Been marinating in my brain...

Bags of gasoline, toilet paper, water bottles, land, houses, gold, bitcoin, dogecoin, baseball cards, pokemon toys, amiibos, sneakers, you name it.

The media will frame this as the irresponsible and ignorant hoarding of your fellow man, the unending greed of American citizens; but I also have to think of this speaks to, oft unexamined in mainstream news outlets, the desperation of regular folks. They buy bags of gasoline not just for themselves but on the off chance they make it big. They hoard toilet paper on the off chance they can sell in excess. Everything is a hustle because when you are starving, are broke, got bills up to your neck, you have to hustle.

Or am I wrong? Is it a fundamentally American thing to reach certain stratas of society and just want to greedily turn every object into a cash-cow, a golden goose egg? Once you reach an extra 30k of income, and you don't want to waste it on your dumb stupid family, you decide to gamble with it out of sheer boredom?

Who are these people really?

  • TurboGrafx16 [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Currently, Pokémon cards (and other trading cards) are having a moment: people have swamped card grading companies, hoping to get a rating that makes their cards more valuable, and The Pokémon Company has been rushing to print enough cards to meet the demand. It seems that all the big numbers around the truly rare original cards have caused a lot of excitement around new cards as well. But Target isn’t feeling the hype.

    Literally just another fucking investment scheme.