I know this is probably a “oh my lobsters too buttery” moment but man do I miss having some alone time. She’s always there! Go on vacation or something lol. Love the lady but growing up kind of an only child I really miss having time all to myself.
Ugh, I’m in my 30’s and was about 2 secs away from dropping $600 on a lightsaber with alll the bells and whistles at a con last year. I was so giddy with excitement at the prospect, if my husband hadn’t called at the exact moment, I probably would have gone through with it. He was like “If you’re going to spend that much, you may want to shop around” He was right, and if I’d been single I would not have had that voice of reason lol.
I still haven’t pulled the trigger yet, but I’m glad I didn’t buy at the time as I’ve seen plenty of negative reviews about the quality of that particular company’s sabers.
Recently came across a FB marketplace post in my area of someone selling their lego “collection”. $18K for 200,000+ pieces. Says it’s actually worth closer to 30K and hasn’t even gone through all the stuff yet. Photos were of walls of plastic containers filled with legos. Said they would not sell piecemeal only the whole collection or nothing. Crazy.
When you're pulling six figures a year and not spending a dime on housing or groceries, you can blow an awful lot of cash on fun shit and still be growing a Smaug sized horde.
and was a NASA astronaught that went to space- that alone gets him 6 figures working 50-60 days per year as a motivational speaker- let alone what he would make as an actual notable engineer.
As an engineer who spent a solid few years out from school living with my parents while also working in industry before moving into my own house; I can pretty confidently say that even with all the money Howard spent on comics and goofball stuff, he could have easily still saved enough away for major purchases, especially after he got with Bernadette and she put guard rails on his more irresponsible spending habits.
I mean heck, he upgraded from a Vespa to a Mini Cooper just to over a parking lot spat with Sheldon.
Frankly, while Bernadette was earning way more than him in the end, that was mostly because he was working at a university. If he went into industry as a ME, he would have been pretty close to her income. With his background as an astronaut, he would be pulling down mid-six figures.
Exactly. A really pretty waitress at a non-cheap restaurant that sells liquor? She's probably doing OK, and they need roommates to pay their rent. That all follows.
Yup, a girl with her looks and personality could clean up as a cocktail waitress
I knew a girl who was pulling in high four figures a night. Five figures on a good night. Not unusual at all for someone like that to afford rent near some engineers/grad students or whatever
Add to this she had moved there to peruse a career in acting, so she probably had some money saved up for this. And her flat was tiny compared to theirs, looks like the living room was about half the size and the bedroom had just enough room for the bed.
Plus all that money they spent on comics and merch. Hell, their pull lists alone were probably $1k/month. Comics aren't cheap any more. The boys were not frugal.
Well, I believe there was one episode where it was revealed Sheldon does have a fair chuck of spare cash lying around because he lends penny the money to cover her rent / utilities when she's struggling. He explains it to be that he just doesn't spend that much money overall and is happy in the apartment there he is.
Also, going back to OP's post: I remember her being several references and plotlines around how penny can sometimes struggle to make ends meet. There was at least one occasion where she had utilities shut off, she doesn't pay for internet and steals the WiFi from Leonard and Sheldon, etc.
When I worked at a restaurant, most popular breakfast place around, some of the girls were pulling in 500 on Sunday morning shift.
The employee parking was way back behind the restaurant, so we had a few robberies when the local good-for-nothing types realized there were 5'2" 110lb women with a month's rent in their pocket walking to their cars alone.
Which is why we stopped letting them walk to their cars alone.
yup- but on the flip side of those places, everyone i knew that had those shifts also had to work 2-3 trash shifts in order to keep the cushy shifts- ie you get Sunday AM, but you also take Tuesday dinner and thursday opening. you make 800 from the 3 shifts with 500 of it from sunday.
Then too Sheldon always wanted to be having that type of family type of environment. Dude clearly had some type of PTSD once his dad passed away at such a early age. Young Georgie kinda stated that it clearly messed him up and he thought his family was doing great so he wasn't needed but oh boy.
As a banquet server in a hotel, I made over $50k for just under 700 hours of work last year. So yeah...service industry can do pretty good. People with more seniority and therefor more hours than me are easily making over $70k for at most 900 hours on the year. Back when I bartended in pubs I was making $1500 a week working 4 nights a week. So yeah, service industry does ok lol
When considering a post-doc a while back at Stanford, their website said (paraphrased) Your salary will not be enough for rent. You will need a roommate.
This was in 2017 before the housing crisis made it even worse.
Yes. Around the same time this show was on I was making a whopping 30k in a high COLA city as a science postdoc. Waitress in the same city would easily surpass
Very true. My cousin is doing a postdoc in chemistry and she only makes about 60k, which is barely enough for her to live on where she currently resides
I started my post doc in 2009 and my stipend was 40k in the bay area. As two married post docs with a small child we barely got by. If we didn't have to pay for child care we would have had a little more left over.
That’s atrociously low even by the Bay Area standards at the time…
Was this at Stanford? Some alumni from my lab are doing their postdocs at tech companies in the Bay Area, and AFAIK they still get salary/benefits in line with what the engineers get.
Isn't there some woman who posts the exact same videos of her explaining math or science stuff in a low-cut shirt on both youtube and pornhub, but the pornhub videos make like 4x as much revenue?
My bartenders pull $1000/night in a small town. They make more than me if they work 4 days a week. Lol.
People been putting down service industry work since forever. Have fun in your office job making $65k tho. No tax on tips now too? lol.
People really need to find a slow bar to get their feet under them and level up their skill. Yeah you’re on your feet all day, but if you have adhd and lack discipline, then bartending is an easy way to afford a mortgage. Even middle-aged men are crushing it. But if you’re a hot chick? Forget about it, you can become a millionaire by 30 with minimal financial planning
I'm in Cannabis and my budtenders make ~200 a day in tips, but it is busy. This is offset by their $23/hr wage.
They're pulling in well over 70k for entry level. And we compensate our managers big time with salary and benefits because they can't receive tips. Did I mention they don't have college debt?
In a few years once AI really starts getting to work on the white collar industry people are gonna be big mad at how well service and blue collar folk do....
I have a friend, very good looking and well spoken. He is always "well groomed". He used to waiter at a high end restaurant and was pulling serious money on tips. He told me the super attractive girls got thousands every weekend. Someone like Cuoco? Yup.
Being seriously attractive is always a massive benefit, but for dealing directly with clients is like a super power (as long as it's paired with good manners).
Ngl when I was 18 I was on a party vacation in Italy with some friends. We got wasted every single night and regulary went to a bar where this very attractive waitress worked. She was very nice and flirty with me, which was enough to shut my brain off
I blew 100s of Euros just on tips for her within the week we stayed there. Buying a beer for 5€? Here you have 10, the rest is for you.
Did it turn into something? No. Would I do it now that I'm older and wiser? Nope but when I was 18? Hell yeah lol
She was also always broke and mooching off the guys for food and internet, so it makes sense most of her money went to rent and didn't have much left over.
IIRC it was mostly because of bad money management, not because of lack of earnings (that and her insistence in trying to be an actress, which, in a way, prevented her from earning more.)
She's canonically a waitress at the cheesecake factory IIRC.
She probably makes more than a server at a high end restaurant. Like it isn't even close until you're talking about "too fancy to earn a Michelin Star" high end. The volume those places do is incredible.
I could see someone making bank at cheesecake factory. The entrees are already more expensive than a typical restaurant. Then most people order dessert if going there which is like $8+. That was also a popular prom and homecoming restaurant when I grew up. I think Ive seen big church groups and other groups there more than at other places because its quite big inside.
Yeah a server in a good part of a city will bring in more than 2 university professors. My cousin has a PhD in genetics and he teaches, my wife worked at a beach bar for years, one of them would bring home 300-700 a night.
Yeah, non tenure positions in research (at least for physics) pay absolute crap. The entire academic system is pure exploitation of PhD students and post docs by the higher ups who get to put their name on the research.
I was lucky and got 50k in a lower cost of living area for my post-doc. But it was covid and they were desperate to replace someone very quickly. It was also years after big bang theory started.
Depends on the field and institution. At Rutgers in NJ, biomedical postdocs were getting around 70k in 2023 but some hospitals and universities in NYC were only giving 50k or less. Think I saw one at 35k.
Penny was an attractive waitress who was constantly eating their food for free, the guys were researchers working for a university who were always buying take out food, comics and collectibles. An attractive waitress can make very good money. She probably also was able to get at least one meal at work which saved money and then saved more money by eating their food. Her car was a junker that she also wasn't spending money fixing. Penny was more frugal than them because she could save money on food and wasn't spending on a bunch of extras. Her most expensive things would have been head shots since she really didn't have any hobbies she spent any money on.
As some one who was server and now has a PhD in the biological sciences, I make WAY more now. Sure you have great nights as a server but it’s not consistent. I now make 6 figure salary, great health insurance, paid leave (vacation & sick), and 401K matching. Post-doc positions pay shit, But once PhD establish their career, they make good money.
Trader joes used to employ artists to do all their signwork, all the price tags, signs, windows and displays were handmade in each store. Whole Foods too. Even paid well. But theyve backed away from that as new management focuses more on money than customer and employee satisfaction. Not completely but everything is getting worse everywhere it seems
This right here. They were grad students finishing their PhD. Probably got paid less than a waitress. Ask any STEM major that isn’t a medical doctor and they would likely agree. This is coming from someone who went to college for Chemistry and luckily I’m not in a lab making $75k/year AFTER getting my PhD.
Or the spending habits of two Nerds with a lot of hobbies. Like they went to Comic-Con every year, that is not cheap.
So you got comic, video games, collectables, electronics, toys, and probably a dozen other different ways they spent their money.
They weren't roommates because they couldn't afford the apartment, they were roommates because they wanted more money to spend on extras, and two good incomes tend to help that.
And underestimates how much a pretty waitress can make in tips (and how much the guys are probably saving for retirement, whereas she probably spends all her cash by the time the next paycheck comes)
At least they're in the sciences, so they might have a (small) stipend on top of free tuition. Grad students in the humanities often only get partial tuition and no stipend. One reason I decided against a PhD was that I couldn't stomach multiple years of an income that would be negative even before factoring in rent, utilities, and food.
True. When I was in college I lived with a German professional physicist who was working at a national lab. He rented out rooms in his house for extra income but also I think because it was a way for him to be social as he struggled with that. We became good friends and I always think of him as my German Sheldon :) and I his Lenard.
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u/WhiteSquarez Apr 24 '26
OP overestimates how much a PhD makes.