It’s the silent suck on the wallets that get you. Everyone budgets for food, shelter, but very little attention is paid to the dailies, the subs, the fees, the lattes.
No. It's not the subscriptions or lattes. Those are markets that have real competition.
It's the sectors of the economy that have become consolidated. Food, insurance, banking, healthcare. There is very little competition in those markets and prices are artificially high because huge conglomerates manage to siphon off a larger and larger stake, while preventing small players from offering an alternative either through market power or regulation.
Unlike subscriptions, it does not show up on your credit or debit card statement because the price of everything just goes up by a little percentage here and there.
By that logic I suppose Rent or Mortgage is also a subsciption. But not many people can "just buy a house", so I don't know what action you are suggesting.
I cancelled every sub except for like, Youtube and Rider over 2025. No more Amazon, no more media services, no more gym membership, no more premium news.
I saved $300/month at best. Rent is 2200 a month. Yes, clearly that stabucks latte is what's doing me in.
I call it Rent-seeking, of which, subscription fees are just a part.
The biggest issue here is that the "meta" of capitalism has turned to toll booths and rent collection. This is why people say that American capitalism is turning into neo-feudalism, the people making the money are not the people producing things of value, its the landlords, asset holders, and tech companies that can continuously tax the peasantry.
> the landlords, asset holders, and tech companies
Largest household expense after housing is usually (sometimes indirect) health insurance premiums. For a family of 4, this is running on the order of $30k annually now. That's creeping up on half the median household income (which often requires two workers).
Hiding this very real expense in tax deductions for employers obscures the fact of just how large it is.
If yes, then conceptually we're on the same page, if no, then I think this is wildly off base.
If rent is not a subscription fee, then you're probably talking about virtual goods like entertainment and games. I think consumers get a ton of value from digital entertainment and media, the problem is that literally everything else in the physical world feels like it's getting more expensive and falling apart.
Young people have virtually limitless virtual entertainment and media options. But they have almost no options when it comes to affordable housing or transportation.
The cost of housing has outpaced inflation every year for 2 decades (basically the entire lifetime of Gen-Z) and owning a home feels more and more out of reach every year. The average age of first time homebuyers is now over 40 years old, and the average age of all homebuyers is over 50.
The average cost of a new car in the US is now over $50,000. Public transit projects if they're being built at all are years behind schedule and billions over budget, and existing infrastructure is falling apart. This is in a time where wage growth has stagnated.
It's completely understandable why young people feel they're getting a raw deal, and wealthier and older people seem more out of touch every year. Actual physical needs : housing, transportation, healthcare and food feel viscerally more expensive every year.
Capitalism seems to only want to address these needs by pushing more and more substitution of virtual entertainment: Have more games, more apps, more stuff on social media, more cat videos, AI generated content in endless quantity.
It's almost like the internet is the Heroin of our age, a drug that keeps both the stock market and individual consumers high so they're less conscious of how much everything in the physical world sucks more every day.
TLDR; if you're founding a company do a hardware startup. We're maxxed out in how much our digital services can improve our lives.
It’s the silent suck on the wallets that get you. Everyone budgets for food, shelter, but very little attention is paid to the dailies, the subs, the fees, the lattes.