6 ms·

Closely related to the toilet paper metric. The poorer you are the more you pay per sheet, on average. A middle-class person will drive to a place like Costco

by retrac 4y ago

Closely related to the toilet paper metric. The poorer you are the more you pay per sheet, on average. A middle-class person will drive to a place like Costco a few times a year, buy a few large packs, and they're set. For a poor person this has an number of hurdles. Costco membership is an up-front cost. Can't fit three large packs on the bus so expensive cab fare. Less likely to have the time when the store is open. They won't have as much storage space. And $60 of toilet paper is a rather big outlay when you're broke. You can buy two rolls at the convenience store for $4 though. And again the next week. And again. Which prevents them from saving up for the bulk purchase and cab fare so they can escape the vicious cycle of over-spending on TP. It's very expensive to be poor.

paulpauper 4y ago
obligatory reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory The Sam Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness, often called simply the boots theory, is an economic theory first popularised by English fantasy writer Terry Pratchett in his 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms. In the novel, Sam Vimes, the captain of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, reasons that poverty causes greater expenses to the poor than to those who are richer. Since its publication, the theory has received wider attention, especially in regard to the effect of increasing prices of daily necessities.
duxup 4y ago
Yeah the amount of cost saving I discovered…. after I stopped being poor was amazing. When I think of my crappy one bedroom apartment I started out in, I wouldn’t even have room to stock up on toilet paper. Now I’m my big house basement are several massive packages of TP, paper towels, tools that let me fix things on my own rather than having to pay, stocked up food basics … etc. These all save me money AND time (no need to shop often). None of these savings were available to me previously just due to space.
blackshaw 4y ago
> It's very expensive to be poor. True indeed. This article gives many more examples: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/it-is-expensive-to-be-poor/282979/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/it-is-e... > If you can’t afford the first month’s rent and security deposit you need in order to rent an apartment, you may get stuck in an overpriced residential motel. If you don’t have a kitchen or even a refrigerator and a microwave, you will find yourself falling back on convenience-store food, which—in addition to its nutritional deficits—is also alarmingly overpriced. If you need a loan, as most poor people eventually do, you will end up paying an interest rate many times higher than what a more affluent borrower would be charged. To be poor—especially with children to support and care for—is a perpetual high-wire act.
- Plasmoid 4y ago
  People create a lot of laws around rental housing that are designed to help the poor. The effects tend to make housing completely inaccessible to the working poor but more accessible to middle class. For example, making it difficult to evict someone will cause landlords to raise the qualifications for renting.
  - harvey9 4y ago
    The downside of less regulation may be homes with mould. While that is better than sleeping in a doorway, we should aspire to have eveyone in safe homes and the free market won't do that it the cheaper end of the spectrum. Granted it's also failing to do it even with regulation because of a lack of enforcement of same.
    - Plasmoid 4y ago
      Housing is a pretty terrible product. Everything is bespoke, but often durable enough that you can defer maintenance for a decade without paying for the costs. We've also tied a bunch of financial planning into the mix which amps up the bad ideas.
cvccvroomvroom 4y ago
Yep. The same goes for utilization of public benefits: a homeless person without refrigeration or transportation is often reduced to buying small quantities of food and things from expensive convenience stores. Their dollars of assistance are so meager and yet they don't have a meaningful ability to use them better.
- graphe 4y ago
  You're speaking about a very narrow type of person, atypical of any scenario. Homeless can go to churches if they behave. Most recipients are not homeless people with no transportation. I'd ask how meager? How much money did they get per month? My ex and I were eating better than we'd get for ourselves normally and we had money left over, with one link card. In California you can use link for restaurants too.
  - geysersam 4y ago
    People without access to lots of refrigerator storage are not atypical. It's quite typical if you're relatively poor, and live in an urban area with a family. People with limited access to transportation are also quite typical. If you don't own a car and live anywhere outside of the areas with the best public transport you're immediately in this category.
    - graphe 4y ago
      He said a homeless person with no transportation and no refrigerator. You are saying limited refrigeration and limited transportation. Are they the same to you?
      - geysersam 4y ago
        I think what op said was equally relevant for either of the categories mentioned. Focusing only on the most uncommon of them is to miss the point.
waboremo 4y ago
This is also a fantastic illustration for understanding why lifestyle changes are very difficult the more poor you are, even before any mental or physical conditions.
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
This is why social support networks are important. When someone in that position has a friend or relative with a car that's willing to take them shopping, it becomes a question of "when you've saved up a bit and are ready to go, just text me". It doesn't fix poverty but mutual aid makes it less worse. Edit: Another commenter made the example of buying tools (expensive upfront) to make your own (cheaper) repairs vs. paying someone else to do it, there's such a thing as tool libraries now. IMO every community should have one.
- graphe 4y ago
  It's true. A lack of redundancy is the issue. One feeble car. One month rent. One day worth of food. One day at a time you have to juggle taking more out of one or fearing it'll go away or stop working.
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
This seems unnecessarily dramatic, or at least outdated? Why not just do this: 1. Make a free account on Amazon 2. Buy the cheapest portable bidet, which (looking just now) is $7 including shipping. Sure, that's 75% more than the standing weekly toilet paper budget, but surely one can find an extra 3 dollars in the couch cushions? 3. Once the bidet arrives, toilet paper usage will drop immediately. You could probably reduce that $4/week budget to, say, $1/week. 4. That means you'll already break even on the bidet in a little over 2 weeks,. After that you're effectively printing money. 5. After another 20 weeks of making it rain $3/week in pure profit over your previously massive and over-inflated toilet paper budget, you'll have $60, which is surely enough to head back to Amazon and buy all the toilet paper your heart desires, in bulk. 6. That'll likely bring the $1/week budget down even further to, say, $0.50/week. 7. That's a nearly 17% bump in your weekly recurring profit, from $3 to $3.50/week, which you can use to keep on pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Heck, those numbers are basically good enough for a Series A pitch deck.
- vsareto 4y ago
  You're not wrong, but the answer to "why not just do this" is because those people probably don't know about bidets, because it's not very prevalent elsewhere in life (in the US especially). Lack of knowledge is a problem when you're poor too. If bidets were ubiquitous in the US such that just about everyone has used one, you'd not be seeing this issue.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- baremetal 4y ago
  People with a mentality like this don't stay poor. Also taking a shower directly after using the restroom does wonders.
  - iinnPP 4y ago
    It sure does. The sum of people who understand bidets is represented in the following formula: Population - Sum of people who panic purchased TP for Corona Virus = Definitely not just poor people
bko 4y ago
Sure, but rich people are more likely to buy more expensive toilet paper (name brand n-ply), while a lot of less wealthy people by the cheapest off brand toilet paper (Fiesta brand is popular in bodegas) The convenience store is more convenient though and you're paying a premium for that convenience. It's really about money. You can trade off money for convenience. A middle class person has to pay for the car which they don't use 99% of the time, the gas, insurance, etc. It's not entirely clear that they're getting a better bargain when you factor in everything else. But it's really about money. The article makes it sound like its about class or privilege as though only some people can fly: > The social privilege gradient is also a time gradient: if you can afford a plane ticket, you can travel quickly across the country rather than losing days to the Greyhound or a road-trip. But if you're even richer, you can pay for TSA Precheck and cut your airport security time from an hour to minutes. Go further up the privilege gradient and you'll acquire airline status, shaving another hour off the check-in process. Privilege has nothing to do with buying a plane ticket. Its open to pretty much everyone with money
- nostrademons 4y ago
  Money is privilege.
  - bko 4y ago
    No, it's not. > priv·i·lege - a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group. Note the "available only to a particular person or group". In a free and open society, money is available to any capable person through free and open exchange. If a person loses his money and pay for things, he doesn't keep the car, Costco membership, house and cheap toilet paper. Capiche?
    - nostrademons 4y ago
      Ease of making that money is disproportionate across society. That's what makes it "a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group". Or are you saying that a Haitian immigrant fresh off a raft has the same opportunities for making money that Jeff Bezos does? Quantity matters. The whole point of the article is that you can avoid various taxes on your time if, say, you can afford to drop $30K to buy a car for cash rather than take the bus, or if you can afford the down payment on a house rather than renting a motel room.

by retrac 4y ago

paulpauper 4y ago

obligatory reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory The Sam Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness, often called simply the boots theory, is an economic theory first popularised by English fantasy writer Terry Pratchett in his 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms. In the novel, Sam Vimes, the captain of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, reasons that poverty causes greater expenses to the poor than to those who are richer. Since its publication, the theory has received wider attention, especially in regard to the effect of increasing prices of daily necessities.

duxup 4y ago

Yeah the amount of cost saving I discovered…. after I stopped being poor was amazing. When I think of my crappy one bedroom apartment I started out in, I wouldn’t even have room to stock up on toilet paper. Now I’m my big house basement are several massive packages of TP, paper towels, tools that let me fix things on my own rather than having to pay, stocked up food basics … etc. These all save me money AND time (no need to shop often). None of these savings were available to me previously just due to space.

blackshaw 4y ago

> It's very expensive to be poor. True indeed. This article gives many more examples: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/it-is-expensive-to-be-poor/282979/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/it-is-e... > If you can’t afford the first month’s rent and security deposit you need in order to rent an apartment, you may get stuck in an overpriced residential motel. If you don’t have a kitchen or even a refrigerator and a microwave, you will find yourself falling back on convenience-store food, which—in addition to its nutritional deficits—is also alarmingly overpriced. If you need a loan, as most poor people eventually do, you will end up paying an interest rate many times higher than what a more affluent borrower would be charged. To be poor—especially with children to support and care for—is a perpetual high-wire act.

Plasmoid 4y ago
People create a lot of laws around rental housing that are designed to help the poor. The effects tend to make housing completely inaccessible to the working poor but more accessible to middle class. For example, making it difficult to evict someone will cause landlords to raise the qualifications for renting.
- harvey9 4y ago
  The downside of less regulation may be homes with mould. While that is better than sleeping in a doorway, we should aspire to have eveyone in safe homes and the free market won't do that it the cheaper end of the spectrum. Granted it's also failing to do it even with regulation because of a lack of enforcement of same.
  - Plasmoid 4y ago
    Housing is a pretty terrible product. Everything is bespoke, but often durable enough that you can defer maintenance for a decade without paying for the costs. We've also tied a bunch of financial planning into the mix which amps up the bad ideas.

cvccvroomvroom 4y ago

Yep. The same goes for utilization of public benefits: a homeless person without refrigeration or transportation is often reduced to buying small quantities of food and things from expensive convenience stores. Their dollars of assistance are so meager and yet they don't have a meaningful ability to use them better.

graphe 4y ago
You're speaking about a very narrow type of person, atypical of any scenario. Homeless can go to churches if they behave. Most recipients are not homeless people with no transportation. I'd ask how meager? How much money did they get per month? My ex and I were eating better than we'd get for ourselves normally and we had money left over, with one link card. In California you can use link for restaurants too.
- geysersam 4y ago
  People without access to lots of refrigerator storage are not atypical. It's quite typical if you're relatively poor, and live in an urban area with a family. People with limited access to transportation are also quite typical. If you don't own a car and live anywhere outside of the areas with the best public transport you're immediately in this category.
  - graphe 4y ago
    He said a homeless person with no transportation and no refrigerator. You are saying limited refrigeration and limited transportation. Are they the same to you?
    - geysersam 4y ago
      I think what op said was equally relevant for either of the categories mentioned. Focusing only on the most uncommon of them is to miss the point.

waboremo 4y ago

This is also a fantastic illustration for understanding why lifestyle changes are very difficult the more poor you are, even before any mental or physical conditions.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago

This is why social support networks are important. When someone in that position has a friend or relative with a car that's willing to take them shopping, it becomes a question of "when you've saved up a bit and are ready to go, just text me". It doesn't fix poverty but mutual aid makes it less worse. Edit: Another commenter made the example of buying tools (expensive upfront) to make your own (cheaper) repairs vs. paying someone else to do it, there's such a thing as tool libraries now. IMO every community should have one.

graphe 4y ago
It's true. A lack of redundancy is the issue. One feeble car. One month rent. One day worth of food. One day at a time you have to juggle taking more out of one or fearing it'll go away or stop working.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago

This seems unnecessarily dramatic, or at least outdated? Why not just do this: 1. Make a free account on Amazon 2. Buy the cheapest portable bidet, which (looking just now) is $7 including shipping. Sure, that's 75% more than the standing weekly toilet paper budget, but surely one can find an extra 3 dollars in the couch cushions? 3. Once the bidet arrives, toilet paper usage will drop immediately. You could probably reduce that $4/week budget to, say, $1/week. 4. That means you'll already break even on the bidet in a little over 2 weeks,. After that you're effectively printing money. 5. After another 20 weeks of making it rain $3/week in pure profit over your previously massive and over-inflated toilet paper budget, you'll have $60, which is surely enough to head back to Amazon and buy all the toilet paper your heart desires, in bulk. 6. That'll likely bring the $1/week budget down even further to, say, $0.50/week. 7. That's a nearly 17% bump in your weekly recurring profit, from $3 to $3.50/week, which you can use to keep on pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Heck, those numbers are basically good enough for a Series A pitch deck.

vsareto 4y ago
You're not wrong, but the answer to "why not just do this" is because those people probably don't know about bidets, because it's not very prevalent elsewhere in life (in the US especially). Lack of knowledge is a problem when you're poor too. If bidets were ubiquitous in the US such that just about everyone has used one, you'd not be seeing this issue.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
baremetal 4y ago
People with a mentality like this don't stay poor. Also taking a shower directly after using the restroom does wonders.
- iinnPP 4y ago
  It sure does. The sum of people who understand bidets is represented in the following formula: Population - Sum of people who panic purchased TP for Corona Virus = Definitely not just poor people

bko 4y ago

Sure, but rich people are more likely to buy more expensive toilet paper (name brand n-ply), while a lot of less wealthy people by the cheapest off brand toilet paper (Fiesta brand is popular in bodegas) The convenience store is more convenient though and you're paying a premium for that convenience. It's really about money. You can trade off money for convenience. A middle class person has to pay for the car which they don't use 99% of the time, the gas, insurance, etc. It's not entirely clear that they're getting a better bargain when you factor in everything else. But it's really about money. The article makes it sound like its about class or privilege as though only some people can fly: > The social privilege gradient is also a time gradient: if you can afford a plane ticket, you can travel quickly across the country rather than losing days to the Greyhound or a road-trip. But if you're even richer, you can pay for TSA Precheck and cut your airport security time from an hour to minutes. Go further up the privilege gradient and you'll acquire airline status, shaving another hour off the check-in process. Privilege has nothing to do with buying a plane ticket. Its open to pretty much everyone with money

nostrademons 4y ago
Money is privilege.
- bko 4y ago
  No, it's not. > priv·i·lege - a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group. Note the "available only to a particular person or group". In a free and open society, money is available to any capable person through free and open exchange. If a person loses his money and pay for things, he doesn't keep the car, Costco membership, house and cheap toilet paper. Capiche?
  - nostrademons 4y ago
    Ease of making that money is disproportionate across society. That's what makes it "a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group". Or are you saying that a Haitian immigrant fresh off a raft has the same opportunities for making money that Jeff Bezos does? Quantity matters. The whole point of the article is that you can avoid various taxes on your time if, say, you can afford to drop $30K to buy a car for cash rather than take the bus, or if you can afford the down payment on a house rather than renting a motel room.