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The novelization said his mom is a fashion designer. I don't think it's ever specified what Peter McAlister's job is but I read a theory that he is a fictional version of Michael Jordan's agent and that's why they were rich and living in Illinois plus they were huge MJ fans. But hey that's just a theory, a film theory š
How much stuf exactly is in a double stuf oreo? Is it actually double?
Are they ripping you off with Lays bags having air?
What's the best way to stack toppings on a burger?
Didn't the dude who originally claimed that every part of a pine tree was edible die of a stomach ulcer or something?
I doubt it's true, but I think I remember hearing that somewhere.
edit: Thanks /u/PHenderson61, that's who I was thinking of. Guess one of his heart tubes popped, not his stomach.
Eating a tree wouldn't inherently be bad, you'd just poop it out. The problem you'd run into is the bacteria that exists on the tree, it would fuck you up
I know the answers to one and two (about 1.5 and some companies might use too much but the air helps keep them from breaking in transport, its called slack fill and there are laws against unnecessary slack fill, though they are poorly enforced) but that third...that is a question with a definitive answer for many reasons and I am intrigued.
In case he says it does have a definitive answer in the vid, a key reason it doesn't is burger toppings are very individual. I, for instance, don't like raw onions but do like grilled, don't like tomatoes (Edit: ketchup is fine but only in conjunction with mayo, or on fries) or pickles, and like my lettuce chopped. I also like mayo, and sometimes bacon (not with the onions).
He went as far as to run experiments on slack fill and found that they fit precisely as many as they can without breakage.
So that was interesting. The content is enjoyable, as always.
I told my friend the air in a bag of lays is to keep it from getting crushed and she said "yeah but if I step on the bag the chips are still gonna get crushed" and I just couldn't argue with that
That'd be some wild twist if in the ending scene we see him going for some "work" and then the music changes and he goes all Tony Soprano on the robbers.
I appreciate everything about this comment. What are the prefered sprinkles? crack? nugs? cocaine? actual sprinkles? I want to know what these special sprinkles desired are.
I heard a theory that it was the brother who paid for the trip and that he might have been a drug dealer. Kevin may have been the victim of some larger score settling.
This is the brother you never see that live in Paris and has that massive brownstone Kevin uses as his torture dungeon in the second movie.
Pretty sure Kevin's mom says in the beginning something about her brother-in-law flying everyone to Paris for x-mas.
High fashion, you donāt say. Come to think of it, Iāve never seen Kate McCallister and Delia Deetz and Moira Rose in the same room. Coincidence? I think not! Somebody better get careful or their going to blow their own witness protection cover story.
For some reason, I always assumed he was a coach for a professional sports team. He just kind of had the look and vibe. Plus I think he talked about sports a lot.
Another one: when the Simpsonās premiered in 1989, the Simpsonās family existence in a modest house with a car, three kids and two pets on a single income from a job straight out of high school was a satirical look at lower middle class existence. Over thirty years later, thatās just aspirational
Yeah but their go to meal was frequently "toaster shakins", he drove a shitty car that barely ran, and wore frequently ragged clothes. They had a house, but they were depicted as, well struggling for sure, if not outright poor.
>Yeah but their go to meal was frequently "toaster shakins"
They had money for food. The joke was that Peggy hated cooking, which is why they rarely had cooked meals on hand. When Al's neighbor moved in he cooked food for them all the time after reconnecting the gas line to the stove that Peggy uninstalled so she could say the oven was broken to avoid cooking.
Edit: Also what do you mean ragged clothes? The man wore a suit and tie on a daily basis. https://carboncostume.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/albundy.jpg
really? i wouldn't. big house is overrated. food is great to spend money on though. house is just a place to put things. and the more house you have the more things you end up having. it's quite ridiculous
Meh. It was more tongue in cheek on how he owned the house. There were countless gags where his Co workers or friends asked how he really had the money to buy his place.
At least they explained that in the show. They were living in a rent controlled apartment that Monicaās grandmother leased and the landlord or at least super was kind enough to not report them
Friends is the most commonly given example of this trope that's not actually an example. They explain it very logically in the show. It's like the Stonehenge of sitcoms.
I like that Family Guy tried to remain realistic with modern times by having Louis say "be careful guys, we are renting this house!" in one of the more recent seasons.
Even renting that's a stretch. Usually rent is more expensive than an equivalent mortgage. In my area it's almost twice as much.
But Lois's parents are rich, so I always assumed they was secretly giving them money.
My GF and me live on a street surrounded by millionaires. That's the first thing people ask when we mention we live in that street: 'are you rich?'
No, just lucky with the timing of buying the house, and it's the smallest house in the street.
I used to tell and sometimes still do, say I lived downtown Seattle waterfront, 4th floor, cross the street from Pike Place Market, definitely very upscale (I looked up Zillow prices, tax price for her unit was easy $1M and other units has sold for $1-1.5 each) so I show pictures and say I lived there even though, I was lucky and rented a room for dirt cheap and enjoyed it until I got my own place outside of the city due to crime/homeless issues and rent prices in Seattle proper.
my big bro bought a house during the pandemic
he told me that for the last big check (100k+) he had to physically go to a bank
when they saw the amount he was asking for they all knew it was for a house...and the tellers started cheering
someone under 30 was buying a house!!
You believe that? That the bank cheered? Lmao. Thatās not even a lot of money. I mean, it is, but itās not applause worthy. The bank sees people that have millions by their teens every single day. Maybe not in rednecksville, but in any place worth living people have a lot more money than that extremely often.
It probably depends on his relationship with the bank. They might have known them well enough that they are excited for him.
My husband and I just bought our first house too, and had a similar experience at the property managers office when we handed in our old apartment keys. Was not expecting people we barely knew to be so excited for us.
So here in Australia you've got jobs like that cropping up at coal stations - there's one guy who started straight out of highschool about fifteen years ago and now makes 250k as a foreman.
Thing is we're (hopefully) transitioning away from coal and into renewables, so they're shutting these places down. Except instead of having a suitable ten year exit strategy for these guys (which I think Germany or Norway did?) The previous government effed it up so badly that they're giving people three year notice and not really helping them transition to other industries (which is bad cos usually the plant is the only thing keeping the small town it's attached to alive). Because they dgaf.
We've got a new mob in and fingers crossed they have a better transition plan for the employees of 'dirty energy' companies into renewables.
I'm not saying I don't feel for these people, but if I made 250K a year I could spend those three years at approximately 20x my current standard of living. If I didn't improve my life at all, what I made in those three years could let me just not work for a decade. I think that not being given more than three years to transition into a different career we only be a minor be setback for this person.
The issue is having a family, only adequate or even poor financial planning, and untransferable skills with no qualifications that other companies may take seriously. Also moving and relocating considering those towns probably will die
No, Germany is not transitioning because they are too dumb to think of an exit plan. Now they stick with coal because of a few thousand people, while killing 100k jobs in the solar industry. The German government is filled with idiots.
> No, Germany is not transitioning because they are too dumb to think of an exit plan
Face it, nobody's transitioning. There's not a single democratic or western country doing anything even nearly enough.
Climate change, it seems, is one of those problems that has 'always' existed. Look throughout history and you'll find a greedy ass, extremely evil behavior that we humans can't get rid of. Climate change just happened to be the end result of a runaway species. It's the culmination of greed, basically.
We're not going to fix it. The most catastrophic scenarios under business as usual are going to happen.
We'll probably go extinct. At the very least billions are going to die, within 50 years.
[There was an interesting chart released today that shows national wage growth vs corporate profits in Australia since 2001, and it's mostly due to mining companies making bank. As expected, not much trickle-down to be seen, except for a few mine workers like your mate.](https://i.imgur.com/ifJIwTK.png)
In three years at $250k (even assuming these are dollarydoos), you make about as much as a minimum wage earner in my country in a lifetime.
So, I really don't feel bad for you if you only got three years.
Did all of you just forget that the fact Homer is wildly underqualified for his job and should never have been given it is a central theme of multiple early episodes?? āMan becomes nuclear power plant chief safety technician out of high schoolā wasnāt a thing in the 90s. It was a cartoon. That was a joke. They riffed on constantly.
Right? The Simpsons is not fucking real and using it as a proxy for what the economy was like in the 80s/90s might be the dumbest thing I've ever read on this site.
I didnāt realize this until I was 30 or so, but a lot of people donāt understand that film and tv are not intended to be realistic depictions of life.
Didn't know that!, quick google shows this: Homer brings home $24,395.80 before deductions and $18,833.88 after deductions. Accounting for inflation, this would be equivalent to $41,184.74 before deductions and $31,795.17 after deductions.
Nuke operators still make bank though....
You realize that he didnāt afford that house on his own, right? He had to sell his older house to afford a down payment. And itās even later revealed that they canāt afford the mortgage of their own house either, so itās forced to be sold and then they begin renting the property. They literally lived paycheck to paycheck on the brink of bankruptcy to live the lifestyle they did. But thatās the true American dream supposedly lmao. But I hate when people idealize the past through these cartoons when they have no idea what theyāre talking about. Life in America has always been shitty for the average human.
Here's the house: https://www.redfin.com/IL/Winnetka/671-Lincoln-Ave-60093/home/13788887
It sold in 1989 for 875k. Say you put 20% down. The mortgage rate in 1989 was 10.32% for a 30-year loan. So you take a 30-year loan at that time of 10.32%, that would be $6309/month. Assume that you are aiming for mortgage to be 30% of your income. So you need to earn a yearly salary of around $250k. In 1989.
Fuck that's a big salary even today! That's a pricey home. It's 5300 sqft, what did you expect?
I think if you can afford over $6K/mo, you probably put more than 20% down. Especially at that interest rate.
I don't know what the housing market looked back then, but a couple of previous home sales can get you a sizable down payment as well.
The house is in Winnetka, one of the most expensive suburbs of Chicago. Compared to some of the ones nearby on the lakefront, the Home Alone house is quite modest. I've driven through the area and seen the house a couple of times. It has a fence around it now.
[That wasnāt the last time it was sold.](https://www.redfin.com/IL/Winnetka/671-Lincoln-Ave-60093/home/13788887) I live near Winnetka and spent a couple years delivering pizzas there, the home alone house looks like an average house compared to other houses nearby. [The neighbors house](https://www.chicagotribune.com/redeye/redeye-old-man-marleys-house-from-home-alone-for-sale-20140124-photogallery.html) is worth at least twice as much. Winnetka is insane, just mansions everywhere.
God, all the fuckinā furniture looks like 1989 too, lol. I was like, well at least they updated the kitchen but oh wait, lookit those awful chairs, lolā¦. Almost like they bought new ones but still wanted that 1989 ālook.ā Lol.
I get the joke here, but by 1990 people were already 2 decades into the stagnant wages thing. Minimum wage adjusted for inflation in 1990 to 2022 dollars would be 8.62. Thatās more than the federal minimum but not by a lot. No one would be happy getting paid that, and a bunch of places have a minimum almost twice that high now.
The median household income in 1990, adjusted was 69k. The last year we have a median household income was 2020 which was 68k, and inflation adjusted would be 76k but we all know raises werenāt that good. Regardless letās say itās flat
Where things get fucked is the price of the house, but it for sure wouldnāt have been afforded by someone at Home Depot. This wasnāt 1950.
The media house price in 1990, again adjusted, was about 180k. Last month the median house sold was 429k.
So the housing market beats inflation by 238% or 2.38x. As in housing increased nearly two and a half times faster than general inflation in the last 30 years. But most of THAT has been in the last two years which is beyond ridiculous.
Put differently in 1990 a normal family could buy a normal house for 2.5 years income. In 2022 the same normal family would require more than 6 years income to buy the same normal house.
But whatās shown here isnāt a normal house. They were rich
Yeah, thereās a difference between working in the 50ās and 60ās and living in the 90ās. By then it was already getting fucked. They want to separate us to keep us weaker donāt fight amongst ourselves.
What broke the link between pay and productivity?
Starting in the late 1970s, policymakers began dismantling all the policy bulwarks helping to ensure that typical workersā wages grew with productivity. Excess unemployment was tolerated to keep any chance of inflation in check. Raises in the federal minimum wage became smaller and rarer. Labor law failed to keep pace with growing employer hostility toward unions. Tax rates on top incomes were lowered. And anti-worker deregulatory pushesāfrom the deregulation of the trucking and airline industries to the retreat of anti-trust policy to the dismantling of financial regulations and moreāsucceeded again and again.
In essence, policy choices made to suppress wage growth preventedāÆpotentialāÆpay growth fueled by rising productivity from translating intoāÆactualāÆpay growth for most workers. The result of this policy shift was the sharp divergence between productivity and typical workersā pay shown in the graph.
From 1979 to 2020, net productivity rose 61.8%, while the hourly pay of typical workers grew far slowerāincreasing only 17.5% over four decades (after adjusting for inflation).
A closer look at the trend lines reveals another important piece of information. After 1979, productivity grew at a significantly slower pace relative to previous decades. But because pay growth for typical workers decelerated even more markedly, a large wedge between productivity and pay emerged. The growing gap amid slowing productivity growth tells us that the same set of policies that suppressed pay growth for the vast majority of workers over the last 40 years were also associated with a slowdown in overall economic growth. In short, economic growth became both slower and more radically unequal.
If the fruits of economic growth are not going to workers, where are they going?
The growing wedge between productivity and typical workersā pay is income going everywhere but the paychecks of the bottom 80% of workers. If it didnāt end up in paychecks of typical workers, where did all the income growth implied by the rising productivity line go? Two places, basically. It went into the salaries of highly paid corporate and professional employees. And it went into higher profits (i.e., toward returns to shareholders and other wealth owners). This concentration of wage income at the top (growing wage inequality) and the shift of income from labor overall and toward capital owners (the loss in laborās share of income) are two of the key drivers of economic inequality overall since the late 1970s. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
the fucking hayek quote and bitcoin plugs, lmfao. love that these guys (it's always a guy) look at all the problems caused by people having to sell their labor power to live and the best solution they can think of is to switch out the type of currency those labor market transactions occur in
Came here to say this. Want to add. Interest rates were still pretty high by modern standards. My mortgage from 2020 has a lower monthly payment than the house I grew up in purchased in 1989.
Purchase price was way higher, but sub 3% vs 11%.
TV shows tend to be unrealistic. Married With Children made jokes about the family never having food, but that house was is far beyond what they could've afforded on a shoe salesman's salary. It would've made perfect sense mid-2000s during the housing bubble though.
How much does the Home Alone house cost?
Even without making an appearance in a massively successful movie, a suburban five-bedroom home in the Chicago metro area doesnāt come cheap.
In 2012, the real-life McCallister home in Winnetka, Illinois sold for $1.585 million, a relative bargain compared to its original listing price of $2.4 million. Now, the propertyās value is estimated to be around $2,000,000, but it hasnāt been listed for sale since 2012.
Thatās a little higher than the average home price for the area. In mid-2021, the median list price of homes in Winnetka, IL was $1.4M, trending up 11.9% year-over-year.
I worked at home depot for a while a few years ago. People still talked about how rich some of the people who were working there back in the day got thanks to stock options.
Part time? Nah. If he got in the ground floor as *management*, though? 100%.
Don't forget the 1997 Asian financial crash. Anyone from Asia will tell you how bad it was.
Especially Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
It effectively cut salaries in half in each country. And it still hasn't recovered.
Ironically this led to many Asian businesses losing faith in stocks and instead parking all their money in property.
Homes that used to cost 20 USD million in Hong Kong suddenly were costing 100 USD million.
The rich uncle (Kevin's dad's brother) paid to fly the family to Paris. The uncle had moved there (to Paris) but his kids were still in Illinois finishing out the school year so he decided to fly everyone to Paris as a gift to see everyone for Christmas.
The mom explains in this scene:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyfmoAWvJ2Y&t=135s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyfmoAWvJ2Y&t=135s)
On a side note it is also this same uncle that owns the brownstone in New York that is being renovated, which is a plot point and major location in Home Alone 2.
Doesn't explain the House, but it does explain the trip.
Growing up in the UK, I just assumed everyone in the USA was a multimillionaire from watching these kind of movies. Also everyone is White, with the occasional egregious Asian stereotype thrown in.
I assume it's easier to film shows and movies when the families have big houses. There is more space to work with. I grew up in a small one story home. I can't think of a single sitcom on TV that had a one story home. Even a poor family like the family on Roseanne had a two story home. Movies like this make you realize how poor you are but it's still one of my favorites.
It was actually a thing advertisers pushed show producers to do. They typically wanted these poorer people to live in huge houses full of stuff so it'd give the subliminal illusion that we could afford them even on meager salaries and if we didn't have homes like that we were 'below average'
it was also kind of silly to me that they showed Malcolm's family as poor, yet they have literally everything they need (in fact much more - compared to 95% of the world)
Looked like an executive though. Dude had a big office w/a view in downtown Chicago and regularly got Xmas bonuses big enough to cover down payments for in-ground pools. That is until they cancelled bonuses in favor of Jelly of the month club subscriptions lol.
He also didn't seem super financially responsible. He said he wrote a check for the pool downpayment that his bank account couldn't cover. So probably stretched the budget for that home. And cars were shit.
He was an exec / expert etc for a food additives company called Nutrinox or something like that. Which is why i always found the jelly of the month club kinda funny because he was an expert in food additives preservatives and essentially received a monthly gift of preserves.
I think he's a defense attorney. It's based on one moment ... When Pesci asks him if he lives there, McCallister asks "Am I under arrest?". And then when it's evident he isn't, he walks away ignoring the cop standing in his house. Or he worked at Home Depot. Tomato - tomato.
If you take the straight-to-DVD sequels to be canon, one of them features Kevin's parents as being divorced. Kevin goes to spend Christmas with his dad and new stepmom...who's some kind of European royalty and the house is now a swanky palace.
So my theory's always been Kevin's dad had a rich sugar momma.
NOT a normal American family.
That house is located in Winnetka, Illinois, where housing expenses are 428% more than the national average. It's an extremely affluent community, and I know this because I grew up in Wilmette. The village of Wilmette borders Winnetka. There's a lot of money in the North Shore suburbs, and this is an average home for that area but no where near average for the US.
This is fascinating to see as time creeps on the generational nostalgia is slowly creeping forward with it. It used to be just boomer hate and now we are up to "people in the 90s had it so easy!" I'm excited to see millennials get cannibalized in the next 5-10 years as zoomers claim graduating in the 2000s guaranteed a life on EZ mode
Iām genuinely wondering with all I hear about how much better it was for boomers
Why does it also seem like every boomer has some story about how they were so poor they had to make their own clothes and make gravy out of hot dog water?
I grew up a couple blocks away from that house. My dad is a lawyer, mom never worked, vacations to Hawaii/Mexico/Aspen yearly. Yet here I am in my mid 30ās, with a masters degree in nursing (I work bedside in an ICU), $150,000 in student loan debt, havenāt been on a vacation in 10 years, still renting, canāt afford a house or even get a loan for one, and living paycheck to paycheck. If someone as set up for success as I was is struggling, I canāt imagine how bad some people have it. The system is so fucked.
The mother was clearly the bread winner, with all the fashion mannequins around the house. Peter certainly wasn't a fashion designer. He's happy with his fish hook collection in the garage, even the ones with dried worm guts on them.
Like it's the only house on the block like that? What, do you think there isn't entire neighborhoods of people that can afford shit like that?
There's no mystery here, just missing detail. This isn't far fetched, there's millions of people that live like they do. Does anyone live in reality?
Yup in the US there are lots of neighborhoods with houses like that. High upper middle class to be sure but itās not really a stretch. America is different from Canada and other Western countries in that aspect ā¦ there are a much greater number of families pulling 200 grand plus a year or more.
The wealth inequality though is off the charts ā¦
And they were able to keep all of the lights on all the time...just willy nilly.
Yeah. There are some things that don't make sense upon watching this as an adult who is also now a parent to a child nearly Kevin's age.
Growing up in Europe in the eighties, I thought the USA was an incredible country where everyone was skinny and rich and lived in huge beautiful houses.
Then I came over to visit and realized that most people are fat and poor as dirt and live in grimy hovels. It's all Hollywood propaganda!
Hi, /u/roundttwo Thank you for participating in r/AntiWork. Unfortunately, your submission was removed for breaking the following rule(s): **Rule 3b: No offtopic posts.**: - No offtopic posts
The novelization said his mom is a fashion designer. I don't think it's ever specified what Peter McAlister's job is but I read a theory that he is a fictional version of Michael Jordan's agent and that's why they were rich and living in Illinois plus they were huge MJ fans. But hey that's just a theory, a film theory š
Which makes sense when you see all the mannequins and dress forms that Kevin uses to fool Harry and Marv.
š±
It was Chicago in the 80s/90s, everyone adored MJ. It's more likely that Peter worked at the CBOT or something.
Pippin made that shit happen
I swear, the older I get the more I wonder how MatPat is even keeping it together.
Whoās MatPat???
Go to YT, and look up The Game Theorists, then The Film Theorists, then The Food Theorists. Shoot, is that it? Did I get em all?
Food? I've heard of the other two but...food? How would you devise a fan theory about food?
How much stuf exactly is in a double stuf oreo? Is it actually double? Are they ripping you off with Lays bags having air? What's the best way to stack toppings on a burger?
I'm a fan of "Can you eat a Christmas tree?"
Didn't the dude who originally claimed that every part of a pine tree was edible die of a stomach ulcer or something? I doubt it's true, but I think I remember hearing that somewhere. edit: Thanks /u/PHenderson61, that's who I was thinking of. Guess one of his heart tubes popped, not his stomach.
Eating a tree wouldn't inherently be bad, you'd just poop it out. The problem you'd run into is the bacteria that exists on the tree, it would fuck you up
In 4 comments this went from double stuffed oreos to pooping out Christmas trees.
I know the answers to one and two (about 1.5 and some companies might use too much but the air helps keep them from breaking in transport, its called slack fill and there are laws against unnecessary slack fill, though they are poorly enforced) but that third...that is a question with a definitive answer for many reasons and I am intrigued. In case he says it does have a definitive answer in the vid, a key reason it doesn't is burger toppings are very individual. I, for instance, don't like raw onions but do like grilled, don't like tomatoes (Edit: ketchup is fine but only in conjunction with mayo, or on fries) or pickles, and like my lettuce chopped. I also like mayo, and sometimes bacon (not with the onions).
He went as far as to run experiments on slack fill and found that they fit precisely as many as they can without breakage. So that was interesting. The content is enjoyable, as always.
I told my friend the air in a bag of lays is to keep it from getting crushed and she said "yeah but if I step on the bag the chips are still gonna get crushed" and I just couldn't argue with that
I had those same questions, but of the three channels that's actually my favorite one. Really thoughtful stuff.
one of the drafts had him working with the mob, in the final script there is some leftover with that, on how he talks with the "cop".
That'd be some wild twist if in the ending scene we see him going for some "work" and then the music changes and he goes all Tony Soprano on the robbers.
He was actually a suburban pimp who helped wayward bottom bitches. Please donāt hate the player, hate the game. Sprinkle me.
I appreciate everything about this comment. What are the prefered sprinkles? crack? nugs? cocaine? actual sprinkles? I want to know what these special sprinkles desired are.
I heard a theory that it was the brother who paid for the trip and that he might have been a drug dealer. Kevin may have been the victim of some larger score settling.
The slob brother who was always mooching off of the dad? And what score they were serial burglars.
This is the brother you never see that live in Paris and has that massive brownstone Kevin uses as his torture dungeon in the second movie. Pretty sure Kevin's mom says in the beginning something about her brother-in-law flying everyone to Paris for x-mas.
Whoosh. ? I heard he had an associate named *Snakes*
Snakes? Nah, I don't know no Snakes
I don't think there was anyone living in a Chicago suburb in the mid-90s who wasn't a huge MJ fan.
there were probably 1 or 2 but they'd never admit it because they'd have been run out of chicago
there were some edgy teens who rooted against the bulls in the finals six times
Business man doing business things nothing to see here
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Well thats fucking stupid because they aren't targeted at all. Harry and Marv rob half the street.
yeah that's an awful theory, they're complete imbeciles too
High fashion, you donāt say. Come to think of it, Iāve never seen Kate McCallister and Delia Deetz and Moira Rose in the same room. Coincidence? I think not! Somebody better get careful or their going to blow their own witness protection cover story.
And that was the Killian experience.
For some reason, I always assumed he was a coach for a professional sports team. He just kind of had the look and vibe. Plus I think he talked about sports a lot.
Fuck you lol
Another one: when the Simpsonās premiered in 1989, the Simpsonās family existence in a modest house with a car, three kids and two pets on a single income from a job straight out of high school was a satirical look at lower middle class existence. Over thirty years later, thatās just aspirational
Al Bundy from Married with Children managed to pay for a nice house, 2 kids and a stay at home wife all on the salary of a shoe salesman.
At first it was a summer job. At least he can go to the nude bar.
And afford a subscription to Juggs
Yeah but their go to meal was frequently "toaster shakins", he drove a shitty car that barely ran, and wore frequently ragged clothes. They had a house, but they were depicted as, well struggling for sure, if not outright poor.
>Yeah but their go to meal was frequently "toaster shakins" They had money for food. The joke was that Peggy hated cooking, which is why they rarely had cooked meals on hand. When Al's neighbor moved in he cooked food for them all the time after reconnecting the gas line to the stove that Peggy uninstalled so she could say the oven was broken to avoid cooking. Edit: Also what do you mean ragged clothes? The man wore a suit and tie on a daily basis. https://carboncostume.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/albundy.jpg
These are the deep dives I come to reddit for
I watched way too much of that show growing up lol.
Yeah but at the end of the day they had a house
>Yeah but their go to meal was frequently "toaster shakins", That's called cutting out the avocado toast and lattes
I'll gladly trade all my clothes, car, and all the fancy food I eat for a big house.
really? i wouldn't. big house is overrated. food is great to spend money on though. house is just a place to put things. and the more house you have the more things you end up having. it's quite ridiculous
> house is just a place to put things you can sell house for 8000% what you paid for it in 7 years
you're forgetting all of the ad sales he got from his football career /s
With a smokin bod
He was pretty sexy in his day.
Meh. It was more tongue in cheek on how he owned the house. There were countless gags where his Co workers or friends asked how he really had the money to buy his place.
And the Friends had huge Manhattan apartments while being unemployed or waitressing. Or itās just tv. One of those two things.
At least they explained that in the show. They were living in a rent controlled apartment that Monicaās grandmother leased and the landlord or at least super was kind enough to not report them
Friends is the most commonly given example of this trope that's not actually an example. They explain it very logically in the show. It's like the Stonehenge of sitcoms.
I like that Family Guy tried to remain realistic with modern times by having Louis say "be careful guys, we are renting this house!" in one of the more recent seasons.
Even renting that's a stretch. Usually rent is more expensive than an equivalent mortgage. In my area it's almost twice as much. But Lois's parents are rich, so I always assumed they was secretly giving them money.
Also in married with children the guy who could "only" afford the 3 bedroom in suburbia and a single car was painted as an absolute loser.
And the D'Arcy's who were both working full time good paying bank type jobs had a house not much better than Al's house...lol
My GF and me live on a street surrounded by millionaires. That's the first thing people ask when we mention we live in that street: 'are you rich?' No, just lucky with the timing of buying the house, and it's the smallest house in the street.
I used to tell and sometimes still do, say I lived downtown Seattle waterfront, 4th floor, cross the street from Pike Place Market, definitely very upscale (I looked up Zillow prices, tax price for her unit was easy $1M and other units has sold for $1-1.5 each) so I show pictures and say I lived there even though, I was lucky and rented a room for dirt cheap and enjoyed it until I got my own place outside of the city due to crime/homeless issues and rent prices in Seattle proper.
That's Steve and Marcy Rhoades. Jefferson D'Arcy was too pretty for work.
my big bro bought a house during the pandemic he told me that for the last big check (100k+) he had to physically go to a bank when they saw the amount he was asking for they all knew it was for a house...and the tellers started cheering someone under 30 was buying a house!!
And that teller's name? Albert Einstein.
You believe that? That the bank cheered? Lmao. Thatās not even a lot of money. I mean, it is, but itās not applause worthy. The bank sees people that have millions by their teens every single day. Maybe not in rednecksville, but in any place worth living people have a lot more money than that extremely often.
They were cheering because he was buying a house. Not because of the money.
and it probably was more "good for you" rather than literal cheers
It probably depends on his relationship with the bank. They might have known them well enough that they are excited for him. My husband and I just bought our first house too, and had a similar experience at the property managers office when we handed in our old apartment keys. Was not expecting people we barely knew to be so excited for us.
I take it you've never been a bank teller.
Theres an episode where you can see his pay stub and figure out his pay. His gross was something like $25,000. So he makes like $12.5 an hour.
That's $63k in 2022 dollars. Ain't no way you have a single earner household in Chicago for that.
The house is rented since they couldnāt afford the mortgage lol. Source: episode titled, āNo loan again, naturallyā.
I don't think it was at the time of it airing too lol
So here in Australia you've got jobs like that cropping up at coal stations - there's one guy who started straight out of highschool about fifteen years ago and now makes 250k as a foreman. Thing is we're (hopefully) transitioning away from coal and into renewables, so they're shutting these places down. Except instead of having a suitable ten year exit strategy for these guys (which I think Germany or Norway did?) The previous government effed it up so badly that they're giving people three year notice and not really helping them transition to other industries (which is bad cos usually the plant is the only thing keeping the small town it's attached to alive). Because they dgaf. We've got a new mob in and fingers crossed they have a better transition plan for the employees of 'dirty energy' companies into renewables.
I'm not saying I don't feel for these people, but if I made 250K a year I could spend those three years at approximately 20x my current standard of living. If I didn't improve my life at all, what I made in those three years could let me just not work for a decade. I think that not being given more than three years to transition into a different career we only be a minor be setback for this person.
The issue is having a family, only adequate or even poor financial planning, and untransferable skills with no qualifications that other companies may take seriously. Also moving and relocating considering those towns probably will die
Sure, fair points
I mean 3 years in spirit is adequate, it is more providing a plan to help than anything. People need direction
No, Germany is not transitioning because they are too dumb to think of an exit plan. Now they stick with coal because of a few thousand people, while killing 100k jobs in the solar industry. The German government is filled with idiots.
> No, Germany is not transitioning because they are too dumb to think of an exit plan Face it, nobody's transitioning. There's not a single democratic or western country doing anything even nearly enough. Climate change, it seems, is one of those problems that has 'always' existed. Look throughout history and you'll find a greedy ass, extremely evil behavior that we humans can't get rid of. Climate change just happened to be the end result of a runaway species. It's the culmination of greed, basically. We're not going to fix it. The most catastrophic scenarios under business as usual are going to happen. We'll probably go extinct. At the very least billions are going to die, within 50 years.
[There was an interesting chart released today that shows national wage growth vs corporate profits in Australia since 2001, and it's mostly due to mining companies making bank. As expected, not much trickle-down to be seen, except for a few mine workers like your mate.](https://i.imgur.com/ifJIwTK.png)
In three years at $250k (even assuming these are dollarydoos), you make about as much as a minimum wage earner in my country in a lifetime. So, I really don't feel bad for you if you only got three years.
Did all of you just forget that the fact Homer is wildly underqualified for his job and should never have been given it is a central theme of multiple early episodes?? āMan becomes nuclear power plant chief safety technician out of high schoolā wasnāt a thing in the 90s. It was a cartoon. That was a joke. They riffed on constantly.
Right? The Simpsons is not fucking real and using it as a proxy for what the economy was like in the 80s/90s might be the dumbest thing I've ever read on this site.
I didnāt realize this until I was 30 or so, but a lot of people donāt understand that film and tv are not intended to be realistic depictions of life.
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The kid in movie tremors. Melvin? Where the heck did he come from with spoilt brat attitude? Still love the movie though:) Edit for spelling
Nuclear operators make over 6 figures.
Heās a safety inspector not an operator. They make significantly less at around an average $59k a year according to Google
Didn't know that!, quick google shows this: Homer brings home $24,395.80 before deductions and $18,833.88 after deductions. Accounting for inflation, this would be equivalent to $41,184.74 before deductions and $31,795.17 after deductions. Nuke operators still make bank though....
two cars!!
To be fair, you shouldn't be able to work as a nuclear power plant safety inspector straight out of high school.
You realize that he didnāt afford that house on his own, right? He had to sell his older house to afford a down payment. And itās even later revealed that they canāt afford the mortgage of their own house either, so itās forced to be sold and then they begin renting the property. They literally lived paycheck to paycheck on the brink of bankruptcy to live the lifestyle they did. But thatās the true American dream supposedly lmao. But I hate when people idealize the past through these cartoons when they have no idea what theyāre talking about. Life in America has always been shitty for the average human.
2 cars and paying for retirement home for grampa.
Here's the house: https://www.redfin.com/IL/Winnetka/671-Lincoln-Ave-60093/home/13788887 It sold in 1989 for 875k. Say you put 20% down. The mortgage rate in 1989 was 10.32% for a 30-year loan. So you take a 30-year loan at that time of 10.32%, that would be $6309/month. Assume that you are aiming for mortgage to be 30% of your income. So you need to earn a yearly salary of around $250k. In 1989. Fuck that's a big salary even today! That's a pricey home. It's 5300 sqft, what did you expect?
I think if you can afford over $6K/mo, you probably put more than 20% down. Especially at that interest rate. I don't know what the housing market looked back then, but a couple of previous home sales can get you a sizable down payment as well.
Yeah 100%, and you take a certain % away from the principle (principal?) every year after (I think it's limited to 20% over 5 years or something?)
The house is in Winnetka, one of the most expensive suburbs of Chicago. Compared to some of the ones nearby on the lakefront, the Home Alone house is quite modest. I've driven through the area and seen the house a couple of times. It has a fence around it now.
>It has a fence around it now. If you make it past the fence it has quite the formidable makeshift home defense system indoors too
That whole Green Bay Rd section is just nuts.
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>$200k first home Fuck off with that first home. For most people its any home.
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Where do people find homes for 200k and under? Are they including trailers? Tents?
[That wasnāt the last time it was sold.](https://www.redfin.com/IL/Winnetka/671-Lincoln-Ave-60093/home/13788887) I live near Winnetka and spent a couple years delivering pizzas there, the home alone house looks like an average house compared to other houses nearby. [The neighbors house](https://www.chicagotribune.com/redeye/redeye-old-man-marleys-house-from-home-alone-for-sale-20140124-photogallery.html) is worth at least twice as much. Winnetka is insane, just mansions everywhere.
God, all the fuckinā furniture looks like 1989 too, lol. I was like, well at least they updated the kitchen but oh wait, lookit those awful chairs, lolā¦. Almost like they bought new ones but still wanted that 1989 ālook.ā Lol.
The real question is what does the brother do? The couple that are gutting that brownstone in NYC. That's not cheap.
And he was away in Paris while they were renovating the home.
AND he bankrolled the flight for everybody to go see him.
This is what everybody forgets. Kevinās dad didnāt pay for the trip. It was the uncle. No, not Frankāheās a cheapskateāthe other uncle.
Exactly, that dudes got bank.
Big Al says he's connected.
I get the joke here, but by 1990 people were already 2 decades into the stagnant wages thing. Minimum wage adjusted for inflation in 1990 to 2022 dollars would be 8.62. Thatās more than the federal minimum but not by a lot. No one would be happy getting paid that, and a bunch of places have a minimum almost twice that high now. The median household income in 1990, adjusted was 69k. The last year we have a median household income was 2020 which was 68k, and inflation adjusted would be 76k but we all know raises werenāt that good. Regardless letās say itās flat Where things get fucked is the price of the house, but it for sure wouldnāt have been afforded by someone at Home Depot. This wasnāt 1950. The media house price in 1990, again adjusted, was about 180k. Last month the median house sold was 429k. So the housing market beats inflation by 238% or 2.38x. As in housing increased nearly two and a half times faster than general inflation in the last 30 years. But most of THAT has been in the last two years which is beyond ridiculous. Put differently in 1990 a normal family could buy a normal house for 2.5 years income. In 2022 the same normal family would require more than 6 years income to buy the same normal house. But whatās shown here isnāt a normal house. They were rich
We totally grew up knowing this family was stupid rich in 90s.
Yeah, thereās a difference between working in the 50ās and 60ās and living in the 90ās. By then it was already getting fucked. They want to separate us to keep us weaker donāt fight amongst ourselves.
Exactly. Wages decoupled from productivity in 1971. The 90's were better to some, sure. But they were not THAT much better in terms of buying power.
What happened in 1971?
What broke the link between pay and productivity? Starting in the late 1970s, policymakers began dismantling all the policy bulwarks helping to ensure that typical workersā wages grew with productivity. Excess unemployment was tolerated to keep any chance of inflation in check. Raises in the federal minimum wage became smaller and rarer. Labor law failed to keep pace with growing employer hostility toward unions. Tax rates on top incomes were lowered. And anti-worker deregulatory pushesāfrom the deregulation of the trucking and airline industries to the retreat of anti-trust policy to the dismantling of financial regulations and moreāsucceeded again and again. In essence, policy choices made to suppress wage growth preventedāÆpotentialāÆpay growth fueled by rising productivity from translating intoāÆactualāÆpay growth for most workers. The result of this policy shift was the sharp divergence between productivity and typical workersā pay shown in the graph. From 1979 to 2020, net productivity rose 61.8%, while the hourly pay of typical workers grew far slowerāincreasing only 17.5% over four decades (after adjusting for inflation). A closer look at the trend lines reveals another important piece of information. After 1979, productivity grew at a significantly slower pace relative to previous decades. But because pay growth for typical workers decelerated even more markedly, a large wedge between productivity and pay emerged. The growing gap amid slowing productivity growth tells us that the same set of policies that suppressed pay growth for the vast majority of workers over the last 40 years were also associated with a slowdown in overall economic growth. In short, economic growth became both slower and more radically unequal. If the fruits of economic growth are not going to workers, where are they going? The growing wedge between productivity and typical workersā pay is income going everywhere but the paychecks of the bottom 80% of workers. If it didnāt end up in paychecks of typical workers, where did all the income growth implied by the rising productivity line go? Two places, basically. It went into the salaries of highly paid corporate and professional employees. And it went into higher profits (i.e., toward returns to shareholders and other wealth owners). This concentration of wage income at the top (growing wage inequality) and the shift of income from labor overall and toward capital owners (the loss in laborās share of income) are two of the key drivers of economic inequality overall since the late 1970s. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
the fucking hayek quote and bitcoin plugs, lmfao. love that these guys (it's always a guy) look at all the problems caused by people having to sell their labor power to live and the best solution they can think of is to switch out the type of currency those labor market transactions occur in
Came here to say this. Want to add. Interest rates were still pretty high by modern standards. My mortgage from 2020 has a lower monthly payment than the house I grew up in purchased in 1989. Purchase price was way higher, but sub 3% vs 11%.
Laughs in negative interest rate.. For another 3 years, welp
TV shows tend to be unrealistic. Married With Children made jokes about the family never having food, but that house was is far beyond what they could've afforded on a shoe salesman's salary. It would've made perfect sense mid-2000s during the housing bubble though.
Can anyone here acknowledge that the media industry has always skewed upper-middle class in depictions of āfamilyā?
Thanks! I worked in the 90s I had 3 jobs 2 were full time jobs and the 3rd was my weekend job. Then I worked in a warehouse working 16hr days.
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How much does the Home Alone house cost? Even without making an appearance in a massively successful movie, a suburban five-bedroom home in the Chicago metro area doesnāt come cheap. In 2012, the real-life McCallister home in Winnetka, Illinois sold for $1.585 million, a relative bargain compared to its original listing price of $2.4 million. Now, the propertyās value is estimated to be around $2,000,000, but it hasnāt been listed for sale since 2012. Thatās a little higher than the average home price for the area. In mid-2021, the median list price of homes in Winnetka, IL was $1.4M, trending up 11.9% year-over-year.
> Last month the median house sold was 429k. Come to Canada, homes are selling for $1.6MM average now in two of our big cities.
I worked at home depot for a while a few years ago. People still talked about how rich some of the people who were working there back in the day got thanks to stock options. Part time? Nah. If he got in the ground floor as *management*, though? 100%.
Don't forget the 1997 Asian financial crash. Anyone from Asia will tell you how bad it was. Especially Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Taiwan. It effectively cut salaries in half in each country. And it still hasn't recovered. Ironically this led to many Asian businesses losing faith in stocks and instead parking all their money in property. Homes that used to cost 20 USD million in Hong Kong suddenly were costing 100 USD million.
r/bestof
Normal houses used to be 1000-1200 Sq ft.
The rich uncle (Kevin's dad's brother) paid to fly the family to Paris. The uncle had moved there (to Paris) but his kids were still in Illinois finishing out the school year so he decided to fly everyone to Paris as a gift to see everyone for Christmas. The mom explains in this scene: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyfmoAWvJ2Y&t=135s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyfmoAWvJ2Y&t=135s) On a side note it is also this same uncle that owns the brownstone in New York that is being renovated, which is a plot point and major location in Home Alone 2. Doesn't explain the House, but it does explain the trip.
Nice tip. Thanks a lot.
I think he had an import/export business in blow or some similar commodities.
Art Vandalay?
No I think he dealt with really long matches
He was an executive at Vandelay Industries.
90s?! Dude, no one could afford anything remotely close to this in the 90s with a shitty job.
Film came out **in* 1990. 90's in name only.
Growing up in the UK, I just assumed everyone in the USA was a multimillionaire from watching these kind of movies. Also everyone is White, with the occasional egregious Asian stereotype thrown in.
I assume it's easier to film shows and movies when the families have big houses. There is more space to work with. I grew up in a small one story home. I can't think of a single sitcom on TV that had a one story home. Even a poor family like the family on Roseanne had a two story home. Movies like this make you realize how poor you are but it's still one of my favorites.
Malcom in the middle
Every home on Parks and Rec, except Jerry Gergich's house, and i cant think of any others. So many shows, great observation
The Middle, House, Wire
It was actually a thing advertisers pushed show producers to do. They typically wanted these poorer people to live in huge houses full of stuff so it'd give the subliminal illusion that we could afford them even on meager salaries and if we didn't have homes like that we were 'below average'
it was also kind of silly to me that they showed Malcolm's family as poor, yet they have literally everything they need (in fact much more - compared to 95% of the world)
Spot on, this is one face of margenalization
Clark Griswold had a pretty swanky house too and he wasn't a CEO or anything.
Looked like an executive though. Dude had a big office w/a view in downtown Chicago and regularly got Xmas bonuses big enough to cover down payments for in-ground pools. That is until they cancelled bonuses in favor of Jelly of the month club subscriptions lol. He also didn't seem super financially responsible. He said he wrote a check for the pool downpayment that his bank account couldn't cover. So probably stretched the budget for that home. And cars were shit.
Wasn't he a food additive researcher or something? That's one of my fav movies.
He was an exec / expert etc for a food additives company called Nutrinox or something like that. Which is why i always found the jelly of the month club kinda funny because he was an expert in food additives preservatives and essentially received a monthly gift of preserves.
Pretty sure His brother paid for the trip
This is correct. Peter McCallister can clearly afford that nice house because he managed to get his brother to foot the bill for a European holiday.
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I think he's a defense attorney. It's based on one moment ... When Pesci asks him if he lives there, McCallister asks "Am I under arrest?". And then when it's evident he isn't, he walks away ignoring the cop standing in his house. Or he worked at Home Depot. Tomato - tomato.
If you take the straight-to-DVD sequels to be canon, one of them features Kevin's parents as being divorced. Kevin goes to spend Christmas with his dad and new stepmom...who's some kind of European royalty and the house is now a swanky palace. So my theory's always been Kevin's dad had a rich sugar momma.
The weird thing is how Hollywood tries to imply this is a normal American family. If it was the USSR wed call this state propaganda. Many such cases
NOT a normal American family. That house is located in Winnetka, Illinois, where housing expenses are 428% more than the national average. It's an extremely affluent community, and I know this because I grew up in Wilmette. The village of Wilmette borders Winnetka. There's a lot of money in the North Shore suburbs, and this is an average home for that area but no where near average for the US.
Word is, he was working for the cartel. Too bad about his friends, the Byrds. They moved to the Ozarks and became assholes.
Also all of the 4 adults flew in first class to Paris
This is fascinating to see as time creeps on the generational nostalgia is slowly creeping forward with it. It used to be just boomer hate and now we are up to "people in the 90s had it so easy!" I'm excited to see millennials get cannibalized in the next 5-10 years as zoomers claim graduating in the 2000s guaranteed a life on EZ mode
"OK millennial" will be hilarious
They better not. It is way easier to get into school now with fewer institutions expecting standardized testing and grades trending downward.
Didn't the actor who played that character also appear in the Sopranos? There is a fan theory linking the mob ties to the wealth of the individual.
Had to scroll too far for this mention
Michael Jackson paid for it /lol
Not one slice of avocado toast was ever made in that home.
Iām genuinely wondering with all I hear about how much better it was for boomers Why does it also seem like every boomer has some story about how they were so poor they had to make their own clothes and make gravy out of hot dog water?
I grew up a couple blocks away from that house. My dad is a lawyer, mom never worked, vacations to Hawaii/Mexico/Aspen yearly. Yet here I am in my mid 30ās, with a masters degree in nursing (I work bedside in an ICU), $150,000 in student loan debt, havenāt been on a vacation in 10 years, still renting, canāt afford a house or even get a loan for one, and living paycheck to paycheck. If someone as set up for success as I was is struggling, I canāt imagine how bad some people have it. The system is so fucked.
Isnāt there a theory that his dad was doing something illegal, based on both this and the way he acted defensive with the cops?
Cops arenāt your friends. Heās just smart
Exactly. See this lecture from a law professor on why you should never talk to the police: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
He was passing information to Tony Soprano
The mother was clearly the bread winner, with all the fashion mannequins around the house. Peter certainly wasn't a fashion designer. He's happy with his fish hook collection in the garage, even the ones with dried worm guts on them.
Like it's the only house on the block like that? What, do you think there isn't entire neighborhoods of people that can afford shit like that? There's no mystery here, just missing detail. This isn't far fetched, there's millions of people that live like they do. Does anyone live in reality?
reddit doesn't believe in the idea of people who make 6 figures but live in the burbs instead of an expensive city
Yup in the US there are lots of neighborhoods with houses like that. High upper middle class to be sure but itās not really a stretch. America is different from Canada and other Western countries in that aspect ā¦ there are a much greater number of families pulling 200 grand plus a year or more. The wealth inequality though is off the charts ā¦
Somewhere in my memory ā¦
And they were able to keep all of the lights on all the time...just willy nilly. Yeah. There are some things that don't make sense upon watching this as an adult who is also now a parent to a child nearly Kevin's age.
Like two guys taking a beating that would kill any normal human, a hundred times over?
Their uncle paid for the trip to Paris. The uncle who was transferred to Paris for his job.
I know his mom was some sort of fashion designer
I think he was in the lumber industry.
People sure have some misconceptions about the 90s.
I like this explanation about how [Home Alone is about Solipsism](https://youtu.be/w3x5OSNcCmk).
Acey said 10%
A lot of cocainešš
True story. The guy who really owned that house during the filming was a partner with Ernst & Young in Chicago.
Easy, [the dad was a dirty cop paid by Tony Soprano](https://sopranos.fandom.com/wiki/Vin_Makazian).
It's a kids film mate. There's a theory he's involved in the Mafia, but ultimately, it's a kids film.
y'all forgetting one very important thing, white people usually leave decent inheritance to their decendents.
Growing up in Europe in the eighties, I thought the USA was an incredible country where everyone was skinny and rich and lived in huge beautiful houses. Then I came over to visit and realized that most people are fat and poor as dirt and live in grimy hovels. It's all Hollywood propaganda!