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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

> The average family paid 100 for cable and on top kept buying dvds for 10-20 a pop.

Lol, no way in hell that was the average. That was the high end dream consumer that very few of the people I knew matched even back in cable’s heyday.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/680645/number-of-cable-s...

In my family we would rent lots of movies each week with an 2-3 times a week ritual trip to the video rental store to pick something out for $2 or so.

Movies we liked were bought when they went on sale at the cheap DVD trough at Walmart for $5.

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probably it was the average family but not the median family, which of course means that the high end dream consumer family was paying much more than that.

Man, I grew up lower/lower-middle class, about 30-40% of the median family income, and we had the $80/month cable package plus went to Blockbuster for 5+ rentals per week

I don't think that was unusual, either.

If you're watching 5+ rental films per week, when do you have the time to watch anything on the cable package?

Sounds like a ridiculous waste of money to me, but then I'm firmly at the other end of the spectrum. I finally cancelled my £30 a month TV package, I've not rented a film for over 10 years, and would buy blu-rays or DVDs only for things I thought I'd watch more than once, or where buying them was cheaper than renting (common in the case of box sets).

It's not particularly difficult to imagine a family situation where that would happen - although perhaps not nowadays when there is a much broader entertainment landscape:

1. traditional patriarchal setup, male parent works, mother at home, watches some cable during the day.

2. Kids come home from school / kindergarten at 4, watch some cable.

3. Eat dinner at 7, watch movie.

4. kids go to bed at 9, folks watch cable for couple hours.

5. Kids at age where they have their own tastes, 3 kids, buy 2 movies for adults 3 movies for kids or variations thereof.

I mean obviously the time to do this stuff is a waste of time, but often families waste the time because parents are burned out from various things and the easiest way to get through the time is to give everyone media to consume and forget about them.

Yeah, it probably wasn't the most efficient use of my family's limited budget, but that's how it goes

Nowadays I'm a big /r/financialindependence guy, and I was shocked recently to find out that a lot of my lower-middle class friends and family are constantly ordering food with those ripoff delivery apps. It's completely insane IMO to pay $50 for cold, soggy food that should have cost 25, but I guess people do it. They buy new top-end smartphones every year or two, lease cars, and do all sorts of other ridiculous money-wasting stuff.

Of course you don’t think it was unusual, that was your upbringing. The stats I linked showed that cable’s peak was 40 million households.

No, it wasn’t the median either. That would be the high end of a cable subscriber setup in the 90s and 00s. About the only way to go above it is constant on demand rentals and PPV fights.

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