[neuronerdgirl]

Right but the salary ranges here are not that tipping point. Sure, a coke is a coke, but how many people can even consider the other options when it's 5 dozen for $10 for that or 5.99 for 8 Aura Boras? Having significant excess income allows you to stop making minimum choices and start choosing for quality, which leads to lots of benefits. For example, you may want to source your groceries from local farms and small grocers, which keeps money in the local economy rather than pushing it back to shareholders at kroger or amazon. You can afford high quality natural materials for your clothing a la the boots problem, leading to both greater longevity of your own personal wardrobe and also a reduction in microplastics down the road. You can consider the full range of brands of sodas, some of which are both smaller creators and perhaps zero calorie too, making you slightly healthier and at the same time pushing competition in favor of newer innovative companies.

I think what we are seeing in these data is that people with less than enough money to have even started to conceive of these decision points simply don't factor it into their perceived desires for more income at all, and that has a sort of cliff effect on desired salary increases that falls off once people actually get out of the rut of survival wages. No one at 200k is being forced to buy the cheapest everything and pinching the pennies, but theyre also in no way "set for life" unless they've indeed been doing so.

[kjkjadksj]

You can do all of this stuff yet the small lot milk is only $8 and the smoothie at Erewhon is only like $10 still. This is what they mean by things being more expensive for poor people. Even with being choosy, prices can only realistically be so high. Say you are a working professional: the local economy by default has to price things such where they are somewhat affordable to a certain number of people to support the business. Unless you live in Monaco chances are you having a degree and using it in your work puts you at the elite end of the wage earning scale in your local city. Therefore to satisfy business cases, things are relatively cheaper for you and relatively more expensive for everyone else. This is true for coca cola, erewhon smoothies, local farmers markets, cars, plane tickets, and homes. Whatever it is. It's even more egregious for the filthy rich. How shameful we let someone like Lionel Messi only pay $10 for an Erewhon smoothie or only $100k for a mercedes considering what that relatively means to their bottom line compared to what it means for ours.