This article is surreal and out of touch

[jimbogumbo]

I think it is pretty bad for everyone below the median yearly income and for those above who are overextended with debt. We now live in a high COL state to be near younger grandchild. My wife is trying to get me to agree to purchasing a cheaper second home in first stay to take care of aging parents more and visit older grandkids. Sorry, took a bath on a house "investment" for then young granddaughters to have a house to grow up in. That was 2007. A divorce for daughter and the subsequent selling of the property several years later at a roughly 400% negative ROI has suggested to me it is a bad idea.Trying to make sure we stay out of category two above.

[kaysixteen]

Us Gen Xers did not even *have* backpacks in school.   Books can be carried, though I do admit to stuffing them in my gym bag in hs (do kids even have gym clothes and change into them in schools nowadays?).   If a backpack is needed, one bought last year ought to be plenty good enough.  Those with $100k incomes, even in Inflationary America 2022, are not needy.

[ergative]

If a backpack is needed, one bought last year ought to be plenty good enough. 

My Jansport rarely lasted more than one year before disintigrating.

Those with $100k incomes, even in Inflationary America 2022, are not needy.

Agreed. Although, with five kids, in Inflationary America 2022, I could imagine them occasionally bumping elbows with kind of financial budgeting requirements that dominate every minute of truly needy people's lives.

When we first moved to our current place, I was at the bottom of the pay scale and Absolutive's teaching credential hadn't transferred over yet, so he couldn't work. We were not truly needy--we had savings--but I was keenly aware of those months where we depleted our savings a bit more, and a bit more again, because the monthly income didn't quite cover expenses.

[kaysixteen]

I have seen a bunch of headlines to articles (cannot actually stomach reading any of them) recently to the effect that many employers are now trying to force employees who have gotten used to pandemic working from home to go back to the office, and said employees are rebelling.   Low wage retail 'essential worker' types, like underemployed humanities PhDs, never got Day 1's worth of work at home time, and had to, for that low wage, schlep on into work every day, during the raging pre-vax pandemic era, risking life and limb.   My sympathy for spoiled sots who now do not want to return to the office is, well... almost as great as it is for $100k moms who whine about not having $25 for a new backpack for junior every year (BTW, even in Inflationary America 2022, you can still get a serviceable backpack at Wallyworld for noticeably less than this).

[Hegemony]

I am in total agreement with people who don't want to return to in-office work for various reasons. One is that some of us have health conditions that mean sitting around large offices with dozens of unmasked people is no safer than it was a year ago. The second is that commuting is a bear, and in high-cost-of-living areas, a lot of people are commuting from the lower-cost areas they can afford to live in. When I rode along with a friend in the Bay Area, I was horrified to see what a long commute she had come to see as inevitable. The extra pollution from all those cars and the cost of gas are extra aggravations as well as the dispiriting waste of time. She has now been working from home happily, saving 15 hours of commuting time a week, and hurray for her.

The inflation of middle-class life, though, to the point where everybody has to have all-new everything every school year, and decorate their dorm rooms like magazine spreads, and not disgrace themselves by taking an older car to college — yeah, color me old-fashioned and cantankerous on that front.

[marshwiggle]

Us Gen Xers did not even *have* backpacks in school.   Books can be carried, though I do admit to stuffing them in my gym bag in hs (do kids even have gym clothes and change into them in schools nowadays?).   If a backpack is needed, one bought last year ought to be plenty good enough.  Those with $100k incomes, even in Inflationary America 2022, are not needy.

This is the comment I found bizarre:

The younger children are inheriting siblings' backpacks and desks that still have life in them.

Families get new desks for their kids every year?????

[mahagonny]

Again, there ae two questions for me. (1) How bad is it now and (2) how bad will it get. So you don't have to be at the stage of having to pay your heating and electricity bills late just before they get turned off to be legitimately worried about what's coming. Especially if you are one of those (like me) who is worried that our current POTUS is senile, narcissistic personality disorder afflicted, and backed by people with Trump derangement syndrome. Bottom line, the rate of inflation and indifference to it are very scary even if not yet crippling.

[ergative]

I have seen a bunch of headlines to articles (cannot actually stomach reading any of them) recently to the effect that many employers are now trying to force employees who have gotten used to pandemic working from home to go back to the office, and said employees are rebelling.   Low wage retail 'essential worker' types, like underemployed humanities PhDs, never got Day 1's worth of work at home time, and had to, for that low wage, schlep on into work every day, during the raging pre-vax pandemic era, risking life and limb.   My sympathy for spoiled sots who now do not want to return to the office is, well... almost as great as it is for $100k moms who whine about not having $25 for a new backpack for junior every year (BTW, even in Inflationary America 2022, you can still get a serviceable backpack at Wallyworld for noticeably less than this).

I am also sympathetic to the front-line workers who were hailed as 'essential' but still only paid minimum wage and got sick and died because of the forced exposure. That was unjust, and a profound failure on the part of society to protect and value its citizens.

I don't, however, see what that injustice has to do with the people who do have the option of working from home. Do you also think that people shouldn't get pavloxid now because two years ago other people didn't get it and died? Denying one person the chance for a better quality of life because that same chance was denied to other people is only enforcing a weird kind of 'fairness' that is satisfied by bringing everyone down to the worst option, rather than trying to raise other people up to the best option.

In addition to increasing rush hour traffic, pollution, etc., crowded offices spread disease, and sick office workers still have to buy groceries, where they might infect the checkout clerks all over again.

[ciao_yall]

A coworker of mine said her kids LOVED their older cousins' hand-me-downs. They saw it as a rite of passage that they were becoming "big kids."

But seriously, I don't recall buying school supplies. My school had pencils, pens, paper, etc for everyone.

[marshwiggle]

A coworker of mine said her kids LOVED their older cousins' hand-me-downs. They saw it as a rite of passage that they were becoming "big kids."

But seriously, I don't recall buying school supplies. My school had pencils, pens, paper, etc for everyone.

Same here. As I recall, any "back to school" shopping happened after school began, if and when teachers sent home a list of specific items needed for a course, such as a geometry set for math or pencil crayons for geography that would involve map-making. There was no "generic" purchase, even of clothing, that I remember. (And similar when I was a parent; I certainly didn't run out to purchase new wardrobes for my kids each fall.)

[kaysixteen]

I do not, up to a point, mind people working from home, if they have the health conditions or family with conditions that make it a good idea, but in Vaxxed America this is less needful.   But:

1) it is certainly true that people working from home at jobs that used to be on-site can, and many will, simply do less work than those in the office.   This is more or less parallel to what we have sadly discovered with regard to remote, virtual schooling-- we are simply avoiding dealing with the lost year aspect of k12 kids' education during the pandemic, esp for non-affluent kids/ school districts, and this is another way the lower economic orders are screwed over.   It is not hard to see why employers would want to say enough here, because, well, it is much less dangerous to go in to work than it was in April 2020.
2) It is unacceptable for those not wanting to go into the office again to whine about this requirement (esp if they have no health concerns undergirding this desire), and unseemly to do so.

BTW, did anyone catch the part in the OP's quoted story, where the schoolteacher said that she had customarily bought school supplies for her students, but inflation makes her unable to do so this year?  That teachers are expected to do this is appalling-- can anyone imagine a college professor buying school supplies for his students, or faulted when he cannot afford to do that?  But it is also true, as marshwiggle noted, that for most of us Xer types (and olders), we can recall going to school where, esp at elem school level, the school itself bought these supplies for students.   Schools/ school districts, following antitax policies, have largely outsourced to parents many things we used to take for granted that they would provide.   Another way the lower orders are taking it on the chin...

[AvidReader]

Same here. As I recall, any "back to school" shopping happened after school began, if and when teachers sent home a list of specific items needed for a course, such as a geometry set for math or pencil crayons for geography that would involve map-making. There was no "generic" purchase, even of clothing, that I remember. (And similar when I was a parent; I certainly didn't run out to purchase new wardrobes for my kids each fall.)

When I taught secondary school about 10 years ago, the teachers were expected to make a list at the end of each year detailing what a student in each class would need for the next year; these lists were then distributed to all students but also the local supply stores. Walmart in particular would print them out and have all the lists available at the front of the store for at least all of July. So the list might require a "backpack" (but it of course wasn't required to be new) and a "3-ring binder" (again, needn't be new) but also some teachers would require very specific things that didn't necessarily match the previous year's (e.g. not "two pens" but "one blue pen, one red pen"; not "3-ring binder" but "1.5-inch 3-ring binder with clear front pocket"). And lots of things wear out; 10 years ago, personal dry-erase markers were all the rage, but most of them lasted only a month or two. I can't imagine more than a few survived from one school year to the next.

AR.

[Parasaurolophus]

Families get new desks for their kids every year?????

I missed that!

Old desks are better anyway.

[marshwiggle]

2) It is unacceptable for those not wanting to go into the office again to whine about this requirement (esp if they have no health concerns undergirding this desire), and unseemly to do so.

I've read a few articles recently about companies wanting to get employees back in person, but surprisingly they seem to say very little about productivity; they talk more about "creativity" and "innovation" inspired by in-person interaction. The writers of the articles often point out the cost of expensive leases on (now mostly vacant) office space. The point is, if productivity was suffering in a big way, they'd be shouting it from the rooftops and would have a much better case for bringing people back.

[jimbogumbo]

Most recent studies indicate workers are more productive at home: https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivity-statistics/