corporate greed $

        The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

    Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

    But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
    Men at Arms


  

-Sir Terry Pratchett

I like to take virtual tours of dead/dying towns via Street View. The one constant is that the one main Street has one Dollar General with cars in the parking lot, on the outskirts of town. The proper grocery/general stores are all dilapidated husks 'down town'.

Dollar Trees and Dollar Generals fuck over poor people. Those “cheater” sizes of cleaning supplies or similar cost more for the same amount of product, it’s just that if you are broke you can only afford the tiny ass bottle of laundry detergent or whatever in the short term.

I'm so glad the "cheap" stores around here don't sell tiny versions of products. It's non-brand name/lower quality or larger quantities to make them cheaper per volume.

For example my current toilet paper brand comes in four packs in the grocery store, with consistently good quality. The "cheap" store sell nine packs of the same stuff for 50% or so more, but you risk getting some that are slightly worse quality than the four packs. It's made in the same factory and is never bad, it's just that the second tier of quality control goes into the bulk ones.

Side note: I know people who have worked in/with soap facilities. And they mix, bottle and ship out dozens of brands. The majority of each type of soap, is made from the same base ingredients. Some are a bit watered down, lack pleasant scent, color or similar. But you can easily find soap that is at half the price of fancy ones, that work just as well(might need tiny bit more, but not enough that you lose money).

It also works the other way around, if you choose to spend your money on cheap supplies (because you are shortsighted) it will cost you more money in the long run.

A lot of people need to learn how to use their money effectively, and budgeting can help for some.