local paper in about five minutes now. The biggest articles are either from AP or NPR. So a quick scan of those and you get the jist of it all. They could save a lot of time by just condensing it into one paragraph. Still worth it for a couple local stories and the obits but most of the rest is worthless.
No … I can’t think of anyone who have completely given up driving b/c of the cost. But I do know some who have reduced their driving. Even in this forum, posters have said they’d given up ‘going for a drive’ partly b/c of the expense. I’ve reduced my own driving, not so much b/c of the expense, but b/c of the opportunity to get a little more exercise by walking or cycling, combined w/a significant increase in rude driving & parking behavior. 15 years ago I’d seldom see a sign on the rear of a car saying “please be patient, new driver”. Today, I see that sign on the back of cars all the time.