We’ve all felt that little thrill of finding a great deal. A coffee maker marked down 60 percent, streaming services offering promotional rates, gadgets on clearance that seem too good to pass up. The advertisements are everywhere, promising us incredible savings on thousands of products. But here’s the uncomfortable truth that gets lost in all the noise about bargain hunting: none of those discounts matter if you can’t afford bread.There’s a fundamental disconnect in how we talk about affordability in America. We celebrate falling prices on electronics and appliances while glossing over the relentless climb in the cost of groceries, rent, and healthcare. It’s like bragging about getting a great deal on a vacation package while your car is being repossessed. The priorities are completely backwards.Think about what actually keeps a household running. You need food on the table every single day. You need a roof over your head. You need electricity and heat. You need basic medical care when you’re sick. If you have kids, you need childcare so you can work. These aren’t luxuries you can delay or skip. They’re the foundation everything else sits on.When the price of eggs doubles or when your rent jumps by hundreds of dollars, that’s not just an inconvenience. That’s a crisis that ripples through your entire budget. You can’t substitute these things away. You can’t decide to just not eat this month because chicken got too expensive. You can’t tell your landlord you’ll pay half because that’s all you can afford. These costs are non-negotiable, which makes them the most important measure of whether people are actually getting by.
Yet somehow, our national conversation about inflation and affordability often fixates on the wrong things. We hear about how great it is that you can buy a television for less than ever before, or how technology prices keep dropping. And sure, that’s nice. But a cheap television doesn’t help the family that’s choosing between filling their gas tank and buying enough food for the week. A smartphone on sale doesn’t matter to someone who’s skipping meals to afford their insulin.The problem is that staples have largely moved in the opposite direction from discretionary goods. While you can get amazing deals on consumer electronics, the cost of simply existing has climbed steadily. Housing costs have soared in most cities. Health insurance premiums and deductibles have grown far faster than wages. Childcare costs rival college tuition in many places. Even basic groceries, which used to be one of the most stable categories of spending, have seen dramatic swings.This creates a strange economic reality where the overall statistics might look fine, but individual households are struggling badly. Someone might point to low inflation numbers or growing GDP, but those figures don’t capture the experience of a family watching their grocery bill climb by thirty percent while their paycheck stays flat. The average can hide a lot of pain.
What makes this especially difficult is that there’s very little you can do to optimize your way out of it. Personal finance advice often focuses on cutting unnecessary expenses, shopping smarter, finding deals. That works great when you’re trying to save money on things you could live without. But when the problem is that necessities have become unaffordable, there’s nowhere left to cut. You’ve already stopped going out to eat. You’ve already cancelled the subscriptions. You’re already buying the store brand. What’s left?The psychological toll of this situation shouldn’t be underestimated either. There’s something uniquely stressful about being unable to afford the basics. It’s not the same as wanting something nice and not being able to buy it. It’s the constant low-level anxiety of not knowing if you can keep the lights on or feed your family. That stress affects everything from your health to your relationships to your ability to focus at work.
Meanwhile, the solutions offered often feel completely disconnected from reality. Budget better. Meal plan. Shop the sales. These tips assume the problem is inefficiency rather than insufficiency. They assume there’s fat to trim when many households are already down to bone. You can’t coupon your way out of rent that takes seventy percent of your income.
What we really need is an honest reckoning with what affordability actually means. It’s not about whether you can get a good deal on a new phone. It’s about whether someone working full time can afford a place to live and food to eat without having to choose between them. It’s about whether a medical emergency will bankrupt you. It’s about whether parents can afford to both work and pay for childcare, or whether one of those things cancels out the other.The price of discretionary goods matters, but it matters at the margins. The price of necessities matters at the core. When staples are expensive, everything else becomes irrelevant. You can’t save your way to stability when the basics are out of reach. And celebrating falling prices on things people don’t urgently need while ignoring rising prices on things they can’t live without isn’t just missing the point. It’s almost cruel.Until we start measuring economic health by whether people can afford the essentials, not by whether they can get good deals on extras, we’ll keep having this conversation where the numbers say everything is fine while real people struggle to get by. Lower prices are only helpful if they’re on the things that actually matter. Everything else is just noise.