One thing I didn’t find adequately reflected in this article is how expensive it is being poor.
If you can’t afford the more expensive, but more durable version of X, where X is something you really need, means that over time you will spend much more on this than you would have if you could have afforded the more durable option.
At one part of my life I could only afford the cheapest pair of shoes for 10€, and since it was the only pair I owned I needed to buy a new pair every few months. Of course, I quickly paid more on shoes than I would have if I’d been able to afford one good pair of shoes.
This gets repeated a lot especially for clothes (eg boots theory) but it hasn't been true for decades. We are ridiculously far from 1900 levels of material comfort. Clothes are so rock bottom cheap that we are swimming in them, and charities are too. Too many clothes to know what to do with.
In places like NYC anyone can get free clothes if they want them. There are hundreds of charities and gov orgs (eg [1]) for precisely this reason. Shoes are free if you are not picky. Zero dollars. That's way cheaper than "shoes that last" regardless of price.
So much this. Also having money means you can buy in advance, or in quantities -important for a relatively big family-, also have a car, for example, and can go further to get better deals in X.
I always assume the bottom 10% in any market is going to be garbage, whether it's shoes, jeans, food or anything else. Of course knowing that doesn't help if you are really destitute.
Lots of people make the same assumption, and companies take advantage of that. E.g. if they want you to buy a bottle of wine at $10 a bottle, they'll place plenty of $10 bottles on the shelves, as well as some $7 bottles, with the assumption that you'll regard them as bottom of the barrel crap.
At one part of my life I could only afford the cheapest pair of shoes for 10€, and since it was the only pair I owned I needed to buy a new pair every few months. Of course, I quickly paid more on shoes than I would have if I’d been able to afford one good pair of shoes.