It's certainly true that top-end clothing lasts longer than cheap stuff. But the people who buy it like nice things, and variety. Maybe car repairs? But probably a trick of counting the new-car service plan as part of the purchase price.
Poor people have to buy on hire purchase or using payday loans, which end up being significantly more expensive.
Wealthy people in the UK can buy their utilities using direct debit, which is normally cheaper than paying the bill as it comes in. Poor people may be on a pre-payment token meter. These used to be more expensive than a normal bill.
There's a bunch of stuff like this.
What I'm disputing is that this is anything like the pattern, and that this is useful for thinking about poverty. People with more money spend more money on their cars, their clothes, their kitchens. They aren't staying rich by their ability to save 5% on their (larger) electricity bills by paying on time.
I've seen it with people buying jeans for work. Buying the cheapest quality jeans possible from a Rural King, and then having to buy another pair again in a few months. Same with tennis shoes from Payless Shoes, for instance, versus buying Nike.
i buy almonds at the indian grocery for $5/lb in 3lb qty rather than $7. i drive a used toyota camry even though it's boring as hell but low $/mile.
heck part of the value of desktop pcs is their modularity... there's also a subreddit called buyitonce iir.
You're thinking of /r/BuyItForLife.
More seriously I've also saved money by having a prepaid phone plan which was a lot more expensive per minute. And by buying super-cheap ice skates which I'm sure would have worn out after 10 times... and throwing them out when I moved soon after. In other words, sometimes the simple calculation by which a more durable item is cheaper, leaves out important things.
It would be interesting to have some actual data. An easy thing would be to look across countries, are there any cases where a poorer country has a larger (in absolute terms!) motor sector than a richer one? I would be surprised, this is certainly not the pattern.
(2) It does no good to compare across countries either. The necessity of a car is a distinctly American thing. In many countries you can get by without one thanks to public transportation or walking. America's poorest often don't have either of those luxuries, thus it'd be impossible to compare to poorer countries.
That said, I do know it effects clothes pretty heavily. I've bought two pairs of cheap tennis shoes this year. Now, I knew they were cheap and that they likely wouldn't last long and I didn't need them to, which is why I went ahead and got them. But for some that's all they can afford. If they go through three pairs, they've spent around $60-70, which is enough for one good pair that would last over a year. But they often don't have that money to drop on one good pair, and thus have to keep buying cheap ones. It's even more prevelant with boots, because they're more expensive.
And it happens with clothes too, especially when people have to wear the same thing to work regularly, and thus often wear the same two or three pairs of jeans. They wear out quicker, and if they're buying cheaper material, it happens faster too.
Although it would be nice to have data. I guess the technical term is something like "inferior good", and I thought such things were rare beasts, not such broad categories as clothing. (Perhaps things like fake-leather belts would qualify).
Do they spend a larger proportion of their income on clothing? This could go either way, I think, rent hurts. But that's a different question to the boot one: If they spend more only in proportion, not in dollars, then they spend the same or less!