Reasons you wouldn’t move to US

[Preiu]

Dh has been offered a job in the US. The increase in salary would put us into a completely different wealth bracket but I really don’t want to move.

• fear of home invasion with guns
• school shooting - guns in general I guess
• American exceptionalism attitude annoys me
• Being away from family
• Not having Europe on doorstep

Can I ask if you have any other reasons

Guns
Food quality
Right wing Christianity
The politics
The fact I wouldn't feel able to send DD to school due to shootings

Guns.. could just be someone having a bad day. I couldn't live like that.
Food
Everything miles away with few town centres.
I can find something about most countries to tempt me. Not one single thing about USA.

Yes - they still sell all the generic stuff too but if you’d clicked on the whole cheese section you would see all the other cheese options there too:

shop.wegmans.com/shop/categories/1

The supermarket thing and the processed/prepared food thing really varies, I live in LA now and people generally eat far better here than my family/friends in the UK, far less processed food, prepared food etc. I am always shocked by the quantities of junk in Tesco etc compared to where I shop but I realize that is probably not the norm and obviously I am paying more for my food (but I am also lucky to not have to pay a huge amount to heat my house so it balances out ). Even my work canteen is all locally sourced in season food, even the more junky things come from local or organic farms!

*With perhaps the exception of New York which has exceptional if expensive delis.

Though I love going there on holiday so not dismissing US entirely, we could live there due to DH job but the school shootings are just too scary to contemplate

I think we are still talking at cross purposes - what I’m saying is the the main UK supermarkets are all of a similar high standard. There’s not much difference between the different chains in terms of what you can expect there. You get similar options whether you are in a Tesco as a Morrisons and wherever you are in the country you can rely on finding what you need.

I’m saying that’s very different to the US - where it can be very dependent on which state you are in. You say where your parents live the supermarkets down have the wide range of fresh produce choices in their supermarkets - and I’m saying here in my part of Virginia they do.

As I said earlier on this thread - it’s like going to a supermarket in Poland and judging all the supermarkets from Paris to Portugal.

I find this to be true. I cook a lot and I often get annoyed with American recipes because they often involve a jar in the actual recipe. The one attached is the second google result if you search chicken alfredo recipe. I very rarely see recipes including things like jars on mainstream uk cooking sites.

I watch a lot of US vloggers and have made the observation.

Slightly out dated but I do think Americans don’t cook from scratch as much as other countries do.

So I do see some recipe bloggers and influencer types making recipes with jars etc but I’ve never really noticed when googling a recipe. So I did my own Google search for chicken Alfredo recipe and opened the first six recipes that came up.

The third one for me had ready made jars as an ingredient but the other five were all made from scratch.

The search algorithms are tailored to us but no idea why I got such different results to you. The one you found wasn’t even in my top six results.

Trump
Gun laws
The extortionate tipping system
Healthcare system
No parental leave
Only 10 days statutory annual leave
I could go on..

Be wary of the salary increase. Typically jobs in US are a lot higher - my friend and her family moved to US as DH was a software engineer and went from £75k to £160k for but found that once they had paid out rent and all other bills they were left with a similar amount to UK.
They stayed for a year (kids were about 9 and 11) and enjoyed it. But when they returned they said it was v expensive and they do expect you to work all the hours for your salary. They also said Americans were hard to get close to ‘beneath the surface’ (their words not mine).
Don’t mean to sound negative. I was pretty jealous when they left! Seemed a great opportunity and great for kids to live elsewhere and experience a totally different lifestyle. Overall they did have a good experience.
Could you go and see it as a short term (year or two thing) thing? Nothing is irreversible - you may love it and wish to stay:)

No I wouldn't do it.

Why is this a reason not to move to thr US.?

Because one poster was saying there’s not the same range of fresh food produce available in supermarkets which might be a downside for the OP.

The reasoning is either Americans don’t cook from scratch so there’s no market for fresh or there’s no availability which means Americans don’t cook from scratch.

However it’s totally dependent on where you live - my coubty / parts of my State are full of great supermarkets with lots of fresh produce and cheese counters as good as any Waitrose / Tesco.

There’s no such thing as one American experience.

Had an American visitor over earlier this month....she said our beef tastes delicious compared to hers in the US. I have no idea as I have never been to the US. Its what she told me about steak pie I had made.

To be fair your beef is what put me on the “not allowed to donate blood’ list for about 20 years in the US. 🤣 I’m not sure I’d be bragging about it.

But to sum up the thread as a whole. Please keep hold of your bizarre impressions of the US based on tv and the internet… quite frankly we have enough busybodies here already and don’t need anymore. We totally welcome anyone who is up for a new and different experience. We’ll even tell you the password to use at the grocery store to be able to buy real cheese instead of the spray cheese in a can 🤣

Even if someone is using hamburger helper or taco seasoning or whatever they're still going to buy fresh meat and onions, as you say there are plenty of vegetables available to buy.

Personally I think UK supermarkets are pretty dire for produce, there's such a narrow range available (that has nothing to do with seasonality). I have to go to specialty stores just to find spinach that's not "baby," chard, often tarragon and other things I consider standard.

The US has good vegetables but I do think a lot of the fruit there has been bred to be pretty bland, especially the grapes and melon.

Can someone be honest with me. Career wise is "earning potential" a lot higher in the USA?

Healthcare. Look at the healthcare package offered to your husband. Make sure any pre-existing conditions would be accepted.

Then go. It'll be an amazing experience.

It’s all relative isn’t it? What profession? What area of the country?

@IJustFarted to give a little context to my question… the US is so varied there isn’t an answer without more specifics.

So if you are say a mid level manager in an office. Your earning potential is going to be a lot less in rural Idaho than it would be in Chicago, IL. That being said your expenses will be a hell of a lot less in Idaho than Illinois. So your standard of living may be better in Idaho than Illinois.

Some professions will be well paid in the US vs the UK as a general rule… nursing for example. And then you have to factor in other things to understand who comes out ahead… yes healthcare, non-salary benefits, taxes, etc. Then look at family situations… if a married HH then generally one spouse’s job carries the health insurance and the cost is split among 2 workers as an example.

You have to think of the US like you would all of Europe. Is the earning potential higher in Switzerland than it is in Albania? Because that is the question you have to sk about individual states in the US.

ETA: a good article that gives examples of some of the things I mentioned

globalnursepartners.com/2022/11/16/how-do-us-nursing-salaries-compare-to-nursing-salaries-in-the-uk-ireland-canada-the-middle-east-australia-and-new-zealand/

I’d go there for a year and travel around to areas of interest but I wouldn’t want to stay long term.

Because:

Too much inequality
Poor public education
Polarised politics
Poor public transport system
More lax food safety standards
Healthcare even when insured
Ignorance about other countries

Ignorance about other countries

🤣🤣

Oh God yes the level of variation between supermarket chains in the US is really shocking. This is something you have to learn if you come here: what chains you have and which ones are good for what things. UK supermarkets are not always amazing but they are more consistent. The mid-market US chains (think the ones owned by Kroger, which owns about a dozen different names now, Safeway-Albertsons, and Ahold Delhaize) are what I call "aggressively mediocre." Nothing is bad, but mostly, not very good, either, though the local Kroger formats vary from area to area. Now, if I go to Wegmans, they take a lot more pride in the fresh food, the cheese, prepared products. H-Mart (Korean chain) has an amazing produce department (good prices too) and a fabulous fish counter. If you want really good fruit, you need to buy it fresh from a farmer's market or stand, unless it's something that ships very well like apples and citrus.

Also, I might have said this on this or another thread, but the US has a lot of recipes that were concocted by companies in the 1950s and 1960s to sell products. They have stuck around to varying degrees. The Midwest is supposedly the capital of this kind of food. A lot of people do mix things up. For example, making a pot roast from scratch but using a seasoning packet.

Even something like pasta sauce: You can buy Prego, which is pretty blah and has sugar in it, or you can spend 2x as much on Rao's, which is on a par with homemade. (Except for jarred Alfredo, which is vile from any brand.)

Beef: I've had delicious beef in the US and mediocre, I think again the variety is huge. There's also lots of choice if you go to the right stores. Think being able to choose between grass or grain fed as well as grade of beef. I don't eat pork but I hear more complaints about that because during the whole low fat craze they bred lean pigs and labelled it "the other white meat". My friends who like pork say if you want juicy chops or roasts you have to buy heirloom pork. American lamb is actually delicious but can be hard to find, it's not as popular and cheaper Australian imports push it off the shelves.

Earning potential depends substantially on job and location.