> Yes, it's cheaper by the fluid ounce to buy a barrel of Pine-sol at Costco.

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.)

I have seen the same loss leaders at “traditional” supermarkets, but it’s also true that stores like that are disappearing from rural areas. And they’re usually losing out to a Dollar General or Dollar Tree. So even in head-to head competition, dollar stores are meeting some perceived need.

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 The cheap cafe has been replaced by bar covered in shiplap and the fruit trays run $25 after labor.

$100 is plenty to afford groceries at a grocery store. If they only had $4 or something your point would make more sense.

You can take $30 to a grocery store and walk out with a decent quantity of rice and beans, at good prices per ounce.

I'm not sure where "poor people should subsist on only rice and beans" became a valid idea. Sure, I mean, it's a cheap meal. But it's also boring and soulcrushing to have everyday.

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.

"But it's also boring and soulcrushing to have everyday" It's also rich in vegetable protein and a great source of fiber. Geez, when I think of "boring and soulcrushing" meals I think of SOYLENT not a nutritious meal enjoyed by tens of millions across LATAM on a daily basis.

If you believe that anyone counting cents is aware or concerned with it being "rich in protein" by your standards then count yourself among the disconnected. Survival is first.

"Geez"

I used to volunteer to feed the homeless vegan meals in downtown LA and also spent 2 years volunteering for a vegetarian soup kitchen in Copenhagen. Clearly you are the expert on the matter and I'm clearly the one "disconnected" from reality.

I don't know why we blame the poor for this but a bad diet is quite literally bad macro economics and good micro economics for the companies making the profits.

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.

Just plain rice and plain beans every day? I think there is a lot of work that goes into preparation you're willfully ignoring for in making it less boring and soulcrushing.

This is precisely why I avoided using adjectives such as savory or delicious. Taste is entirely subjective and varies widely from individual to individual. Nutrition on the other is based on scientific fact, hence why I chose to use terms such as: nutrients, fiber, protein.

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.

You seem to have a very utilitarian view of food that most people do not have: the average person does not quantify food purely in terms of their nutritional value, and enjoying the taste of it is a pretty big factor for if they want to eat it every day or not!

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.

The op mentioned "$100 is plenty to afford groceries at a grocery store." Surely some of that could go into things like: salt and garlic, no? You also talk about "the average person" which makes me seriously wonder what you mean by this? What is an average person in your world view? I've had the opportunity to live in 3 different continents and I'd be hard pressed to describe an average person to you. Perhaps you are right and my views are a bit utilitarian, but I can assure you that my soul is not crushed whenever I sit down to eat a plate of moros y cristianos.

At $100/week you can trivially have have chicken every dinner. You made it $30/week to justify rice and beans as the sole meal. Which makes it harder to purchase addons. Especially if that works out to $7.50/person/week for a family of 4. Just over $1.07/person/day doesn't leave a lot of extra money.

>and enjoying the taste of it is a pretty big factor for if they want to eat it every day or not!

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.

I'm sorry but

>username

> Go do a quick search for levels of diabetes and obesity among nations which rely on plant based diets

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.

With an electric pressure cooker, say Instapot ($60 new, 11/23/21), prep time for rice is less than 3 minutes, and beans even less. Just did it. Cooking time from 1 cup beans (no presoak) to cooked is 1 hour, two cups rice to cooked is 20 minutes. Maybe you can do both combined at the same time in an hour. Total time of involvement by chef…about 5 minutes. And the pot keeps it warm until you wake up from your nap.

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)?

I also have a pressure cooker, cooking time for rice is nowhere close to 3 minutes, it's about 30 minutes.

You misread their comment: prep time 3 mins (i.e. the time you are actively doing anything), the rest is it cooking away on its own.

For folks who are keeping 2 jobs just to stay afloat that cooking time is carved from sleep time.

Rice and beans is a basis. There's also a lot of corn. But it's not that those people are different, it's that preparation takes a real amount of time.

There's also the time cost and, in the case of Costco, membership cost. Plus the general lack of knowledge of all of the above.

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.

Except it's not just a cash flow problem, it's first and foremost a community collapse problem. Poor immigrants buy in bulk and share all the time. Eventually the only way to avoid poverty is effectively cooperating with other people - at work to accomplish tasks worth paying for, social networking to get a job, staying married to provide for children. I am not patronizing anyone here, just acknowledging that their troubles have many more dimensions than just unit prices of small portions of various goods.

Yes, depopulation of small towns accompanies a lot of this, which means you have isolated seniors and the disadvantaged making up a lot of rural places.

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.

They may not have the space for a barrel of Pine-sol either.