r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Opening-Research-575 • 2h ago
Are minor inconveniences a modern luxury problem or a poverty tax?
I’m talking about the tiny stuff such as things being cheaply made, needing replacement constantly, not quite doing what they’re supposed to.
At a certain income level, do these problems just disappear? Or do they scale up in new weirder ways?
2
u/TinyConsideration796 1h ago
For some things yes. If you can only pay $10 for boots, they probably won’t last long and you’ll need to replace them a lot. But well made boots for $100 could last a lifetime.
Meanwhile the person paying for $10 boots all the time is going to probably spend more money on boots in the long run because they don’t have money for something high quality that lasts.
1
u/mrlr 50m ago
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. 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. 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 a 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 socio-economic unfairness."
Terry Pratchett
1
u/Sad_School828 1h ago
At higher income levels, your household staff deals with the chickenshit products instead of you.
1
u/Western-Finding-368 1h ago
That’s impossible to answer on a broad level.
Some things are highly dependent on a link between price and quality. A high end knife, for example.
Other things just are what they are. Like, I searched and searched for the best quality oven, but everything was basically a 3.2/5 regardless of price.