Or have lower class families been buying plastic to increase the appearance of their quality of life for 6+ generations?
I get that we're going through mega-inflation since covid. Even before that, if you bought whole foods and clothes that aren't plastic (nylon), the ol' paycheck only stretched so far.
I'd really like to pick the brain of a self-aware Boomer and find out how long it's been like this.
The Middle-Class has long existed for quite some time. I can tell you with absolute certainty that it has a unique culture and a unique perspective that I (as an upwardly mobile under-class person) have never really understood and have engaged with.
You're kind of thinking of the Lower Middle-Class people who are buying everything out on credit and can't really afford the payments on their Middle-Class lifestyle.
Actual Middle-Class people see their house as an investment vehicle, and have an IRA (or other such retirement fund), and are attempting to navigate the professional-managerial class social systems in order to give themselves and their kids opportunities within that realm. They have at least $20,000 in savings. To them, golf clubs are expensive, but it's not a big loss to go out and buy some. They DO NOT tolerate shopping at Wal-Mart because they don't like the products, and also don't really like the lower class. When they go out to eat, they think that "The Olive Garden" is bottom of the barrel. They are very NIMBY, and they are typically some kind of faux-Christians that mimick something you'd see off the Hallmark Channel.
Politically, I despise them. They are the kind of "Conservatives" that unironically say shit like, "I hate that I'm forced to chose between Trump and Biden again, they're both as bad as one another. We need real Conservative leadership in this country, with real conservative values, like Paul Ryan!" They are unironic Jeb Bush supporters. As for the middle-class Leftists: they will tell you Obama was the greatest president we ever had, and Joe Biden unified the country. I still see the "Hate Has No Home Here" signs that have been out for 4 straight years.
I hate them.... SO MUCH.
They throw away food ALL THE TIME!!! They never eat left-overs, unless it's "meal prep".
The issue is that they are so intwined in the monetary and social side of maneuvering through the middle-class towards the upper-class that they inherit a lot of luxury beliefs, accept the middle-managerial establishment at face value, and have no real understanding of what it's like to be poor, especially when you have Poverty Thinking. They literally can't help the poor, and most likely they were never actually poor themselves, so they just like to look generous. However, they don't really have the skills, thinking, or connections to actually be upper-class, or manage the kind of finances an upper-class person has to manage; so it remains perpetually out of reach. Getting to that first million dollars in asset wealth is wildly more difficult than getting to the 2nd million, and they don't really know that.
None of the things you described are exclusive to middle-class people. Some of the worst wastefulness I've seen has actually been from lower-class people.
Lower-class people can't conceptualize the future (incapable of abstraction), buy everything on credit (it's "free money"), and only care if the monthly payments don't go over their meager wages (can only do basic addition/subtraction, nevermind complex shit like percentages or compounding).
The current stagflation and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis were created from giving poorfags money they didn't deserve.
It's so painful seeing the way people use food stamps. They'll buy ice cream, candy, cigarettes, booze, and lottery tickets all in one go, and they'll tell the cashier, "Put the food on this card, and the rest on my credit card".
That's not just wastefulness. What I describe is the middle-class mentality that is based around the fact that they have a significant enough money to not have to worry about "waste". That's a key aspect.
Seems to me like lower-class people actually do less worrying than middle-class when it comes to waste. The idea that lower-class people are these virtuous and frugal paragons in contrast to the middle-class just seems a bit romantic. I've lived among them myself and was disillusioned through experience.