A lot of these boomer “collectibles” 20 years from now will end up in a landfill. Younger generations cannot actually afford that shit even if they wanted to. Those wildly overinflated assets only work if those generations can actually afford it. But while AI is annihilating earning potential of white collar workers, people are not going to buy that shit. Something has to give somewhere, which is why housing sales are in the toilet. Buying overpriced coke bottles or baseball cards is just not going to happen.
This has probably come up in this thread before, but a big one is dinner services. Most people no longer particularly care about having a teapot that matches cups that matches their dinner plates that matches their drinking glasses, in part because most people don't want a big china hutch for the good china that gets used once a year, nor do they have space for a coffee set and a tea set of slightly differently shaped cups.
High quality sets are not themselves without value but the ones that crop up the most are the ugly ones from the 70s-90s. Not cutting edge designs, but a faux historical pastiche that has dated horribly:
I wouldn't particularly mind picking up some ugly dinner plates cheaply, although I don't need the full set, even when entertaining. I'm never going to transfer hot soup into a tureen so people can ladle it out themselves, I'm not going to tip ground coffee into a coffee pot and brew it that way, I can't remember the last time I used a saucer for tea. I don't use sugar bowls or milk jugs. But so often you see job lots of ugly crockery getting listed for several hundred pounds because it was seen as an investment piece (and it was so rarely used it's probably immaculate). For that price you could get a brand new high quality set in a plain or understated style that won't date - and sure, it won't have a matching butter dish and cruet set, but I don't want those, anyway.
The only exception is you do sometimes see this listed by the piece, but I assume they're for older people who want to replace a teacup that they broke so they've still got 8 matching cups in case the Queen comes to tea.
Even upper and upper-middle class people realized that disposable plates and utensils are superior for large family gatherings in every way. It’s about the food and the family not your antiques you’re scared to use.
"Rare" comic books, stamps, coins and other collectibles
It's mas produced crap so it's not rare, bad resell value, not stored in perfect conditions which destroys the value.
The baseball card and stamp market has pretty much collapsed already much to the chagrin of boomers who were too late to liquidate.
I’m still waiting on the firearms market to correct itself. A lot of clueless wives and soyboy children are going to inherit a whole lot of classic Colt revolvers and stuff like HK P7’s. Most of them will have no idea what they’ve got or think guns are icky and sell them for prices far more reasonable than what their obnoxious dads are asking for.
The boomer worship of college will never stop infuriating me. My father recently made a snide comment about how he thought my cousin would have "gotten her act together and went back to school by now". I asked what she was supposed to get a degree in, and what the fuck kind of job she was supposed to get with it. "She could go be a nurse!" I point out my mom was in the hospital for 2 months in 2024 and we saw a grand total of 3 nurses under 30 who were white the entire time. I bring up the tuition page of the local nursing school, and then bring up job listings and physically show the man that what he proposes is that she spend 8 years at least and $$$$$$ of dollars for a $$$$$ career that she won't even be hired in because she's white. WELL SHE SHOULD STILL GO DO IT IT'S BETTER THAN NOT HAVING A DEGREE. He literally thinks she should give up her low-pay but stable job that has allowed her to move out and have her own place to go into debt for a piece of paper. He really thinks she should waste years of her life in diffrent classes finding that magic combination that will finally get her a job that starts out at $35,000 a year and tops out at $90,000 if she's lucky. They refuse to stop living in 1990 and it's absolutely insane.
My parents are boomers but aren’t bad boomers and ever since I got my pharmacy tech license they have a hard on that I should just go to pharmacy school, even though that is 4 years, six figures of tuition, and the possibility of pharmacists not being needed in the future due to AI if the clamps aren’t put on that shit are a possibility. As well, I’d probably have to go to a hospital to work that is surrounded by suburbia development hell, surrounded by McMansion housing developments and cookie cutter homes.
I also am tainted on higher education in general, because I went to school to be a biology teacher and got my masters degree, just to find out that schools would rather hire the cheapest and most economical person they can rather then the most qualified.
Nothing will shatter your heart more than seeing an opportunity for your dream job, you apply, you gather your letters of recommendation, you get interviewed(!), and then you have to wait a month and a half to just find out you didn’t get the job and instead the school merged the leaving teachers class in with another existing teachers class to save money.
I’m honestly just tempted to say fuck it and work in the oil field.
>boomers and shopping at department stores
Ok, you guys triggered this little rant nugget off my head.
One boomer I know lives and breathes department stores.
Buys everyone's gifts at them. Books, toys, tools, clothes.... You name it, it still has the [department store] price tag on it.
Except....Greeting Cards.
Which they get from dollar stores.
I understand that most of us are autists that are probably like "well fuck greeting cards anyway" and I truly empathize.
However 90% of the time dollar store greeting cards look like this View attachment 8573095Shitty art and walls of terrible text View attachment 8573150 The person you're giving this extremely unfunny art/joke would rather you LITERALLY KILL them instead View attachment 8573161You know you can just print a more personalized photo for the person you love right?
Here's the real hack: Department stores. At least where we live, they might be 2x or 3x more expensive, but you're comparing with 5x to 8x the price from more specialty stores. And they are noticeably better than dollar store.
This person basically lives in the department store, and NEVER does this one simple trick to not have to go to another shitty store to save like 3$? It boggles my mind man!
I hold onto most cards that are given to me, but boomers with their cards/thank-you notes are infuriating. They'll go ballistic if you don't participate in this wasteful, typically meaningless gesture.
Years and years ago, my mother was given some bags of kids' hand-me-down clothing by my father's aunt. The aunt was expecting a thank-you to arrive in the mail. When that didn't happen, she threw a huge bitch-fit and acted like my mother was ungrateful and rude. She'd just moved, and had three young children to deal with. Sending cards in the mail was the furthest thing from her mind, especially since phones exist.
Using moms as dumping grounds for your excess stuff isn't worthy of a handwritten thank-you note, I'm sorry. You should be thanking them for taking it off your hands.
When I was in the throes of postpartum depression/psychosis, my grandmother-in-law threw a little party for the baby. It was full of extended, elderly relatives/friends of hers who I didn't know at all. My husband didn't know them either. I thanked them all profusely over and over for attending, buying things for the baby, and so on.
Well, after the party was over, my husband's grandmother gave me a stack of stationary, telling me to send thank-you notes to everyone. In all fairness, I was completely crazy at the time, but my thoughts were, what the actual fuck is wrong with you, you old cunt? You're going to give me a CHORE? While I'm dealing with a NEWBORN?
I was so, so angry. Maybe it's convenient for you 'cause you're a thousand years old, but the world doesn't operate this way anymore. I don't even send birthday messages on Facebook 'cause I'd rather call the person or say it to their face. Asking someone in their early twenties to write out a bunch of notes to people they barely know, deliver it in the mail, forced to use their own postage, is psychotic in how out-of-touch it is. That's not even factoring in the lethal sleep-deprivation I was going through, and an extremely needy baby.
You know what's the worst part? I wasn't able to do it right way, obviously, so this bitch was literally texting me reminders to get it done. I THANKED EVERYONE IN PERSON. I THINK THAT'S MORE MEANINGFUL. I also think it's more meaningful if I do of my own volition, because it was my idea, not because I'm being badgered to.
What I ended up doing was cobbling something halfway personalized in Canva, printing it out, cutting it out, gluing it to the notes, and sending that shit out. I didn't have the bandwidth for anything else.
This makes me come off like the most spoiled person alive, I know, but I don't think my generation values these social rituals anymore, and expecting us to is obnoxious.
It's like boomers can't do any kind deed without it being transactional in some way. It stopped feeling like, "We put this party together because we love your baby" and turned into, "We require tokens of gratitude because we went out of our way for you." Does that make sense?
I'm overthinking it. I know it isn't that deep, I just can't wrap my head around why notes are so important and sacred to them.
The absolute worst boomer mod I've seen to a house is an insulated crawlspace. You may be surprised to learn that the wooden components of a crawlspace are meant to breath so that they don't accumulate moisture. Well, back when I did construction, I got to see a 700k house that an exceptionally retarded pair of boomers decided to "renovate" with an insulated crawlspace. Yes, I'm referring to the sandy underbelly of the house with the sump pump to remove water accumulation. Anyhow, they had the whole thing lined with insulated aluminum foil. A few years later, I heard that the whole place had become termite infested. The first thing the exterminators did was remove the insulation.
OT/ not a boomer (genx), though I confess to cringing at some of the critiques in this thread and have now moved up "appt with financial advisor" on my list of to-dos.... But as someone with an uninsulated, dirt-floored crawl space under part of her house that has had 2 successive years of a frozen main (that fortunately was thawable with a heat gun and an obliging plumber, but still cost a thousand dollars), I am a bit sympathetic to their "but we've got to do something!". I do not have a sump pump. Even without the freezing, that space is ice fucking cold, and the back of the furnace is fully open to it, making the house leak like a sieve. No contractor who's ever been in my house has ever understood it, jyst stuffed insulation over most of the hole so it's a little bit mitigated. And I haven't looked it up, either - but I know that most people don't have furnaces fully open to what is practically the outdoors. And I haven't ever considered something janky like aluminum foil in the crawl space, but I don't know why I'd need that giant hole in my house.
If you've got exposed plumbing in a cold environment, you will want to insulate it and avoid any situations where the water just rests without flowing. Without seeing your home, I wouldn't offer advice beyond suggesting some cheap pipe insulation that you can install yourself. Just tape down the open side and you should see improvement under normal use. The water flowing inside should provide enough heat to prevent freezing. If anything goes wrong, it's easy to rip off.
I don't know if it makes sense for this thread but the subject of tea and other china sets is an interesting topic to me because it's an example of something that used to be a thing people did to try and replicate what the rich/upper class did, which has sort of been lost in translation as the times change. Why do tea cups come with saucers? Because they used to be served tea not at a table but in a parlor, sitting on a sofa or some such, and didn't want to risk spills and crumbs on their clothes. Why a tea pot, why not get it straight from the kettle? Because it was transported away from the kitchen to the parlor or other room for one and tea used to be steeped in the pot, not the cup. Single serve tea bags weren't a thing back then. Of course being a wealthy family these sorts of people would have expensive sets and expensive silverware which needed to be kept organized somewhere but also something which had value, if times got tough you could sell silverware (with actual silver) and actual gold detailed china. And keep in mind you would be entertaining other well to dos, you can't just serve them on any old thing, it would signify you weren't doing as well and had no sophistication!!! So as the middle class grew you'd show off your china sets in a more conspicuous area because it signified something and also because you didn't have a dedicated closet, possibly on a basement level like the "big houses did". So it was kept in a "banquet" in the dining room.
The history of the middle and upper middle class growing and beginning to make attempts at replicating what the very wealthy were doing is a fascinating one. It's why a lot of old victorian homes have side entrances or back doors for seemingly no reason. It was for "the help" but unlike much larger houses they couldn't have a dedicated back entrance/basement level entrance for it that was more out of sight and went straight to the kitchen/servants quarters.
I think a lot of boomers hold on to ideas that used to signify if not being wealthy yourself then being a close approximation. But not only does it no longer translate over, the things do not have any actual value. And they don't seem to get while for a long time these cultural holdovers still meant something but they're finally getting twilighted.
(That said I do have a soft spot for kitschy old kitchen stuff. Especially tea sets. There is something very quaint and cozy about them and they're fun to use on occasion.)
My boomer mother is the same way. She’d send like $5 or $10, put it in some cheap 49 cent Hallmark rip off card to a relative for their birthday and get angry that they didn’t respond with a thank you note. She stopped doing it eventually, thinking that not getting five bucks was a grave insult they’d surely interpret as such.
If a relative did send a thank you letter back, she’d critique how short of a letter it was. She wanted like a couple pages of updates from a ten year old on their lives for five bucks. It was insanity.
the things do not have any actual value. And they don't seem to get while for a long time these cultural holdovers still meant something but they're finally getting twilighted.
The problem is “fine china” was still mass produced. Most “heirlooms” were but like you said, imitated the upper class just enough to where some boomers took it super seriously. I even understand that to some extent but the true delusion is thinking this stuff has any resale value. Boomers conflate sentimentality with external resale value. I get that your depression era great grandmother bought a set and that meant not being dirt floor poor anymore but that does not mean that set has any value to anyone outside of the family. I had boomer relatives try selling that stuff off before and then stomping their feet and getting huffy over a $50 offer when they think it should be worth $5,000.
I get that your depression era great grandmother bought a set and that meant not being dirt floor poor anymore but that does not mean that set has any value to anyone outside of the family. I had boomer relatives try selling that stuff off before and then stomping their feet and getting huffy over a $50 offer when they think it should be worth $5,000.
Lot of boomers didn't "buy" homes, some "rented" them for 90 years and paid upfront.
It's not their land and they're just allowed to live there.
That's what all the squatter panic is about; big corporations like BlackRock noticed they can't legally reclaim their land because of the squatting laws, and spread panic/false squatter stories (or real stories) to change the law.
I hold onto most cards that are given to me, but boomers with their cards/thank-you notes are infuriating. They'll go ballistic if you don't participate in this wasteful, typically meaningless gesture.
My mother would get on me about this as a child/teenager, and I hated this so much. I never wound up doing it, but my mother would continually do it. And I made that same exact "thank everyone in person because it means more" argument as well, though it seemed to go in one ear and out the other. She has stopped doing it after I became an adult.
Thank-you notes remind me of how I feel about greeting cards( and gift cards to some extent), given they're the biggest scam in the world because you're buying someone's prewritten emotions and hope you get it right.
Honestly, I wouldn't doubt most "broke" boomers are that way because Mark/Gerald/David/Susan/Karen/Debra decided to blow their life savings on their 60th birthday trip to Vegas.
The primary driver of me saving and investing starting in my early 20s was boomer tales of woe about how they started saving for retirement in their 50s and how that wasn’t enough to retire at 62. It sounds like a retarded strategy but they really did think they could save for only a few years and have that cover retirement. Muh 401ks have expanded catchup provisions for such people.
This has crossover with the niggercattle finance thread but these fucking boomer morons have also bitched to me about how they have all these useless liabilities like ATVs, RVs, boats, etc. that nobody wants to buy, even at steep discounts. Xers, millennials, and zoomers don’t seem to think a $250k boat that they only take out to a lake a couple times a year is worth it.
Boomers can have some valuable advice when it’s learning from their mistakes.
Boomers are the ones keeping Stephen King and Danielle Steel in print. It irks me.
I go to thrift stores and used bookstores and it's wild how the scarce/expensive shit is always gotten by either boomers or foreigners. I also see a lot of resellers/flippers at my used bookstores and they're so jeet-like.
The closest thing that Xer, millennial, and zoomers participate in is retro game collecting and now that mass layoffs are happening at tech companies, that scene is cooling off. The funko pop shit came and went. Dumb chicks used to collect Stanleys but that has faded away. Even with that, very few seriously thought that a bright pink Stanley or some retarded Labubu is something they can retire on, unlike boomers with baseball cards, coke bottles, and tchotchkes.
Correct. Boomers and their slop collections are fucking hilarious because many die off and they shit is sold for literally pennies on the dollar or trashed because their kids / estates don't want to deal with it
Short list of things boomers think are investments, but are actually liabilities:
China sets and fine dinnerware:
Ugly as shit and nobody wants it.
Summer houses:
Require maintenance, taxes and utilities, it's empty most of the year.
"Rare" comic books, stamps, coins and other collectibles
It's mas produced crap so it's not rare, bad resell value, not stored in perfect conditions which destroys the value.
Antique furniture:
No one cares about your old ass ugly furniture, unless it's something very rare and beautiful no one cares.
Vinyls:
I don't need vinyls when I have the internet.
Classic cars:
They degrade, parts are hard to find, only boomers care, why would I care about some old shit car, only museum grade quality antique cars hold value.
RVs:
Same as summer houses, requires lots of maintenance, and it depreciates in value quickly, why would I want an old ass RV.
Boats:
The king of out of touch boomer investments, self explanatory.
Anything that's "Limited edition" that comes with a certificate or is signed:
It's mass produced garbage no one wants, there is no real collector market or demand for it, it will resell for 10% of it's value.
The root of the issue of boomers buying liabilities thinking they are investments is that investing money is boring, when you invest you buy a financial asset and you just leave it there, boomers deluded themselves into thinking they can own "fun" stuff and it's going to be as good as buying corporate bonds. This boat? It's super fun and it's actually as good as buying corporate bonds! lmao no.
Lol the classic cars and RVs thing gets me. So many retarded Boomers on social media think their poorly restored 1969 Chevelle is gonna be worth $250k+.... Or they retire and buy a $150k+ RV they use exactly 3x a year.
The boomer worship of college will never stop infuriating me. My father recently made a snide comment about how he thought my cousin would have "gotten her act together and went back to school by now". I asked what she was supposed to get a degree in, and what the fuck kind of job she was supposed to get with it. "She could go be a nurse!" I point out my mom was in the hospital for 2 months in 2024 and we saw a grand total of 3 nurses under 30 who were white the entire time. I bring up the tuition page of the local nursing school, and then bring up job listings and physically show the man that what he proposes is that she spend 8 years at least and $$$$$$ of dollars for a $$$$$ career that she won't even be hired in because she's white. WELL SHE SHOULD STILL GO DO IT IT'S BETTER THAN NOT HAVING A DEGREE. He literally thinks she should give up her low-pay but stable job that has allowed her to move out and have her own place to go into debt for a piece of paper. He really thinks she should waste years of her life in diffrent classes finding that magic combination that will finally get her a job that starts out at $35,000 a year and tops out at $90,000 if she's lucky. They refuse to stop living in 1990 and it's absolutely insane.
It's funny how boomers will shelter their children and coddle them to "protect them from those bad behaving, dangerous, coddled other kids". They don't realize that sheltering their own children like that is exactly the coddling they complain about so much. It becomes a cycle where people shelter their kids, never letting them obtain any life experience or pass normal social milestones, and then wondering why they eventually snap, act out and stop caring about authority or morality. Other boomer parents will think, "oh my god i have to protect little Timmy from these coddled juvenile delinquents" and do the exact same thing, coddling their own kids and keeping the cycle going. It's quite fucked up, as another example a lot of people just found out about the 764 type groups operating online, and as a kneejerk reaction have vowed to never let their teenagers go online in any way or socialize with their peers for fear that they might become victims. The problem with that is that subjects those kids/teenagers to isolation. Isolation breeds depression, and depression breeds nihilism, and nihilism breeds degeneracy, all of which those groups feed off of. In other words people are contributing to the very issues they vow to keep their kids protected from.
The discussion of boomers not realizing that their kids (or anyone) don't give a fuck about their "collectibles" or "hobbys" reminds me once again of this article from 2024.
The discussion of boomers not realizing that their kids (or anyone) don't give a fuck about their "collectibles" or "hobbys" reminds me once again of this article from 2024.
The discussion of boomers not realizing that their kids (or anyone) don't give a fuck about their "collectibles" or "hobbys" reminds me once again of this article from 2024.
