What the quoted study showed was a lot of "did" and "didn't" behavior, but the article phrased it as "can't".
There are some poor of whom it is literally true that they can't spend $24 on toilet paper. My local food bank gives out rolls of TP, and keeps nearly-empty rolls in the public bathrooms because rolls that are above half get stolen. Some of the clientele literally have every dollar for the month already spoken for, and $24 of TP is not in the budget.
But for a lot of the poor, it's more accurate to say that spending $24 on toilet paper would interfere with other things they've chosen to spend on instead. It's not impossible to come up with $24, but they'd rather spend it in other ways when they do. Now, it's not my place to say that a poor family should or shouldn't use a small surplus to become more efficient and generate bigger surplus later, when they could spend it on something with a more immediate psychological benefit (like a nicer-than-their-average meal). This isn't a judgment, it's just an observation. But I think it's an important observation to make, because the hidden implication is that an extra $20 a month would allow for a new efficiency (like buying TP in bulk/on sale) which would then snowball. But the reality is that an extra $20 a month rarely has anything close to its full potential effect on efficiency, for psychological reasons. Attempts to ease the inefficiencies of poverty need to account for this.
I grew up on welfare, in a single parent home. Parent chainsmoked 2 packs a day, which barely left enough money for decent food let alone toilet paper. And yet, somehow, we stocked up on toilet paper when it was on sale.
The poor get financially hosed in so many different ways in the US that singling out toilet paper, of all things, seems almost laughable.
How about real killers, like payday loans, bank fees, and paying more for milk, eggs, and everything else at the corner store because you don't have transportation to get to Costco?
And if you want next level hosedom, how about the opportunity cost of having limited or no transportation?
Many of the poor have felony criminal records, as I do, so how about the political cost of being denied the right to vote?
The list goes on and on. [edit] The title does say "..and almost everything else" so I guess I missed that.
The article also explained why toilet paper was chosen. It's something people stock up on when they can, but having a stock pile doesn't change usage habits. It turns out to be a good product for investigating what the article is interested in.
Why are payday loans a real killer? Is it because you think short-term, high-interest loans to people with poor credit is bad for the people with poor credit, or are you OK with it in principle but think they should be more upfront about some of the shady things like hidden fees, deceptive tactics, etc.?
Credit, which was literally created to hose the poor.
How about goddamn product marketing which merely has the effect 1) robbing poor people of their time and 2) jacking up costs of goods at the expense of 1?
I've never been able to articulate my own feeling about wealth and poverty. I've been objectively poor at some points in my life. I became vegetarian in my early 20s when I was travelling because I couldn't afford meat. Even then there were some weeks where I didn't eat for a few days because I had spent all my money for the week. It sounds bad, but being hungry taught me how to prioritise and I don't regret it.
In other times of my life, I have quit my job and spent half a year writing free software, or training karate -- without any income. I also spent 5 years living in a run down shack spending less than $10K a year, when I was teaching English in Japan.
By many measures, I was living in poverty because I had almost no income, or I was spending almost no money. But at no time in my life have I ever thought of myself as poor. I have always had money in the bank and I have never really been in debt. When I went hungry it was because I stupidly spent my food budget on beer (or something similar). I didn't have money for food, but I did have money.
Money is an option to buy things and for me the feeling of being rich is the feeling of always having that option. You can be happy with less things, I think. Nobody actually needs a yacht to be happy, or a big house, or a collection of vintage wine. But I think it is really hard to be happy when you have no options. It is even harder to be happy when you spend your options in the future and have to suffer with crushing debt -- possibly enslaved forever.
I could choose to be hungry. I could choose to give up my job and do something that paid no money. I could choose to move half way around the world and live in a shack teaching English. That's incredible wealth for me. That kind of wealth is available to many people, but I think that most people can't see it, unfortunately.
It would be fair to say that you have some technical skill not afforded to the truly poor. Most English teaching positions in Japan require a college education, which is the epitome of this study carried to an extreme.
Anyone can learn to code or do Linux ops work, a skill that you have that keeps true poverty at bay. Most can go to school on grants if they are truly poor but there's a learning curve to being able to fill the paperwork out, a time and transportation cost to getting the paperwork done and to the right place.
In these situations, you have chosen to live as poor, but the opportunity to not be poor is always there because you had an education, you had a skill, and those things gave you an opportunity to save up enough to work for free for a while.
There are a lot of places in the world where people don't even know you could work on computers for a very high wage. And even when they do, they lack the know-how to find a geographically diverse community that can mentor them.
> That kind of wealth is available to many people, but I think that most people can't see it, unfortunately.
I don't much like beer. Something about the taste, maybe the hops, I dunno. Every time I tell someone I don't like beer, they say "Oh, you just haven't had _good_ beer! You should try this one!" And I try it, and I don't like it. Some folks can acquire a taste for beer, given enough exposure. I've given it plenty of exposure, and it just doesn't work for me.
I suspect that the ability to "see" the kind of wealth you're talking about, to be happy and fulfilled on a razor-edge budget, is like a taste for beer. Some people have it built-in, some people can acquire it, some people will never have it; they just aren't wired that way. It's really cool that you were able to be happy under those circumstances. But it's dangerous to assume (with just about anything) that everyone else could learn to be like you, if they only wanted it enough.
At those times, you were poor in the same way that a person who goes on a camping trip experiences being homeless for a weekend.
If you have the skills/connections/etc to be able to trivially leave poverty when you need to then you are never truly living in poverty. You lack the vulnerability.
Your story is nice, but it has nothing to do with poverty.
Some destitute-college-student friends were telling me that they lived on a $20/week of rice + beans + canned tomatoes; I suggested that I take them out to Costco and for $100 stuff their pantries with ~3 months of supplies.
They patiently explained to idiot me that the reason they ate so poorly was because finding $100 was effectively impossible.
This is why immigrants with strong community support rapidly get out of poverty while the exact same people (ie. same skill, environment, ability) without a strong community don't.
With community support you can pool your money, then split the goods and the savings.
But you have to be able to implicitly trust your community.
Do your friends have other friends in similar situations? Do they trust them enough to make pooled purchases?
(Also, you start with pooled purchases simply to help your community. Eventually that transitions into making a bit extra, and before you know it you opened a store. If you are a good person, then you continue to quietly help people in your community with discounts or credit.)
Why not loan them the money in return for paying back a portion of the savings? And then reinvest the savings in other modes of greater efficiency, which enables more, etc.
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
I was just about to post this because it said there was no comments and when I opened it you had just beaten me to it! I would like to note that it was from the book "Men at Arms".
The older I get the more I see this. Paying upfront to get a lower rate on your mortgage. Having money to begin with to manage well to get a good rate on a mortgage to start with. Having the flexibility in general to try something that may lead to less money overall if it pans out, but is a waste if it doesn't.
Sorry, the quote irritates me to no end (doubly so how people trip over each other to copypaste it).
In practice, most opportunities are not a pure savings like this where you will end up ahead in every way if only you could borrow the money; usually, you'll end up with more painful feet but more money to spend, as the cheaper shoes aren't completely useless and in need of replacement.
If the quote were as true as claimed, then someone could make a program where helpers pair up with a poor person, loan them 50 dollars, and then let the savings spiral up virtuously -- that loan enabled $100 of savings, which can be reinvested in more savings, when frees up more savings, etc.
But obviously no one's figured out how to make that happen, and the poor can often already get loans of such size and not trigger the upward spiral. So something's missing.
With that said, being poor does tend to be a double whammy where e.g. you live in a places that makes bulk purchases harder ... but it looks nothing like the dynamic in the Vimes copypasta.
I heard a quote somewhere regarding buying quality items: “I’m so poor I can only afford to buy the very best.” It’s life-changing when you can get to that minimum income threshold.
One day I needed to pick up a few things on the way to a party. Was passing through a bad part of town and figured I'd stop at the only grocery store. Surely they have the basics, beer, snacks, etc... To make a long story short, I left without buying anything because the prices were more than I was willing to pay.
I ended up wandering around the store comparing the prices to what I pay in my neighborhood. Almost everything was more expensive. I have no idea how the lower class folks in that neighborhood eat.
What people miss is those prices are high in large part due to theft and low volume. A Safeway really can't operate in such places without jacking up prices. And the same is true of most other retail, poor customers are both low volume and expencive.
That is why you don't see poor people protesting a Walmart, but you hear claims from local businesses. Heck, Walmart pays better wages than the local grocery store did.
> spending patterns in developing countries, where cigarettes are sold in singles and shampoo can come in tiny, pricey sachets.
I wouldn't call the sachets pricey. They are single-use and come at an extremely affordable price (mostly just one rupee = 2 cents). Sachets allow the poor to try out products that they could not afford before, or products that they don't use daily.
Sachet sales created a whole new business paradigm.[0] They form the basis of C.K. Prahalad and Allen Hammond's article Serving the World’s Poor, Profitably (HBR September 2002) [1] and C. K. Prahalad's book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Wharton School Publishing, 2004).
This analysis ignores inventory costs. Those who can afford to buy in bulk accrue a cost to holding inventory in their dwelling.
This can manifest in two ways: 1) the storage space physically necessary to hold the TP and 2) the capital tied up in owning this before you need it.
To put it another way, maybe poorer people can afford to buy in bulk, but in their apartments they have no place to put a gigantic package of toilet paper. Or, maybe they choose not to tie up $25 in securing future TP when they need that liquidity to ensure they can make a car payment this month.
In either way, they get something of value by not holding inventory in their house. That's why it costs more. It's not completely clear that they'd be better off if they could lock in low TP prices, even if they did have the cash on hand.
The space issue seems to be a non-issue until you scale up to multiple bulk products. Unless you are talking about people living in either a shelter or the housing units that are basically a bed and everything else is communal.
My wife has taught me so much about living frugally. We both grew up relatively poor and I consider myself frugal, but she knows the power of coupons and sales. She combines coupons with sales to get very good prices, and budgets strictly for what we need. She'll also game the heck out of store policies ("you are out of stock on item Y so I'm wondering if I can buy item X for the same price").
Also buy a bidet. They cost less than $40, are better for the environment, and will save on your TP costs!
Every so often I read one of these articles. Thing is, this isn't new information. I've been reading about it since at least the 80's (and I'm quite certain it's been happening since forever). Sadly, nothing every gets done about it. The price of a half gallon of milk will never be half the price of a whole gallon.
Oh fuck this shit, I was poor and I saved by buying rice in bulk and toilet paper in bulk, and everything as cheap as possible.
Seriously, you have to be really fucked up to not be able to put away $25 for rice.
If you're poor and not taking advantage of every savings you can I really don't know how one expects to become not poor. If you're so poor as to not be able to afford a large pack of toilet paper, sacrifice one of your dish rags, I assure you they can be washed for long enough for you to save the extra cash to afford a large pack of toilet paper.
Want to know what my 'rich' neighbors who have a BMW in their drive way do on weekends? Collect cans from their neighbors trash. I can only assume at one point that they were exceedingly poor.
Also, almost everyone I know who was/is poor also smokes. Poor people are mostly poor because they make really bad financial decisions, yes its fucking hard and it seriously takes its toll on you but eventually you get so tired of it you stop making the decisions that keep you poor.
I have never eaten so well, or been so healthy as when I was poor. I walked everywhere, never ate out, spent time with friends, meat was like dessert, and you'd buy the cheapest cuts and marinate and cook them until they were delicious and dropping off the bone.
The only thing I really had a problem with was saving $200 for a decent pair of shoes that would last. Instead I just bought cheap shoes from the thrift store, the nice thing about being poor is you generally don't have anything else to do, so you check veevies every other day. Again if I wanted to solve this problem I know full well I could have stopped smoking and in two months I'd have cash for shoes.
Wow. Not everything is clear black and white you know. Your single experience does not cover everyone else's. Let's ignore any depression or anything else stemming from long term poverty that makes things worse, or at least less clear cut.
> they make really bad financial decisions
A lot of the time they KNOW they are making poor financial decisions. Imagine there is barely enough money coming in each month, the kids need to eat, the cooker just broke, the mortgage/rent is due, and you don't have money to solve all of those. So, make a sensible financial decision please, one that is not going to worsen your lot. A second hand cooker is only £50
Sorry kids, no more hot food? Just instant noodles for all for a week, so we can buy the old cooker?
Sometimes the choice is between a poor decision, a bad decision and a really stupid one.
The thing about poverty, especially long term poverty, is it completely takes away your ability to survive an emergency. That could be as simple as an appliance or transport failure. It's the crisis that generally fucks people up. The first three months, whilst the budgets remain credible and intact, is something any fool can cope with.
Most parents I've known would put themselves into penury and risk malnutrition to keep half decent food in their kids' bellies daily. Oftentimes knowing full well, and with due consideration, that they are making their future a little (perhaps a lot) harder.
And just in case you are thinking, but why have kids if so poor? Maybe there was a good job when the kids arrived. Before the recession, accident, or before dad died or whatever.
This exact example was given in a Reddit post. It was sad thread since the question was to the poor of Reddit and what do they buy/how/why. One person was buying tampons for his wife out of a quarter machine. It's easy to not empathize with the poor when you can just ignore it, close yourself off in gated communities.
"You've read your limit of free articles for this month." So.... how to the poor read the Washington Post?
I was talking to a recruiter today. He asked me if I could start a job immediately instead of the usual two week notice. I wondered how I was going to buy gasoline to get to work. Guess I better start saving up.
The poor buy toilet paper? When I was a dirt poor student, it was assumed that one would simply take two or three or etc doses extra, whenever one was in a public bathroom.
I went to a little store in a poor neighbourhood a few weeks ago and was surprised to see a tiny container of Tide for 7.99, and there were no other sizes or brands of detergent.
There's some really insightful comments here that I don't want to take anything away from.
I think one important observation is that it's very hard to distinguish poor because they can't from poor because they make bad choices and don't have the tools to make better ones.
Some comments here point out that while toilet paper at Costco might be cheaper than at the corner store, lack of transport options means the corner store is the only option.
Other comments point out that somebody who is poor might spend what little money they have on bad and/or frivolous choices with that money.
Having been pretty darn poor a couple times in my life, I can say that both are true. I've personally been in situations where the only available options were several times more expensive than the cheapest possible one. I've also (and have known many other poor folks) made fabulously stupid decisions on what to spend our limited money on.
An anecdote, I had a poor friend who was constantly struggling to make his rent and car payments and was in a state of near constant financial emergency. He knew, down to the penny, how much money was in his bank account on a daily basis, when pay day was and all his bill paying days. "Don't cash that check until next Thursday" was a normal phrase from him. And yet when a local fair would come around, he'd take a day off work, gather his family in their beat up used car, buy expensive custom made costumes for everyone and spend the day walking around and spending yet more money.
At one point when he ended up on the wrong side of collection for non-payment of a medical bill I showed him with pretty basic arithmetic that his 2 WoW accounts would cover that bill easily if he cancelled his WoW service -- but there were all kinds of emotional reasons why he couldn't and he didn't and he ended up in very serious financial trouble.
But he also packed his lunch every day, would skip meals, knew the prices of all the local gas stations so he could save on fuel, and wore clothes that were literally falling apart. Then spend $50 one Friday night at a movie premier, or spending $500 on a tattoo or whatever.
It turns out humans are complicated, and poverty/being poor is complicated. There are probably a pretty large number of people who are currently very poor who would be in a far better situation with decent financial management -- but have never had the luxury of learning how to do that. And who would probably be better off with training on how to make better life choices.
For example, when I was putting myself through college, I remember coming to the realization that I shouldn't buy any more entertainment of any sort because
a) I didn't have enough time for it anyway
b) It turns out there's plenty of free and legal ways of killing time
Now I'm not poor (thankfully) and have carried this forward with me. I almost never go to movies or concerts, I don't buy lots of bullshit or useless electronics. I'm selective in clothes and other necessities. I don't pay for cable TV or a land-line phone (neither of which I'd use) And when I feel like blowing off some steam I simply fire up Hulu or a freeware game or youtube or I paint, read a book or watch a DVD from the library etc.
I turned not spending money on stupid stuff into a habit, but it was definitely something I had to come to a personal realization about and consciously train myself for. I still get that sweaty palm feeling when I see a Steam sale or a Humble Bundle. But paradoxically, I have the disposable income to buy that stuff because I trained myself not to have disposable income.
This is very hard to get across to many poor-but-could-be-ok folks because they have strong emotional and irrational reasons for what they do and it's those reasons that are very hard to break.
I'm almost convinced that there's a kind of poverty in otherwise high functioning people that could be "fixed" with a certain mental health and training regime, without any other changes to their financial status.
The points in the article are all true but there's a case when the poor would pay less that isn't discussed.
For something like toilet paper people who aren't poor probably don't even check the price. In that regard they would be paying more than someone who did comparisons to find the most economical option.
That's just a matter of habits and motivation. A well-off person who can't be bothered to price-compare toilet paper still could pay less if they wanted to, they just don't care to because they don't need to. The poor person stuck paying more doesn't have the option to pay less if they want to.
[+] [-] lotharbot|10 years ago|reply
There are some poor of whom it is literally true that they can't spend $24 on toilet paper. My local food bank gives out rolls of TP, and keeps nearly-empty rolls in the public bathrooms because rolls that are above half get stolen. Some of the clientele literally have every dollar for the month already spoken for, and $24 of TP is not in the budget.
But for a lot of the poor, it's more accurate to say that spending $24 on toilet paper would interfere with other things they've chosen to spend on instead. It's not impossible to come up with $24, but they'd rather spend it in other ways when they do. Now, it's not my place to say that a poor family should or shouldn't use a small surplus to become more efficient and generate bigger surplus later, when they could spend it on something with a more immediate psychological benefit (like a nicer-than-their-average meal). This isn't a judgment, it's just an observation. But I think it's an important observation to make, because the hidden implication is that an extra $20 a month would allow for a new efficiency (like buying TP in bulk/on sale) which would then snowball. But the reality is that an extra $20 a month rarely has anything close to its full potential effect on efficiency, for psychological reasons. Attempts to ease the inefficiencies of poverty need to account for this.
[+] [-] developer2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cubano|10 years ago|reply
How about real killers, like payday loans, bank fees, and paying more for milk, eggs, and everything else at the corner store because you don't have transportation to get to Costco?
And if you want next level hosedom, how about the opportunity cost of having limited or no transportation?
Many of the poor have felony criminal records, as I do, so how about the political cost of being denied the right to vote?
The list goes on and on. [edit] The title does say "..and almost everything else" so I guess I missed that.
[+] [-] city41|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stvswn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dclowd9901|10 years ago|reply
Credit, which was literally created to hose the poor.
How about goddamn product marketing which merely has the effect 1) robbing poor people of their time and 2) jacking up costs of goods at the expense of 1?
It's all wrong.
[+] [-] mikekchar|10 years ago|reply
In other times of my life, I have quit my job and spent half a year writing free software, or training karate -- without any income. I also spent 5 years living in a run down shack spending less than $10K a year, when I was teaching English in Japan.
By many measures, I was living in poverty because I had almost no income, or I was spending almost no money. But at no time in my life have I ever thought of myself as poor. I have always had money in the bank and I have never really been in debt. When I went hungry it was because I stupidly spent my food budget on beer (or something similar). I didn't have money for food, but I did have money.
Money is an option to buy things and for me the feeling of being rich is the feeling of always having that option. You can be happy with less things, I think. Nobody actually needs a yacht to be happy, or a big house, or a collection of vintage wine. But I think it is really hard to be happy when you have no options. It is even harder to be happy when you spend your options in the future and have to suffer with crushing debt -- possibly enslaved forever.
I could choose to be hungry. I could choose to give up my job and do something that paid no money. I could choose to move half way around the world and live in a shack teaching English. That's incredible wealth for me. That kind of wealth is available to many people, but I think that most people can't see it, unfortunately.
[+] [-] lxe|10 years ago|reply
There is also the "working 2 jobs to feed 3 kids" sort of poor.
These are completely different kinds of "poor".
[+] [-] jethro_tell|10 years ago|reply
Anyone can learn to code or do Linux ops work, a skill that you have that keeps true poverty at bay. Most can go to school on grants if they are truly poor but there's a learning curve to being able to fill the paperwork out, a time and transportation cost to getting the paperwork done and to the right place.
In these situations, you have chosen to live as poor, but the opportunity to not be poor is always there because you had an education, you had a skill, and those things gave you an opportunity to save up enough to work for free for a while.
There are a lot of places in the world where people don't even know you could work on computers for a very high wage. And even when they do, they lack the know-how to find a geographically diverse community that can mentor them.
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|10 years ago|reply
I don't much like beer. Something about the taste, maybe the hops, I dunno. Every time I tell someone I don't like beer, they say "Oh, you just haven't had _good_ beer! You should try this one!" And I try it, and I don't like it. Some folks can acquire a taste for beer, given enough exposure. I've given it plenty of exposure, and it just doesn't work for me.
I suspect that the ability to "see" the kind of wealth you're talking about, to be happy and fulfilled on a razor-edge budget, is like a taste for beer. Some people have it built-in, some people can acquire it, some people will never have it; they just aren't wired that way. It's really cool that you were able to be happy under those circumstances. But it's dangerous to assume (with just about anything) that everyone else could learn to be like you, if they only wanted it enough.
[+] [-] matthewowen|10 years ago|reply
If you have the skills/connections/etc to be able to trivially leave poverty when you need to then you are never truly living in poverty. You lack the vulnerability.
Your story is nice, but it has nothing to do with poverty.
[+] [-] Eric_WVGG|10 years ago|reply
They patiently explained to idiot me that the reason they ate so poorly was because finding $100 was effectively impossible.
[+] [-] ars|10 years ago|reply
With community support you can pool your money, then split the goods and the savings.
But you have to be able to implicitly trust your community.
Do your friends have other friends in similar situations? Do they trust them enough to make pooled purchases?
(Also, you start with pooled purchases simply to help your community. Eventually that transitions into making a bit extra, and before you know it you opened a store. If you are a good person, then you continue to quietly help people in your community with discounts or credit.)
[+] [-] SilasX|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gohrt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcheung|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harryh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangerlibrary|10 years ago|reply
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
[+] [-] jimktrains2|10 years ago|reply
The older I get the more I see this. Paying upfront to get a lower rate on your mortgage. Having money to begin with to manage well to get a good rate on a mortgage to start with. Having the flexibility in general to try something that may lead to less money overall if it pans out, but is a waste if it doesn't.
[+] [-] SilasX|10 years ago|reply
In practice, most opportunities are not a pure savings like this where you will end up ahead in every way if only you could borrow the money; usually, you'll end up with more painful feet but more money to spend, as the cheaper shoes aren't completely useless and in need of replacement.
If the quote were as true as claimed, then someone could make a program where helpers pair up with a poor person, loan them 50 dollars, and then let the savings spiral up virtuously -- that loan enabled $100 of savings, which can be reinvested in more savings, when frees up more savings, etc.
But obviously no one's figured out how to make that happen, and the poor can often already get loans of such size and not trigger the upward spiral. So something's missing.
With that said, being poor does tend to be a double whammy where e.g. you live in a places that makes bulk purchases harder ... but it looks nothing like the dynamic in the Vimes copypasta.
[+] [-] Eric_WVGG|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zelcon5|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jpindar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|10 years ago|reply
I ended up wandering around the store comparing the prices to what I pay in my neighborhood. Almost everything was more expensive. I have no idea how the lower class folks in that neighborhood eat.
[+] [-] Retric|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e15ctr0n|10 years ago|reply
I wouldn't call the sachets pricey. They are single-use and come at an extremely affordable price (mostly just one rupee = 2 cents). Sachets allow the poor to try out products that they could not afford before, or products that they don't use daily.
Sachet sales created a whole new business paradigm.[0] They form the basis of C.K. Prahalad and Allen Hammond's article Serving the World’s Poor, Profitably (HBR September 2002) [1] and C. K. Prahalad's book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Wharton School Publishing, 2004).
[0] http://repository.umac.mo/bitstream/10692/1300/1/7444_0_Sy-C...
[1] https://hbr.org/2002/09/serving-the-worlds-poor-profitably
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortune_at_the_Bottom_of_t...
[+] [-] stvswn|10 years ago|reply
This can manifest in two ways: 1) the storage space physically necessary to hold the TP and 2) the capital tied up in owning this before you need it.
To put it another way, maybe poorer people can afford to buy in bulk, but in their apartments they have no place to put a gigantic package of toilet paper. Or, maybe they choose not to tie up $25 in securing future TP when they need that liquidity to ensure they can make a car payment this month.
In either way, they get something of value by not holding inventory in their house. That's why it costs more. It's not completely clear that they'd be better off if they could lock in low TP prices, even if they did have the cash on hand.
[+] [-] Lawtonfogle|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt_wulfeck|10 years ago|reply
Also buy a bidet. They cost less than $40, are better for the environment, and will save on your TP costs!
[+] [-] chanux|10 years ago|reply
THIS! I really don't understand why a bidet isn't very popular.
[+] [-] eru|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ars|10 years ago|reply
You need just a bit of paper after to dry yourself and that's it. No wiping.
[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stvswn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fleitz|10 years ago|reply
Seriously, you have to be really fucked up to not be able to put away $25 for rice.
If you're poor and not taking advantage of every savings you can I really don't know how one expects to become not poor. If you're so poor as to not be able to afford a large pack of toilet paper, sacrifice one of your dish rags, I assure you they can be washed for long enough for you to save the extra cash to afford a large pack of toilet paper.
Want to know what my 'rich' neighbors who have a BMW in their drive way do on weekends? Collect cans from their neighbors trash. I can only assume at one point that they were exceedingly poor.
Also, almost everyone I know who was/is poor also smokes. Poor people are mostly poor because they make really bad financial decisions, yes its fucking hard and it seriously takes its toll on you but eventually you get so tired of it you stop making the decisions that keep you poor.
I have never eaten so well, or been so healthy as when I was poor. I walked everywhere, never ate out, spent time with friends, meat was like dessert, and you'd buy the cheapest cuts and marinate and cook them until they were delicious and dropping off the bone.
The only thing I really had a problem with was saving $200 for a decent pair of shoes that would last. Instead I just bought cheap shoes from the thrift store, the nice thing about being poor is you generally don't have anything else to do, so you check veevies every other day. Again if I wanted to solve this problem I know full well I could have stopped smoking and in two months I'd have cash for shoes.
[+] [-] anexprogrammer|10 years ago|reply
> they make really bad financial decisions
A lot of the time they KNOW they are making poor financial decisions. Imagine there is barely enough money coming in each month, the kids need to eat, the cooker just broke, the mortgage/rent is due, and you don't have money to solve all of those. So, make a sensible financial decision please, one that is not going to worsen your lot. A second hand cooker is only £50
Sorry kids, no more hot food? Just instant noodles for all for a week, so we can buy the old cooker?
Sometimes the choice is between a poor decision, a bad decision and a really stupid one.
The thing about poverty, especially long term poverty, is it completely takes away your ability to survive an emergency. That could be as simple as an appliance or transport failure. It's the crisis that generally fucks people up. The first three months, whilst the budgets remain credible and intact, is something any fool can cope with.
Most parents I've known would put themselves into penury and risk malnutrition to keep half decent food in their kids' bellies daily. Oftentimes knowing full well, and with due consideration, that they are making their future a little (perhaps a lot) harder.
And just in case you are thinking, but why have kids if so poor? Maybe there was a good job when the kids arrived. Before the recession, accident, or before dad died or whatever.
Yeah, it's easy man.
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|10 years ago|reply
If you assume that the really poor own a dish rag, let alone multiple spares, you may not understand the kind of poverty we're talking about here.
[+] [-] withdavidli|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ars|10 years ago|reply
I wonder is she realized what she was saying/implying by writing that.
She's basically saying "the poor can't be trusted to save their money, so help them spend it well, before they waste it [later in the month]".
[+] [-] strathmeyer|10 years ago|reply
I was talking to a recruiter today. He asked me if I could start a job immediately instead of the usual two week notice. I wondered how I was going to buy gasoline to get to work. Guess I better start saving up.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|10 years ago|reply
Alternate theories are that (some) poor people have weak impulse control, are bad at delayed gratification, and/or have low intelligence.
In reality the causes are very likely a mix of all these factors, but the article makes no attempt to even consider other explanations.
[+] [-] fiatmoney|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] re_todd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|10 years ago|reply
I think one important observation is that it's very hard to distinguish poor because they can't from poor because they make bad choices and don't have the tools to make better ones.
Some comments here point out that while toilet paper at Costco might be cheaper than at the corner store, lack of transport options means the corner store is the only option.
Other comments point out that somebody who is poor might spend what little money they have on bad and/or frivolous choices with that money.
Having been pretty darn poor a couple times in my life, I can say that both are true. I've personally been in situations where the only available options were several times more expensive than the cheapest possible one. I've also (and have known many other poor folks) made fabulously stupid decisions on what to spend our limited money on.
An anecdote, I had a poor friend who was constantly struggling to make his rent and car payments and was in a state of near constant financial emergency. He knew, down to the penny, how much money was in his bank account on a daily basis, when pay day was and all his bill paying days. "Don't cash that check until next Thursday" was a normal phrase from him. And yet when a local fair would come around, he'd take a day off work, gather his family in their beat up used car, buy expensive custom made costumes for everyone and spend the day walking around and spending yet more money.
At one point when he ended up on the wrong side of collection for non-payment of a medical bill I showed him with pretty basic arithmetic that his 2 WoW accounts would cover that bill easily if he cancelled his WoW service -- but there were all kinds of emotional reasons why he couldn't and he didn't and he ended up in very serious financial trouble.
But he also packed his lunch every day, would skip meals, knew the prices of all the local gas stations so he could save on fuel, and wore clothes that were literally falling apart. Then spend $50 one Friday night at a movie premier, or spending $500 on a tattoo or whatever.
It turns out humans are complicated, and poverty/being poor is complicated. There are probably a pretty large number of people who are currently very poor who would be in a far better situation with decent financial management -- but have never had the luxury of learning how to do that. And who would probably be better off with training on how to make better life choices.
For example, when I was putting myself through college, I remember coming to the realization that I shouldn't buy any more entertainment of any sort because
a) I didn't have enough time for it anyway
b) It turns out there's plenty of free and legal ways of killing time
Now I'm not poor (thankfully) and have carried this forward with me. I almost never go to movies or concerts, I don't buy lots of bullshit or useless electronics. I'm selective in clothes and other necessities. I don't pay for cable TV or a land-line phone (neither of which I'd use) And when I feel like blowing off some steam I simply fire up Hulu or a freeware game or youtube or I paint, read a book or watch a DVD from the library etc.
I turned not spending money on stupid stuff into a habit, but it was definitely something I had to come to a personal realization about and consciously train myself for. I still get that sweaty palm feeling when I see a Steam sale or a Humble Bundle. But paradoxically, I have the disposable income to buy that stuff because I trained myself not to have disposable income.
This is very hard to get across to many poor-but-could-be-ok folks because they have strong emotional and irrational reasons for what they do and it's those reasons that are very hard to break.
I'm almost convinced that there's a kind of poverty in otherwise high functioning people that could be "fixed" with a certain mental health and training regime, without any other changes to their financial status.
[+] [-] bcheung|10 years ago|reply
For something like toilet paper people who aren't poor probably don't even check the price. In that regard they would be paying more than someone who did comparisons to find the most economical option.
[+] [-] mikeash|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unclebucknasty|10 years ago|reply
The poor have it bad. Now, what are we going to do about it?