Comment by eru

Yes, that theory was never very convincing to me. I grew up on welfare and now make software developer money. I can tell you that I definitely spend more on shoes now, even if they last longer.

Yes, a rich person and a poor person could try to buy the same items and the rich person might be able to buy them cheaper. But: first, when you have more money you generally want to buy nicer stuff, and the bang-for-buck generally goes down. Nicer shoes might cost twice as much, but they are perhaps twenty percent better. (And that's worth it for well-off people!)

Second, you can save a lot of money if you are willing to invest some time. From DIY or just generally shopping around. But: rich people's time is more expensive, even if just by opportunity costs.

From the Wikipedia article:

> In June 2024, the National Bureau of Economic Research from USA published a working paper expanding on the ONS findings, showing that cheapflation, a term the authors coined, is a global phenomenon:[21] "prices of cheaper goods increased at a faster rate than those of more expensive varieties of the same product",[22] thus placing a higher financial burden on poor people.

Funny enough, this observation is perfectly compatible with the notion that everyone, including poorer people, got richer over time as the economy grew, and so the cheapest and nastiest goods were removed from the market. The cheapest most basic TV you can buy today is miles better than what you could buy in the 1970s for example.