That was very funny, but also completely appalling.

jesus christ Noel

I was desperate for this to end with “and then they literally ate us” and reveal it to JUST be the most horrifying short story of all time

oh hey it is me remembering every time i tried to explain housing instability to one of the gentry and they just couldnt get over the first hurdle of "you dont get to choose where you live?" and checked out.

i have been, spiritually, the aldi shopper in these situations and damn.

This is the sort of thing I mean when I call people "carbrained."

I believe, now more than ever, that it should be legal to hunt rich people for sport.

I find it extremely uncanny how the opinions and values of the businessmen in this story can be so... Easily reproduceable. If anything I find it harder to find people who would value living in a city because they are in a city, than just a place where they work and sleep.

I just got back from one of the biggest cities in the world the other day (São Paulo), and I kept feeling the extremy uncanny, well feeling that the city was hostile to the people, and in turn made people hostile. And after reading your text, it really reinforces how the richer people can just... Both ignore and reinforce that facet. Why worry about building a community if I can just live in my own isolated house and take an uber straight to work, right?

This was a wonderful (if not slightly existentially terrifying) read!

And by the way, I wrote a little bit of what I felt during that visit, if it might pique your interest! It left me quite impacted, and I feel like your text resonates with what I felt. https://cohost.org/explorermoo/post/1931480-this-city-s-vibes-ar

Drives me nuts that taking a train to Chicago and doing stuff there is easier than doing the same thing with Detroit despite LIVING IN THE GREATER DETROIT METRO AREA

Talking to wealthy people definitely feels like you're talking to aliens.

this was beautifully written, and really sad too. i never stop being surprised at the level of dehumanization these people are comfortable with.

Rich people are absolutely the kind've people who do not appreciate the smell of coffee in the morning.

Bwahaha that was a slow boil but it boiled

suit is vaguely right about "self driving cars talking to each other", traffic really could be more efficient...except for the fact that every time it's more practical for more cars to be added to the road, more cars will be added to the road. happens every time they add more lanes to the highways. in a different sense, it's the same problem as making gas-powered cars more efficient: yes, but what if you didn't pump oil from the ground to burn it? what if you didn't fill the entire road with individual self-powered capsules far oversized for the loads they carry? billions and billions of dollars spent every year in an attempt to make obviously impractical premises more workable, not realizing that they can never make headway. it's not possible. these are not solvable problems. make cars more pleasant to drive, they'll drive more. make cars cheaper and less environmentally unfriendly to drive! they'll drive more. the greed knows no bounds. the smog expands to fill the container.

you know what's a really easy way to make self-driving vehicles? rails. it's so much easier to just make things go forwards and sometimes backwards, with occasional decision points. sigh

Wow, this is compelling writing 👀

Reminds me of the two glorious years I lived in New Orleans proper instead of the hell suburbs on the northshore that I have spent most my life. My dad literally cannot understand why I hate commuting. Though my parents freak our neighbors out cause they drive to the city twice a week just to hang out. Suburbanites have a really specific kind of brainworm.

yeah, wow.

Two friends are getting married this month and they were briefly considering the DAC because one of their uncles or something is a member, but it would have been tens of thousands of dollars; and sounds like it wouldn’t have been that nice anyways!

my guess about their opinion on uber is: "the driver could be anyone!" but at that point most probably started to realize they invited less bigoted people into their midst. but yeah just a silly guess on my part.

wild story... but eerily relatable

As someone who just moved from a suburb into a city where I'm one block away from an Aldi and the fact that I can just pop down to grab something for dinner and a bag of nectarines for a snack and it's one of my favorite parts about living here: That part hit, I felt it

it's a crime that the wealthy are as tasteless and boring as they are

Skirts below the knee!!!

This is my life. This is how I live, fighting off car-brained people, advocating for walkable cities, for zoning that isn't based off raising property values. It's so tiring. It's so crazy how asking for public transport makes me feel guilty, and how I have to spend so much time saying that this will make life better for people who drive because it reduces traffic overall.

what a horror story

I'm kind of surprised your spouse wasn't quietly let go for being the wrong kind of person. For marrying someone who would shop at Aldi.

that... is spectacularly bleak. these are the people that the built environment caters for, and i cannot fathom being the sort of person that would want to live like that.

I recently moved back to Ohio suburbs to take care of some family business after living in Seoul for 6-7 years. This story felt even like when talking to my averagely middle class friends who never left. The suburbs is comfort poison! And it's not even that comfortable! I just feel like sprawl is this weird cultlike infection borne out of capitalism that gets away with it just because you have generations who never experience otherwise. Or! will ever have a chance to because there's this indoctrinated fear of being in the city and being forced to walk or travel with strangers.

oh, you know, those... nefarious characters at aldi.

also sakes alive it's remarkable what white flight does to a society's ability to understand each other as being different people with different wants and needs

A little glimpse into the parasitic world doing its best to destroy this country.

This is kind of sad because I'm sure there are many reasons Detroit citizens love the city, and you didn't get to meet any of them. You were there looking for character, and these folks sold you veneers.

I feel like you just met my aunts and uncles and as someone who left the Safe, Republican Haven of Suburban Texas for the Urban Hellscape that is [checks notes] Seattle, I feel so incredibly dearly to my heart this entire post.

"Aldi shopper," they say, like a slur,

oh i super feel this, i was at a wedding a little while ago for one of my (very rich) cousins-in-law and the wedding was in downtown madison. an absurdly walkable and bikeable university town that had an e-bike rental station right outside our hotel. and people gave us strange looks for walking a mile from the hotel so we could see the city during our weekend there instead of just having the hotel hire a taxi for us

(which, sidenote, i did end up passing through chicago for a few hours on the way back, and i super understand your feelings about the place; it's an absolutely stunning city, even from what little i've seen of it, and assuming my wife and i could manage paying for the move i would go there in a heartbeat oh my gosh. you can get trains that actually go to more than one place,)

I work with a lot of hilariously rich people at my job and they are 100% this. they have no concept of public services, no inconveniences, no interacting with the "lower class" whatsoever unless it is part of some business venture. they might as well live in a different universe. they only do what they want to do and see what they want to see. They are extremely overly concerned about time, and being at places on time, and spending absolutely obnoxious levels of money to get places faster because time is the only thing you can't buy once you get into generational wealth.

Every once in a while I have to break the illusion for them as part of my job and you would not believe how little they value other people that aren't in their exclusive club once the mask comes off.

I unfortunately have dealt with people like these frequently in my life and it's when I like to bust out stories about being homeless or all my friends who are trainhoppers. These people are the base of fascism and are absolute enemies of humanity.

This is absolutely heart-wrenching. I found that I really love cities and dislike suburbs. I love commuting by bus or train because it gives me time to scroll through my social media and read articles. I love go out from my rental room and sit down at library and do a bit of my remote work in a noise of people around. I love to go for an evening stroll and get some boba tea from a local place. This energizes me. I would easily prefer to rent an expensive room in Brooklyn than anything outside in suburbs.

I would say that this lady would've been more dangerous to me, than a fair bit of "all kinds of people shop there" people that she means.

I cannot even conceive WHAT people in suburbs do. It's surreal.

Yup, this is exactly why I’ve lived in New York City most of my adult life and haven’t owned a car for almost all of that time. Big r/fuckcars vibe, you should post it there (if you want). The whole car culture thing just drives me nuts.

I love a good city fuckaround and the fact that I instead live like a suburbanite now (stay in home, drive directly to destination, drive home) has been slowly killing me

I know you were trying to minimize conflict, but bless your restraint for not giving "ew Aldi" the "no, I don't understand, who do you mean exactly" treatment.

I have never lived in a big city, but I hope to one day. God, just the dream of not owning a car . . .

I want to pull on one particular thread that underlies all of this:

What the fuck even is a social club anyways?

As far as I can tell, the main service/activity of a private social club is literally just that: socializing. What we in the Aldi economic spectrum call "hanging out."

They pay hundreds of dollars a month to hang out.

The money goes to various facets of that activity to make it worth hundreds of dollars, such as having people of color nearby acting conspicuously In Their Place. And like classical artwork or whatever.

But really, the main service they are paying hundreds of dollars a month for is for it to cost hundreds of dollars a month. To the purpose of ensuring that when they hang out, they are at no risk of hanging out with people who shop at Aldi.

Such a weird thing. If you don't want to hang out with someone, just don't. But no, they gotta go to lengths to ensure that it's physically impossible for """those people""" to hang out with them. Or nearby. In visible range, really. Those people are allowed in the space, but they are obviously and conspicuously not hanging out when they're present.

This is the same principle behind the design of lots of suburbia as well. Lots of resources dedicated to ensuring that something that wasn't gonna happen will definitely not happen.

Dear god the "you never know who might have shopped/rode in that store/car", just saying that part out loud, it just... oh man

toronto has become pretty much entirely dominated by people with this worldview over the past few decades. it's not that most people in the city feel this way, it's just that they're politically marginalized by the windshield crowd. it feels like living in an amusement park for suburbanites to visit.

Oh my God it must have felt like you were living in a Jordan Peele film in real life this is just absurd.

I hate to see my own family around me succumbing to suburban brainworms, the very idea of me going to Dallas, the nearest city to us, actively scares them. Like last week on a day off I took my little sister up to Deep Ellum a really cool walkable neighborhood, we were just there a while to get her some school supplies from a really cool little stationery shop, and they actually called me on my phone to ask what the hell we were doing in Deep Ellum, and to NEVER bring my sister there again. They're not racist people but they've been told there's "bad people" there and that it's a "bad part of town" and they take that at its word without thinking critically about who told them that and what it might actually mean. Society decays around us.

That's an interesting read, thanks for sharing <3

As a person without driver's license in a country way less car-centric than USA - i'm still surprised by all lifestyle differences between "walkers" and "drivers", even where i live.