Sure, but the status implications of doing this severely depend on your general situation. If you have an expensive townhouse, picking up furniture off the str

Sure, but the status implications of doing this severely depend on your general situation. If you have an expensive townhouse, picking up furniture off the street can be seen as either being clever with your money or even "artsy" (especially if your refurbish it before putting it in your expensive townhouse). If you are dirt poor, it just reaffirms your inability to afford actually spending money on things like that. And because being actually poor (e.g. being raised in a poor family, lacking a reasonable level of education, having bad job prospects (no chance of career advancement), working three crappy jobs to barely sustain your household without being able to put any money aside, and so on) carries a lot of stigma, poor people tend to be more self-conscious about how poor they appear to their peers (especially peers that do buy expensive crap even if they have to sign this kind of bullshit contracts). There's also a distinct difference between being poor as a student or entrepreneur (because being poor is just a temporary thing and it's seen as a temporary sacrifice) versus being poor as a regular part of the workforce (why don't you just save some of the money or work more?) or unemployed (why aren't you working?) or even long-term unemployed (why haven't you been working? or from the employer side: there must obviously be something wrong with you or else you would have been working).