I owe my soul to the company store...

[Mr Mark]

I used to play this song on a CD a while ago that talked about the terrible situation of a guy working all day yet ending up worse off. I'm sure most of you are familiar with the song. It's normally associated with the 'bad old days ' bringing images of sharecroping and manual Labour.

But as I see our society now we have exactly the same situation  wrote large and the USA especially is just a ginormous "company store" for most of the population. 

Work(for the company ), spend (from the company), borrow ( from the company ). And indeed keep digging deeper in debt.

Sure, the individuals are borrowers for nice cars and eating out, holidays in the carribean  and iPhones, yet the fundamentals are unchanged.

"Work all day and what do you  get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St Peter don't you call me cos I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store"

Apt description of America it seems.

[bobechs]

You can ditch the store Amerika with ease:

Order from e-bay for delivery straight from China or Hong Kong plus free shipping via China Post.

Stick it to the Man...

[Metric Mouse]

Or move. Or quit working. Many options to avoid the American economy if one wishes.

[Mr Mark]

Or move. Or quit working. Many options to avoid the American economy if one wishes.

Oh don't get me wrong I'm not whining. Part of mustachianism is learning to avoid that debt wage slave trap. I just feel a bit sorry sometimes for the people trapped in that cycle.

As a capitalist it's in my favour. It's what helps FIRE - all hail the rentier economy

[Gondolin]

The difference to my mind is that the song is about a coal miner who is literally indebted to a single entity in true wage slavery. He likely entered the mines at 15 and now lacks the education or means to escape.

Most Americans in this day and age are voluntarily entering wage slavery through poor lifestyle choices.  They aren't helped by mass marketing and predatory corporate practices but, that's nothing compared to the real indentured servitude practiced by early industrial businesses.

[LalsConstant]

That coal miner probably would have killed for the extravagance of a contemporary overspending American.  I mean if you are that far underwater you're never coming out I would rather do it in the era where you can charge up some pretty cool stuff instead of Depression era household staples.

Plus, I used to be an indebted idiot and I changed, and I am not smart at all.  Personal choice matters  great deal.

[Mr Mark]

^ ^
Oh absolutely.

We've gotten much, much better at getting people to voluntarily go into debt and outspend their means, while therefore committing themselves to working until their late 60s to pay for it all. We also provide almost zero education on the issues related to finance, retirement, interest rates, taxation and debt, and flood the media with advertising and validation.

It's a big contributor to why gaming the system enables us to FIRE so early. I don't think many 'ordinary hard working Americans' even know that you can set yourself up such that you can get over $90,000 in income and pay zero in Federal taxes totally legally.

Or backdoor Roth your way to tax free dividends and cap gains.

[LalsConstant]

But the thing is, when you try to talk to people about this stuff, they don't want to listen.  Horse and water, something like that.

Plus I have known several people who were happy as clams following the standard script (counterpoint that not all people are well adjusted: I have also known a nihilistic man who spends every dime because he plans on committing suicide at a certain age because he doesn't want to age).  It just seems to work for most people.

I make way less money per year here than a lot of posters but even my comparatively modest efforts to harness the ideas of early retirement blogs to my own advantage make me a pariah among my peers at times.  "Whaaaat you don't have the special edition rose gold IPhone with the ruby ear buds!?  What's wrong do you have brain damage?"

I occasionally meet the person who "gets it" but the funny thing is, you rarely have much to talk about with such people because you're both "boring".  You don't have trashy stories of your own desperation and you aren't very dramatic compared to most because you live with more purpose and focus than most people.

The point being this approach isn't for everyone.  People do all kinds of things with their lives I think are misguided and people think I in turn am misguided.  Maybe I am right or maybe they are, who knows?

But to reign it back in, most people following the standard life script of zero balance retirement accounts and max balance credit accounts do seem to at least tacitly realize this extreme behavior is extreme even if it is culturally celebrated.  I am a big fan of libertarian paternalism (I.e. set people up with a marginally prudent course of action as a default and only allow them to deviate if they consciously wish to do so) so I would be open to any suggestions how to stop this from being so widespread, but any solution I can think of that is governmental or institutional carries so many perverse downsides I think they would do more harm than good.

The only exception being a practical education in personal finances, however some sacred cows are going to have to be slaughtered politically before that can ever happen.  My high school actually did use to have a math of money curriculum, but it was phased out after No Child Left Behind and left as only a one semester elective, and then common core and standardized test score driven school evaluations killed it completely.

The only way it's going to stop is the culture will have to shift and that means individuals are going to have to make decisions like I did.  What's the old saying, be the change you want to see inn the world?

[Telecaster]

The difference to my mind is that the song is about a coal miner who is literally indebted to a single entity in true wage slavery. He likely entered the mines at 15 and now lacks the education or means to escape.

That, and he was probably paid in script that could only be spent at the company store. 

[Rural]

The difference to my mind is that the song is about a coal miner who is literally indebted to a single entity in true wage slavery. He likely entered the mines at 15 and now lacks the education or means to escape.

That, and he was probably paid in script that could only be spent at the company store.

Scrip. And yes, exactly.  Also the mines would open a few weeks before harvest season to Lure in families with farms, keep them there until it was a little too late to get in the crop, and then close down, leaving them with no food and no income. Ostensibly this was in order to get a lot of coal ready  to ship north in the buildup to winter, and a lot of that was probably true. But it saved the mining companies the bother of storing anything and ensured the loss of family farms at the same time. Then the people who previously had a way out had nothing but the coal company, and the company had a captive labor force.


For the interested, there's a fabulous novel by James Still called River of Earth about a coal mining family in the early 30s.