4. They only have a dollar.
Yes, it's cheaper by the fluid ounce to buy a barrel of Pine-sol at Costco. But if you have $100 for groceries and household expenses this week, you'll pay more per ounce to minimize the cash-flow problem.
Their cash-flow constraints and cost of credit both prevent them from economizing. That is how most Americans shop.
Its frequently cheaper to buy the same size package of a grocery item at a traditional grocery store than a dollar store; I've seen cases as extreme as things that regularly go 4/$1 (and occasionally go on sale at 10/$1) at regular grocery stores going for 1/$1 at a dollar store.
But if you don't have a regular grocery store in convenient distance (walking/biking distance if you don't have working car!), that doesn't matter. (Costco and similar stores present another level of problem; they tend to both be more distant for most people than even standard grocery stores and to bias toward larger package sizes—aside from whether you can afford to tie up money in the larger item even with a smaller unit cost, storage space becomes a problem.)
Then, in the suburbs, it seems grocery stores are trying to go up the chain by focusing on prepared foods. The cheap cafe has been replaced by bar covered in shiplap and the fruit trays run $25 after labor.
You can take $30 to a grocery store and walk out with a decent quantity of rice and beans, at good prices per ounce.
You're also aside the fact that rice and beans takes a good amount of time to prepare, which is a problem if you're working 16 hours a day - making rice takes 30 minutes and that is coming out of your sleep.
But most importantly, only having $4 at a time is how a lot of poor people have to shop. They have $4 today. Maybe they have $4 every work day as a day laborer. But they don't necessarily have $100 at the start of the week to plan everything out.
Btw, I find the term "souldcrushing" to be an insult to the millions of individuals who rely on such food staples for their daily nutritional intake. Go do a quick search for levels of diabetes and obesity among nations which rely on plant based diets and then come back and talk to me about soulcrushing.
And again, comparing subsisting on "$30 of rice and beans" is a completely different proposition to "nations which rely on plant based diets": people in these nations are not eating unflavored rice and beans every day.
Yeah and people only enjoy the loudest music because they have to turn the volume down which makes everything else sound worse...
Sugar is like that, as you get used to the sugar rush, everything else tastes worse but only relatively worse, not absolutely worse.
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And none of them rely on just rice and beans. They use spices and herb to make things taste better. You keep reading "rice and beans are soulcrushing" as "vegan food bad". When it's really a) repetitive and b) requires a lot of labor to make tasty. Most Asian saucy dishes are around making rice tastier.
"Geez"
It's especially bad with all the fake/bullshit nutritional science that has to be debunked which created a whole weight loss industry.
Shitty refined carbs and sugar/corn syrup might save you money over the short term but over the long term you're going to pay the price with massive health issues. Considering most poor people's greatest asset is their own body that's false economics.
Don’t go “Four Yorkshiremen” on the price of the pressure cooker. You can get it for less used, and it’s a perfect present from anyone who knows money is an issue for you. Maybe free at dumpsters when college students are clearing out their dorm rooms.
Re: the “boring and soul rushing” bit…I recommend bringing that up with anyone in Mexico or Latin America. Or are those type of people just…different (or more creative)?
With $100 perhaps I could walk into Costco and get huge quantities of maybe 1/4 of what I need in a given week, and because I bought it at Costco instead of Dollar Tree those items will last me two months instead of a week. But now I have to go to Dollar Tree anyway and that's hard because I work 6 days a week and Costco is really far away because I live in a rural town where even a Walmart is at least 20 minutes away.
It's of course smarter to take the 20 minute drive to Walmart and save even there, but if I'm rural and uneducated I probably don't know that and assume that the per unit price at Dollar Tree is roughly the same as Walmart.
But the economic incentives to leave it all behind for the big city are strong. The internet makes it better, in theory, but there’s an online political divide, too.