There are a lot of people for whom the choice is not “spend $20 every two years, or spend $200 today and never again” but instead “spend $20 today or just not have a working coffee maker”
Again I don't really think many of these concepts really apply any longer. I'm currently wearing $10 Chinese knock-off shoes that are lasting for years comfortably, while there are plenty of low income types running around in Air Jordans because of marketing.
This is part of the reason I have a bit of a personal crusade against marketing and advertising. I think its currently one of the main things that is realistically keeping the poor poor. Endless creation of artificial demand and instilling false hope about what 'luxury' goods would do for a person is just screwing over poor people. Some hip hop and other stuff has started going down this track [1], but it's still outvolumed a few hundred times over by the culture of glorifying being exploited by corporations.
There needs to be a term for this argument, because I think it's frequently used but generally fallacious and primarily used to defend the indefensible. It's a sort of strawman, in that you're concocting some demographic as something being reasonable for even though that demographic either doesn't exist, or exists in negligible quantities. The pitifulman?
And on top of all of this - again, French press. Cheaper than coffee maker and makes better coffee than a coffee maker. Are we to now invoke the same pitifulman again and claim that there's this same demographic that can't afford anything, yet works so much that even the extra 2 minutes you'd spend with a French press in impossible for them and their 7 part time jobs?
I mean FFS we live in a world where you can earn $20/hour frying frozen precut fries at McDonalds.