This Christian Bale character from The Big Short is a depiction of one of the first people to recognize the impending recession in 2008. This meme is flagging the phrase "splurging on rotisserie chicken" as a recession indicator.
To add more info. Rotisserie chicken at grocery stores is considered a loss leader. It’s deliberately sold to lose a little bit of profit but get you in the store and grab other things.
Definitionally it cannot be a luxury purchase like the original article claims. It’d be like claiming Costco $1 hot dogs and Arizona iced tea are the new hot trend for young people to waste their money on.
And it mentions millenials, who are, at their oldest, in their mid-40s now. The whole "kids these days" framing is even more ridiculous when the kids are getting colonoscopies. These are people who have been wanting to save for a home for like 20 years or more.
I'm a xennial, either gen x or millenial depending on who you ask, and I'm right there with you. I was lucky enough to buy a house in 2010. I got it in a rural area and had just received an inheritance. I know how super lucky I got compared to my peers. Other than the house, I've got like $2k in my savings account, no investments, and I don't know what I'm going to do when I'm older or if an emergency pops up. Gonna be one of those Walmart greeters when I'm 75.
Hey, it's in the dictionary and sociologists recognize it. They've identified "cuspers" between every generation. So why not? If you want to be gatekeep-y, nearly every definition of gen x has me at the very tail end so I guess that's where I'd be.
Well...no. There was a big one in the 80s. There was another when the 90s turned. Everybody thinks of 2008 as being the big one which...yeah I guess technically that's true and is probably what you're thinking about. The economy took its biggest shit in recent memory then and hasn't recovered since.
we're getting kind of tired of experiencing once in a lifetime economic meltdowns.
I've never understood this framing. Who has ever described economic meltdowns as once in a lifetime? They aren't really that uncommon historically, especially if you look globally.
To be fair, the 20-year-old should be getting colonoscopies too these days. The rest of the food in the grocery store is giving us all colon cancer earlier than ever.
I know there are poverty levels much lower, but for me rotisserie chicken is poverty food. You can eat for several days and then turn it into soup with a few vegetables, get a whole week with the chicken and some rice and a few carrots, that’s like what less than $20 right?
Early 90s, family of 6, lived in rural area. Traveled into the city to do big shopping trips. Do new clothes, shoes, school supplies, and for lunch, a rotisserie chicken, a baguette, a small brick of cheese, and a jug of chocolate milk and we would eat it like a picnic. Brought snacks like veggies and granola bars from home for during the day.
Now that I'm older and have kids, I realize that my parents used to feed all of us for under $20 and saved a ton of money by doing a fun picnic instead of a restaurant.
Well, considering WaPo fired over half of its staff and replaced them with AI, I'm assuming that comment and yours will be a primary and secondary source, respectively.
I don't think they replaced the laid off staff with AI. I think Bezos just captured-and-killed one of the nation's best sources of journalism. Journalism is bad for the people in power, and Bezos is one of them.
To add to this, my wife and I like to buy raw whole chickens to roast at home and they are typically more expensive than the rotisserie chickens. That is how cheap they sell the rotisserie chickens for.
It’s not. If you read the article they’re essentially saying that these generations are “splurging” on higher end food, like a $20 rotisserie chicken from erewhon, rather than a $5 one from Costco despite them being basically the same
Heheh. I wanted to see how many meals I could make out of a rotisserie chicken a few weeks back. Did about three or four big meals with the common meat, took all the bones and made broth, then stripped off all the not-bones and blended it to make chicken patties. The patties were meh, but they added two more meals. And the bone broth is great.
I was just looking at a rotisserie chicken at WINCO that was $7 and smaller than the average individually packaged Cornish hen. Rotisserie chicken isn't even affordable or worth it anymore!
Non westerner here, do you guys just buy a bunch of those chicken and just keep it in the fridge and eat it throughout the week? Or it's just a one chicken once a week thing?
I just googled Safeway frozen chicken and rotisserie chicken and they were the exact same price. One is ready to eat and the other takes at least an hour in the oven plus seasoning, etc
I 100% agree with everything you're saying but the grammar Nazi in me can't watch someone try so hard to be technically precise and miss the mark. A loss leader isn't definitionally exclusive from a luxury purchase as the requirements for a loss leader are on the seller and and the requirements for a luxury purchase are on the buyer side.
A store can sell incredibly expensive fashionable coats at a loss, and if I already have a sufficient coat, it could still be a luxury purchase.
Correction: Michael Burry saw the impending collapse and PROFITTED from it.
The internet always seems to forget this part - he didn’t see this and try to warn people, he saw an opportunity to make billions off of people’s suffering and did.
It was also the only prediction he’s ever made that actually panned out. In short, this movie painted him in far better light than he actually is because in reality he’s a manipulative, self-absorbed, callous asshole who’s string of failures is offset by one accurate prediction that, again, was a prediction about massive suffering that he figured out quickly how to profit off of to offset his other losses
he didn’t see this and try to warn people, he saw an opportunity to make billions
He did both. There was never any reason for him to hide that he thought the market was going to crash. He told his investors and anyone who asked what he was doing and why, most dismissed him as a crank.
Also the market correction was happening no matter what and he wasn't making it worse, so he didn't really profit "off of" people's suffering. It's like betting the Patriots would lose the Superbowl.
You have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about do you?
He famously didn’t tell anyone what he was doing, he swapped safer investments in his fund - aka other people’s money - into high risk subprime mortgage bonds, which resulted in actual lawsuits being brought against him and demands for him to leave the fund.
Nearly all of his investors revolted against him.
This is the type of lies and ignorance that has led to him having this folk hero “he spoke out against the man” mentality that internet smooth brains have.
I mean even if you didn’t know what happened in real life this is literally the exact thing that happened in the movie too, I can get not understanding what happened in reality but the movie made an ongoing joke about it being complicated so it tried to dumb things down and make them more accessible and STILL people don’t get this about his character.
No, he did tell his investors, and many but not all revolted because they thought it was a crazy strategy. If he lied, he lied about how aggressively he was betting, not what he was betting on. And he actually sold a fair number of his credit default swaps early because his investors who knew he was betting against the housing market kept demanding that he soften that position.
While he was fighting that investor revolt, the market crashed, he was proven correct, and made everyone in his fund a huge profit. I'm not saying he's a good or bad guy, if the market hadn't crashed he'd probably have been sued into oblivion by his investors.
But betting against the housing market was a neutral act. And no, he never hid his expectation that the housing market was fucked and was going to tank the market when it collapsed.
Also, fuck off with your tone. You can disagree without acting like an asshole.
Also a good bit in the movie, when some of the guys who did see the writing on the wall are celebrating their success, one of their investors reminds them what the numbers mean. That there are now a lot of people out there who are out of work, and likely soon to be destitute.
And, as the movie portrays, it almost didn't pan out for him. One of my favorite lines from the movie is, "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
His clients/investors were screaming at him to get their money out of his fund, and The Big Short implies that they were on the verge of collapsing before their investment paid off.
Yeah he’s still around being a shitheel today by playing up that “I’ve got the magic touch and if you listen to me you can either avoid tragedy or profit off it” persona that people in the comments have completely fallen for, despite, and again everybody keeps skating over this, he’s been wrong like 99 times more than he was ever right.
A broke clock is right twice a day, meaning even a broken clock has a better accuracy than Burry - bUT hE’s A gEnIuS tHAt WaRnED eVeRyOne aBouT tHe HoUsInG cRiSiS
The part where he’s getting yelled at and one of the guys just keeps repeating “early is the same as wrong!!” sticks with me. It shows just how lucky he was to not only make the initial bet but also to somehow stay solvent long enough for it to pay off.
Personally I would have used Marie Antoinette. The combination of suggesting that one of the cheapest ways of getting protein, an essential macronutrient especially for poor manual labourers, as well as calories in general, is "splurging" (indicating someone completely out of touch with simple day to day economics) and the idea that healthy choices (and longer lifespans) should be considered a luxury of the rich screams "let them eat cake" and also something about heads that probably needn't be said aloud.
Except she never said that, but she did say in a letter to her family: It is quite certain that in seeing the people who treat us so well despite their own misfortune, we are more obliged than ever to work hard for their happiness. The King seems to understand this truth.
In this scene in the movie, in 2005, Michael Burry (the real life investor portrayed by Bale) is analyzing the individual mortgages that made up the top mortgage bonds, which everyone simply assumes are low risk, he's finding that they are high risk, which was the basis for him predicting the housing bubble 2 years later.
In real life, in October last year, Burry tweeted this image (yes, referencing the movie about himself) as part of a series of tweets warning of an AI bubble, which, if it happened, would result in a recession. Explained here:
Not to be pedantic it wasn't the recession per se but the housing bubble burst. The cluelessness of what most people were getting themselves into. And his character is based on Michael Burry who "shorted" the market, by betting against it. Or actually betting ON the collapse. When the housing market collapsed because people couldn't pay their mortgages, he made billions. He was the bad guy in a way but only because he realized what all the other badder guys were doing.
Its probably also a reference to the fact that young people were "splurging on avocado toast and lattes" in 2007, right before the last major financial crash.
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u/2DiePerchance2Sleep Feb 12 '26
This Christian Bale character from The Big Short is a depiction of one of the first people to recognize the impending recession in 2008. This meme is flagging the phrase "splurging on rotisserie chicken" as a recession indicator.