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Nice People Thread Number 11 - A Treasury of Nice People
Comments
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PasturesNew wrote: »Wages in the UK have been kept low since the NMW was invented. There's even been a recent report about this - that NMW is now the "norm" that employers adhere to. In 1997 I got a job at £17-18k and that same job is still paid at £17-18k in that firm.
As stuff has become poncier/posher in life, this has meant that the poorer bands are priced out of more than they used to be. It's in a lot of things. Look at the cost of getting into a National Trust/English Heritage place, or hiring a beach hut, or getting into County Fairs .... even the price of B&Bs. Everything became "poshed up" and a higher price tag was affixed.
Latest addition to that is Stonehenge .... I think they built a posh/new Visitor Centre (1 mile from the actual stones) and the entry price has now doubled..... so rather than tramping across a field for free (which I'd have done), or paying a couple of quid to tramp along a path (which I'd have done), it's now a whole/posh Visitor Experience at a price I won't be shelling out for.
The other one is pub grub ... you used to be able to walk into a pub, have a half a cider and order a slice of quiche/chips or pie/chips and still get LOTS of change from £5. Now you've a choice of hand-pressed ciders and a gastro-pub menu and struggle to walk away with any change from £20 ... so there's another activity that's priced out.
That annoys me too: a cuppa used to be the cheap option and coffee much more expensive. Then Star*ucks started selling £2 a cup tea and all of a sudden the going rate is £2 not 35p in every crappy greasy spoon.
I suppose for many, the cheap pub in the UK is Wetherspoons. It's something of a Maccas of a pub but you can get a pie and a pint for very little. That at least still exists.
A plus for living in Aus is that there are still plenty of cheap/free things to do as long as you plan ahead a bit. We do loads of public things. For example, I can take the family out on Australia day to watch the fireworks. I can take a picnic and a bottle of fizzy pop and feed us all for what we'd spend just staying at home. The buses are free for things like that so you don't even spend on petrol.
Free BBQs in the park and at the beach are also a godsend to the family wanting a special but cheap day out. Wave jumping for a couple of hours followed by BBQ'd rump steak with salad and bread rolls can be done for a little over five quid and a hot dinner as the sun sets makes it all a bit more special.
My feeling is that this is just what happens. 50 years ago, a holiday would be unlikely for many lower earners every year. As for a holiday to stay somewhere with central heating? Why would you have central heating away when you didn't at home. Today you can't get the discount for staying somewhere without heating.
Not long before that, a holiday for many Londoners was staying in a tent and picking hops. If you approached a farmer in Kent these days with that sort of offer you'd be thought of as mental.0 -
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Not long before that, a holiday for many Londoners was staying in a tent and picking hops. If you approached a farmer in Kent these days with that sort of offer you'd be thought of as mental.
http://www.wwoof.net0 -
That annoys me too: a cuppa used to be the cheap option and coffee much more expensive. Then Star*ucks started selling £2 a cup tea and all of a sudden the going rate is £2 not 35p in every crappy greasy spoon.
I suppose for many, the cheap pub in the UK is Wetherspoons. It's something of a Maccas of a pub but you can get a pie and a pint for very little. That at least still exists.
A plus for living in Aus is that there are still plenty of cheap/free things to do as long as you plan ahead a bit. We do loads of public things. For example, I can take the family out on Australia day to watch the fireworks. I can take a picnic and a bottle of fizzy pop and feed us all for what we'd spend just staying at home. The buses are free for things like that so you don't even spend on petrol.
Free BBQs in the park and at the beach are also a godsend to the family wanting a special but cheap day out. Wave jumping for a couple of hours followed by BBQ'd rump steak with salad and bread rolls can be done for a little over five quid and a hot dinner as the sun sets makes it all a bit more special.
My feeling is that this is just what happens. 50 years ago, a holiday would be unlikely for many lower earners every year. As for a holiday to stay somewhere with central heating? Why would you have central heating away when you didn't at home. Today you can't get the discount for staying somewhere without heating.
Not long before that, a holiday for many Londoners was staying in a tent and picking hops. If you approached a farmer in Kent these days with that sort of offer you'd be thought of as mental.
I think the change in relative prices also confuses/makes things seem expensive. Cinema, Meals out, theme parks, petrol etc are now all much more expensive and yet stuff TVs, washing machines, video games consoles are so much cheaper - a 40 inch tv for the cost of 2 and a half tanks of petrol?!I think....0 -
Holiday caravans of my youth never had a loo/bathroom, nor heating, no electricity and certainly no telly.
Our caravans had a drop down bed for the parents and gas mantle lamps. Some had chemical toilets in a wooden 'shed' and some were just communal loo blocks. We also had to go and collect water from the standpipes.0 -
I think the change in relative prices also confuses/makes things seem expensive. Cinema, Meals out, theme parks, petrol etc are now all much more expensive and yet stuff TVs, washing machines, video games consoles are so much cheaper - a 40 inch tv for the cost of 2 and a half tanks of petrol?!
...or an evening at Disney on Ice.Everything that is supposed to be in heaven is already here on earth.
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I think the change in relative prices also confuses/makes things seem expensive. Cinema, Meals out, theme parks, petrol etc are now all much more expensive and yet stuff TVs, washing machines, video games consoles are so much cheaper - a 40 inch tv for the cost of 2 and a half tanks of petrol?!
Very true and something very easy to forget.
The average Briton spends, from memory, about 11% of their income on food which is down from over a third a few decades ago (sorry to be so vague: can someone else look it up?).
As we have more income spare, companies will find ever better ways to remove that spare income from us and we will complain less about them doing so.
I can buy a decent bicycle for £300 today in the UK. Nothing amazing but something that will be enjoyable to ride and be pretty reliable. The first decent touring bike I got was in 1984. It cost £299.99.
It was nothing amazing but was something that was enjoyable to ride and pretty reliable.
What's the fall in the value of the pound via inflation in that time? 60% perhaps?
Is this getting out of the Nice People zone? Maybe time to start a thread...0 -
PasturesNew wrote: »Maybe she could set up a small/cottage industry of Mail Order to NPs.
She makes wedding cakes and so forth - the billiard-table smooth multi-tiered type with hand-made sugar flowers and that kind of thing. She's making one for a mate of # sister 2's for her wedding in late July, and apparently needs to start now (today!).
So I'm picking over 5lb of assorted currents and raisins this morning for stalks, for the bottom (12 inch) tier. Isaac might help, but is banned from eating them and thus might get bored quickly.It was a great day out although I reckon to really do it justice I should have budgeted $500 rather than $200 for it. I'd like to do it as the full-on crazy consumer festival that it is one year while the kids are still young enough to fail to appreciate that we're weeing 3 weeks' supermarket budget up the wall! Next year.
That's an awful lot of money for a fair and a county show, though.......!...much enquiry having been made concerning a gentleman, who had quitted a company where Johnson was, and no information being obtained; at last Johnson observed, that 'he did not care to speak ill of any man behind his back, but he believed the gentleman was an attorney'.0 -
You can't really compare then to now ..... for starters, if we look at prices today, I'll tell you that a "brand new car" costs £6-7k, yet there are some people here who would state a "brand new car" costs £20-25k.
We all have different experiences, expectations and viewpoints.
This makes it difficult to remember what you had 20/30 years ago and compare it to something today, that's changed in spec.
I do remember we'd get a "family sized large bag of chips", enough to feed 5 of us as our main evening meal, for 2/6d, which measuring worth says is £3 in today's money based on average wages..... I bet it'd be difficult to get such a bag of chips at that price today (except up North in a backstreet, estate, grubby chippy). One portion's £1.50 in most places.0 -
PasturesNew wrote: »You can't really compare then to now ..... for starters, if we look at prices today, I'll tell you that a "brand new car" costs £6-7k, yet there are some people here who would state a "brand new car" costs £20-25k.
We all have different experiences, expectations and viewpoints.
This makes it difficult to remember what you had 20/30 years ago and compare it to something today, that's changed in spec.
I do remember we'd get a "family sized large bag of chips", enough to feed 5 of us as our main evening meal, for 2/6d, which measuring worth says is £3 in today's money based on average wages..... I bet it'd be difficult to get such a bag of chips at that price today (except up North in a backstreet, estate, grubby chippy). One portion's £1.50 in most places.
Right but we can say for certain that wages have risen by more than inflation because living standards have clearly risen for most.
So you can't afford to go out and get a packet of chips but you can afford a bag of oven chips or to buy a bottle of Tesco Value Cider (the latter so you care neither about chips or relative prices).
The price of Tesco Value Cider when I left the UK cost about 2 mins work for me. When I was a paperboy, 4 pints of cheap cider cost me about a week's wages.
As you say, it's all relative.
I suspect the problem you have is that you are trying to live off wealth at a point in time when living off wealth is very hard: you are expected and encouraged to spend your wealth.0 -
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