Have you met any poor people? Once you're poor you only buy something that you can afford right now, it doesn't matter that spending more would save you more money in the long run.
“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 believe HackerNews ran an article that covered a similar situation but the product involved was baby diapers. That if you're buying in bulk, from say, Costco, you can save a lot of money on baby diapers. That's good for those that can afford it. But those on welfare (in the US) will never have enough cash on hand to make that initial bulk purchase and achieve those savings. As a result they have to buy the smaller packages which are significantly more expensive and eat up much more of their welfare check.
Disposable diapers are a luxury item. Buy cloth and reuse them a hundred times. I could afford disposable and still bought cloth to save a literal crap ton of money.
Cloth diapers are a luxury item. They are for people with access to washing machines and sufficient time to handle them. They might financially seem cheaper, but poor people often need to work multiple jobs to keep their heads above the water. They can’t afford spending extra time. (Same goes for junk food vs. cooking stuff that you cheaply sourced from a market, ...)
I believe people in developing countries without access to washing machines use cloth diapers, so it’s not lack of access to washing machines. Cultural issues probably pay a role, however.
We bought ours on eBay (third hand, and they did for 3 kids and still were good enough to sell on), they were more work than disposable but certainly cheaper. But, we had a washing machine -- again, second hand (fixed and plumbed in by me).
There's also the aspect that nice things require other nice, expensive things to keep them up. Having a nice set of boots isn't going to help much if it's sitting in the rain overnight regularly.
This all points to the lesson that wealth and riches aren't the same thing. Rich people are rich because they have wealth, even poor people can amass riches, say by winning the lottery, but can't be called wealthy until they actually have wealth.
A person can become wealthy off the efforts of other people, but if we want wealth for all, then it's society itself that must hold the wealth. This was Karl Marx's conclusion, but all attempts to build a society capable of holding wealth for all failed.
So we're stuck with trickle-down, the idea that the surplus wealth of the wealthy is good enough for all.
Half my childhood we were the kind of broke where you chose between meat besides hotdogs or the electric bill. We clipped coupons, shopped for sales, and made every penny count. Never in a million years would we have bought a single roll of toilet paper at any kind of markup; we'd have done without until we had enough to get it on sale. Course if we were that broke, I'd have been sent to knock on doors asking for odd jobs until I had enough to cover whatever crisis was at hand.
At any given month they may only have $100 to spare, so at that point it doesn't matter if spending more upfront saves money in the long term because they may not have the amount needed for the upfront cost.
