> HEB operates a similar model to Costco in being more expensive to the customer in a subtle way, through desirability. Their products are so interesting and appetizing that I go in with the intention of buying $30 of groceries and leave with a $100 load.
Costco groceries are expensive because you're forced to buy in bulk. You can leave HEB with 1 tube of toothpaste or a single potato. You can't leave Costco with fewer than 5 tubes of toothpaste or several pounds of potatoes. I love Costco and imo they win in a few areas like the butcher, but HEB crushes them in the variety of desirable groceries hands down.
>If you wanted to offer a more convincing doubt about the method, I suggest complaining about their treatment of mix shift.
I'm not trying to convince anyone who will agree on a data-driven premise without actually seeing the data. The article states that a record number of cities have $1m+ starter homes, but there's no easily accessible list of those cities. I couldn't find it, where did you see it? I gave up after clicking about 10 different links and only landing on another vague article or advertiser's product.
> Does the US have the same distinction we have here in Australia where there will be a small local government area in the centre of a city named that?
It varies, but mostly yes. I think they're limiting the definition of a "city" to as small as possible to inflate the prices for a scary headline. Austin is the most expensive metropolitan area in TX. Fire up zillow if you can access it, search for Austin, TX with a $600k limit and it'll automatically put the city boundary on the results. You'll find plenty of listings, over 1900 standalone homes for me as of right now. Including townhomes and condos it's over 2800.
I used Austin as an example because it's the most expensive metropolitan area in Texas, which supposedly has 7 of these $1m+ starter home cities. It doesn't hold true there and it's even less true for the larger cities like Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.
Anyway, my point is that it comes across as deceptive by providing ambiguous information with no easily accessible data to reference and loading the article with as many advertising links as possible.
> they don't need to nudge you into a particular position.
That's exactly what they're doing and I even put a snippet from the article in my comment. Here it is again
> For buyers navigating today's market, Zillow Home Loans' BuyAbility℠ tool provides a personalized, real-time estimate of the home price and monthly payment that fit within their budget. Home listings on Zillow also include a down payment assistance module to help shoppers identify local programs that may be available to them.
It's fear driven advertising with no meaningful information. They don't mention the cities and I wasn't able to find them. The article is chock full of links other zillow articles, their own products and 3rd party advertisers.
> The number of cities where a typical starter home is worth $1 million or more has nearly tripled since before the pandemic, rising from 80 in February 2020 to a record 242 today.
Doubt. They don't define what constitutes a city and seem to be purposely be hiding the data. There's only a count of the cities per state with no mention their names. I followed link after link and couldn't find them and gave up. Texas supposedly has 7 of these $1m+ starter home cities. Austin is the most expensive metropolitan area, and there are plenty of < $600k homes in centrally located areas. Venture out to the suburbs like Pflugerville, Cedar Park or Buda and you'll have plenty of options with $400k to spend. There are only a handful of small pockets around the city where $1m won't buy you a starter home like Zilker and Tarrytown.
> For buyers navigating today's market, Zillow Home Loans' BuyAbility℠ tool provides a personalized, real-time estimate of the home price and monthly payment that fit within their budget. Home listings on Zillow also include a down payment assistance module to help shoppers identify local programs that may be available to them.
> For those who decide renting is the right call, Zillow Rentals® lists options across every price point and property type — including single-family homes, apartments and individual room listings. Renters can also use CreditClimb to report on-time rent payments to the major credit bureaus, building the credit history that will put them in a stronger position when they're ready to buy.
This is just fear driven advertising. BUY NOW OR YOU'LL NEVER OWN A HOME!!
My first attempt at programming was in 8th grade (mid 20's now) using VB. I remember writing a program that converted text to pig latin and I was so proud of it. Despite majoring in engineering, I only had to take some intro programming courses and used a bit of Matlab. Well, fast forward to about 8 months ago I came up with an idea for a web-app and decided that now was the perfect time to become good at programming. For about 2 months straight I spent at least 3 hours every day following tutorials and tried to create little algorithms in PHP (sort an array, find largest number in an array, count the instances of a character in a string, etc...). After ~200 hours I felt comfortable enough to start writing the web-app. I'm amazed how far I've come in the past ~8 months.
Not to hijack this post, but does anyone else remember their first "cool" program?
Costco groceries are expensive because you're forced to buy in bulk. You can leave HEB with 1 tube of toothpaste or a single potato. You can't leave Costco with fewer than 5 tubes of toothpaste or several pounds of potatoes. I love Costco and imo they win in a few areas like the butcher, but HEB crushes them in the variety of desirable groceries hands down.