The Juicery
There’s a new store in the new shopping mall underground at the Columbus Circle subway station called The Juicery where you can buy a 16 oz bottle of special juice blends for $6.50.
In other news, an article at the Atlantic says that almost half of Americans would not be able to come up with $400 for an emergency except by borrowing money or selling something. This is not just a poor-people problem. “Nearly one-quarter of households making $100,000 to $150,000 a year claim not to be able to raise $2,000 in a month.”
Lion of the Blogosphere 
Do you include NAMs because we know about those people. Just like including them in school test scores and crime skews the numbers.
Mayor of Space
April 20, 2016 at 9:29 PM
I keep telling you mates that you need $200-250,000 after tax to live normally. I know what I’m saying.
I pay about that much for freshly squeezed carrot juice. Yummy! Totally worth it. It’s a fair price as long as it’s the real thing. What’s the pro let with juice now?
Yakov
April 20, 2016 at 9:30 PM
$200K puts you in the top 5% for household income in the US. Surely, normal means something closer to the 50% mark?
Curle
April 21, 2016 at 2:01 AM
I’m talking about what people NEED to make, not what they ACTUALLY make. The article supports what I’m saying. Mates, can you be rational?
Yakov
April 21, 2016 at 11:32 AM
You’re full of it. SF is almost as expensive as NYC. To live “normally,” i.e. like I did as a middle-class kid in the ’70s, takes after-tax income of about $90k.
Tiny Blades
April 21, 2016 at 2:21 AM
How many kids did you have in private schools? What was the tuition? These are basic needs for normal people.
Come on already, four kids will cost you north of $80,000. Now add the expenses. How do you need to live on again? Or are you willing to lose the evolutionary battle? Well, I’m not! I’m fighting to win in.
Yakov
April 21, 2016 at 11:20 AM
???? And most of your working class proles do not make anything of that sort. You’re FOS!
JS
April 21, 2016 at 10:19 AM
This is why they are losing the evolutionary battle.
Yakov
April 21, 2016 at 11:30 AM
What evolutionary battle?
Tell everyone to go on welfare like blacks with a few kids, or better, like the Hasids with their dozen children.
JS
April 21, 2016 at 12:30 PM
Mate, if you keep being irrational and getting emotional we cannot get anywhere. Deal with reality.
I’m not telling you what to do, but you have to admit that unless you do something, you will become a dinosaur.
I’m telling you that you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. Figure it out for yourself.
Yakov
April 21, 2016 at 2:28 PM
??? You just said we need $200K/year or more after taxes, to live a normal life in America. I have that kind of money. Yet, you keep chiming on about trades, which many them don’t even pay anything near $200k.
JS
April 21, 2016 at 3:35 PM
@JS
If you had that kind of money you wouldn’t be flying off the handle over an innocent discussion on the Internet, nor would you be running away to Canada or discussing French philosophy with French girls. Why would a guy making this amount of money bash America? Only pathological types like Obama or Soros do this. I’m grateful to America for everything it gave me. Gratitude is the foundation of a healthy personality. Ungrateful people that make this amount of money are beyond repair.
So first you become grateful to America and then we talk.
Yakov
April 21, 2016 at 7:54 PM
Because you’re FOS, and your suggestions don’t make any sense. The chances of a nobody getting a lucrative white collar position is less far fetched than a person hacking it with the trades. Not many proles are able to become millionaires working at HVAC.
JS
April 22, 2016 at 9:25 AM
The topic of discussion is how much one needs to live a normal life in America. The article says that $150,000 is not enough, it supports my thesis not yours. First set the right target, then start moving towards it. I don’t understand how a guy can have such a lack of ability to think logically. You must be trolling.
Yakov
April 22, 2016 at 4:11 PM
What does a normal life mean to you? It’s all relative. Dining out every night and taking vacations every weekend?
A normal life for me might be different from yours.
There are plenty of people in Manhattan who pay below market rent, and they live better than the chump with a high paying job, when you factor free time and leisure.
JS
April 22, 2016 at 4:46 PM
For $6.50 it had better have some ethanol in it.
Vincent
April 20, 2016 at 9:40 PM
Juice is nice but not particularly healthy as noted in a past post. But what I don’t get is the inability to raise $2000 in 30 days for someone making north of $100K. If it were an emergency (or even a profitable bet), one could just ignore other obligations temporarily and use salary to raise the money in 30 days. Am I missing something? It seems to me that 25% of people with that salary are too stupid to handle it.
Polentone
April 20, 2016 at 10:07 PM
Maybe not paying bills is considered a form of debt?
Lloyd Llewellyn
April 21, 2016 at 4:28 PM
Wow, I was gonna go all OT on you and bring up that Atlantic article. So what did you make of it? I think Gabler made a mistake in sending his daughters to Stanford & Emory. I mean, maybe it’s worth it to spring for Stanford, but Emory? And the one who went to Stanford became a doctor – wouldn’t she have made it into a good med school if she had gone to a good state U?
I think that’s where Gabler went wrong. Also paying a lot of money for his daughter’s wedding. What’s with this? It has a 37% chance of breaking up anyway.
I think if you can’t afford something you shouldn’t pay for it.
gothamette
April 20, 2016 at 10:11 PM
I too have wondered what the attraction of Emory is. I once worked for a law partner in SF, a Stanford grad as it happens, whose daughter was going there. I figured she must have been a dolt.
Tiny Blades
April 21, 2016 at 2:26 AM
That’s actually a bargain… The cold-pressed juice stand near my apartment charges $9 for a 16oz bottle and the cost of living is much lower where I live.
theoak
April 20, 2016 at 10:54 PM
They have a place like that in Miami Beach. They just expanded by opening a little mini store within the Whole Foods that sells 8 oz bottles for $10-13 dollars. It is constantly packed.
PerezHBD
April 20, 2016 at 11:17 PM
“Nearly one-quarter of households making $100,000 to $150,000 a year claim not to be able to raise $2,000 in a month.”
Meh. Skip a house payment. Done. Nobody forecloses anymore, it’s too expensive.
Portlander
April 21, 2016 at 12:24 AM
my bank lets me skip a payment penalty free… actually because I made a couple extra payment awhile back I can skip multiple payments penalty free
Marc KS
April 21, 2016 at 12:15 PM
The great thing about that Atlantic article is how it turns into a humblebrag if you keep reading. First the guy’s all about his economic insecurity, then you learn:
– Thinks were tight for him in NYC because he and his wife put their two daughters in private school to avoid “bad” public schools.
– Then he moved to East Hampton, where the public schools were “good”.
– One of his daughters became a Rhodes Scholar, went to Harvard, then medical school. Or something like that.
– He sold a screenplay that was made into a movie by Martin Scorsese.
Other than that, he’s just like you, ya poor bastard!
Dave Pinsen
April 21, 2016 at 1:04 AM
Yes, exactly. The author is so poor that his parents had to pay for his daughter’s tuition at Stanford (!!!):
“In the end, my parents wound up covering most of the cost of the girls’ educations.”
I have little sympathy for writers who complain about their poverty. They are actually complaining about the fact that they are unsuccessful in their chosen field. It is a standard trope, recycled every few years. There is a reason why Woody Allen, Philip Roth, John McPhee, etc, etc, do not complain about money, it is because they are successful.
In Prolistan, where I was raised, there was a simple and straightforward admonishment: Get a job!
The Shepherd
April 21, 2016 at 10:34 AM
He only says the public schools in the Hamptons are better than those in New York City and he specifically says that the people that live there year round like him are poor. And he just optioned a story to Scorscese it was never made.
And even if you were accurate that’s still not Humblebragging would be saying that he never had any money on hand because he always had his money in killer investments and couldn’t bear to maintain any substantial amount of liquidity since he was getting such incredible returns. I take him at his word that he’s considers himself a financial failure and is constantly worrying about money. The fact that he has certain other accomplishments doesn’t really change that.
Lloyd Llewellyn
April 21, 2016 at 6:39 PM
“He only says the public schools in the Hamptons are better than those in New York City.”
Only a fool would think otherwise.
“he specifically says that the people that live there year round like him are poor”
There are no poor people in the Hamptons, and he isn’t poor.
“I take him at his word that he’s considers himself a financial failure and is constantly worrying about money.”
Indeed he does because his neighbors are rich people in the Hamptons. If he lived at the other end of the state, in Buffalo, he’d feel a lot wealthier.
Lion of the Blogosphere
April 21, 2016 at 6:41 PM
http://www.greatschools.org/new-york/east-hampton/schools/
Those schools aren’t full of rich people. Didn’t you write a bunch of blog posts about all the poor low wage service people that get imported to rich area like cape cod and the hamptons and ruin them?
https://lionoftheblogosphere.wordpress.com/2013/06/11/public-schools-in-the-hamptons-invaded-by-hispanics/
If you read the article he says he feels poor because he stays up at night worrying about not being able to pay bills. I don’t doubt that he could have made smarter decisions that would have left him with less debt (something he admits to freely). Even if he’s not particularly sympathetic he’s still indicative of something very wrong with the economy collective culture .
Lloyd Llewellyn
April 22, 2016 at 1:27 AM
“In other news, an article at the Atlantic says that almost half of Americans would not be able to come up with $400 for an emergency except by borrowing money or selling something. This is not just a poor-people problem. ‘Nearly one-quarter of households making $100,000 to $150,000 a year claim not to be able to raise $2,000 in a month.'”
Yup. And that is one example of why people are unhappy with the times despite whatever indicators out there claiming times are good: people live from paycheck to paycheck.
JayMan
April 21, 2016 at 7:09 AM
After going after matzah and gefilte fish, Lion goes after juice now? A pound of carrots costs, say, $1 and you need 2.5 pounds to make 16oz. To pay $4.00 not to have to chew through 2.5 lb of carrots like some crazy rabbit is a good deal, a very good deal. Do you think normal people have time to munch on 2.5 lb of carrots every day? And this is just carrots, what about all the other fruits and vegetables? Not everything can be made into juice, you know. Bananas and avocado and yucca – you can’t juice them. Maybe a robot can do it somehow, but this is science fiction already. What did I tell you? Some would rather pay taxes on cash transactions and complain and whine about something as innocent as a cup of fresh juice! Like please already…
Like this is funny, imagine Lion sitting around and grinding 2.5 lb of carrots with his teeth every day? I think your priorities are messed up. Get yourself Medicaid glasses next time and drink carrot juice, it’s beneficial to your eyesight. Carrots contain beta-carotene, a substance that the body converts to vitamin A, an important nutrient for eye health. So instead of waisting money on designer glasses to look cool, go full Medicate and be cool. Farshteist?
At least if you wore lenses I could understand, but glasses? Even then, a girl needs lenses to look good, but a guy? No, definitely go with Medicate and invest the difference in S&P 500 index, you’ll be amazed in a few years. And drink that juice.
Yakov
April 21, 2016 at 7:13 AM
Yakov, while we appreciate that old Eastern European wisdom about how great juice is for you, it’s just another Neolithic abomination. Juice is raw sugar and a few beneficial vitamins and minerals thrown in with none of the digestion slowing properties of having to eat the whole fruit or vegetable. It’s a recipe for early onset of diabetese.
If you want vitamin A, eat liver. As an Eastern European of Jewish descent you probably have no problem with this and will be doing it over the holidays anyway. The body is very inefficient at converting beta carotene to Vitamin A (that 2.5 lbs of carrots yields about 17% of your daily recommended dosage of Vitamin A. Anyway chicken liver patte tastes much better.
I take your general point about juice bough, people complain way too much about its price without realizing what a hastle it is to make at home yourself, just to save $0.50 on labor costs. That’s for poor people. Time is money.
Off topic:
@gothamette
You asked in another thread we had, why I consider economists to be leftist globalist apologists. It’s for a number of reasons:
First they are generally extremely supportive of free movement of labor, which is generally their way of underhandly supporting the destruction of borders and sovereignty but doing it under the cover of economics, BUT they are doing it for lefty cultural reasons primarily and not economic. You give legitimacy to the ideas and sell them to right thinking practical people with economics. That’s the whole raison d’être of magazines like “The Economist”. To make the bobo Wall Street class feel good about their work in promoting policies which are otherwise destructive to our domestic economy.
Second, on policies of the welfare state they are generally supportive of various handout programs, but again under the cover of economic stimulus or some other model related gobbledygook. In reality when you push them into a corner that stimulus is a failure or what if it is net negative they default to the moral argument that social spending programs are good. Actually, you need those programs to run a globalist trade program where one trade partner runs massive deficits, since only the government has a credit card rating good enough to charge two decades or three decades worth of stuff to the national tab and prevent an implosion of the lower classes whose livelihoods were destroyed.
Leftism and globalism go hand in hand, it’s pretty well documented in this part of the Internet. It’s only a coincidence that pure laissez-fairie capitalism also supports globalist ideas. You can’t have Globalism without heavy handed government no more than any other program that is highly antithetical to human nature.
Sorry you had to wait so long.
“All economy is political economy.” You heard it here first.
TickerReader
April 21, 2016 at 3:05 PM
So what’s better to eat a carrot or to juice or or it makes no difference?
Yakov
April 22, 2016 at 2:22 AM
Eat a carrot. Better yet eat some liver schmaltz.
TickerReader
April 22, 2016 at 11:39 AM
Make sure to medicate, Yakov. It’s needed of you!
JS
April 21, 2016 at 3:11 PM
“One of his daughters became a Rhodes Scholar, went to Harvard, then medical school. Or something like that.”
Right. She went to Stanford, too. He goes into an entire discursion about that and ends up saying it was worth it.
gothamette
April 21, 2016 at 11:06 AM
Most people spend everything they earn, no matter how much they earn.
Even executives can be broke because they are under pressure to spend conspicuously. A pocket mansion in a tony neighborhood, a weekend home in the countryside, private school tuition, two luxury cars, luxury European vacations and a country club membership will bankrupt even someone who earns $500,000 per year.
WRB
April 21, 2016 at 11:50 AM
There’s a part in Bonfire of the Vanities where one of the character talks about how a million dollars a year (in the late 1980s) wasn’t enough to live on.
A healthy culture would leave breathing room for unexpected expenses and barring that there should be some kind of forced government savings plan akin to social security.
Lloyd Llewellyn
April 21, 2016 at 6:22 PM
To be fair… why would I even need to worry about keeping 400-2000$ cash on hand anyways? I access to multiple lines of credit totally a little over 30,000 in borrowable cash (with the majority of it at a 3% interest rate and the remainder at a reasonable 6%) and if for some reason I couldn’t use that I pull cash from my credit card for an emergency and go to the bank to consolidate (i.e. get a loan at a better rate).
What is the point in me keeping 2000$ cash around, when I could put that cash against my existing debt and pay less in interest… I still have the liquidity in the case of an emergency.
Marc KS
April 21, 2016 at 12:20 PM
This is correct. Real cash is only useful for a mad max shit hits the fan scenario. This is neither what people are referring to in the mainstream media when they talk about rainy day funds nor would $2000 save you in such a situation.
TickerReader
April 21, 2016 at 3:08 PM
A lot of the time you need around that much in cash just to get a free checking account. And the vast majority of people that don’t keep that much money around can’t and if they took out more credit card debt (assuming they even had credit cards) they would just end up with a credit card debt that much more insurmountable.
Lloyd Llewellyn
April 21, 2016 at 6:29 PM
I have not read the article, but I did hear an interview with Gabler on NPR. At one point he said, “If someone saw me on the street, they wouldn’t think I’m poor, and frankly, they wouldn’t think I’m poor if they saw my 1040.”
He mismanaged his money, and I have very little sympathy for someone who lives beyond their means. I make jack shit, but I can come up with $500 or $2000 at a moment’s notice. It’s mind-boggling that people do not make an effort to save in case of an emergency.
Vince
April 21, 2016 at 1:38 PM
Some of my clients make over $300K, a year and a few fuss over a necessary evil that cost $500 dollars. Meanwhile, their eating consists mostly of restaurant bills. I’ve seen there bank and credit card statements. Hardly anything for groceries.
JS
April 21, 2016 at 3:13 PM
The fact is it’s a reality that has to be dealt with. Whether or not you feel bad certainly doesn’t matter to me and I would argue it shouldn’t matter for you.
Lloyd Llewellyn
April 21, 2016 at 6:25 PM
The article reminded me of Bonfire of the Vanities when the main character after he realized that he might lose his high-paying Wall street job calculates that he *needs* to earn about a million dollars (or so, I don’t remember exactly, this takes place in the 1980s) to keep what he considers the minimal requirements of his lifestyle.
If that writers daughter was so damn smart, wouldn’t she get a scholarship? Or make it even with a degree from a public high school or a somewhat less expensive university?
nomen nescio
April 21, 2016 at 3:01 PM
WRB, Marc KS and Vince had worthwhile comments that will be under-appreciated by the very people who need them most.
No matter how much you make or have you can still blow through it faster. Studies show that people actually get a “high” from spending money. But, in my experience, it ultimately causes stress and clutter. Happiness comes from simplicity and self-control and personal achievements. Not from blowing cash on the upper middle class version of “bling”.
You should pay yourself a small salary and set the rest aside. The salary should be low enough that you have to keep a budget. If you don’t then you lose perspective and impulse control. Check out all the athletes and celebrities who’ve made insane amounts of money then end up bankrupt with insane amounts of debt.
destructure
April 21, 2016 at 3:29 PM
In the realm of movie critics he was pretty successful. He should have gone talk show host like Michael Medved.
momomoliere
April 21, 2016 at 3:50 PM
Didn’t he get replaced by Michael Medved?
Herb Dregs
April 21, 2016 at 9:59 PM
There’s nothing new about this. Long time ago the NY Times had an article “Feeling Poor on 600K a Year.” Look it up.
gothamette
April 21, 2016 at 5:19 PM
An anecdote: A friend of mine is a sailing instructor at LA’s Marina Del Rey – that’s world’s biggest man made yacht harbor. According to him, majority of yacht owners don’t sail! They actually use their yachts as their weekend cottages, typically to have a dinner with friends on the deck.
Which is an excellent example of what makes rich people go broke.
WRB
April 21, 2016 at 8:07 PM
“Nearly one-quarter of households making $100,000 to $150,000 a year claim not to be able to raise $2,000 in a month.”
What’s this supposed to mean? They don’t have family and friends from whom to borrow? They are so alone in life? I don’t understand this.
Yakov
April 21, 2016 at 9:22 PM