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Comment by jonathankoren | Hacker News Reader

That’s not the point. The point is that at some point there’s a quality quantum jump. If you can’t afford it, you’re always paying more. It's the same thing about buying in bulk. Yes, buying cereal from the warehouse club is cheaper per unit, but you have to be able to afford the 10 pounds of cereal, and the membership fee, and afford a place where you can store the 10 pounds. If you can’t, you’re stuck paying more per unit.

Or let’s take predatory check cashing places. No one should be lose 3% to 7% of their wages to literally cash a check, yet if you can’t carry the minimum savings amount, you can’t get a bank that won’t charge you a monthly “maintenance fee” (lol, like what “maintenance”are they doing? Polishing coins, and ironing bills?), so you lose 3% of your wages as a poor tax, whereas someone with a more lucrative job, keeps all of their take home pay.

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FYI, the boxes of cereal at Costco weigh much less than 10 pounds, and are basically just two bags of cereal sold in a box at a grocery store put into one box, it is not onerous to buy or store assuming you have a car to transport it.

>yet if you can’t carry the minimum savings amount, you can’t get a bank that won’t charge you a monthly “maintenance fee” (lol, like what “maintenance”are they doing? Polishing coins, and ironing bills?),

Yes, operating a physical building, employing people, taking on liability all costs money. The US government could do its job and offer people free money transfer services if it wanted to ensure everyone had access to electronic money accounts. I do not see why one would expect a non charity to take up this responsibility.

IME Costco at least is not price competitive with typical grocery store private labels brands. Better quality? Sure, maybe, but they really don't compete at the "bagged discount cereal" price level AFAICT. In general Costco is usually 60% - 100% more expensive than my local HEB's HCF products.

Maybe our Warehouse Stores are run very differently? Not sure. Been awhile since I've gone to Sam's, maybe they compete in that price range.

And I just checked Chase, they charge $12 / month* for basic checking. (*Waived with just $500/month direct deposit, but let's ignore that.) If you're cashing more than $400/month, you should just sign up for it. ($400/month is deep, deep poverty level, like panhandling.) I'm sure there's people who don't get a real checking account and could benefit from it, but the reasons are probably more along thines of "ineligible to get a bank account" or math illiterate, not "too poor for the minimum balance requirements".

The whole idea is just ridiculous. The main consumer good people get screwed over like this is housing, but that's 60% screwing over the other 40%, not the top 1% vs the 99%, so most people don't see themselves in those terms.

You would have to compare prices for Costco's Kirkland brand to HEB's proprietary brand. Also, Costco's goal is not to be the lowest price. Their goal is to be the lowest price relative to the quality, and their claim is they do the due diligence of providing a minimum level of quality for their products such that the customer will be more likely to be satisfied with the product than at other stores.

Awfully convenient that their due diligence results in everyone spending a lot more money!

Seriously though I have no problem with them setting a minimum quality bar, but the idea that poor people would be rich but for their ability to shop at Costco is just wrong.

> Their goal is to be the lowest price relative to the quality

i.e. best value

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