> But instead of spending the money on a house big enough to host those dinner parties, you could host them at a fancy restaurant, with better food and the ability to spend the entire evening with the guests instead of in the kitchen.
Ultimately people do things they enjoy. People enjoy different things.
I love hosting groups of people at home. Yes, it's hard work, but it's satisfying. The meal planning, excitement of preparing the house, cooking, having a big party at home - I enjoy almost all of it.
Having a party at a restaurant is a totally different set of activities - it needs longer term organisation to book a date, work out exact numbers, maybe pay a deposit. When the meal's over, everyone goes home. Doing it with kids is much harder. There's a different set of societal expectations over payment (people are much less comfortable being paid for in a restaurant than eating food you've provided).
These are different sets of activities. Some people enjoy doing one set more. That's OK. From my point of view - I'm finally in the position in the last few years where I can host large parties at home, and I'm really happy about it. To me it's worth the cost.
Also, in restaurants there is usually less to do - you either sit and eat/drink, or stand. Home parties have more activities - people can cook their own food, browse books, play with other things. They also last longer, and in the end it can be just a few last people chilling on a couch discussing life and stuff in general - can't have that in a restaurant.
And if they drink too much they can stay longer or stay over. No rush to get home.
It’s also cozier and you don’t feel pressure of having to get going after a couple of hours —any kids can find things to do around the house, be it gaming, TV, running, going off to a corner, whatever. Adults can group into convos of interest, etc.
If people are worried about food quality (rarely is food the focus, but if it were that can be catered).
In my experience if you care about food quality you must cook for yourself. Catered food is always cheap, mass produced, and lacks taste and nutrition.
It depends. Local caterers can be good. This is a good option for people who are not great cooks. But yes, if you order catering from a run of the mill place it can be average. Another option is to hire a chef.
But not really this. Many other parts of the world have much rarer house parties and much more done in restaurants with private rooms, etc being easy. Cultural norms and etiquette largely determines what we can enjoy and what is available, we aren't really following our own personal preferences most of the time.
In the case of many of these things there's an early outlay of a lot of money to then pretend the incremental costs is negligible where something with less actual costs might be a lot more enjoyable but is harder to disguise.
The "totally different set of activities" and much higher effort also means that it often just doesn't happen.
The same problem happens with car sharing: If you have the car in your driveway, using it is trivial. If you add booking a rental/shared car, going to the station, checking it for damage, ... a quick trip turns into a major chore.
And even if it may be overall cheaper to rent as needed than owning the "overkill" solution the whole time, it won't be much cheaper, because renting is ridiculously expensive. Short time rentals and car sharing around here are typically $50-100 per day and/or not that expensive per time but $0.50 per km which makes it prohibitive for longer trips. You can get an OK used car for a couple thousand and it will cost you way less than that in maintenance.
Self-delivering self-driving cars could alleviate at least the hassle (since you'd be able to reserve a fungible car from a citywide pool, for pickup and return at your door), although the cost aspect will likely remain.
Exactly this! It's a bit frustrating that there seems to be no acknowledgment of friction being an issue, even though the vast majority of our industry is practically defined by it.
Everyone who's ever worked on a website knows the value of being above the fold, the value of reducing a single click in a checkout, etc.
I lived car-free for many years, and while I had carshares easily available to me and went through the high-friction bits already (had the apps downloaded, accounts signed up, license verified, everything ready to actually rent) - I rarely did it (in fact I did it exactly twice in about 10 years!)
I sympathize with the argument here - having 4,000 lb steel boxes rolling around with a single person in them and no cargo is terribly wasteful, but a lot of the alternatives suggested assume a physics-experiment-like smooth frictionless surface that doesn't actually exist IRL.
Aren't you completely discounting the friction inherent in ownership of a vehicle? Humans tend to find clever ways to justify their irrational decisions, but there is absolutely more friction involved in owning a large truck that is used to haul cargo once a year versus having the same cargo delivered once a year.
Two things. First, the time of friction is important. Pretty much all friction points with vehicle ownership are distributed throughout the year, *and are amortized across all uses of the vehicle*. When you want the vehicle to haul the mulch you press the button and you get bacon. Contrast with renting a truck to pick up mulch, or renting a restaurant for a party, or putting your parents in a hotel. Those friction points happen every single time you want to do the fun thing, and happen when you want to do the fun thing. Press button, pay tax, *then* get bacon. There's a big psychological difference there.
Second, I think you're framing it as {truck + self pickup} vs {no vehicle + delivered}, but I think the more likely comparison is {truck + self pickup} vs {sedan + delivered}. Nobody's going to get a truck as their only vehicle that they'll literally only use a few times a year. They'll be choosing between truck and sedan as their daily driver (or truck as second vehicle). In the replacement case in particular (truck vs sedan) the friction delta is very small.
If you own the vehicle and it breaks you have to fix it - but most of the time it isn't broken. You need to pay insurance, but that comes in a regular bill, and so is easy to budget. In return for this you get a vehicle ready to use when you want to.
If you don't own the vehicle and need one there is a lot more friction: you need to figure out where to get a vehicle. More than once I've gone to get one and found they were sold out and so I couldn't rent when I needed one. More than once I've gone to get one and discovered the fine print didn't let me use it for what I wanted.
Yeah, the people acting like carshares and rentals are low-friction feel like they live in a different universe than the one I lived for over a decade.
Open the app. Oh no, the car that's near my apartment isn't available when I need it. Ok what else is around? Ehhh the BMW is pretty expensive and unnecessary. Ah here's a Honda... but it's a 25 minute walk away.
Ok so I have to walk 25 minutes just to start the car. Then I can go where I want to - but if I bring anything back I'll have to find street parking in front of my apartment building to unload. Then I have to bring the car back to its spot, and then walk another 25 minutes back home.
Oh and don't forget to gas it up, because unlike owning a car, with a carshare more often than not you have to gas it up on the way back to avoid a penalty. You roll your eyes slightly at not just having to drop by the gas station but literally paying for the rental time to do it. But it's fine, whatever.
Like, I get that lots of people find this to be fine (I did, for over a decade!) - but it's anything but low-friction.
Traditional rentals are even worse - unlike carshares their pickup/dropoff locations are nowhere near you, so now you have to think about an Uber!
Where is the friction in owning the large truck? Paying for gas?? Finding parking?
(US-centric view.)
If you live in a major urban center, sure. Paying hundreds of dollars a month for a parking spot would quickly convince me that car ownership was a bad idea. Otherwise, at least in the US, cities spread out to make room for the habits of their inhabitants. There's going to be easy parking where you live because that's what all of your neighbors want.
Of course, I agree that you should just have the deliveries... but I'm not seeing this as an argument why. The costs are not great enough.
You’re paying considerably more all of the time – the vehicle is 2-3 times more expensive to buy, fuel costs are similar, every component will cost more to repair, and, yes, most buyers will have to worry about finding a parking spot on a regular basis. Insurance and, often, registration will cost more, too.
Now, if you’re in the 20% of truck buyers who really need them those are necessary costs but most people are buying them as a lifestyle accessory.
There’s also a fairly large group of people who live in urban settings who think they need all of that but are paying more than the cost of renting on the few times they actually do. Those people have been very good to the manufacturers’ profit margins but unfortunately all of the extra pollution and lowered safety affects their neighbors as well.
That's the key people are missing, it's classic upselling. You're not comparing "nothing" to "truck" you're comparing "ok I get this vehicle that does X" to "or I get this other one that does X+Y".
This is the real reason the SUV has eaten everything, because the so-called "crossover SUVs" and other small ones are just fancy hatchbacks, and a car with a square butt will always be more useful than a similar sized car with a trunk.
The question was a large truck, but there’s also a complication here which might be fading with high interest rates: low rates, pandemic shortages, and improved wages meant a lot of buyers went upscale and that pushed the average truck sale price north of $60k, with a lot of luxury models in the $80k range. That’s what I had in mind for my comment.
I think gas and parking are good examples. If your truck has had 30% less fuel efficiency than a car, then you're going to spend 30% more of your time at the gas pump, huffing fumes, than a car owner for exactly the same outcome in terms of utilization.
Parking is similar. I can fit a small 2-door car into x% more parking spots in a city than a larger truck. So you can spend x% more of your time looking for parking spots. Maybe you're still looking for a spot when the car owner has already completed the errand.
As someone else mentioned, this friction is amortized over time so for some the psychological cost is lower, but for those who understand the principle of opportunity cost, it is a very real and tangible cost of ownership.
So address the fact that there are 4000 lb boxes doing 70 mph.
Physics, to a first order approx, doesn't care about the car mass, btw. It does care about A*Cd*v^3 though. Especially the v. A lot of problems depends on that v.
A couple thousand is probably not enough. But I think people do tend to exaggerate how expensive used cars are. You can buy a ~10 year old Prius for around $5k, for example.
That still seems a bit high to me, unless you mean older ones? A ten year old Prius is >$10k here [1] and I don't see $5k until I get back to the 2010 model year (14-15 years old, and starting to get a lot less reliable).
Yea, location is definitely a factor. With my zip, kbb.com puts a 2012 Prius v Five Wagon with 120k miles in a private party sale at between $5900-$8200. A bit higher than I thought, tbh. I bought a 2008 Prius a couple years ago for $4,000. I'm thinking I may have just been a little lucky with that deal.
I've found KBB valuses a bit low for used cars since the pandemic, FWIW.
Did you buy your Prius at the beginning of the pandemic? There was a brief period when cars got super cheap (no one was buying anything, sellers were desperate) followed by one where they got very expensive (manufacturing was blocked on missing parts, more people were trying to buy used since they couldn't buy new).
Car sharing is mostly about the 300+$/month you spend on a parking space and insurance not the minimum car you can own.
I used to drive so rarely car sharing would have saved me several thousand per year and been less of a hassle because I could skip annual inspections, gas stabilization, etc. Driving weekly and owning a car is probably worth it but drive quarterly and it’s a hassle.
Exactly this and the rhetoric of ‘spending on a house’ isn’t really a fair comparison.
When you buy a house there is an implied level of investment/saving as a by product of the fact that bricks and mortar in many countries are seen as a good store of value.
When you spend money in a restaurant it’s just gone, there is no chance of your annual meal/get together being counted towards your savings if/when you need to rustle up some extra cash.
There’s also the fact that it is almost always cheaper to host a meal at home opposed to paying for an entire group of friends/family to dine out.
95% of the country is completely undeveloped. The problem isn't a lack of space, but too many people wanting to live in the most desirable eras. Many people don't seem to realize that the housing boom in the 50s and 60s wasn't people just building these buildings in ultra-premium areas, but building them in cheap, relatively undesirable areas. But the mass of people moving to these areas ended up making them desirable, and ultimately also not very cheap.
This effect was so substantial that from 1950 to 1960 the population of most major cities actually declined [1], in spite of a rapidly booming population!
This is the thing people miss and forget, that there should be natural ebb and flow, but population centers are instead just getting bigger and bigger without really getting more dense.
(It's actually still happening, but people dismiss where it is happening as "suburbs" but if you live in a "suburb" that is 60 miles from "the city" and basically never go to the city, it's really it's own thing.)
Your own example is pretty interesting. From 1950 to 1960, the population of Reno (capital of Nevada) increased by more than 40%! [1] Of course you're right there was also a huge surge in commuting, but people weren't the only ones leaving cities. Businesses also moved outside cities, taking advantage of cheaper real estate themselves, and new businesses also cropped up to service the booming suburban populations.
And IMO this is all a much more reasonable thing to aim for. Density can only take you so far. There are hard limitations and it comes with lots of nasty stuff. I think the only reason things are taking as long as they are to naturally go this direction is because of the hyper-centralization of businesses and seemingly endless low interest rates, making companies with billion dollar valuations quite trite. And at that scale, the long-term cost impact of real estate in an ultra-premium location versus in the middle of nowhere is a rounding error. But monopoly money economics will end, probably sooner rather than later - and it may well end up solving this problem, alongside a slew of others.
In theory, it means that young families should buy the absolute maximum house they can afford. Stretch and limit spending in every other area as much as possible, then hold it as long as possible. Then "old people" can sell and downsize to trade space for cash.
Looking back, it seems like a lot of places looked a lot like this for a long time. It is fairly recent that we see people swapping every 4-7 years, at surprisingly high cost.
You could probably host just fine without the dining room. And most people in your position aren't getting enough enjoyment that they would actually miss much if they didn't have the room.
The earlier comment isn't a critique on what people enjoy. It's a critique on people's inability to estimate how changes affect their enjoyment, instead making things into an inflexible checklist.
Ok, but the poster had clearly explained a reasonable thing that they want to do. And keeps getting pushed and gatekeeped/kept on that stance for some reason.
The point is that for every one person with a good reason, there can be several people with a bad reason.
People keep taking everything personally when it comes to personal anecdotes when this is about mere majorities. Gatekeeping is not the intent. It's to speak of a broader group that has an impulse to want a thing, but many in that group will be served fine with alternatives. And wanting something doesn't mean you thought it through.
Especially for gardening supplies, delivery has no real downsides, it's a straight money calculation.
> People keep taking everything personally when it comes to personal anecdotes when this is about mere majorities. Gatekeeping is not the intent. It's to speak of a broader group that has an impulse to want a thing, but many in that group will be served fine with alternatives. And wanting something doesn't mean you thought it through.
No, no.
They are simply saying 'cater for the edge cases'. No more, no less.
We know what you are saying.
They're just saying that you're ignoring nuance to their detriment (true), and therefore you are not trustworthy in decision making (true).
No, we are not prepared to let you make decisions for us ("But many in that group will be served fine with alternatives"). No, that's precisely the problem - Centralised planning thinks that the alternatives are fine, and they are often not. Similar to Google not having a phone number to unblock locked accounts.
>And wanting something doesn't mean you thought it through.
Sure. We will assume that this is charitable / general statement (if it weren't: It is this attitude that makes one unqualified to make decisions. They think they know better, and assume that the other person does not.)
> No, we are not prepared to let you make decisions for us ("But many in that group will be served fine with alternatives"). No, that's precisely the problem - Centralised planning thinks that the alternatives are fine, and they are often not. Similar to Google not having a phone number to unblock locked accounts.
You're making a jump here that is not at all warranted.
Many literally means many.
Not in the sense that they will get lucky, but in the sense that different people have different edge cases.
They're not trying to tell people what their needs are, it's that different people truly do have different needs.
A bunch of people are arguing that their purchases have to cater for needs that they don't actually have. Trying to argue them down is not trying to say nobody has those needs, it's that too many people are thinking about a problem for 5 seconds, not considering alternatives, and claiming to have needs, when the actual number is a lot smaller.
It's not about specific people being told they're wrong. It's statistical. We can count how many people are doing X or Y and it's not most people. People get aspirational about the future and make claims that are wrong. Or they consider a lack of an "expected" feature to be far more impactful than it actually is. It's not uncharitable to say this about statistical aggregates, it's a fact.
Yes, we live in a socialist / night-watchman / capitalist / legislative / etc. hybrid structure.
I'm not an absolutist anarchist, and I don't think that undermines my points (given an adult conversation where nuance and context is discussed).
We don't need absolutism across the board here (the "if you legislate against personal atomic bombs, you must be in favour of legislating against people having a 2mm knife blade!" whataboutism fallacy)
Ultimately people do things they enjoy. People enjoy different things.
I love hosting groups of people at home. Yes, it's hard work, but it's satisfying. The meal planning, excitement of preparing the house, cooking, having a big party at home - I enjoy almost all of it.
Having a party at a restaurant is a totally different set of activities - it needs longer term organisation to book a date, work out exact numbers, maybe pay a deposit. When the meal's over, everyone goes home. Doing it with kids is much harder. There's a different set of societal expectations over payment (people are much less comfortable being paid for in a restaurant than eating food you've provided).
These are different sets of activities. Some people enjoy doing one set more. That's OK. From my point of view - I'm finally in the position in the last few years where I can host large parties at home, and I'm really happy about it. To me it's worth the cost.