The person who asked the question is Akilah Green, a writer-producer, recovering lawyer and an Emmy loser. The tweet got 58k likes and a lot of people joined the conversation. They not only shared the questions they asked the rich that exposed them as being poor, but also various stories of wealthy people not realizing they are living a privileged life that not many experience.
A screenshot of the tweet with Twitter user Grace Kelley’s answer was posted on Reddit a few days ago and it has already been upvoted over 34k times. The viral story was about a time she was proud of her outfit and bragged to her coworker that it was actually thrifted. Her boss heard that and told her to not say such things as it makes him look bad: her thrifting her outfit means he doesn’t pay her enough.
Shock horror, he didn’t pay her enough. We got to know more about the story as the Twitter user saw the Reddit post and commented saying “It was a fashion company that paid $45k/yr in NYC, so I couldn’t afford to get work clothes from anywhere other than a thrift store. The Devil Wears Prada is a documentary lol. Same guy used to pick on me for bringing my lunch from home and go on rants about ‘entitled Millennials’ who wanted too much money.”
Shock horror, he didn’t pay her enough. We got to know more about the story as the Twitter user saw the Reddit post and commented saying “It was a fashion company that paid $45k/yr in NYC, so I couldn’t afford to get work clothes from anywhere other than a thrift store. The Devil Wears Prada is a documentary lol. Same guy used to pick on me for bringing my lunch from home and go on rants about ‘entitled Millennials’ who wanted too much money.”
It wasn’t the only time the boss showed how cheap he was, but the woman isn’t working there anymore and she says that she is making a lot more money in a different state.
The Twitter thread has many more similar stories and it is quite concerning that rich people are almost like a secluded society, not knowing what goes on in regular people’s lives as according to Statista, 37 million Americans, which is about 11 percent of the whole country’s population, lived under the poverty line in 2020.
That means that a family of 4 was earning less than $26,200 or a single person was earning less than $12,760. And even if you are a little bit over the threshold, it is not a lot at all.
37 million is the same amount as it was in 2007, just before the economic crisis in 2008. Between the years of 2009 and 2016, the number was always higher than 40 million, however, it has been decreasing ever since 2014. In 2019, just before the pandemic came, almost 34 million people were living in poverty and the number increased in 2020 when a lot of people lost their jobs due to businesses closing as a measure to fight the virus.
If we go outside the US, the numbers are even scarier. In many African countries, more than half of their populations are living in poverty. The global average was 9.3 percent in 2017, according to the World Bank data. That means almost a tenth of the world’s population don’t earn more than $1.9 a day.
We know things best that occur in our reality, but it is important to be curious and learn about the world and be compassionate to those who are less fortunate. But for now it’s just fun to read about how the wealthy receive a reality check. We also would like to hear your stories, so put them in the comments!
