Why are US consumers so angry? It's not just high prices

Unfortunately, that's a debate you need to be having with the collective restaurant owners of the nation. Until and unless they start paying living wages, there will be a "standard", however unofficial, that tips of some level are expected for every server who's not actively terrible.

The picture you paint of there being a "vocal minority advocating for tipping...that receive higher tips," at the expense of those who want good wages, suggests that you have very little contact with the type of people who work these jobs. Absolutely, all of them would love good wages. But that's not something they have the power to push for (because labor power in the US is abysmally low, and frequently vilified as if corporations were the entities the country—nay, the entire world—is set up to serve, rather than human beings).

So rather than snidely grumbling about how greedy these people are who want tips, instead of good wages, maybe put that energy toward telling your representatives you want a higher minimum wage? ...Or are you also one of those who thinks that minimum wages are counterproductive and will necessarily be inflated away (despite the fact that many locales, in and out of the US, already have higher minimum wages, and are thriving for it)?

I paid $2,200 for a couch that's made in Canada from solid wood. Not sure I can agree with you.

https://www.urbanbarn.com/en/product/sibley-sofa-chaise-SIBL...

I always wondered how my coworkers in tech (imply to) spent so much money (even without kids) and then I hear things like "you can't buy a car for less than 50k these days" or read these posts. Then you test drive a 20k used car and the only thing that is more than 10% worse about it about it is how quickly your ego goes 0 to 60 :) A good couch costs around 1k and I'm pretty sure based on extensive experience the $200 IKEA couches are quite decent.

How much is private equity to blame? At first I was tired of the bogeyman, but it's starting to show patterns. Working in tech, I've seen from colleagues the shannanigans played - they come in the form of taking out debt of one company, dooming it, to fund something else, they also come in the form of weird chargeback commitments with big vendors we all know - IBM, Google, especially Microsoft, Oracle, etc.

Here's a weird and mild anecdote. I have enjoyed using a combo duvet cover and covertlet, it works all year around, you can put the winter comforter in it, or it's heavy enough to use by itself. Used these for years, ordered from Amazon and BB&B. I spent a lot of time recently looking at the same thing. It was called Vue by Ellery Lifestyles. Eventually Google explained what happened - private equity gutted it in a classic tale of how private equity squeezes and destroys companies. Will spare you the boring but the gist:

(company is from 2010 or so)

"In 2017, Ellery Homestyles (the actual manufacturer of Vue) began aggressively restructuring and acquiring other bedding assets (like Extreme Linen) to scale up for massive digital and omnichannel retail.During this corporate scale-up, older multi-piece specialty sets like the 2-in-1 Barcelona coverlet were phased out to make room for high-volume, mass-market designs.Eventually, Ellery Homestyles' brands were absorbed into even larger manufacturing parents, like home textiles giant Keeco"

"The final blow to the brand's original identity came when Keeco’s private equity strategies ran into severe financial headwinds. Keeco aggressively loaded up on debt to merge with a bankrupt competitor, Hollander Sleep Products, in 2022. When major customer Bed Bath & Beyond went under, Keeco was left holding massive debt.To handle this, their private equity backer, Centre Lane Partners, executed a classic PE maneuver in early 2025: a corporate carve-out.They split the company in two. They rebranded the core utility bedding business as Live Comfortably and threw the struggling fashion bedding/window division into a separate sister company called Simply Interior Homes.

By June 2026, the newly formed fashion division filed for bankruptcy, with court filings explicitly stating that the private equity carve-out left the fashion business severely underfunded and hollowed out. Private equity essentially treated the brand exactly how the playbook dictates: it funded its initial growth, rolled it into a massive $1 billion corporate conglomerate to eliminate manufacturing complexity, and finally carved the company apart when debt mounted. The high-end, 100% cotton Vue Barcelona set was a casualty of a system designed to favor mass-production efficiency over specialty textile design."

No one ever cared, at least in the U.S. about 'food rent healthcare transport'. In the U.S. we don't combine those ideas together. Unless you're a student or a politician, almost no one talks like that.

You and I know it's connected in a sense.

But is it meaningfully connected? It plays into a story about corporate hegemony, money influencing politicians through lobbying, the power of health care conglomerates and large corporations.

But it doesn't have any teeth to the average person, who's talking about inflation, or they're talking about gas, or they're talking about taxes, or they're talking about health care bills. I never hear a unified narrative. Should I be? Is it helpful? Socialist narratives have a bad reputation, and our current socialist politicians talk a LOT about what happens overseas, or immigration, or matters of race and gender. I am talking about the U.S. socialists, here.