The question is not what you do, but when.
If you did the same job you do today 50 years ago, you’d get massively better pay for it. Real (inflation-adjusted) wages have declined in the last decades, especially if you compare with cost-of-living inflation.
It just means that the demand for human labor is diminishing.
It’s funny that people view the middle class lifestyle as luxurious now but while living the lower class life style they call themselves middle class
It’s hard to fit a camera crew in a realistically sized house
They were all foster kids and the government gave them like $1,000 a month per kid. He was making 6 figures before even counting his job money.
Money laundering. The trip was an excuse to meet with his associates without arousing suspicion.
I was gonna say, my head canon seems to either recall or have invented the idea that the dad was some kind of CFO or accountant… but I don’t know if that idea has any actual evidenced merit from the movies, been a long time since I’ve seen em.
This is just how things worked back when unions were in the equation. If you sold TVs or drove a truck for a living, you got a house. If you had a good job, you had a house like this and basically everything you wanted.
We traded that life for a few hundred people having yachts instead.
If you were white, and it was immediately after WWII when every other major country in the world had been pulverized in WWII while the US was essentially untouched.
Even if it were possible to bring back the strong unions from the end of the great depression, and to bring back the laws from the New Deal which were in force at the end of WWII. And even if you did those things while simultaneously taking away the rights from black people so that they had the pre-civil-rights lifestyle. Even then, you couldn’t get to this level of wealth for a truck driver without also having a world war that smashed every other country and left the US whole.
Union membership in the US was at 16% in 1991. Obviously that’s better than today’s 10%, but that spread is hardly big enough to be the difference between the presumed worker’s paradise of the early '90s and the dystopian nightmare of 2025.
Thing is, you don’t even have to be in a union to get the benefit of other industries having them. They raise the bar for everyone.
I’m a Teamster - you don’t have to sell me on unions.
It doesn’t change overnight. Union membership was the plug holding all the money in the barrel, holding back the pressure of the bosses just taking whatever they could squeeze, gradually in a coordinated bloc, but not enough that people would jump ship from their specific operation and go to another place, but enough that every year there would be less and less, until now a majority of Americans can’t pay their expenses.
Maybe it wasn’t unions. You might be right. There are all these graphs pointing to something specific that happened in the 1970s that suddenly divorced productivity gains from wage gains, so maybe whatever it was that caused that finally began to have its real awful influence in the mid-1990s and finally really bear fruit in the late 2000s. Kevin’s dad didn’t buy that house in 1991. You get what I’m saying. There’s a delay. But, like I say, I have no real idea. I’m just guessing and throwing out random possibilities. Something fucked everything up. Probably a combination of things. Not having unions definitely couldn’t have helped.
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I don’t think the McAllisters were in union jobs. I think they were pretty high up the tier of management.
People talk about union jobs going away, but don’t forget, non-unionized middle management has totally been gutted by outside consultants over the same time period. So the changes in the workforce have hurt the earning power of both the line workers and the middle managers who used to make up the middle class.
Hm, I’m not really all that expert on the topic, but I feel like people in union jobs making enough of a salary to buy a comfortable home is going to drive up wages for everyone, even the people who have nothing to do with it.
Of course, UPS drivers are making $175k/yr right now, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot stopping other companies for paying people in washers and balls of lint for doing the exact same job. My feeling is that it’s an issue of critical mass, but like I say that’s more or less just a guess.
but I feel like people in union jobs making enough of a salary to buy a comfortable home is going to drive up wages for everyone
Even if that is an effect where increased unionized non-supervisor wages push up supervisor salaries, my point is that there are simply fewer middle managers to benefit from that effect.
Plus the second order effects of a hollowed out middle choking out the pipeline for promoting and training future business leaders, so that it’s a small number of big corporate executives overseeing jobs they’ve never had instead of the older system of a lot more small and medium sized business leaders supervising jobs they used to personally work.
Yeah. The amount of fuckery is large, and varied.
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My mom worked in a factory, my dad has been chronically unemployed and her parents worked at a food cart.
We owned a 3 story house with two kitchens, four bathrooms, and six bedrooms for $70k in the hood. Gentrification happened and it’s worth a million now.
I make double what my mom makes, and with the combined salaries of my wife, we still rent.
People insisting trickle down economics worked, when, in fact, it tricked up into the pockets of Bezos and the Waltons.
It trickles up almost by definition.
“Trickle down” refers to urine, not wealth.
This belongs on T shirts and beer cozies.
In fact the only way to effectively redistribute wealth, proven time and time again, is taxation, which Reagan gutted.
Yeah, affording a house isn’t the same as having a mansion and taking everyone you know on a vacation.
You gotta read past the first sentence my man lol
I did
I’m sorry about your poor reading comprehension.
Well let’s change that!
The surgeon who performs illegal organ transplants.
Child trafficking, let’s be clear 9 children are not that many to count.
They counted the neighbor kid instead of Kevin while getting into the vans. Kevin’s airplane ticket got thrown out the night before, so it didn’t come up at the airport.
I really wish this stupid meme would die.
They say it and refer to it multiple times during the opening: THE UNCLE THEY ARE VISITING IS THE ONE PAYING FOR THE VACATION.
Also, the answer is banking/finance.
What does / did the uncle do, then?
Sell cocaine in Paris, probably
I don’t remember it being revealed what Rob’s job is, but he is transferred from New York to Paris just before the start of the first movie. And it’s his townhouse in NYC that is used in Home Alone 2.
Stole Kardashian jewelry.
I mean, that’s fine. But also it implies significant generational family wealth.
The point is that Kevin’s family is loaded. Dad’s likely an investment banker, mid-level corporate executive, white shoe lawyer, or other high income profession. And he comes from a family with similar wealth and status, such that they can afford to shell out five figures on an extended vacation abroad.
I think this is alluded to in the class character of Kevin himself, who seems fairly comfortable playing the spoiled rich kid, but is initially terrified and disoriented when presented with people living in poverty.
I wouldn’t say loaded. They’re upper middle class. They put the kids in coach while the parents flew first class. If they were loaded they’d all be flying in a private jet.
They put the kids in coach while the parents flew first class.
I mean, when you’re 8 years old, coach might as well be first class.
Roger Federer and his kids all fly in a private jet!
That doesn’t explain the house and so many children though.
Most of the kids were family members visiting. Do we even know which kids were just part of the main family that lived in the house other than Buzz and Kevin? I can’t even remember if Buzz or any of the other kids from the first movie appear in the second one. 🤔
Shhhhh… Not a word
This house is currently worth about $5.5 million.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/671-Lincoln-Ave-Winnetka-IL-60093/3360197_zpid/Dang thats really close to Lake Michigan.
Ever seen Snake Eyes with Nic Cage? Kevin’s Dad killed the SecDef and was a weapons dealer.
He was also in the sopranos
His dad was an exec, and his mom was a fashion designer. They either alluded to, or outright said what his dad’s profession was, and the only reason to have those mannequins sitting around is if someone is designing clothing.
His parents had money. However, the uncle was the one that paid for the vacation, as he had even more money.
It was also the 90s. To anyone who didn’t live it I can not overstate how many benefits the McCallister adults had. Not even from the government just the world. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, China hadn’t risen yet and Europe had just finally recovered from WWII. America was at the end of being uncontested internationally for 50 years and had another decade to go before it all starts to crumble. Being middle class in the United States meant you had a good paying job, not the single bread winner jobs of decades before but wayyy better than what most people are offered now. It was a very different time.
Remember how Homer Simpson was supposed to be a loser? Owning a 2 story house in the suburbs and supporting a family of 5 on a single salary? The 90’s hit different.
Ask any Baby Boomer for career advice, and you’ll see how true this is. Who else was advised to “go straight to the boss” when applying for a job?
Double points if you were then directed to apply on a website.
Triple points if you told whoever offered you advice that you had to do the entire application process online, and they didn’t believe you.
Quadruple points if the website both requires you to upload a CV and enter all of the details into a form before you can submit.
So we’re just giving out free points now?
According to everything I read his father was listed as a prominent man in business, but the script doesn’t go further than that. Yes, the script says the mother was a fashion designer, but doesn’t say for what company, or anything more specific than that.
They didn’t say more because it’s fashion you wouldn’t understand
now we need something where the bandits break in, and they get restrained by the sculptures, ala beetlejuice
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Uncle Buck?
Private equity or high finance would be the easiest path
Was born at the right time
Wasn’t he supposed to be a neurosurgeon?
