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Comment by TeaDrunk | Hacker News Reader

One of the biggest indicators to me, as someone who has navigated such lines before, is how comfortable co-workers are with waste. A co-worker who takes catered food home (without saying something like, "oh I have 3 growing teenagers" or something else to excuse it) is low-class. Do you keep the little sauce packets, napkins, disposable cutlery, etc. from take-out? Low class. Do you keep the pencils and notepads etc. from places? Low. Class. Also this causes you to need to have a place to store all these things, and now you fulfill the stereotype of a poor, messy person.

Minimalism, aka the confidence to be able to acquire anything you may need at the moment with resources always available to you, is a class indicator.

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When I was in law school I went out to many work lunches and dinners during the recruiting season. I was impressed by one firm — made up mostly of biglaw refugees — that took the leftover food at the end of the meal. It stood out in contrast to the normal practice, which was to spend $65 per person on lunch (20 years ago), and leave 1/3 of it on the table.

I chose to intern at the firm that took the leftovers.

I noticed you didn't bring up them also taking napkins, sauce packets, sugar and creamer, cutlery etc. You either already were eating at wealthy enough places (metal cutlery + real cloth napkins) that this wasn't an opportunity for you & that was itself a class indicator, or you were focused on one thing (taking food home) and missing the bigger picture.

Of course each individual action of preventing waste isn't a 100% indicator for having grown up in poverty. Low-waste is arguably fashionable, even. But being low-waste is different from acquiring and retaining arbitrary stuff to use later in place of things you can just buy when you need it. Buying a reusable straw is different from keeping every disposable straw you're given, same as buying a reusable bag is different from keeping every takeout/grocery plastic one. The house of my parents displays my impoverished childhood clearly-- it is a place of incredible resourcefulness using all the things people normally refuse to acquire or throw away if given to them.

I've been poor and I've never known anyone to take sauce packets. You're supposed to take what you need for your meal not so you can take them home. It's iffy ethically.

It didn't seem they were suggesting raiding the supply so much as taking avoiding disposed packets.

I can assure you , a lot of people in my situation take sauce packets.

> I noticed you didn't bring up them also taking napkins, sauce packets, sugar and creamer, cutlery etc.

That wasn't the point of my story, so it would have been a distraction to mention. Even now, 20 years later, I have a drawer stuffed with free napkins, and I've kept some ketchup packets so long they burst.

I was keeping my reply succinct, and the point was that it stands out when wealthy people take home leftovers, and some people view that as a positive thing.

My point is not that no wealthy people save things. My point is that a lack of minimalism is often an indicator of the class where one grew up.

> My point is not that no wealthy people save things.

That may not be your point in this comment, but in your original comment you listed several things (taking home leftovers, keeping sauce packets, hanging onto free pens) that you labeled as low-class indicators. These are only indicators of being low-class if they are not done by a significant number of non-low-class people.

My point was that there are actually some people who are quite wealthy/comfortable who do these things also, and that some people (like law-school-me) react positively to it. The point is that people who do this because of their current situation or past situation need not feel embarrassed or odd for doing this, because some people see it as practical and commonsense.

You have got to get out of your own head if you think in these terms day to day.

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