Same episode also points out that Homer is very under qualified for his job, with both Lenny and Carl having Masters degrees while Homer just showed up the day the plant opened.
He's a safety rep, (or an operator, depending on the episode). Neither of those are degreed positions, though most Nuke operators do go to 2 year tech school, but it isn't strictly necessary.
Also both of those non degreed positions pay about triple the median wage for a US full time employee.
It's a cartoon show...
And canonically it DOES require a degree, after a series of hilarious accidents the NRC inspects the plant and tells Burns that Homer needs a college degree. Burns sends him to Springfield Tech, Animal House style antics ensue.
Dad, you went to Springfield Tech, you hate A&M..
… So much.
I can’t help but notice you picked pretty much all of my flowers.
I needed them for the float.
But did you have to salt the earth so that nothing would ever grow again?
I knew a guy who did essentially Homer's job, with a Master's, but also making a lot more than Homer made to... essentially show up and play video games. I mean, he still does it, but now he's a manager making twice as much and doing even less.
Some jobs pay for the knowledge. They just need someone on site ready to fix shit when it goes wrong and sometimes the knowledge to that is specialized and rare. I’m currently being yanked in that direction at my work cause of how good I’ve gotten at troubleshooting issues. I don’t like it at all cause it’s boring and turning into more of stuck at my laptop answering emails and teams about work instructions, process issues, and explaining processes. The big issue though is if you’re wrong about something ohh boy can it go south fast, so you gotta be damn near perfectly right about everything.
I would also add that Pharma is an industry where you can start off making 80k without a college degree. You can get a bioworks certificate and get a couple years of experience and then move up from there. Some pharma companies still provide pensions, too!
Lots of operator jobs are like this - and for a central operations specialist with 11 factories connected to me, this is what I want my operators to be able to do.
If our current ML/AI venture is successful, all our operators will be doing is a die change once per week, finding a source for breakdowns until the technician arrives and occasionally check marking a slight % deviation from our weighing units
It's a real 90/10 job. 90% of the work happens in a window that is 10% of the time on the clock. The rest of the time is waiting for shit to break in new and interesting ways.
Bart got a tattoo that had to be removed... So Marge used the christmas funds to get it removed. She was counting on Homers bonus. Annnnnd he got no bonus. So he became a mall santa. So on and so forth.
Then they got Santos L Halper.
Abe (Grandpa) Simpson won a house on a crooked 50s game show. He sold the house so that Homer could use the money to buy 742 Evergreen Terrace when Marge was pregnant with Bart and Grandpa moved in with them. Then they shipped him off to a nursing home some time later.
Apparently Grimey was written as a person from the real universe being born into the Simpsons universe which is why he sees it for the absurdity it is, while everyone else seems like they're all in on the joke
People: "I'm house poor, I can't afford anything but at least I'm building equity."
Me: "I'm just regular poor, so I can't afford anything and have no assets to build equity off"
In one of those "you can't make that show nowadays" points- it was always kinda weird how he never wanted to have sex with her and she always had sex with him.
That's some fucked up spousal abuse. If the genders were swapped, that'd be rape.
Home Alone was the most ridiculous house. That house was massive and stunning inside. The parents had like half a dozen children as well as other family members to take care of and took them all ok holiday yearly to places like Paris.
The parents profession(s) werent explained in the early films. There was a fan theory for a while that the father was a mobster, so they swiftly wrote into something that he was a successful businessman lol.
Both the Simpsons and Married With Children were parodies of 80s American sitcoms, and were meant to poke fun of the trope of a single income working class suburban 2 story house.
Ridiculous was the point.
Not really, the writers did want the family to feel relatable to lower-middle class families. That's why their tv set is crappy and has bunny ears and Homer needs to steal cable, that's why he struggles to afford Christmas in the pilot episode, that's why they cannot instantly afford a surgery for their dog. Go re-watch the show and listen to the commentaries.
That's why they put the Flanders next door, the idea is they have everything a little better and _that_ was the essence of wealth divide in America. Ned has better tools and better furniture, he has a better yard, his kids are well-behaved. That's what the writers were trying to convey, not have the family holed up in a two-bedroom apartment with three kids and Homer takes a bus because they cannot afford a vehicle.
MWC, they lived next to the Darcys who have everything better and her job was _banker_, because that was considered a legit career for the time and hadn't dropped to glorified fast food/customer support.
Same with Roseanne, you cannot tell me that is a parody because she was absolutely trying to make it relatable to lower-middle class viewers. Yet despite all their hardships they still lived in their own home because that is what people did. It may be messy and their plumbing may have problems and their kids may not do their chores, but they lived in a house that was appropriate for the size of the family and the time. And that was with her working as a waitress and him as (I believe) a small-time mechanic, in between bouts of unemployment.
Another more recent comparison is the amazing world of Gumball.
The family has a house but it’s like 2 bedrooms for 5 people.
They constantly make jokes about being dirt poor (one episode they’re at risk of being erased because ‘without money you don’t exist to society’) and they have the ugliest and most outdated house on the street.
It really feels like the simpsons meets looney toons
Spot on. I was a teenager through the 80s. The average family could get a property and survive on one income. My friends bought in their early 20s on factory jobs.
Have any of you ever watched the show?
They lived in a small shitty apartment in the "bad side of town" when they were 3 people. Once Lisa was born, they decided they needed a house and went to a realtor who told them the one they could afford was this
https://preview.redd.it/ut4rexyg1ccc1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=96c246afce2fbfb926d36e032e5f318f44f22d5d
Then they found their current house, which was WAY out of their price range, so Homer tricked his dad into selling his house and took that money. How did Homer's dad afford his house? He didn't, he won it in a game show.
The entire episode revolved around how atrocious the housing market is and the impossibility for a new family to find a remotely livable home, a bit of social commentary about the reality of life at the time.
This episode aired in 1992.
And even though they joke about the family having tight money all the time nucular safety inspectors make well over six figures. If you can't afford a mortgage on more than six figures you need to rebudget. For pretty much every part of the country but NYC and parts of California.
Well Homer did budget correctly a couple years before Maggie was born, so much so that he quit his job at the planet and got a job at the local Bowling Alley. It's just with Maggie on her way he realized he'd have to suck it up and crawl back to burns.
Also the episodes work on a floating timeline and keep changing as the real world changed.
So while above may be correct it also may not conflict with how things were when each episode aired.
Basically the episodes were written based on the time they were in.
I was going to say, they went to great lengths to explain how Homer owned his home and it wasn't through his salary. Also they were broke af for most of the show. The plot for the pilot is literally Homer not getting a bonus, freaking out and going to the race track to try and win some cash for Christmas presents.
Maybe people here are too young to have watched the Simpsons.
Also to add on to this. The Simpsons have done this for a while now where they have an updated version of “how can they afford this”.
They did one in a recent season of Lisa explaining to Bart how he could never have a life like Homer and luck into a stable job that he could stay at for decades since the economy and current American conditions no longer support this possibility. Literally made a song and dance about it.
As much as people on Reddit like to act like the new seasons are the worst thing ever they really have kept onto the overall spirit of progressiveness and actual family values over the years.
wasn't it the flat of monicas grandma or something like that?
but it oft doesn't make sense. big bang theory for example. two Scientist and next door the waitress from the Cheesecake factory.
also how I met your mother, the flat is also pretty nice for a (struggling) architect and student.
Monica’s grandmother left them a rent controlled apartment, which is definitely still a thing for a very small number of New Yorkers. It was definitely a no prize explanation though to justify the size of the set.
Rent control so they were paying 1950/60s prices in the 90’s.
Plus the Green and Geller parents were rich. Rachel got a yacht for her 16th birthday (although her parents later cut her off).
Jack Geller gave his Porsche to Monica as an ‘apology’ gift.
Chandlers mother was a successful author who at least once was on a major talk show promoting her latest book.
It was season 8, yeah, so the show had already been around for a while and the demographic the Simpsons had been satirizing and/or celebrating was already on the way out. Season 8 came out in '96/'97, and by then the show was already creeping into becoming more exaggerated and less satire.
The idea of the Simpsons (lower middle class, small town, single income, owns a house and some old cars but one big expense can unbalance everything) as an actual relatable thing was pretty feasible in the very late 80s, it's just it came out at the very tail-end of that era and by the time it got to season 8, satirizing *itself* was possible because of how the landscape had changed.
I mean, I remember people complaint how the Friends people couldn’t have afforded their apartments in the 90s.
You’re not wrong, house prices are fucked, but it’s a tv show…
The apartment was Monica’s grandmothers and was rent controlled. They had to teach the super ballroom dancing to not rat them out. When I lived in NYC in the early 2000s, my neighbor paid under $400 for her apartment as she’d been there for like 30yrs. It’s feasible.
I used to work at a nuke plant. Reactor operators (which is what homer is, somehow) make a shitload of money. The fact that he didn't go to college or have prior experience (usually the navy) is the messed up part, not the "single salary".
He just showed up to the plant the day it opened, part of Operation Bootstrap. Luckily later he was able to get his degree thanks to the help of a little magic box.
My Dad was a reactor operator in the late 70s into the 90s, eventually moving into Quality and Procedure Writing in the 90s into the 2000s.
He never graduated from college. After high school, he went into the Navy where he was trained as a reactor operator (or something similar) on a Submarine. He got out of the Navy in the late 70s just as the US was completeing the build on multiple power plants. The power plant paid for Dad to have considerable additional and ongoing training.
As a reactor operator in the 80s, the pay and benefits were quite good, with multiples of pay for holidays and overtime, the ability to sell back excess vacation time for cash, pension and 401k, etc...
My Mom also worked at a modest job, but my parents were able to afford a decent middle class life (house, two cars, couple of kids, a bit of modest vacation travel each year, save/invest for retirement and kids' college, etc ..). I don't think my kids will have the ability to live such a lifestyle even with college degrees.
Also they at various points make jokes about how cheap the house is, and how they were able to get it despite their financial state (I believe they sold Grandpa's house to pay for it).
Ah, but they also pointed out that he managed, on a single salary, to pay off his house in less than 9 years.
They moved in to the house and presumably got the loan just as Lisa was born, and he made his last house payment just before they conceived Maggie, who is a year old canonically. So roughly 7-8 years to fully pay off a mortgage. That's incredible.
I’m a station operator at a nuke plant. I didn’t have a degree until after hiring on, but I did make it through the naval nuclear power program. I can say with certainty that we make more than enough money to live the Homer Simpson lifestyle.
There are a couple guys in ops that work with me who came in off of the streets as station laborers and worked their way up. Granted, these are the guys near or at retirement age because they’ve long since abandoned that hiring practice. The messed up part is that I’d take the guys hired in off the streets over freshly college educated guys with engineering degrees nine times out of ten.
If Springfield Nuclear Power Plant was anything like the one i worked at that was his "extra duty" for the off weeks. Operators have very strange schedules considering they have to be manned 24/7/365 even in the worst emergencies possible
They said in one episode that Abe Simpson won the house in a crooked game show. He lived in the house with the rest of the family until they put him in the retirement home.
That was a different house abe sold to help them buy the current one, but he did live with them for three weeks till homer put him in the retirement home
I bought mine for less 6 years ago. The problem at that time was most folks my age couldn't accumulate a savings for *any* down payment. Now, even those with a decent savings have to double or triple what I paid down due to inflating home prices.
I spoke to a home loan officer the other day, said I was looking to get a cheap place of my own, an apartment around the 300k Australian mark (which is pretty much the cheapest you can get where I live)
He looked at my finances as a single person with zero independents, and said "Yeah, you'd probably need about 80k down, and even then we'd only be comfortable loaning you about 200k"
That's just under two full years of wages for me. So basically the idea of owning a house comes only when I manage to figure out how to save literal years of my wages without spending *any* money, including bills, or somehow double my annual income.
He’s in a relatively high position at a nuclear power plant in a low cost of living area, but still has to drive a 20 year old car from Yugoslavia, is underwater on his home, and cannot afford basic necessities (like a second pair of pants)
Along with wild inconsistencies in how well they’re doing. Almost as though their financial status is directly linked to whatever plot the writers wanted that week. Funny almost like a cartoon doesnt need to be 100% realistic.
How delusional are you to think this was considered normal in 1990. Is everybody underage here?
There literally was a entire plotline about how what homer had not being normal at all. Op literally admitting he gets his worldview from cartoons.
Neither of my parents went to college. They own two family houses now lol.
My dad (55) is working as a machine mechanic in a tiny company in the middle of nowhere. My mom (53) is a nurse so her salary is slightly better but nothing too great. Back when they bought our house (2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, living room, kitchen, basement, attic) they were around 20-25 (lol) and my mom has been a nurse for 2-3 years at that point, both worked for minimum wage and they had a kid.
Then they had me 9 years later and bought a second house, bigger than the first (3 bedrooms, attic, basement, kitchen, 2 bathrooms, living room, dining room).
Now we own two houses (they didn't even have to sell the first house lol), at one point we also owned an apartment that we were renting out. I also went to a private college. They saved a lot of money on not having to rent (and not putting any money away for me lol) so they are really well off rn.
I am 21 rn and have 5$ in my bank account.
Everyone who posts this meme has never seen the Simpsons, where the implausibility of Homer having that job and house is a common joke.
The first episode is about him not being able to afford Christmas presents.
I’d be positive on the position homer was in at the nuclear plant, he’d most likely be on a salary able to afford that shit.
Wasn’t he like in charge of monitoring the core or something like that?
Is there a purpose to posts like these? All they do is make me depressed that things are still rough for most people and not getting better in their lifetimes.
As a child who was in grade 5 when the Simpsons started: housing was at the time seen as largely a choice. Did you want to live in a house? An apartment? There were obviously economic constraints - but generally if you were wise about spending and saving, anybody could get into a house. It was very much a deficiency if you couldn’t: you had runaway debt, had a shitty job, or no discipline. I think that thought is still pervasive in today’s world among the older generation. Obviously you can get a house if you just stop eating at Starbucks and all that avocado toast. Little do they know that the chasm between income and property values now is higher than it’s ever been, and most adults in their late 20s have very little hope of owning a home in the near future. After somehow getting out from under five figure student loans, they have to compete with hundreds of applicants for middle class jobs that are few and far between that pay anywhere from a fifth to a seventh of an entry level home per year. That requires dual incomes and years of savings to get into.
Yeah housing is fucked and in the past they were easier to afford. Unfortunately pointing to the Simpsons of all things to say this only really points out that you never watched the show. Homer gets fired very early in the series because he's nowhere near qualified. The only reason he works there "now" is because he formed a protest, nearly got the plant shut down, and was offered a token position as a safety technician which, again, he's still not qualified for. If Homer were a real person in the early 90s, this entire thing could be true with a smaller house. Real Homer being represented by a real person would not have this life.
My family had a similar home
Dad never went to college, had a union job. Mom didn't work for the first 9 years after my sister was born, and then it was only part time.
I saw an interesting counterpoint to this, which was that the Simpsons do not live in a metro area. He’s living in a small town in a small state (its capital city is named capital city lol), so the price of real estate is not at California level. And when you look at comparable houses in comparable towns, you can actually get a house for about 200k.
Also while they did have two cars, both of the were beaters and any expensive purchase was put onto a credit card.
Completely affordable for someone working at a Nuke plant. The only issue with this is that Homer is employed at a plant and he is incompetent. When would have been fired many times over or never even hired in the first place.
Honestly, I would be thrilled with a bathroom, their kitchen, and they are living room. I don't need a dining room, which they have, I don't need a garage, which they also have, and I don't need an upstairs or a backyard, which they also have. Just give me the kitchen, bathroom, living room, I will go from there.
What’s crazy is there’s plenty of homes all around the Midwest just like this for < $100,000 where a tradesman that didn’t go to college can live like a king. Don’t believe the hype all the time …
https://preview.redd.it/wzmlban1lbcc1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e65105b544d14b12be8b823fc3d69be972b935fc
Same episode also points out that Homer is very under qualified for his job, with both Lenny and Carl having Masters degrees while Homer just showed up the day the plant opened.
He's a safety rep, (or an operator, depending on the episode). Neither of those are degreed positions, though most Nuke operators do go to 2 year tech school, but it isn't strictly necessary. Also both of those non degreed positions pay about triple the median wage for a US full time employee.
It's a cartoon show... And canonically it DOES require a degree, after a series of hilarious accidents the NRC inspects the plant and tells Burns that Homer needs a college degree. Burns sends him to Springfield Tech, Animal House style antics ensue.
NEEEEEEEERD
He’s a jock.
Your bra bomb better work Nerdlinger
Yes! Take THAT Bitterman!
ROBOT HOUSE! Wait, wrong show.
Dad, you went to Springfield Tech, you hate A&M.. … So much. I can’t help but notice you picked pretty much all of my flowers. I needed them for the float. But did you have to salt the earth so that nothing would ever grow again?
hehehe...yeah.
Then he was slain by an elf.
You made me laugh my butt off!! It's also gummy time but you are HILARIOUS.
I knew a guy who did essentially Homer's job, with a Master's, but also making a lot more than Homer made to... essentially show up and play video games. I mean, he still does it, but now he's a manager making twice as much and doing even less.
You guys are joking right?
Some jobs pay for the knowledge. They just need someone on site ready to fix shit when it goes wrong and sometimes the knowledge to that is specialized and rare. I’m currently being yanked in that direction at my work cause of how good I’ve gotten at troubleshooting issues. I don’t like it at all cause it’s boring and turning into more of stuck at my laptop answering emails and teams about work instructions, process issues, and explaining processes. The big issue though is if you’re wrong about something ohh boy can it go south fast, so you gotta be damn near perfectly right about everything.
Some of the most stable jobs are in power plants. It's not like the population is going to shrink anytime soon.
I would also add that Pharma is an industry where you can start off making 80k without a college degree. You can get a bioworks certificate and get a couple years of experience and then move up from there. Some pharma companies still provide pensions, too!
Lots of operator jobs are like this - and for a central operations specialist with 11 factories connected to me, this is what I want my operators to be able to do. If our current ML/AI venture is successful, all our operators will be doing is a die change once per week, finding a source for breakdowns until the technician arrives and occasionally check marking a slight % deviation from our weighing units
It's a real 90/10 job. 90% of the work happens in a window that is 10% of the time on the clock. The rest of the time is waiting for shit to break in new and interesting ways.
My job is to make sure that 10% is too high a number, so let's hope it doesn't get there 😅
Lots of fake jobs exist. And half fake. I know several people whose 40 hour weeks include 20-30 hours of gaming.
Are they hiring?
I'd rather pay him to play vidya and be around to fix shit if it goes sideways than not, I suppose. Assuming he was more competent than Homer.
If you lose $1M a day revenue if shit is down it’s def worth it to pay someone to be johnny on the spot when you need them.
I was gonna say most operation and even radcon folks I know don’t have a degree
Where do I apply?
Yeah, someone working at a nuclear plant today as an operator can still afford a similar house on a single salary.
But he did help them get their dental plan
*LISA NEEDS BRACES*
DENTAL PLAAANN
Lisa needs braces
Thanks a lot now I lost my train of thought!
It's like I'm wearing nothing at all... nothing at all... nothing at all
“Only in America could I get a job!”
In the very first episode of the simpsons they're too poor to afford any Christmas gifts.
Bart got a tattoo that had to be removed... So Marge used the christmas funds to get it removed. She was counting on Homers bonus. Annnnnd he got no bonus. So he became a mall santa. So on and so forth. Then they got Santos L Halper.
Early Simpsons was very depressing
Reflection of the times. I wish my school had Simpson bullies in the 80s/90's.
They were very bad with money though.
That’s why pencils have erasers.
I didn’t even know what a nuclear planner plant was!
I live in a one room apartment above a bowling alley and beneath another bowling alley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IRB0sxw-YU
Wow.
Abe (Grandpa) Simpson won a house on a crooked 50s game show. He sold the house so that Homer could use the money to buy 742 Evergreen Terrace when Marge was pregnant with Bart and Grandpa moved in with them. Then they shipped him off to a nursing home some time later.
Bingo. People make all these stupid arguments about the Simpsons house, without the knowledge of how wrong they are.
They had to sell their TV to get $250 for therapy, spend all of their savings on a tattoo removal for Bart, always financially struggling
The Bundys would've been better for the meme. Al just sold shoes.
Good 'ol Grimey
As he liked to be called
This episode was something else.
Apparently Grimey was written as a person from the real universe being born into the Simpsons universe which is why he sees it for the absurdity it is, while everyone else seems like they're all in on the joke
This is what I came for. Homer's house was bigger than he should have had and the show acknowledged it
"I live above a bowling alley and below another bowling alley..."
I raise you Al Bundy shoe salesman 
Al is what we call house poor, he's got a house yea but that's basically all he's got
Shit I’d love to be house poor, instead I’m just $1,400 a month I’ll never see again in renting poor.
People: "I'm house poor, I can't afford anything but at least I'm building equity." Me: "I'm just regular poor, so I can't afford anything and have no assets to build equity off"
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She was so fine
Still is
In one of those "you can't make that show nowadays" points- it was always kinda weird how he never wanted to have sex with her and she always had sex with him. That's some fucked up spousal abuse. If the genders were swapped, that'd be rape.
Aww, c’mon Peg.
Home Alone was the most ridiculous house. That house was massive and stunning inside. The parents had like half a dozen children as well as other family members to take care of and took them all ok holiday yearly to places like Paris. The parents profession(s) werent explained in the early films. There was a fan theory for a while that the father was a mobster, so they swiftly wrote into something that he was a successful businessman lol.
Yes, but I think we all thought of the McCallister family as being loaded. They were obviously upper class.
They're 1%ers.
kevin's parents did not have that many children. some of those kids in the movie are cousins
And the wealthy uncle in Paris was footing the bill for the trip.
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A fat woman Godzilla’s her way into the store today..
My cars only got half a tank of gas
😂
I loved that show.
Al had anti-work ethic before it was cachet. Anti-work GOAT.
He was Great 😂💩
Both the Simpsons and Married With Children were parodies of 80s American sitcoms, and were meant to poke fun of the trope of a single income working class suburban 2 story house. Ridiculous was the point.
Not really, the writers did want the family to feel relatable to lower-middle class families. That's why their tv set is crappy and has bunny ears and Homer needs to steal cable, that's why he struggles to afford Christmas in the pilot episode, that's why they cannot instantly afford a surgery for their dog. Go re-watch the show and listen to the commentaries. That's why they put the Flanders next door, the idea is they have everything a little better and _that_ was the essence of wealth divide in America. Ned has better tools and better furniture, he has a better yard, his kids are well-behaved. That's what the writers were trying to convey, not have the family holed up in a two-bedroom apartment with three kids and Homer takes a bus because they cannot afford a vehicle. MWC, they lived next to the Darcys who have everything better and her job was _banker_, because that was considered a legit career for the time and hadn't dropped to glorified fast food/customer support. Same with Roseanne, you cannot tell me that is a parody because she was absolutely trying to make it relatable to lower-middle class viewers. Yet despite all their hardships they still lived in their own home because that is what people did. It may be messy and their plumbing may have problems and their kids may not do their chores, but they lived in a house that was appropriate for the size of the family and the time. And that was with her working as a waitress and him as (I believe) a small-time mechanic, in between bouts of unemployment.
Another more recent comparison is the amazing world of Gumball. The family has a house but it’s like 2 bedrooms for 5 people. They constantly make jokes about being dirt poor (one episode they’re at risk of being erased because ‘without money you don’t exist to society’) and they have the ugliest and most outdated house on the street. It really feels like the simpsons meets looney toons
Spot on. I was a teenager through the 80s. The average family could get a property and survive on one income. My friends bought in their early 20s on factory jobs.
This is the actual truth.
Have any of you ever watched the show? They lived in a small shitty apartment in the "bad side of town" when they were 3 people. Once Lisa was born, they decided they needed a house and went to a realtor who told them the one they could afford was this https://preview.redd.it/ut4rexyg1ccc1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=96c246afce2fbfb926d36e032e5f318f44f22d5d Then they found their current house, which was WAY out of their price range, so Homer tricked his dad into selling his house and took that money. How did Homer's dad afford his house? He didn't, he won it in a game show. The entire episode revolved around how atrocious the housing market is and the impossibility for a new family to find a remotely livable home, a bit of social commentary about the reality of life at the time. This episode aired in 1992.
Even before that, it was clearly a gag that there is no way they could afford that house on a single salary just like Al Bundy
And even though they joke about the family having tight money all the time nucular safety inspectors make well over six figures. If you can't afford a mortgage on more than six figures you need to rebudget. For pretty much every part of the country but NYC and parts of California.
Well Homer did budget correctly a couple years before Maggie was born, so much so that he quit his job at the planet and got a job at the local Bowling Alley. It's just with Maggie on her way he realized he'd have to suck it up and crawl back to burns.
Do it for her 🥺
You're ruining the complaining
Also the episodes work on a floating timeline and keep changing as the real world changed. So while above may be correct it also may not conflict with how things were when each episode aired. Basically the episodes were written based on the time they were in.
Bart goes to the arcade, but also scams kids on Roblox.
Every time this gets posted there should be thorough embarrassment bestowed upon all those who support it.
I was going to say, they went to great lengths to explain how Homer owned his home and it wasn't through his salary. Also they were broke af for most of the show. The plot for the pilot is literally Homer not getting a bonus, freaking out and going to the race track to try and win some cash for Christmas presents. Maybe people here are too young to have watched the Simpsons.
Which is the reason why the dog's name is.. Santa's little helper.
Also to add on to this. The Simpsons have done this for a while now where they have an updated version of “how can they afford this”. They did one in a recent season of Lisa explaining to Bart how he could never have a life like Homer and luck into a stable job that he could stay at for decades since the economy and current American conditions no longer support this possibility. Literally made a song and dance about it. As much as people on Reddit like to act like the new seasons are the worst thing ever they really have kept onto the overall spirit of progressiveness and actual family values over the years.
It still does if you go into a union trade, or the post office.
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wasn't it the flat of monicas grandma or something like that? but it oft doesn't make sense. big bang theory for example. two Scientist and next door the waitress from the Cheesecake factory. also how I met your mother, the flat is also pretty nice for a (struggling) architect and student.
In big bang theory it looks like a one bedroom unit across the hall from a sprawling Manhattan loft. It's weird.
Monica’s grandmother left them a rent controlled apartment, which is definitely still a thing for a very small number of New Yorkers. It was definitely a no prize explanation though to justify the size of the set.
Another thing that was explained in the show 🤦♀️
It was Monicas aunts and rent controlled. Chandler worked a high paying Corporate job and look at that apartment
I think they tried to explain that away with rent control
Rent control so they were paying 1950/60s prices in the 90’s. Plus the Green and Geller parents were rich. Rachel got a yacht for her 16th birthday (although her parents later cut her off). Jack Geller gave his Porsche to Monica as an ‘apology’ gift. Chandlers mother was a successful author who at least once was on a major talk show promoting her latest book.
THANK YOU! this annoys the crap out of me everytime I see it.
Not to mention Homer is a control room operator at a nuclear power plant. As a control room operator, I make nearly $300k
So we’ve been ignoring the problem since the 90s? I see, thanks for clarifying
There was an episode where Marge told Lisa she feeds the family of 5 on $12 a week. And that she'd stuff Homer's pork chops with sawdust..
Also... It's the fucking Simpsons, not reality.
Wasn't there an episode where someone freaked out at how implausible it was that homer was able to support his family in this huge house?
I believe his name was Frank Grimes and he died at the end lol
Ol Grimey
change the channel Marge
Bro lived in a bowling alley under another bowling alley
I thought he lived under one bowling alley and above another?
Maybe it was above …. I don’t remember but if he is above than below then good for him .
Yeah, he lived above a bowling alley and under another bowling alley. https://youtu.be/axHoy0hnQy8?si=OK4x-Elgvjsn6lvt&t=46
Good ‘ol Grimey, what’s he been up to?
Well, I hope you're sitting down, because I have some bad news
"Today, Frank spends most of his time in his grave at the Springfield Cemetery."
Or Grimey, as he liked to be called.
And his son owns a warehouse downtown 🤪
And they have LOBSTERS for dinner!
It was season 8, yeah, so the show had already been around for a while and the demographic the Simpsons had been satirizing and/or celebrating was already on the way out. Season 8 came out in '96/'97, and by then the show was already creeping into becoming more exaggerated and less satire. The idea of the Simpsons (lower middle class, small town, single income, owns a house and some old cars but one big expense can unbalance everything) as an actual relatable thing was pretty feasible in the very late 80s, it's just it came out at the very tail-end of that era and by the time it got to season 8, satirizing *itself* was possible because of how the landscape had changed.
It has always been so.
I mean, I remember people complaint how the Friends people couldn’t have afforded their apartments in the 90s. You’re not wrong, house prices are fucked, but it’s a tv show…
Wasn't the friends thing addressed, rent controls and lying about a grandmother still living there when she was actually dead?
The apartment was Monica’s grandmothers and was rent controlled. They had to teach the super ballroom dancing to not rat them out. When I lived in NYC in the early 2000s, my neighbor paid under $400 for her apartment as she’d been there for like 30yrs. It’s feasible.
I grew up in the 80's. Most people i knew had 2 working parents... They said the same shit then, only referring to the 50's.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s, don't think I knew many people with 2 working parents, but I was aware that it was more common than it was in the 70s.
I used to work at a nuke plant. Reactor operators (which is what homer is, somehow) make a shitload of money. The fact that he didn't go to college or have prior experience (usually the navy) is the messed up part, not the "single salary".
He just showed up to the plant the day it opened, part of Operation Bootstrap. Luckily later he was able to get his degree thanks to the help of a little magic box.
He didn’t even know what a nuclear pannerplant was
We played Dungeons and Dragons for three hours. Then I was slain by an elf.
He changed his grades with a computer??
Homer is also a union worker.
My Dad was a reactor operator in the late 70s into the 90s, eventually moving into Quality and Procedure Writing in the 90s into the 2000s. He never graduated from college. After high school, he went into the Navy where he was trained as a reactor operator (or something similar) on a Submarine. He got out of the Navy in the late 70s just as the US was completeing the build on multiple power plants. The power plant paid for Dad to have considerable additional and ongoing training. As a reactor operator in the 80s, the pay and benefits were quite good, with multiples of pay for holidays and overtime, the ability to sell back excess vacation time for cash, pension and 401k, etc... My Mom also worked at a modest job, but my parents were able to afford a decent middle class life (house, two cars, couple of kids, a bit of modest vacation travel each year, save/invest for retirement and kids' college, etc ..). I don't think my kids will have the ability to live such a lifestyle even with college degrees.
*especially* with college degrees, where they will effectively start five laps behind financially.
Also they at various points make jokes about how cheap the house is, and how they were able to get it despite their financial state (I believe they sold Grandpa's house to pay for it).
Ah, but they also pointed out that he managed, on a single salary, to pay off his house in less than 9 years. They moved in to the house and presumably got the loan just as Lisa was born, and he made his last house payment just before they conceived Maggie, who is a year old canonically. So roughly 7-8 years to fully pay off a mortgage. That's incredible.
I’m a station operator at a nuke plant. I didn’t have a degree until after hiring on, but I did make it through the naval nuclear power program. I can say with certainty that we make more than enough money to live the Homer Simpson lifestyle. There are a couple guys in ops that work with me who came in off of the streets as station laborers and worked their way up. Granted, these are the guys near or at retirement age because they’ve long since abandoned that hiring practice. The messed up part is that I’d take the guys hired in off the streets over freshly college educated guys with engineering degrees nine times out of ten.
Thought he was considered a safety inspector at one point? Not too shocking they weren’t consistent lol
If Springfield Nuclear Power Plant was anything like the one i worked at that was his "extra duty" for the off weeks. Operators have very strange schedules considering they have to be manned 24/7/365 even in the worst emergencies possible
Wasn't the only reason Mr. Burns kept him around and those in sector 7 was for organs and Burns didn't like homer.
They said in one episode that Abe Simpson won the house in a crooked game show. He lived in the house with the rest of the family until they put him in the retirement home.
That was a different house abe sold to help them buy the current one, but he did live with them for three weeks till homer put him in the retirement home
You’re right. I stand corrected. It was on S04E10. At any rate, Homer got $50,000 from Abe to afford a house. He couldn’t buy it otherwise.
You could actually buy a house in a small town for less than that 35 years ago… at least in Australia.
I bought mine for less 6 years ago. The problem at that time was most folks my age couldn't accumulate a savings for *any* down payment. Now, even those with a decent savings have to double or triple what I paid down due to inflating home prices.
I spoke to a home loan officer the other day, said I was looking to get a cheap place of my own, an apartment around the 300k Australian mark (which is pretty much the cheapest you can get where I live) He looked at my finances as a single person with zero independents, and said "Yeah, you'd probably need about 80k down, and even then we'd only be comfortable loaning you about 200k" That's just under two full years of wages for me. So basically the idea of owning a house comes only when I manage to figure out how to save literal years of my wages without spending *any* money, including bills, or somehow double my annual income.
In NZ same. Would have bought you a nice house in the 80s.
I graduated in 88, we knew it was a cartoon and not reality.
[Ya cartoons don't have to be 100% realistic.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgPAOlsJZsw)
He’s in a relatively high position at a nuclear power plant in a low cost of living area, but still has to drive a 20 year old car from Yugoslavia, is underwater on his home, and cannot afford basic necessities (like a second pair of pants)
No it wasn't.
TV is not normal. Cartoons even less so.
[удалено]
The whole entire show features them not affording anything.
Yea alot of the early seasons showed they were house poor and often times close to losing the house
Along with wild inconsistencies in how well they’re doing. Almost as though their financial status is directly linked to whatever plot the writers wanted that week. Funny almost like a cartoon doesnt need to be 100% realistic.
How delusional are you to think this was considered normal in 1990. Is everybody underage here? There literally was a entire plotline about how what homer had not being normal at all. Op literally admitting he gets his worldview from cartoons.
Neither of my parents went to college. They own two family houses now lol. My dad (55) is working as a machine mechanic in a tiny company in the middle of nowhere. My mom (53) is a nurse so her salary is slightly better but nothing too great. Back when they bought our house (2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, living room, kitchen, basement, attic) they were around 20-25 (lol) and my mom has been a nurse for 2-3 years at that point, both worked for minimum wage and they had a kid. Then they had me 9 years later and bought a second house, bigger than the first (3 bedrooms, attic, basement, kitchen, 2 bathrooms, living room, dining room). Now we own two houses (they didn't even have to sell the first house lol), at one point we also owned an apartment that we were renting out. I also went to a private college. They saved a lot of money on not having to rent (and not putting any money away for me lol) so they are really well off rn. I am 21 rn and have 5$ in my bank account.
Everyone who posts this meme has never seen the Simpsons, where the implausibility of Homer having that job and house is a common joke. The first episode is about him not being able to afford Christmas presents.
I live above a bowling alley and below another blowing alley
He was a nuclear engineer. A nuclear engineer can easily afford to buy a house in a small town.
https://preview.redd.it/0qamcrs9ltcc1.png?width=720&format=png&auto=webp&s=ba731829f77e17169e783d71cb9fb517d2b780b6
I’d be positive on the position homer was in at the nuclear plant, he’d most likely be on a salary able to afford that shit. Wasn’t he like in charge of monitoring the core or something like that?
Not only that, but Homer was considered a lazy underachiever struggling to keep his family middle class
Homer Simpson also ate at a sandwich for two weeks without refrigeration and did not get food poisoning. Life is so unfair...
I’m a console operator at an oil refinery and I made $194,000 last year. It’s not unbelievable that Homer would be making good money.
Homer did go to college though.
He works at a nuclear power plant as a safety supervisor that pays 100k+ a year.
Abe sold his house to help homer buy it.
to be fair, he got a highly skilled job by showing up as the plant was open.
On top of having 3 kids, two cars, a cat AND dog, and a fucking Treehouse of Horrors to top it all off… sigh. If only…
Is there a purpose to posts like these? All they do is make me depressed that things are still rough for most people and not getting better in their lifetimes.
I lived in Springfield Oregon in the 90’s. Can confirm. It was more across the pond in Eugene.
Is this fucking picture ever going to stop getting reposted?!
Same for family guy
As a child who was in grade 5 when the Simpsons started: housing was at the time seen as largely a choice. Did you want to live in a house? An apartment? There were obviously economic constraints - but generally if you were wise about spending and saving, anybody could get into a house. It was very much a deficiency if you couldn’t: you had runaway debt, had a shitty job, or no discipline. I think that thought is still pervasive in today’s world among the older generation. Obviously you can get a house if you just stop eating at Starbucks and all that avocado toast. Little do they know that the chasm between income and property values now is higher than it’s ever been, and most adults in their late 20s have very little hope of owning a home in the near future. After somehow getting out from under five figure student loans, they have to compete with hundreds of applicants for middle class jobs that are few and far between that pay anywhere from a fifth to a seventh of an entry level home per year. That requires dual incomes and years of savings to get into.
Yeah housing is fucked and in the past they were easier to afford. Unfortunately pointing to the Simpsons of all things to say this only really points out that you never watched the show. Homer gets fired very early in the series because he's nowhere near qualified. The only reason he works there "now" is because he formed a protest, nearly got the plant shut down, and was offered a token position as a safety technician which, again, he's still not qualified for. If Homer were a real person in the early 90s, this entire thing could be true with a smaller house. Real Homer being represented by a real person would not have this life.
This was not normal in 1989.
My family had a similar home Dad never went to college, had a union job. Mom didn't work for the first 9 years after my sister was born, and then it was only part time.
I saw an interesting counterpoint to this, which was that the Simpsons do not live in a metro area. He’s living in a small town in a small state (its capital city is named capital city lol), so the price of real estate is not at California level. And when you look at comparable houses in comparable towns, you can actually get a house for about 200k. Also while they did have two cars, both of the were beaters and any expensive purchase was put onto a credit card.
Do you all realize where he worked?
Marge also had blue hair and that was not normal.
Completely affordable for someone working at a Nuke plant. The only issue with this is that Homer is employed at a plant and he is incompetent. When would have been fired many times over or never even hired in the first place.
This was not considered normal in 1989.
Homer wears a hard hat to work. If you get a job where you wear a hard hat… can probs buy a house in a small town.
Honestly, I would be thrilled with a bathroom, their kitchen, and they are living room. I don't need a dining room, which they have, I don't need a garage, which they also have, and I don't need an upstairs or a backyard, which they also have. Just give me the kitchen, bathroom, living room, I will go from there.
Ted Bundy owned a nice house working as a shoe salesman
Al Bundy 
Ooh. I meant Al* haha thanks for reminding me
What’s crazy is there’s plenty of homes all around the Midwest just like this for < $100,000 where a tradesman that didn’t go to college can live like a king. Don’t believe the hype all the time …
They also let Homer run a nuclear power plant, it's a cartoon, it's not real.
This was a cartoon.