Why the poor pay more for toilet paper and just about everything else

I've never been able to articulate my own feeling about wealth and poverty. I've been objectively poor at some points in my life. I became vegetarian in my early 20s when I was travelling because I couldn't afford meat. Even then there were some weeks where I didn't eat for a few days because I had spent all my money for the week. It sounds bad, but being hungry taught me how to prioritise and I don't regret it.

In other times of my life, I have quit my job and spent half a year writing free software, or training karate -- without any income. I also spent 5 years living in a run down shack spending less than $10K a year, when I was teaching English in Japan.

By many measures, I was living in poverty because I had almost no income, or I was spending almost no money. But at no time in my life have I ever thought of myself as poor. I have always had money in the bank and I have never really been in debt. When I went hungry it was because I stupidly spent my food budget on beer (or something similar). I didn't have money for food, but I did have money.

Money is an option to buy things and for me the feeling of being rich is the feeling of always having that option. You can be happy with less things, I think. Nobody actually needs a yacht to be happy, or a big house, or a collection of vintage wine. But I think it is really hard to be happy when you have no options. It is even harder to be happy when you spend your options in the future and have to suffer with crushing debt -- possibly enslaved forever.

I could choose to be hungry. I could choose to give up my job and do something that paid no money. I could choose to move half way around the world and live in a shack teaching English. That's incredible wealth for me. That kind of wealth is available to many people, but I think that most people can't see it, unfortunately.

Sorry, the quote irritates me to no end (doubly so how people trip over each other to copypaste it).

In practice, most opportunities are not a pure savings like this where you will end up ahead in every way if only you could borrow the money; usually, you'll end up with more painful feet but more money to spend, as the cheaper shoes aren't completely useless and in need of replacement.

If the quote were as true as claimed, then someone could make a program where helpers pair up with a poor person, loan them 50 dollars, and then let the savings spiral up virtuously -- that loan enabled $100 of savings, which can be reinvested in more savings, when frees up more savings, etc.

But obviously no one's figured out how to make that happen, and the poor can often already get loans of such size and not trigger the upward spiral. So something's missing.

With that said, being poor does tend to be a double whammy where e.g. you live in a places that makes bulk purchases harder ... but it looks nothing like the dynamic in the Vimes copypasta.

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> spending patterns in developing countries, where cigarettes are sold in singles and shampoo can come in tiny, pricey sachets.

I wouldn't call the sachets pricey. They are single-use and come at an extremely affordable price (mostly just one rupee = 2 cents). Sachets allow the poor to try out products that they could not afford before, or products that they don't use daily.

Sachet sales created a whole new business paradigm.[0] They form the basis of C.K. Prahalad and Allen Hammond's article Serving the World’s Poor, Profitably (HBR September 2002) [1] and C. K. Prahalad's book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Wharton School Publishing, 2004).

[0] http://repository.umac.mo/bitstream/10692/1300/1/7444_0_Sy-C...

[1] https://hbr.org/2002/09/serving-the-worlds-poor-profitably

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortune_at_the_Bottom_of_t...