Caroline Melear

How private equity gutted local malls: Joann Fabrics, Red Lobster, Claire's, and more.

A little-known hack: 2 slices of Aldi wheat bread: $0.17 3 oz of Aldi deli turkey: $0.86 1 slices Aldi cheddar: $0.15 1 condiment of your choice: $0.02 1 apple: $0.53 1 hard boiled egg: $0.14 5 carrot sticks: $0.17 Cold water from the tap: $0.01 Total: $2.05 You can do this.

Boomers and Gen X packed lunches. Not sure why this stuff enrages zoomers. Boomers lived frugally. Going out to lunch was a big deal. Most didn't have long lunch breaks, especially blue collar. You didn't DoorDash, dinners were made at home. I don't even DoorDash in 2026.

Has everyone forgotten that young people have always been more likely to eat out/spend disposable income? This just seems like a very normal difference that would occur between a person in their 20’s vs 60’s in any modern generation? Gen Z is still likely to pay 3x to 5x more for a house.

Gen X here... I've worked hard for 30 years to get where I am. I make good money, and I've earned it. I can afford a $28 lunch, but choose not to spend that much most of the time because it feels frivolous. Gen Z is on here complaining about why lunch costs $28, or why Chipotle or Jersey Mike's costs what it does. I get it, it's definitely more than it used to be. So adjust. Get water instead of a $5 soda. Find a local place that is more reasonable. Bring in a lunch from home once in a while. Solve the problem instead of whining and continuing to hurt yourself by spending that much money if you really shouldn't be.

Boomers and Gen X packed lunches. Not sure why this stuff enrages zoomers. Boomers lived frugally. Going out to lunch was a big deal. Most didn't have long lunch breaks, especially blue collar. You didn't DoorDash, dinners were made at home. I don't even DoorDash in 2026.

Kevin O’Leary says Gen Z is financially cooked when people making $70K a year are spending $28 on lunch

The biggest thing happening behind the scenes in the "expensive lunch" discourse is that Zoomers are eating out at ridiculously high rates. It's a silent assumption for a ton of young people that restaurants are a basic necessity, not an occasional treat.

Kevin O’Leary says people in credit card debt shouldn’t be buying coffee “If you have a credit card balance that goes into the next month and you’re spending $5 on a coffee, you’re crazy” “I’ll give you permission to buy a coffee for $5 if you have no balance on your credit card at the end of the month” “The reason I own all the credit card companies is people are paying 23% interest” “Why would you do that to yourself? I can’t make 23% in the market every year. Why would you let someone do that to you?” “So no, no coffees for you except the one you make at home for 19 cents unless you pay off your credit card”

has a single person in the history of humankind ever once associated the love of nature with the right? Is that something that has ever happened literally once at all?

Can I just pay someone to potty train my 2 year old

I wonder how much of the ire directed at AI is (a) jobs vs. (b) fears of surveillance vs. (c) annoyance at how AI was shoved down our throats without consent Like we didn’t ask for our kettle bells and toaster ovens to connect to WiFi for app subscriptions and now AI feels like the same thing. Basically the whole 'internet of things" (IoT) craze made products and every day living WORSE and even more expensive because too many things required apps, subscriptions and cloud dependency. It was sold as “smart” and convenient, but mostly it just locked us into ecosystems and created new failure points. Now AI is conjuring up the same sense of deja vu - suddenly it’s in your search bar, your photo editor, your writing tools, your customer service, your car, and even your light bulbs. The public never really opted in. It was opt-out at best, and often not even that. So I think some of the ire is Luddite rejection and exhaustion because all this was sold as inevitable progress but it's created instead, nostalgia for the old products and appliances.

I still don't understand how Tim Walz could possibly have tweeted that AOC could "call a mean pick six." He was actually a football coach, right? He is, presumably, a Vikings fan. But no one who has any familiarity with football would ever say that. So what the hell happened?

🚨 JUST IN: Gov. Ron DeSantis has just unveiled a JAMES MADISON statue — in none other than Madison County, Florida! Florida doing it RIGHT yet again! Looks beautiful ☀️ We have statues of: - George Washington in Washington County - Thomas Jefferson in Jefferson County - James Monroe in Monroe County - James Madison in Madison County - Alexander Hamilton in Hamilton County - Benjamin Franklin in Franklin County 👏🏻👏🏻 Florida will take ALL blue states' Founding statues they want to rip apart, buy them on clearance, and give them the RESPECT they deserve 🇺🇸