short term vs long term

I know I have talked about the Roadhouse before, but being an employee there for almost three years really gives you some perspective. I love the people there, but they lead very interesting lives and have perhaps some of the worst consumer patterns that I have come into contact with in my very short life thus far. I am good friends with many of the people there, in fact my coworkers are the main reason I continue to work there. However, let me explain what I mean by poor consumer patters. The first people that come to mind are *aly and *Lindsey (*names are protected), they live together and work at the roadhouse and for now that is all they do. They had another job as bartenders but that establishment closed down. Aly had aspirations of going to college and was enrolled at one time at Ivy tech, but didn’t have the focus or drive to stick with it initially, and Lindsey was a student at AU but had similar problems with lack of focus and some other more personal issues. I bring them up now, because Aly is continuously frustrated at her current status in life, she hates working at the Roadhouse (as do many) and wants to be able to have a real job. The problem lies in short term gratification. The Roadhouse life is simple, and can seem like you’re living the dream for a while. Work doesn’t start till 4 so you can sleep in all day and then you’re usually of work on the weekends by 11, and you deal all in cash as a server. This makes it very easy and very tempting to just go out and spend the cash you have after work and then sleep the hangover away all day before you go into work. The consumer behavior here is instant gratification. They recognize so quickly that they have an unfulfilled “need” and then seemingly skip all the rest of the logically stages before they arrive at a fixed solution. Being a server at Roadhouse is not a rolling in the money kind of job. It pays the bills and leaves room for fun, but only when budget properly. So when they go out every other night and spend up to $30 dollars at the bar or come into work the next day with matching rings from Zales, you wonder where their logic went. Aly wants to go back to school, but cant until she pays off what she owes from the time she went a couple years ago. Because she can’t do that instantaneously, she is continuously discouraged and cant think long term. So the idea continues to get pushed back semester by semester, I wish I could help them with more long term consumption patterns. For now though, all I can do is love and support both of them no matter what their choices are, because you cant change people.