Golf priced me out of playing a few years ago as well. I remember when the county courses were $20 for twilight play, which for the DC area is good. I could walk the entire 18, or if not all of it most of it, before sunset. Now they want $40+, I’m not paying that to walk and take the chance I might not get it all in. When I started seeing 70-80+ for a round I pretty much just stopped.
Sporting events and concerts I stopped going to as well due mostly to the price. If it’s going to cost me 40-50 for a concert I’m not going to want to pay the 15-20 to park on top of it.
I have season tickets for the Green Bay Packers (they’ve been in my family for three generations). When I was in high school (~1980), one of those tickets had a face value of $20. There’s been inflation between then and now, but the BLS inflation calculator suggests that a $20 item in 1980 should cost about $57 today. The current face value on my tickets (the exact same seats as in 1980) is $97…and I suspect that Packer tickets are more “reasonably” priced than most.
Sailing isn’t that bad; you can buy a used Sunfish for $1000 (or less on eBay). They’re pretty much indestructible. A new one is about $4k, but they hold their resale and other than an occasional waxing, they require no maintenance.
I stopped going to concerts because of the pricey tickets. Movie theater tickets have nearly priced themselves beyond what I can easily afford.
I don’t think car trips have been mentioned? We used to routinely take trips to Nashville (350 miles each way) or Dallas (300 miles) for a weekends fun. Even at $3 a gallon thats just not practical anymore. A 700 mile round trip is 45 gallons of gas for me.
Oh God yes. Football tickets are crazy expensive. It’s like buying tickets to an A-list concert. Baseball is by far the most affordable sport to attend. I can buy a Tigers ticket in the bleachers for under twenty bucks.
As a quick fix-up, perhaps. Vinyl is the standard outer finish for houses in the northeast, replacing (now-)hideously expensive wood and composite siding. I did my ten-year maintenance on our vinyl this summer - had it power-washed and fixed two small impact breaks.
I’d also question how “affordable” quality siding ever was - it was cheaper than most other forms of reskinning a house, but replacing a weathered wooden exterior has no cheap options. Siding sales are also the poster child for hidden-costs and killer contract sales, and promoting it as a cheap option is part of the scam.
I recall reading that airplanes were affordable to the middle class for a time in the 1950s, and it was a big issue with an increase in fly-in traffic in what became the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.
The idea of the middle class owning a “cabin up north” has pretty much ended too. With the real estate boom prices exploded and then the bust left a lot of people underwater in their houses. I’m actually glad my family never bought a cabin though, it’s enough work maintaining one house and I’m not locked into one place to vacation too.
Even up to 1982. (See the link in the OP.) Insurance costs climbed to the point where, combined with 8-figure settlements even when the airplane makers weren’t to blame for a crash, prompted Cessna and others to stop building piston-engine singles. The General Aviation Revitalization Act reduced the exposure to the companies, and they started building again. But they were only building about a tenth of the planes they did previously, and demand was high. People were shocked when a Cessna 172 Skyhawk was priced at $175K. Pretty high for an airplane that had been in production since 1957 and the development costs had long since been recouped. Nowadays, you’re looking at about a third of a million and $175K doesn’t look so bad. (Actually, $175K would not be too far out of the ballpark today. Still too much, but not egregious.) But yeah, a four-place ‘family plane’ was attainable to the middle-class wage-earner until the industry came to a virtual halt.
I heard on NPR that the ‘cabin in the woods’ is becoming affordable again.
I think you misheard. They said that the improving economy will lead to more Americans being able to afford Cabin in the Woods as a RedBox movie rental.
Minor league baseball is great. I love going to Staten Island Yankees games. Super cheap. The stadium is small, so every seat is great. It’s a really nice stadium, too. No long lines for beer and hot dogs.
Way more fun than going to a Mets game or a Yankees game.
Football has pre-season games and the tickets are mostly worthless. You can’t have full speed demo games in football with your stars – too much risk of injury – so pre-season is an inexpensive ticket for a sub-par product.
Baseball has spring training games which are fun and festive and relatively cheap but they take place in FL or AZ. The season is just too long to have extra demo games and there’s a huge number of minor league teams to watch for cheaper tickets and getting closer to the action.
Hockey and basketball also have a shorter pre-season but the demand for the games is fairly low as well. People want to watch games that matter. There are also minor league hockey teams to watch - those games are a lot of fun too.
One of the thing that made me pass up on getting my Bills season tickets (other than they suck lately) is that I fell ripped off that I had to buy the two pre-season (exibition) games at full value of the regular season prices. Watching guys play who will get cut and you’ll never hear from again is unexciting at best, tedious most times. The “stars” are out there a few minutes and being careful not to get hurt. I had trouble giving my seats away a few times.
AAA Baseball here in Buffalo, box seats this summer for a Friday night game were $12. I’ve found a new hobby and plan on going to a ton of games next summer. Even if the $7.00 beers were a turnoff.
Shhh – don’t tell them that. My now-grown kids still wax nostalgic for the little ski hill an hour outside of town with four runs and a couple of boxes and rails to grind.
(Where dad could watch them taking jumps from the cozy bar with kahlua hot chocolate)
They loved it all the way through high school, and season passes were cheap if you bought them before November.
But even compared to budget skiing, their other ‘sports’ (skateboarding, running, kayaking, volleyball) were still 1/10 the price.
Well, if you’re getting … what? Rechecking math… 15.5 mpg?!? Well, of course that’s not going to be cheap. I just got back from an awesome road trip where we got 38.5 mpg. So we did six days (920 mi) for $77 worth of gas (~24 gal).
But we spent that fuel savings on local microbrews…
Except for the kickoff team. The desperate elan of an on-the-cusp special teams rookie trying to make the team on the basis of one play often affords the sort of explosive violence I abhor. Every time I go, or watch the highlight reel endlessly.
You can’t do real road trips in a fuel efficient vehicle like a Prius. That kills the fun. You have to have a 6 banger with terrible efficiency at least but preferably an 8 banger plus lots of room.
I am glad you had fun but that does not pass the real road-trip smell test. 920 miles in 6 days is only 153 miles a day or just a regular workday commute for many Americans. If you want to do it the real way, you have to shoot for Cannonball Run coast to coast in 5 days or less preferably in a Camaro or a Mustang. Microbrews are straight out too. That is hipster material. You have to go for Budweiser cans ceremoniously tossed out of the window all across the Heartland. Stop in New Orleans, Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon on the way. End up in San Fran. It doesn’t count unless you are missing at least one person you started with when you arrive.
Didn’t Cessna buy the certificate Lancairs? (Columbia’s?).
That gives them a real 4-place plane that the people who want planes are willing to pay - and they get a 300 mph pressurized bullet, not a tin can from the 1950’s.
Add the Citation, and Cessna can do well without the trainer / puddle-jumper market.
LSA is going to be the only game for mid-incomes (where are they, btw?).
At least you no longer need to pretend to build your plane.
