If you are middle class do you feel your lifestyle is eroding?

[ceramicwitch]

Now I know that as long as we can afford to heat your home, pay your mortgage / rent and afford to feed yourself and your family you can't complain too much. However I am interested if you feel you used to have a a middle class lifestyle, able to afford nicer bits or activities if you feel that is being eroded?

I think I am feeling it, we used to be quite free with putting nice things in the basket at waitrose (not where we go all the time but where we get treats and more premium things) and not we are holding back quite a bit more. We usually go to the Theatre a few times a year and the ballet, especially at Christmas but this year we are giving it a miss due to ever increasing costs. We've stopped going to cafes if not on holiday.

I have good friends who live in quite an expensive part of town, He is a Doctor and they seemed to be quite oblivious to cost of living the past few years but the other day I was talking to him and he was saying how he doesn't much enjoy eating out these days as the cost of it sticks in his throat, even cheap and cheerful is quite pricy now.

Anyone else feeling that quality of life even for the supposedly well insulated middle classes is in decline?

I know! I remember the absolute frustration once when I was there. We had hired a plug in car and I thought I’d charge it while we were shopping in Guildford. But I needed to download an app and there was NO bloody signal in the middle of Guildford! It’s 40 mins outside London!

Because you need those hateful apps to pay for parking everywhere, I had to turn around and go home from one park near Horsham because there was no phone signal and no other means of paying.

My husband is regularly in the U.K. for work and he’ll ring me and say “oh I’m just about to drive past Birmingham so the signal will cut out soon”. So backwards. Yet in Albania we had perfect phone coverage.

Sorry to send the thread on a tangent but this inability for normal things to just work in the U.K. is a real bugbear of mine.

I was unaware about Guildford, there is an area adjacent to where I live , London, which also has a blackspot. Very odd.

I have experienced this in other European countries to be fair but hard to say if it's roaming or the countries internet infrastructure.

We have a black spot in Kent as well near the M26 and M2. Madness in this day and age and with 5G. I digress!

That's near what we used to call Bluebell Hill isn't it? Is it the A249? The car radio used to lose signal there too - many years ago.

Correct!

Oh god yes the phone signal! DH travels all week for work and we can barely have a conversation. Try living in the North West, you can’t get a signal in the very centre of Preston, Blackpool or Lancaster and you’ve no chance in rural areas! I rely on Google maps as I have no sense of direction even when I’ve been to places before and it’s so stressful when you can’t get directions. DH tried complaining to o2 and they wanted individual postcodes of where our phones didn’t work; they don’t work anywhere!

They tried to blame our phones first, all of them so 3 of our phones plus my work phone which is also on o2 and all of my colleague’s and then said we should use WiFi calling. OK, we’ll just stay in our home forever then 😡.

Yeah O2 are a crock of $hite I feel when it comes to signal. I’ve been with them for 17 years and I’m now seriously considering changing over to EE. I think I read somewhere they have the most masts across the UK. I don’t care about 5G or the latest iPhone, I just want proper, decent, reliable phone signal - even simply for GPS to use maps!

It blows my mind that it's 2025 and signal is so poor almost everywhere.

The whole world is set up reliant on mobile signal and yet there isn't any.

There's a new town near us with no signal at all. To pick up or send a parcel from the post office you have to download or screenshot your qr code well outside the town first. I went to pick up a prescription from the pharmacy and couldn't show proof of my prepayment certificate so had to get back in the car and drive away until I got signal again before returning with a screenshot.....

I really worry about this. We definitely can’t afford to do the same things we used to do like going out for meals, booking theatre tickets and going away when we wanted. I worry about our income being reduced (increased taxes?) and things continuing to increase in price.
My main worry is what’s going to happen to all our local businesses? I love going out to places that are lively like high streets, where there are choices of things to buy (even if you do need to budget) and places to meet.

I just wanted to say I really like your username 💤

Most high streets these days are dire! Full of charity shops, vape shops and takeaways!

government has done nothing to curb the cost of living crisis and we are all suffering for it.

It depends on where you live, how much you earn vs how much your lifestyle costs and if you or your children are having a harder/easier time than your parents/your generation at the same age.

The US middle-class has been shrinking since the early seventies, hence why blue collar workers voted for Trump en masse instead of for Harris.

61% of Americans qualified as middle-class (based on earnings) in 1971 but only 51% in the 2000s and it's still shrinking.

Wait until AI wipes out a whole sector of call-centre staff and auxilliary businesses in the next five years.

@peonypatch We were all told in 1981 that PCs would take our jobs and we'd all be out of work. I suppose a few jobs disappeared - typists and filing clerks mainly - but whole new industries were born on the back of the new tech. Support, app development, Web development, gaming, cyber security etc. I've worked from 1984 - 2026 without a break No sign of the 3-day week we were warned about. 😁

AI is just the same. It's just another tool. As people think of more uses for it, there will be more work.

I disagree. I think AI is a completely different ball game entirely to what you are comparing it to.

It may well be the case the AI does replace a lot of us however it’s a long long way off that at the moment it’s performing badly in most areas where I’ve seen it utilised
The problem is garbage and garbage out and it’s not learning what the garbage looks like so poorly educated or experienced people our programming it to replicate the behaviours and outcomes of poorly educated and experienced people
Don’t really know how we get Around that