AIBU to feel middle-class luxuries have become increasingly out of reach?

Having to cut back on the Moet is a nightmare.

All coffee is undrinkable to me Nasty sruff

I'm lactose intolerant. Believe me when I say McDonald's black coffee is undrinkable. Even with sugar added which i don't generally do.

No, it's not. Greggs flat white is also fine and relatively cheap.

Blimey. I never thought I was badly off, but reading this thread is depressing. Monsoon, to me, was always special occasion clothing. I never thought I was doing badly because I thought their dresses were expensive. I certainly wasn't shopping there in my teens, I was in Topshop!

Their hot choc horrible

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But didn't that actually mean physical labour, ie getting your hands dirty? Blue collar, rather than white collar? Blue needed to not show the dirt, white because there wasn't any. This has always been my (uneducated, working class) understanding.
If you use your brain (knowledge, education) then you are professional or middle class.

All of the local fairly basic hairdressers here charge £60/70 for a ladies cut by the junior stylists. Clearly it very much depends where you live.

Oh come on, McDonald's coffee is undrinkable!

I agree. Within the last year I've bought two expensive items from hobs for work. One a blouses wand the seam on the sleeve tore after only a few wears. Another a dress with a tie around the waste and the loop to hold the tie broke on the second wear.

Yes! I'm still wearing stuff from at least 10 years ago, I actually don't like wearing new clothes - I prefer it when I'm used to something and it feels comfortable ( and I'm not scared of getting it dirty!)

Several posts now have said that buying clothes is not middle class. I don't understand then why I'm not seeing thousands of naked people on the street.

There was a huge downturn in quality of clothes about 4 years ago. I've got stuff that I bought ten years ago that's in better condition than the same item bought from the same shops one year ago.

This is true to an extent, but I think that very few people wear clothes until they have completely worn out. You only have to look in Vinted at the billions of barely worn items.

In my experience, most clothing lasts a very long time. Admittedly I don’t shop in Primark or Shein, but I am currently wearing a top that bought in GAP around 8 years ago. It’s a basic ‘at home’ top that has been worn consistently over that period of time and there’s nothing wrong with it.

The stats that I quoted might have been from the US, but I don’t think that the UK is much different judging by the enormous volumes of barely worn clothing that you see on ebay and Vinted.

So many people these days don’t like going out in the same outfit twice. I’ve even heard people being shamed for wearing the same top in photos that they were wearing 2-3 years previously!

Agreed. I used to have Levi's in the early 2000s that would last 2 and a half years of daily wear before they wore through where my thighs touch. I can make the new ones last as long but only if I wear them a couple of times a week.

While I don’t buy anywhere near the amount of clothing mentioned, one key difference is that clothes simply don’t last as long as they used to. It’s a manufacturing issue as well as an overconsumption issue.

I was just reading something about how much clothing we buy nowadays - it wasn't exactly what you said but it wasn't far off. There is more cheap clothing around (Shein, Primark etc) but we also don't keep things for so long and we wear things fewer times (or not at all!) Of course, we're constantly encouraged to buy more because somebody is making a profit from it but it's not good for the planet.

12? Really? This year so far, 4 items of clothing and 2 pairs of shoes. And I consider that a spending spree. Each to their own though - I'm quite spendthrift in other ways.

I think people consume a lot more now. In the 1980s the average woman bought 12 new clothing items a year. Now, the average woman buys around 64 new clothing items a year.

While it’s true that wages haven’t kept up with inflation, it’s also the case that people have become greedy and expect too much.

I think there was a spell - say 1998 to 2008 when there was an explosion in young families having way more spare cash than any generation previously and they drove things - normalising daily take away coffees , weekly meals out, new outfits, holiday day trips that involved paying for something

and many kids growing up in those homes are now looking around and seeing they can’t do that - what they don’t realise is that they are the unusual ones. Their childhoods were materially wealthy compared to all
previous generations

sinve perhaps about 2008 , and certainly over the last 10 years , things have gone backwards for most people in terms of spare cash. But if the “extravagant” decade passed you by ( your habits were already formed ) then you don’t see things as abnormal- you see the expectations - weekly take aways for example - as strange instead

I don't know why you're trying to tell me what my mother was like! I'm not putting her down. I admired her eccentricity. I think she'd have been horrified if anyone thought she had indulgences of any sort!