But their life no longer resembles reality for many American middle-class families.Īdjusted for inflation, Homer’s 1996 income of $25,000 would be roughly $42,000 today, about 60 percent of the 2019 median U.S. Marge is still a stay-at-home parent, taking point on raising Bart, Lisa, and Maggie and maintaining the family’s suburban home. Although he’s had many jobs throughout the show’s run-he was even briefly a roadie for the Rolling Stones-he’s back at the power plant. The Simpsons started its 32nd season this past fall. Marge finds a vintage Chanel suit at a discount store, and wearing it grants her entrée into the upper echelons of society.
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In Season 2, Homer buys the hair-restoration product “ Dimoxinil.” His full head of hair gets him promoted to the executive level, but he is demoted after Bart accidentally spills the tonic on the floor and Homer loses all of his new hair. They also occasionally get a peek into a different kind of life. In the first episode, Homer becomes a mall Santa to bring in some extra cash after Homer learns that he won’t receive a Christmas bonus and the family spends all its Christmas savings to get Bart’s new tattoo removed. Over the years, Homer and his wife, Marge, also face their share of struggles. But we all believed that the ends could meet, with just an average amount of hustle.
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Others lived closer to the edge, with fathers taking second jobs as mall Santas or plow-truck drivers to bridge financial gaps. Some families had more secure budgets, with room for annual family vacations to Disney World.
Most of my friends and classmates lived the way we did-that is, the way the Simpsons did. My parents had no Christmas bonus or savings, so the best gifts usually came from people outside our immediate family. I remember Christmases that, in hindsight, looked a lot like the one portrayed in the first episode of The Simpsons, which aired in December 1989: handmade decorations, burned-out light bulbs, and only a handful of gifts. Neither of my parents had much wiggle room in the budget. Within 10 years, they had both paid off their mortgage. Their houses were their only source of debt my parents have never carried a credit-card balance.
I’d estimate that the combined square footage of both roughly equaled that of the Simpsons’ home. Read: How the coronavirus could create a new working class And significantly, they were both homeowners-an enormous feat for two newly single people. Until my parents’ divorce, we were a family of three living primarily on my mother’s salary as a physician’s receptionist, a working-class job like Homer’s.īy 1990-the year my father turned 36 and my mother 34-they were divorced. My father had a two-year degree from the local community college, which he paid for while working nights my mother had no education beyond high school. My parents’ paychecks in the mid-’90s were similar. He grosses $479.60 per week, making his annual income about $25,000. The 1996 episode “ Much Apu About Nothing” shows Homer’s paycheck. On the contrary, the Simpsons used to be quite ordinary-they were a lot like my Michigan working-class family in the 1990s. This lifestyle was not fantastical in the slightest-nothing, for example, like the ridiculously large Manhattan apartments in Friends. Bart might have had to find $1,000 for the family to go to England, but he didn’t have to worry that his parents would lose their home. A home, a car, food, regular doctor’s appointments, and enough left over for plenty of beer at the local bar were all attainable on a single working-class salary. Homer, a high-school graduate whose union job at the nuclear-power plant required little technical skill, supported a family of five. The most famous dysfunctional family of 1990s television enjoyed, by today’s standards, an almost dreamily secure existence that now seems out of reach for all too many Americans.
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