This was based on a question that my economics professor in college had asked us. His question was more to the effect of “What’s a good/service people buy when they have a bit of money, then they stop buying or buy less of it when they get some more money, and then they start buying it again once they have even more money?” — feel free to answer that too.
My first thought was alcohol: lower class people might buy more of it to cope with their difficult situation, whereas upper class people have more money to spend on vices and luxuries such as alcohol. Not sure if this theory holds true.
The best answer I’ve been able to come up with is golf carts, at least in the US. It’s common to see lower class people drive golf carts around their trailer parks or neighborhoods, whereas middle class people rarely do that. An upper class person might live in a wealthy neighborhood with its own built-in golf course, or the person might even own their own golf course(s).
Some dubious investments, such as crypto or donations to certain social organizations or politicians might also qualify?
Old cars.
Gambling
Transportation services
RVs
Recreational drugs
Horses and related services
This is fun, but I’ll end this with the obligatory: There are two main classes, the ownership class and the working class. The lower and middle classes are subsets of the working class.
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Why does this come off as insufferable? Is it a tone over text thing? Is it me?
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Recreational drugs are purchased by pretty much everything
Good point. I should have said, “illicit drugs.”
Old cars
Large amounts of debt.
Financial services as a percent of income, yes. That’s a good one. Being poor is relatively expensive.
College. The middle class is too rich for aid but too poor to pay
Lawyers
There are lots of middle class divorce lawyers
Legal services, fines, etc. I wish I had thought of that.
Bicycles! Lower class uses them as transportation, upper class uses them for recreation.
You and I have different definitions of upper class.
I know, I think I just got called upper and lower class at the same time. How was that up voted so much?
Upper class have pelatons
Man…I must really be upper class then.
When will my salary catch up to that?We are part of the dwindling middle class & I ride an electric bike to work. So much cheaper than a car but so expensive for a bike, it seems a middle class thing. Though maybe living close to work is in itself an upper class thing?
Our city does a semiannual ebike voucher raffle thing with a large number of large vouchers (would cover the cost) for verified low income, plus a smaller number of smaller vouchers (still would be a big discount) for non income verified.
Cocaine
Eh, that’s really for everyone.
I’d change that to “illegal drugs” as lower class can’t usually afford cocaine that’s not cut with fentanyl, but instead buy weed, shrooms, acid, meth, and other cheap drugs. Rich people, in addition to cocaine also have access to more of the designer drugs like MDMA, not to mention prescription drugs with a high street value that poor folks can’t afford unless they’re addicted to something like painkillers, but then they’ll usually have to go the cheaper route of fentanyl
Crack cocaine use is pervasive among the lowest income folks in my area, as are meth and K2. And those people sure as hell aren’t doing mushrooms or acid. My point is that cocaine use definitely has a bimodal distribution
Meth makes sense, it’s cheap as fuck to produce. Cocaine? I thought that was so expensive nobody could support a habit unless you had essentially unlimited money.
It’s more that clean is hard to find / expensive, and that you can fairly safely build up a tolerance and then burn/snort through a fuckton.
I’m pretty sure all you really need is a plant and some gasoline for distilling or whatever it’s called.
Crack cocaine has always been a poor man’s drug. It’s highly adulterated and thus much cheaper
Chlorine for water treatment. Cheap and useful where clean water is difficult to come by and where water is stored for long term use. Also very common to buy if you have a pool. But maybe for middle class households it is not as common of an item - except perhaps in areas were pools are common enough in middle-class homes.
Just a guess!
Rental properties.
The lower class tends not to own much property, especially not extra houses they can rent out or whatever.
Could we reframe it as rental services? The wealthy pay them to manage the property they own, and the poor poor pay them for the right to live there.
But renting is not buying, and OP was talking about buying.
That’s a good point. I’d still argue that renting is buying a service, but I agree there may be some ambiguity here.
I live in a decidedly middle class area and people driving golf carts around is super common. Some communities even have their own golf cart paths to the local grocery stores, and those stores have dedicated gold cart parking.
It’s very common at least in the US south east.
Any farm animal
also interesting: what are the differences in the kinds of goods throughout the world?
That’s an intriguing take. Blackberries are expensive in some places. In others, you can just grab and eat them as you walk through the park.
This is less of a specific good and more of a trend, but middle class people are more likely to buy bulk goods. Lower classes often don’t have the means to do so (space to store it and money to buy it, or access to places that sell in bulk) and higher classes simply don’t need to, or they buy luxury items that wouldn’t be sold in bulk.
Similarly, middle class people are less likely to shop at places with high markups, such as convenience stores.
The times when people shop would also see trends, with lower and higher classes doing more shopping midday on a Tuesday and middle class working people with average 9-5 office jobs being unable to do so.
