Maude. C’mon, we all knew Bea Arthur was behind it all along, right?
I think this is a rather odd tack to take, really.
Plus this:
In the first snippet, you’re asking how much markup is too much, while in the second, you’re recognizing that — in another industry — there is such a thing as too much. It’s true that different niches in a market have different markups, but I don’t think it’s true that there is necessarily no way to define how much is too much.
There are lots of potential anti-poverty measures that don’t, on their own, end poverty. It doesn’t mean they can’t be part of the solution.
Look, I agree that pay people more is the biggest part of any solution. I just think it isn’t the only thing we can do, and in fact it seems to be the hardest thing to do, on balance.
Me, I’m still waiting for a pointer to that magic savings account. 😜
No, they said it was a curve of accelerating quality as goods get more expensive. Again, using the Vimes Boots story:
Poor person: Spends $10 on poor-quality boots that last a year and don’t work well.
Rich person: Spends $50 on high-quality boots that last more than ten years work great.
The suggestion is that someone who spends 5x as much gets a product that is 10x as good (or more). I was just saying that the curve actually goes the other way: Someone who spends 5x as much gets an item that is maybe 2x as good. Someone who spends 10x as much gets something that’s maybe 2.5x as good. The increase in quality decelerates as you spend more, not accelerates.
DoubleG
4142
Nobody is saying you can fix poverty just by having people buy in bulk. People are responding to this argument you’re making:
To address income inequality you need to understand the unique material conditions of poor people, and you need to understand how wealth is being extracted from them and transferred to the wealthy. It’s not extraneous information – you can’t build a good solution to a problem without understanding the causes.
CraigM
4143
Duh, there is an inflection point where. increased. spending is more about luxury and premium versus quality, but to retort ‘the boots from this literary example can’t. possibly be 10x as good’ is to miss the point so thoroughly.
Take cars. It is patently obvious that a Lamborghini Hurucan is not 10x as good as my Subaru Outback, and won’t magically last 10x as long.
but that isn’t what the story is talking about. That isn’t even the point of the discussion.
Instead a better comp would be my Outback versus a used car you bought for 6-7k. What car do you get there, especially in this market where used cars sell at a premium? How many. miles does it have? What year is it? How much repair work does it need? What annual maintenance costs will you have? How likely is it the vehicle would break down such that it needs to be in the shop for an extended period, and what options do you retain at that point? Do you rent a car, have access to public transit to replace it? If public transit how much time does that cost? Does losing the car for a period put you in hardship or even cost you your job?
There is a very strong possibility that, amortizing the purchase price with the life of the vehicle, that per year I spend less with my new car than someone who is forced to rely on used cars with 150k miles on them. That aside from pure financial angles there are other benefits that are no less real.
Anyone who has ever been poor knows that the next world-altering financial disaster is the piece of shit car they depend on breaking down. It’s the perfect example of poor people basically paying more for something over time because they can’t buy decent quality something.
Here’s Chase’s: Chase Savings(SM) Account | Savings | Chase.com
If you’re over 18, it does have a $5 per month charge if you don’t maintain $300, but that’s better than paying some check cashing place, by spades. I do note that it does have a 6 withdrawal limit per month, as Strollen mentioned above. I don’t recall having that when I had a savings only account, or perhaps I never hit the limit. It’s possible other banks or credit unions have better offers, but Chase is readily available in most states.
Again, $5 dollars a month to cash your checks is not what is keeping people poor. Not making enough money to deal with the major necessities is the issue.
DoubleG
4146
You keep saying this while also saying the cost of those necessities doesn’t matter at all. See the problem?
You’ve over-expanded, repeatedly, what I was referring to as the “emotional plea”. That was specific things like accepting lower durability and bulk buying. Obviously stuff like rent, education, food, and healthcare matter. But focusing on not being able to buy bulk chicken or buying plastic boots instead of leather ones isn’t a substantial cause of poverty. It’s a symptom.
Back to the question I asked that actually relates to bulk buying and your personal dislike of dollar stores: if you could snap your fingers and make every dollar type store disappear, do you think that would materially benefit the poor?
The limit isn’t just withdrawals, it’s also transfers and online payments. Someone using the account to manage a life is probably going to trip over that limit all the time. That’s the reason for it: the bank is using that account to generate predictable revenue.
Certainly it’s an issue, and a big issue, but it is not the only issue. Why insist that it is?
DoubleG
4149
You’re the only one that suggested banning dollar stores as the solution.
Here’s an article on Dollar General’s business practices: How Dollar Stores Prey on the Poor - Progressive.org. Basically, they open stores in food deserts where people without cars can’t comparison shop to get better deals. Possible fixes could include expanding access to public transportation, price controls, or (oh no socialism) providing necessities for free. The possible ways to address these issues are much more expansive than your black and white approaches, and to understand that you need to be curious about why we got here.
Alstein
4150
What we really need are municipal grocery stores in food deserts.
Thrag
4151
Look people, none of these individual trees constitutes a forrest!
LockerK
4152
To give an idea of how long it takes for meaningful change: That article is from 2019 and mentioned that Cleveland was working on a ban that would be voted on “in a few months”. While there were moratoriums in the meantime it was only finalized 4 days ago; dollar/discount stores can no longer be built within two miles of an existing store.
You’ve taken a specific discussion about certain factors (less durable goods, non-bulk buying) and turned it into a general statement that poverty sucks. Yes, poverty sucks and yes, making poor people not poor (e.g., providing all necessities) will solve poverty. But taking away dollar stores means taking away an option, if other dramatic solutions aren’t implemented. It’s not like those transportation-less people will then go off to their closest Target, instead. They just won’t have one more option.
Everything else you throw out is complicated: improving public transit? A viable option in cities, but not for the rural/semi-rural poor. Price controls? There’s no substantial history, mechanism, or political will in America to affect substantial price controls of this kind—might as well wish for UBI.
Basically, I strongly disagree with your position that dollar stores are per se “predatory” or at least what I view as an extremely paternalistic attitude in that. They’re supplying a clear demand for local, small quantity goods—a demand that isn’t filled by their competitors including the Walmarts and mom-and-pop shops. Unlike usurious loans, I don’t think we can say that we’re protecting folks from irrational decisions that are being made out of desperation. It can be very rational to pay a per unit premium for small quantity goods. Poor people probably don’t have an abundance of food and goods storage and securing those would add substantial cost. There’s also value in cash flow control when you have low and uncertain income. Similar, as you yourself have noted, they don’t have the means to travel to and from places that sell at lower per unit prices. One can wish that people didn’t have to be faced by the factors that cause rational decisions like this, but again that’s just saying being poor sucks.
Hey did we ever land on whether or not it’s worth giving a shit about the thousands of ways society screws over the poor every fucking day, making their lives miserable in the name of squeezing out another quarter of a percent of recurring revenue for the hedge funds that control the bulk of the voting shares?
They should just learn to code already.
Yeah, big lol at that.
What happened was an unquestionable quest to become attractive to investors who, according to the reasoning over the decades, appear to still have not been found on any country on earth:
Surprise, workers resign when they have time to think about how better off they’ll be in 50 more years.
Yes, real life problems are generally complicated and have complicated solutions. I’m with you that there’s only so much you can do by looking at item prices, but claiming that it’s easier to increase wages country-wide by decree than to cut costs by providing better local services and infrastructure is weird. Yes, you can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves, such is life. For everyone else, there’s community building.
I pretty much agree, I don’t think Dollar stores are bad per see. Hell, even check cashing and payday lenders, in the small # of states that have made tough regulations, aren’t bad for poor people they do provide a service. If you need $500 to fix the car, better a payday lender than a loan shark.
Poor people make bad decisions for a variety of reasons, often they are ignorant of other options, sometimes they get deceived by business advertising, as do rich and middle-class people. Sometimes, they just have no other choice. Finally, sometimes liberals make assumptions about the behavior of poor people which simply ain’t true. The food desert myth is a prime example
https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2019-12-27/why-food-deserts-arent-the-key-cause-of-nutritional-inequality
I think that’s exactly what the story is talking about:
In the (very specific) example, it’s saying that the poor man pays $10 every year while the rich man pays $50 for something that lasts ten years. Granted it’s a very specific example, but it’s the idea that you spend more in the short term for something that lasts longer in the long term. I just disagree with the general concept that higher prices lead to goods that last an order of magnitude longer.
I’ve had cars that I basically drove into the ground, and in my experience they tend to be cheaper in the long run. Your annual maintenance costs are really low because you don’t tend to get a lot of minor things fixed. A more expensive car uses special synthetic oil that costs a lot, while you can just use cheaper oil on your older car. If one person buys a car for $20,000 and another person buys a car for $2000, I don’t think that the maintenance costs on the cheap car will ever reach $18,000. But hey, maybe my experience is unusual.
