Even industrialised, winter is a lean season

[brin_bellway]

[cw: poverty]


Christmas is over.

This week, people recover from their celebrations, and prepare for the celebrations of next week. Many of them spend the week at home, where they can prepare their own meals rather than ordering out at the office. Next week, many of them will resolve to eat out less or not at all, whether for dietary or financial reasons. For the most part they will keep it up for a month or so, but some will last even longer.

My entire family works in food service. Wish us luck.

Comments

[brin_bellway]

This post brought to you by my one and only shift this week. They have no need of more of my labour than that.

[yvannairie]

That is so bizarre to me as someone whose most lucrative season is the three weeks before and the one week after the winter holidays, because around this time is when I finally have enough money to start saying "fuck it, I'm eating out today" and not feel the sting. Good luck, though :c

[brin_bellway]

Makes sense. I guess people like you must be outweighed by the kind of people who genuinely think that "don't go to Starbucks every morning for your coffee" is a useful life tip.

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The *leadup* to Christmas is good for us. People are feeling generous: they take their families out to dinner, they tip their delivery drivers.

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I don't--knock on wood--expect we're in any *acute* danger. Brother has quite a lot of savings: he'll have no trouble keeping up his usual level of contribution to the communal fund, and I think he'd be willing to chip in extra if the rest of us get desperate enough.

But it still sucks to see progress on the List slip further away.

(On the bright side, I can spend some of that extra free time studying, and get that much closer to my diploma. But that's a rather abstract comfort: while my future *is* actually looking pretty bright, it's...it's like when you're walking toward a mountain, and intellectually you know that every step toward it must bring you one step closer because that's how distance works, but it doesn't *look* any closer.)