I am from Vancouver, Canada, which, aside from being a danger zone for anyone with a sushi addiction,  has a reputation of being pretty expensive as far as cities go. Sure, it’s no London or Singapore, but its real estate is crazy expensive — the average price of detached homes in the city is $2.6 million CAD, making for the third least affordable housing market in the world. Everything in Vancouver (save for sushi) is expensive. Houses are expensive. Food is expensive. Clothing is expensive. One time I rented a car for a day in Vancouver and it cost $450, which is why I get PTSD every time someone says the word “budget.”

I love Vancouver, but I recently moved back to the thriving metropolis of South Bend, Indiana to start my master’s program at Notre Dame as part of an extended Stockholm syndrome, and came across this beauty at Walmart:

That’s $2.37 for a pillow, folks. I also managed to snag an air mattress for seven dollars. Seven dollars! That’s less than a crappy burger from Smashburger (not recommended). As a broke grad student (actually not really, they’re giving me a stipend, but it’s always fun to pretend that grad students are uniformly ramen-eaters who rock themselves to sleep in the library as they contemplate increasingly less original ideas for their theses) this is amazing. Capitalism sucks, right, but at least I’m not sleeping on a monkey shaped like a pillow anymore:

*I suppose there are actually two images, but hey, I have a BA. I don’t know math.