The New York Times' Kevin Roose charts the exploding cost of services, such as Uber and Airbnb, which were, until recently, a way to live "Balenciaga lifestyles on Banana Republic budgets" — all thanks to the Silicon Valley money fire that roared for years as deep-pocketed investors tried to disrupt incumbent industries.
"Today my Uber ride from Midtown to JFK cost me as much as my flight from JFK to SFO," Sunny Madra, a vice president at Ford's venture incubator, recently tweeted, along with a screenshot of a receipt that showed he had spent nearly $250 on a ride to the airport.
"Airbnb got too much dip on they chip," another Twitter user complained. "No one is gonna continue to pay $500 to stay in an apartment for two days when they can pay $300 for a hotel stay that has a pool, room service, free breakfast & cleaning everyday. Like get real lol."
Some of these companies have been tightening their belts for years. But the pandemic seems to have emptied what was left of the bargain bin.
An excellent "changing of the seasons" article. An objection, though: posing the prior cheapness of Uber, Airbnb and so on as "subsidizing" the lifestyle of "millennials" seems to me a baited way of describing predatory pricing.
Folks over 40 have been known to get in an Uber or order food from Grubhub now and again, for starters. Older generations vastly outspend millennials on consumer services. Yet everything must be centered around the avocado toast-eaters as if they were the prime movers in everything. The reality is, for the younger people implicated by this stereotype, that they use "lifestyle" services because they are underpaid workaholics with nothing to show for it.
When Gilead comes, the headline will be "Millennials Swap Wokeness For Wimples."
