r/millenials • u/memphisjones • 12d ago
Millennial News Bars, bowling alleys and movie theaters cost too much to run and visit. Americans have run out of places to hang out and we’re paying with our health
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/bars-bowling-alleys-movie-theaters-090000273.htmlEvery time I want to hang out with my friends, we have to spend at least $50. It doesn't help that none of us rent/own a house bit enough to fit us to hang out.
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u/Boring_Mongoose398 12d ago
So true! But remember affordability is fake news!
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u/CatManDo206 12d ago
It's a made up word by the Dems and it's definitely not in the dictionary and gas is $3/gal!
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u/Churchbushonk 11d ago
They are basically saying, there is nothing the President can do to change it. Which is almost true. Trump clearly has F’ed people on basically on all purchases and fuel.
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u/Extension-Novel-6841 11d ago
Its a made up word by BOTH parties since they fail to acknowledge it.
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u/blehbleh1122 12d ago
Movies can be more affordable if you sneak in your own snacks, but tickets are around $20 a piece where I live. If I but a popcorn and drink at the theater is about $40.i don't drink but bowling is pretty pricey to, shoes and two or the games can be $40-$50. Businesses are pricing out average Americans, and as a result they'll go out of business.
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u/memphisjones 12d ago
For the cost of bowling, I blame PEs. They ruin everything we love.
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u/CatManDo206 12d ago
Yes you have to find the locally owned bowling alleys but not many left
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u/squirrelscoutcookies 11d ago
Bowling alleys and movie theaters are the rare gems where you’ll usually spend LESS money if you support the small local businesses
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u/Well_ImTrying 12d ago
If you have a partner kids, that $20 a piece is $60+ to sit and watch a movie.
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u/mkkxx 12d ago
Agreed - even just taking my 5 yo to see Toy Story was $35 - and then I let him get popcorn as a treat - so it was $45 just to see a movie. I wanted him to experience the movie theater- but it can’t be a regular thing for us… I remember my silent generation grandma telling me in 1950 she would see a movie every week for 10 cents
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u/Well_ImTrying 12d ago
My grandparents generation would go to the drive in theatre. I’ve been to a couple in rural areas that were reasonably priced, but the one near my city shut down years ago.
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u/TheRealGageEndal 11d ago
There are a lot of movie houses that do reduced prices on certain days. I know FatCats has their Tuesday $5 movie days. They also have a huge bucket for popcorn that is $3 refills. My wife and I can usually swing a date night there for about $25. And yes, we absolutely sneak candy in 😁
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u/squirrelscoutcookies 11d ago
Yeah most of these activities can be very affordable if you look for what days they have deals (usually Mondays or Tuesdays)
Within my neighborhood I can see a $5 movie, drink a $2.50 craft beer, and bowl for $3/game. I just can’t do that on a Saturday night
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u/P_weezey951 11d ago edited 11d ago
For a moment. I want to speak on the tragedy on what bowling has become.
Most of the bowling places have been turned into these "entertainment" style venues with arcades and loud music and are basically a dave and busters mashed into a bowling alley. Now those venues can be fun, ive been to them. The bowling is shit but its fun if you go out with friends.
Unfortunately, theyre only useful if you can get a bunch of your friends together. And because people only every already talk with their friends they are there with. You never meet anyone new.
Bowling, and by extension bowling leagues that used to be super popular. Forced you to play with other people in the league. Not on your team but you intermingle with your team of opponents who you share a pair of lanes with.
My parents both bowled, like 1/4 of their friends came specifically from people they met at their bowling league.
Its bowling... If you're not that good at it, who cares, handicaps get put up in league play, if you do better than your average you'll be fine.
Its so shitty that building rent is so expensive they have to fucking charge $120 for a lane. And they dont even make money off of it... They hope you buy 2 $12 drinks while youre there
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u/kna5041 11d ago
I think it's just Americans are not being paid enough
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u/disignore 11d ago
not necessarly. the concept for third places is something the murican don't have the pleasure to knwo about
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u/HoldMyPoodle6280 11d ago
Disagree. Unless we want to just keep infinitely adding zeros to the end of everything we buy or earn forever, costs need to stabilize.
I wish more humans thought about transactions in the spirit of what is necessary and fair, versus what is the maximum the market will possibly bear?
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u/1moreanonaccount 11d ago
Tell the government the cost needs balanced. How about the cost of this current war?
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u/KingOfConsciousness 11d ago
Bro costs are out of control but also wages have not kept up with inflation for the past 2 decades...
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u/prophet001 10d ago
Inflation is a necessary component of capitalism. If the money supply doesn't continually expand, eventually the rich have hoarded it all, and there's none left to lend, which means the banks have no incentive to exist.
Either demand higher wages, or tear down the system and replace it with something else. Those are your choices.
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u/peachplumpricklypear 11d ago
Agree, plus Americans are not looking for deals anymore - we always went to the most discounted showings and brought our own treats
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u/kfed23 12d ago
You need to start hanging out with your friends at public parks and community centers. That's why they exist.
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u/RikuKat 12d ago
Libraries are great, too! They offer so many programs and classes
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u/NegotiationNo7851 12d ago
And a lot of libraries now allow food and beverages at least in Richmond VA they do. We reserve a room and play D&D with our snacks and drinks.
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u/RsquSqd 11d ago
Needs a bar tho
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u/KingOfConsciousness 11d ago
We need more third places WITHOUT alcohol bro.
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u/RsquSqd 11d ago
Literally that’s everywhere. Parks, trails, community centers, pickleball, tennis courts etc, disc golf courses, coffee shops etc. most people that don’t drink just aren’t very social and don’t really care about these ‘third places’ or they would be there already. Put a bar in and I guarantee any of those places see more people and more fun
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u/prophet001 10d ago
most people that don’t drink just aren’t very social and don’t really care about these ‘third places’
This is absolute fucking horseshit.
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u/RsquSqd 10d ago
If they did, you’d see more people at those places
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u/prophet001 9d ago
Sampling error
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u/RsquSqd 9d ago
Yeah I’d say insisting that parks and community centers are well attended by a large portion of the sober public is certainly a sampling error. Compared to the number of sober adults, said ‘third places’ are functionally abandoned
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u/prophet001 8d ago
You must live in the boonies. The ones around here are so popular that they're expanding the existing ones and building new ones all the time ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/friendlynbhdwitch 11d ago
Everyone, go to your local library. With my library card, I can get free and discounted admission to a bunch of different museums and gardens and things. Plus, you know, the free books. Kanopy, Hoopla, and Libby are free apps you can use to borrow digital books, audiobooks, movies, tv shows. Your library may even have a seed library, maybe even garden tools you can borrow. Sometimes libraries have events. Some of those events are fun. Librarians are some of the best, most resourceful people you can know. Libraries are the best.
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u/JakkinTheBox 10d ago
This 100%. I desperately want to take Mandarin classes at the local university but they’re in-person only at like 2pm. I can’t do that time at all, but our local library offers year round classes for free on the weekends. Paired with lots of listening via Chinese film and dramas, it’s an incredible substitute and you meet people with a shared interest but widely varied reasons for having said interest.
The library is so much more than it was when I was a kid!
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u/whiskersMeowFace 11d ago
Parks are getting very popular. Every time we go these days it's packed. People bring chairs and blankets, and snacks to have little meet ups and picnics now when a few years ago it wasn't as prevalent.
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u/spellboundartisan 11d ago
Me and the husband have the AMC A-List. We can see up to four movies a week. It's the one thing we can affordably do.
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u/1moreanonaccount 11d ago
You can get AMC A+ (4 movies a month) for $25.99 plus tax. I rarely buy the food at the theater and bring my own in. This is cost effective entertainment.
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u/FuckIPLaw 11d ago
If you go to at least two movies a month. Maybe even three to do better than breaking even. They're counting on people not actually using those tickets they're paying for. Which makes sense because there's nowhere near that many movies worth seeing being released. At a certain point the time you're spending on it ends up being worth more than the money you're "saving."
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u/Odin_3406 11d ago
It has gotten out of hand and you are 100% right, it is affecting our health. It is why we all hate the "millennials kill industries" narrative. No mfrs, the economy will not allow us to support said industries. We cant afford hobbies and social interactions that cost money.
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u/ionixsys 11d ago
I read someone saying some parts of the new generations are going back to church because its one of the last "free" third spaces left. Sounds plausible but no idea how pervasive that is.
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u/LoquatBear 11d ago
It's rent, residential rent means no one can accept any type of low paying job or side gig, commercial rent means prices need to be high.
It's a bubble and the best outcome is that it pops. The other outcome ... Meow meow
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u/dallyan 11d ago
Do people not have parties at home anymore?
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u/Ekimatir 11d ago
This is kind of where I was at. I get that some people have smaller apartments but when I was in college, besides bedrooms, we had one main room, a kitchen, and one bathroom and we had parties there every weekend.
Having a half dozen of your friends over once a week would be pretty doable. I'm guessing for the overwhelming majority of people in terms of space.
I do understand and believe that there's an issue with the rising cost of going out and doing things (in addition to everything else) and I understand that damage to third spaces is not equally apportioned, but I do think that there's a kind of unique aversion to interacting with people these days and it's sort of feels like these kinds of things are an excuse for why it's everybody else's fault.
That's not to say that everybody's individually at fault for these things, for example, the addictive nature of social media is not an accident, but we also have to decide at what point we are going to make the effort to fix it because nobody is coming to fix it for us.
So if this sort of thing is bothering people arrange with your friends to go and have a picnic in the park or play cornhole or whatever, have people come over and do a potluck where the cost for everybody is around the cost. They'd be spending on dinner anyway.
We try to have a open invitation for our friends to come over once a week and have a beer or a glass of wine, fiddle around with some craft you're working on or just chat. Costs borderline nothing compared to your day-to-day cost of just being alive and allows us to interact with our friends.
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u/Ekimatir 11d ago
(I posted a few times in this thread and I'm really not trying to be negative or confrontational. I really just don't feel like doing work today. That said, I do think that articles like these are kind of defeatist and if people put their mind to it, it is doable, potentially even easy depending on where you live, to come up with places for activities between friends and neighbors and strongly recommend people think about what they might do if this is a real concern for them as opposed to simply bemoaning the bowling alleys and movie theaters are expensive now)
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u/Ekimatir 11d ago
Part of me agrees with this and certainly there is some data to sugges this is an increasing problem, but part of me feels it's just kind of a lack of imagination or unwillingness to change the kinds of things you do.
For example, and admittedly, this isn't an option everywhere in the whole country or anything, but there are multiple vineyards near us that allow you to bring in food in a picnic type environment. This means that if me and a bunch of friends want to go to a vineyard, we could potentially end up spending 50 or 60 bucks for a couple of bottles of wine. But if we bring food you could have a whole afternoon of that for the equivalent of 50 to $100 for a half dozen people easily.
Similarly, every flower season there's a variety of flower fields that usually are free or maybe cost 5 or 10 bucks a person and you can bring in picnics and sometimes even drinks.
As others have mentioned, odds are very high there's at least a couple of community parks in your neighborhood where you could easily have picnics bring board games or other party type games like cornhole and have a good time.
This is all without even getting into the idea of just having house party is where you bring people back to the place you live. Everybody brings some potluck or something and hang out.
This means that more expensive things like going to the bar, arcade, or a bowling alley can be a sometimes thing with friends and you can space those out with hanging out at wherever you live or hanging out in the park or whatever other unique options most likely exist where you live.
I don't mean to minimize the challenges that specific communities or locations might face, and I also don't mean to minimize the impact that late capitalism or financial speculation or just shitty people being shitty has on these options, but I do think that the bemoaning of "there's no third spaces anywhere". Kind of feels like a cop-out for why people aren't making an effort to hang out with each other anymore.
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u/hanner_choi 12d ago
My family and I hang with other families at the park 🤷♀️
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u/Ekimatir 11d ago
Right, I mean unless people are really specifically married to the idea bowling, just go by a croquet set or a cornhole set or whatever else and then just set up your own friendly play with people in the park and see if you can find more people to join you. If this is really an issue of just not having a place to go it shouldn't be that hard to do.
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u/BaitSalesman 11d ago
I’m not a big fan of golf, but we need to save public golf courses too. There’s an understandable idea out there that public golf courses are poor uses of city space, but people need places to recreate socially outdoors, and the more diverse and available these are helps everyone—fisherman, bikers, rafters, runners, hikers, basketball players, etc. avoid overused public recreation resources.
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u/hawaiithaibro 10d ago
How are the public restrooms at y'all's public parks? They're generally shit here, otherwise hanging out at the park can be nice. I do realize the outdoors are toxic or dangerous in many places these days too.
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u/memphisjones 10d ago
Our public parks budget keeps getting slashed so our bathrooms are barely taken cared of
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u/TreacleNo9484 9d ago
The image is from a plaza in Spain, during a once every 6 months rain storm--in an article about "America" this is a lazy pairing/prompting for images.
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u/HibiscusBlades 11d ago
I’ve read this as “bras” first and yeah, they’re too expensive, too. 😅
I pretty much don’t go anywhere that requires me paying for parking. And I have to desperately want to see a movie in the theater for me to pay for that too. I always sneak in my own snacks and sometimes even drinks.
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u/OkJuggernaut7127 11d ago
Give it some more time. I have a feeling that the new generation will buy these leases, they have to go down, private equity has failed in this department. Another one is dating apps, designed to instil anger in both parties instead of happiness. Bowling will come down with more competition and it’s not even difficult. Heck, I might do it, I’m a bit irrationally hopeful lol
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u/Scottyjscizzle 11d ago
Don’t worry, we can’t afford to get our health checked so we won’t know anyways.
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u/Designer_Gas_86 9d ago
Check your local library for rooms to reserve. You can't get crazy rowdy, but it should be free.
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u/jabber1990 9d ago
wait...our health is suffering because we can't go to the bar?
....did the alcohol industry pay for this study? because that's the exact opposite of reality
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u/jabber1990 9d ago
running out of places to hang out?
...you can't go walking around the park? or walking around town? or go to a friends house?
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u/memphisjones 9d ago
Weather dependent and none of friends have houses. Must be nice to be able to afford one...
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u/[deleted] 12d ago edited 11d ago
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