The least rewarding purchase I had to make was a boiler for a house. It's not like something you can show off to your friends. Just thousands in expense to maintain functional parity.
this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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No kidding, I was doing my groceries and they were playing Zombie. I almost cried. She's dead, I'm on the way, and that song that I used to dance to in dark industrial clubs is now accompanying me in the pasta sauce aisle.
I'm 32, I still think it's ridiculous. You have any idea how many perfectly functional appliances are sold on the second hand market (usually because the previous owner doesn't know how to change a fuse)?
Yes, but you still need to get rid of the old one, and arrange delivery of the new one.
I used to repair my washing machine because the parts (GE Filter-Flo) were easily available and a mildly competent chimpanzee can figure it out.
The front loaders need to be disassembled in the order they were built and are full of specific parts to each model and require re-sealing the tub. It's a nightmare.
I buy new now.
however the previous owners are much more likely to pay a junk company to haul it to a landfill than they are to try to sell it
Probably a lot. But I'm one of those people who doesn't know how to change a fuse. But I do tend to call repair people or use the warranty when I can.
Christmas as a child: "Oh man... socks."
Christmas as an adult: "Oh man! Socks!"
My wife: Getting old sucks.
Me: It beats the alternative:
My wife after a few moment of reflection: Not by much.
I feel that
The full story there is that we were at an Orthopedic urgent care. My wife has danced Ballet since she was 4. A bad jump resulted in a 5th metatarsal fracture, commonly referred to as a "dancer's break" and a severely sprained ankle. She was in a boot and crutches for 5 weeks. Her ankle literally had all the colors of a sunset. The Orthopedist took her shoe an sock off and actually gasped.
Omg hope she ended up healing up ok after a while. I know I've heard after a break that people don't necessarily always fully heal which sucks.
I've misread "Getting olds sucked", thinking it was a meme about giving blowjobs to old people.
How 50-80 years ago winning an appliance on TV used to be a big deal, like all the sudden the winner's household gets a massive jump into the space age because the appliances then must have been expensive.
Back in the late 80s, a friend of mine went on Wheel Of Fortune, and won pretty big. Back then, you won "money," which you then spent at the end of the show in the big showcase of products.
My friend went with a strategy, and bought stuff like wall-to-wall carpeting and a fridge, but also a couple things like a gaudy gold watch.
When he got home, he was getting his haircut, and his barber said "I saw you on Wheel. That was a nice watch you got." My friend sold it to him. That was his strategy - buy stuff for the house, but also buy some stuff that would be easy to sell, so he could pay the taxes out of his winnings.
The winnings are taxed?
Of course. All the prize money you see on Jeopardy, Wheel, Family Feud, etc. is all taxed.
If someone wins a car or vacation worth $20K, they will be expected to pay income tax on that value.
When Oprah gave away all those expensive cars years ago, she saddled many in that audience with a significant tax bill. A lot of them probably had to sell the car, just to pay the taxes, and then just have the remaining cash in hand after that.
It's not really an "of course"
Some countries don't tax lottery winnings, Canada for example. Though for Canada game shows are a bit more nebulous.
Don't you know that the US is the standard by now?
Yeah, it's income
Tell me you haven’t been appliance shopping without telling me you haven’t been appliance shopping. /s
I mean yeah, can be pricey, especially if you want all the features. But you can go bottom of the barrel bare bones basic shit and have it be not too much of an ordeal.
I bought my washer and dryer new and it totalled less than I paid for my cell phone lmao. They function just fine. I actually specifically didn't want extra fancy features because it meant more ways to potentially break.
I've had so much luck with used appliances, the trick is to go to appliance shops that are able to do repairs.
We've gotten two different sets from two different used appliance stores. The first set lasted about 9 years and survived several moves. When they finally died we found another (refurbished) matching set, $400 at a used appliance store, they even took our old set away (which I'm sure and hope they refurb'd and sold again). We used them for about 4 months, when the washer suddenly stopped working. We called the place we got it from and they actually came out and repaired it for free due to a 6 month warranty we didn't even know about, they were super apologetic. It was a pretty positive experience.
We've been pretty lucky I guess. You might have to shop around a bit but you can definitely save a ton of money if you're willing to forgo bells and whistles.
What do you mean back then? Appliances are expensive now.
Relatively speaking? Appliances are cheaper than they were before.
Here's a Sears catalog from 1991. Appliances are at the end, past page 800 or so. Stoves are $400 or $500. Washer is $400, and a dryer is $300.
By official inflation numbers, things are about 2.3x as expensive now as in late 1991.
Median rent, the rent that the average person was paying, was around $450. Median rent today is about $1500, more than 3 times as much.
Today, a stove that looks like one of those things in the 1991 catalog costs about $500, maybe $600. Washing machines cost about the same. That's only a 25-50% increase, when overall prices have increased by 130% and rents have increased by 200% since 1991.
So yeah, when a stove was worth a whole month's rent, it was comparatively a bigger deal than today, when a stove is worth less than half a month's rent.
The same is broadly true of furniture and other home goods, too: prices have gone up slower than inflation, so in theory we could store more stuff in our cramped homes.
And they don't last as long anymore.
As a kid i was terrible at guessing the prices because im Canadian and didn’t know about exchange rates, and also as a child i had no concept of what a car or a dishwasher cost
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