4 ms·

To make food at home, you either need fresh, perishable ingredients and/or time to prep and cook. Even accessing fresh ingredients may be a hassle (see: food de

by niftich 10y ago

To make food at home, you either need fresh, perishable ingredients and/or time to prep and cook. Even accessing fresh ingredients may be a hassle (see: food deserts), so eating off the dollar menu often feels like a better use of your money than making the trek to the grocery store to buy some perishables that you then have to cook before they go bad. It's similar to why poor people buy poor-quality shoes more often, as opposed to one high-quality pair once a year. EDIT: or cars. Poor people buy cars that are in poor condition because that's all they can afford, and they spend more money on it overall than if they could've gotten a better-quality car instead. It's expensive to be poor.

Karunamon 10y ago
And just to add on to this, it's worse when you're cooking for one, it's far too easy to let ingredients go to waste. People never think about anything but the cash register price when making this comparison for some reason...
- _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
  I agree cooking for one is not supported by - at least here in Germany - most super markets. Packaging is too big. The trick when I was cooking for myself is cook larger portions and put these into the fridge. Vary them when eating and don't try to keep raw ingredients instead of cooked food. Cooking for two is no problem though, especially if you cook the right things. Cooking for more then 2 and you really have no problems with ingredients going to waste. And you can buy some ingredients for cheap that last, e.g. I buy Japanese rice in 5kg or 10kg sizes, easy to keep in good condition for a long time and much cheaper than 500g from the super market.
IkmoIkmo 10y ago
> It's similar to why poor people buy poor-quality shoes more often, as opposed to one high-quality pair once a year. Haha man I can hardly count the number of $15 pairs of sneakers I bought at the market as a kid, with the glue visible on the sides. Eventually the soles would inevitably come off, partially cause of the crappy shoe and partially because I was always playing football (soccer) with them. The notion of buying a decent pair of shoes and another specialised sport-shoe just never even came up as an option in my mind, to drop $250 total on two pairs of shoes.
- gambiting 10y ago
  I genuinely don't know what point you are trying to make here.
  - billforsternz 10y ago
    He's agreeing with the person he's responding to and noting how the point that person made resonates with his own experience, whilst adding a little background color.
MattSayar 10y ago
Add poor money-management habits on top of that (which eg going out for breakfast exacerbates), and it's a recipe to further entrench you in a poor lifestyle, unfortunately.
_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
I agree if people have no time. I don't watch any TV, but many people do watch a lot of TV so the "no time" is more a prioritization issue for many, watch TV or prepare food. "It's similar to why poor people buy poor-quality shoes more often, as opposed to one high-quality pair once a year." On the contrary, poor people buy poor shoes because they are cheaper and they don't have enough disposable income to afford good quality shoes.
- return0 10y ago
  * more often
harpastum 10y ago
"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." - Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play
- gardano 10y ago
  I immediately thought of Sam Vimes too. Well done!

by niftich 10y ago

Karunamon 10y ago

And just to add on to this, it's worse when you're cooking for one, it's far too easy to let ingredients go to waste. People never think about anything but the cash register price when making this comparison for some reason...

_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
I agree cooking for one is not supported by - at least here in Germany - most super markets. Packaging is too big. The trick when I was cooking for myself is cook larger portions and put these into the fridge. Vary them when eating and don't try to keep raw ingredients instead of cooked food. Cooking for two is no problem though, especially if you cook the right things. Cooking for more then 2 and you really have no problems with ingredients going to waste. And you can buy some ingredients for cheap that last, e.g. I buy Japanese rice in 5kg or 10kg sizes, easy to keep in good condition for a long time and much cheaper than 500g from the super market.

IkmoIkmo 10y ago

> It's similar to why poor people buy poor-quality shoes more often, as opposed to one high-quality pair once a year. Haha man I can hardly count the number of $15 pairs of sneakers I bought at the market as a kid, with the glue visible on the sides. Eventually the soles would inevitably come off, partially cause of the crappy shoe and partially because I was always playing football (soccer) with them. The notion of buying a decent pair of shoes and another specialised sport-shoe just never even came up as an option in my mind, to drop $250 total on two pairs of shoes.

gambiting 10y ago
I genuinely don't know what point you are trying to make here.
- billforsternz 10y ago
  He's agreeing with the person he's responding to and noting how the point that person made resonates with his own experience, whilst adding a little background color.

MattSayar 10y ago

Add poor money-management habits on top of that (which eg going out for breakfast exacerbates), and it's a recipe to further entrench you in a poor lifestyle, unfortunately.

_Codemonkeyism 10y ago

I agree if people have no time. I don't watch any TV, but many people do watch a lot of TV so the "no time" is more a prioritization issue for many, watch TV or prepare food. "It's similar to why poor people buy poor-quality shoes more often, as opposed to one high-quality pair once a year." On the contrary, poor people buy poor shoes because they are cheaper and they don't have enough disposable income to afford good quality shoes.

return0 10y ago
* more often

harpastum 10y ago

"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." - Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

gardano 10y ago
I immediately thought of Sam Vimes too. Well done!