As pointed out elsewhere, when you are dirt poor it's not about unit price. It's about cash flow. Very often it's impossible to drop $90 at once on anything, not to mention the luxury of having Amazon Prime.

I don’t think that was supposed to be the bottom example, it’s half as expensive per unit at Target for 2 lb bags.

> A 50lb bag of white rice can be had on Amazon for $88

There's an obvious problem with cost per unit tricks like this. You have to be able to front the money to buy the big bag of rice. If your food budget is $40/wk, how are you going to spend $88 on a bag of rice? With your non-existent savings account? By eating plain rice and literally nothing else for > two weeks?

I'm picking your response, but it's typical of an archetype that's bothersome in a different way to the GP's archetype of pointing out that volume discounts exist. When you're poor, your food budget isn't a crisp reliable $40/wk that you give like an API call to the store for a constant amount of the same food with $0 left. No, the amount varies up and down, as does the kind of food you get that week, as does the amount left over after all ordinary expenses. This leads to the conclusion that if your time frame expands beyond one week, saving is possible! Even poor people understand saving up, despite archetypes like the GP imagining this is unknown to them and that their particular proposal is the best course of action, or archetypes like yours imagining that it's somehow impossible for them. Oh, and a savings account is unnecessary.

Incidentally, the median US household is said by the BLS to be capable of saving $1k/mo after all ordinary expenses. For those who actually save, a savings account typically isn't the mechanism to do it. This leads to "funny" statistics pushed by news outlets on how a huge percentage of people, even HNers who have thousands or even millions saved up in mostly liquid assets, have no savings, because they're sampling either non-existent or non-useful-and-thus-empty savings accounts.

All good points. I was using GP’s $40/wk for the sake of argument, and “savings account” more as a figure of speech than to literally refer to a savings account (for the reasons you pointed out). I do contend that, for people who have such a small amount available for food every week, saving any amount of money (let alone $1k/mo) is extremely difficult. Life is a never ending barrage of unexpected financial hits, especially when you’re already living frugally.

I think the point is that people on the poverty line eventually have to start making decisions that will break them out of the cycle. There are plenty of programs out there that will do just that. A 50lb bag of rice might very well be too much upfront but it might mean hitting the local food pantry while building up a pantry full of staples from EBT. I don't pretend this is an easy process but continuing to do that same and getting the same results shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Additionally, it can't be stated enough how important it is to build up credit for these people.

You could do a community purchase with your neighbors. Where I'm from people even register officially as cooperatives in order to buy stuff at bulk with proper accounting. Now some people who are super poor might also have horrible social skills, but that is already a compounding issue and moves goal posts.

Ok, so you now need:

A credit card + bank account

A stable address and room to store bulk stuff

A place to get packages where they won't be stolen

$88

That price is not even cheap, grocery stores have rice at a much lower unit price in much smaller packages. Dollar store rice is likely in between them and still a very solid calorie deal. There is still a requirement that one has time, equipment & energy to cook with, though.

You’re talking homeless which is a subset of poor.

Whenever someone says “the poor can do this” someone comes along to give an example of poor people who can’t. We get it, but there are plenty of poor who can do those things.

You can add cash to your Amazon account at AllPoint ATMs, CVS, Walgreens, RiteAid, GameStop, 7-11 and many other stores.

All of the people objecting to your comment seem to believe that the poor have no access to credit. Obviously, they do, often to a dangerous extent. And obviously, a wise use of the same credit that gets plastic trash at Walmart could get bulk food. But there are people (and not just "the poor") who simply don't plan ahead, ever, and sure don't plan ahead something that will require very bland-sounding food prep, week after week after week.

If someone only has $40 for groceries, how will they be able to come up with $88 for just plain rice?

The answer is that they can’t get those same discounts buying larger scale items.

I agree there are still some cases where people may spend irresponsibly, but it’s a different problem than “cheaper calories exist in large enough quantities”