[post-it]

> Look at what it costs to get a work shirt (I mean, for physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s or ordered by the US military in the 1940s, which in neither case could be regarded as super-fancy. You're probably looking at minimum $150.

Of course, this is still cheaper than it was in the 1940s. With my disposable income I could afford to buy a few $150 shirts a month. A worker of my social class in the 1940s could not.

I don't need the quality so I buy $5 Gildan shirts instead. I do buy Made in Canada cat toys for my little guy though. Different priorities.

[wholinator2]

Multiple $150 shirts per month? That's vastly out of range for the vast majority of human beings alive in the United States right now. I know i definitely could not afford a $300-$450/month increase in expenditure, it would literally bankrupt me. I've already had to sell all the stocks i had just to stay afloat renting and eating normal home made good food in a not so expensive city as a relatively high paid graduate student. There's like hundreds of thousands of people in this city making less than I am. Certainly some of them are working physical labor, blue collar jobs. There's a certain tendency to assume that we are the average in income, no matter where we are. And since going back to school and living near $0 savings for years I've learned that what i thought before was very very wrong. Assuming every blue collar worker can afford multiple $150 shirts per month is wild. I'm sure lots of them are well paid, but that's just not realistic for the a huge portion of people working in America now

[pocksuppet]

If your job doesn't cover your rent and food, you are not highly paid. You are, as they say, slave labor.