Slashdot Mirror
Low-Income Users Latch On To iPhone
narramissic writes "The iPhone crowd is still dominated by affluent males between the ages of 18 and 35, but in a series of surveys ending in August, ComScore found that iPhone purchases grew fastest among people with annual household incomes between $25,000 and $50,000. The growth rate in this group was 48 percent, compared with just 16 percent among people with incomes above $100,000. And the down economy isn't going to turn this trend around, says ComScore Mobile analyst Jen Wu. 'I don't see there's going to be much of a slowdown, just because wireless devices are so much more of a necessity than they used to be,' Wu said."
In other iPhone news, an anonymous reader points out a NYTimes story about the rise in car-related applications and uses for the iPhone, which points out that programmers are just beginning to "appreciate just what can be done with an iPhone and other advanced cellphones that know where they are and just how quickly they are going someplace else." Another iPhone story mentions that "Opera's engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple won't let the company release it because it competes with Apple's own Safari browser."
Antitrust lawsuit, anybody?
The high cost forced data plan + voice plan is a trun off me. I want to get S60 based phone running Symbian OS with WIFI and just use WIFI I have ATT DSL so I can use there hotspots for free as well as not being forced to use 1 app store I can get apps from any one with out the app lock in.
This is just another sad example of the American tendency to live beyond one's means. This is another symptom of the disease that is eating this country: financial illiteracy.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
... ComScore found that iPhone purchases grew fastest among people with annual household incomes between $25,000 and $50,000.
Poor people are poor because they're stupid with their money. If or when the Democrats get control next week, we can see more money going down the poor people money pit: sales of consumer electronics, junk food, fast food, Walmart junk, etc... will all increase. But yet, when something that would reduce conspicuous consumption among folks who really need to save and develop some sort of fiscal discipline, it is shot down as helping the "rich". By the way, most middle and upper class folks need to develop some fiscal responsibility themselves. I've dealt with a few folks who were making mid six figures who can't pay their mortgages now because they've lost their jobs or businesses tanked.
What could do what I say? Ah yes, that's it, the Fair Tax - taxing consumption instead of savings and earning as the current ridiculous system does.
So get one?
What's holding you back.
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
The iPhone crowd is still dominated by affluent males between the ages of 18 and 35
Those of us who don't bask in the glow of all things Apple might say they're afflicted as well as affluent.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The iPhone is comming to be widely regarded as "bling". You always see more bling among low-income people.
Caveat Utilitor
I don't want the same phone that some poorie has. That's the reason I own a MacBook Pro and a Mac Pro. No poories allowed!
"Fastest Growing" is a meaningless statistic without context, and TFA doesn't give much of that. For example, it may be the fastest growing because the other income groups rushed out to buy first, while the lower income groups saved up.
Similarly, it could be the fastest growing because it 'grew' from 100 people to 148 people. Still a meager total, but explosive growth.
I'm a first year graduate student in physics, and about 1/3 of my class have iPhones. We're definitely low-income -- Teaching Assistant pay is ~$14k/year.
Usually when the phrase "low income" comes up, people think poor people in the inner city or whatnot. Here, I bet low income mostly means students and the likes. I think owning an iPhone is silly on our pay, but at least we have decent future income potential (better than most low income people), so it may not really be beyond our means.
Well I thought the American Revolution was silly because the British didn't want another country.
And who ever considered the iPhone to be a necessity?
I have a wireless device. It cost me $1 when it came with my plan.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Horrible decisions made from the financial standpoint.
Still I am curious, how many of these people in the income brackets live at home, did not list their spouse's income as part of it, or share a house/apartment which could minimize their income needs?
I know it seems heartless to some but a lot of people just don't get ahead because of their own actions. Go by an apartment complex and your bound to see many cars that make you shake your head. A great example is where I work. In our own support staff we have two guys with expensive cars, like a fairly current Mercedes or year old BMW 5 series. Throw in the cool cell phone and I just sigh and walk away when they bitch about not having sufficient money to do things other people do. Yet these same clueless individuals will buy into whatever politicians tell them, specifically that somehow its not their fault and its not fair. They really believe this to be true!
An article in the AJC earlier in the year was showing the plight of the homeless in Atlanta, the impact of the story fell on its face as all but two of those pictured had a cell phone - a few were using them when the picture was taken.
What it comes down to is that people fail to set proper priorities. They refuse to understand that they just can't have everything unless they have the real means to do so. Yet instead of spending that very same wasted money on improving their means they squander it forever setting themselves back. We used to be a society which tried to help each other out but that fell by the wayside when many began to demand that help without making any sacrifice themselves.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
No you can't. All software that wants to do something "dangerous" on you S60-mobile, like setting the clock, or accessing contact data, MUST be digitally signed. That's great (really, I do like the platform security), but the only Certificate Authority for this is... Symbian. So in the end SYMBIAN decides what may and may not run on YOUR phone.
Yes, Symbian has "open signed", a cheezy web-interface where you can sign unsigned freeware, so it can be installed on YOUR phone, but alas, Symbian is in control here as well.
Don't let the claims of "openess" and "open source" fool you!
It's worked for bullshit vehicles like the Escalade, so I don't know why it wouldn't work for a bullshit smartphone.
$50k/year is considered "low income," now?
Antitrust lawsuit, anybody?
Jesus, no. Please go read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
Please help metamoderate.
I was asked about Opera not being allowed on the iPhone yesterday. My immediate gut reaction was that Apple was being a douche. All my instincts cry out that programmers should be able to put anything they want out there and let the market decide.
I got to thinking about it though. To the best of my knowledge, there is no global preference in place to set which apps respond to which data sources. What I mean is, when I click on a link in an email, Safari opens the page. When I click on a phone number in google maps, an email or a web page, the phone app opens it. Same thing for music, podcasts, videos, etc. You get the idea.
This keeps the phone simple, intuitive and predictable. All the other apps I install are all for doing some *other* specific task than what is provided by the core applications/functionality. What would happen then if I loaded Opera, Konqueror, Firefox, etc. on the phone. Which one would open my web links? Obviously the one specified in my preferences (which don't exist). What if I wanted to open this particular link with FireFox this time? I can't right-click and say open link with. Do I have to quit the program, open preferences and temporarily select Firefox?
I realize that it would be rather simple for Apple to address these issues and add this functionality, but once that camel's nose is under the tent you are now dealing with people demanding a preference and underlying mechanism for modifying the behavior of all the core functionalities. I want Skype to open when I touch a phone number in an email or on a web page (or in my address book), but I only want it to come up when I'm not connected to wireless. When I'm on wireless I want MyVOIP to make the calls. This also applies to which app you want sending emails, text messages, etc.
While the geek in me can get into this sort of configurability, I've already seen the whole other level of complexity added to the preference system with just the addition of push and Exchange connectivity. If users had to go through page after page of preferences just to find the right place to indicate which app they wanted to store their contacts in and have that tie into their Exchange push connection, it would be a nightmare.
I don't think the masses are ready for that or even really want it. That sort of complexity will make the iPhone just like every other smart phone out there. My coworker was bragging up his WinMobile-based smartphone at lunch the other day. He was saying it could do so much more than the iPhone. I don't doubt it, but my god, the gyrations he had to go through to tweak a setting to get it to do things. Just setting up a new wireless connection or a new IMAP email account seemed ridiculously complex. He said it was just due to the fact that he'd downloaded other email apps and tools and that each one had a different place to set up some of the preferences.
Is there a place for a mobile device that lets a geek configure every possible thing and choose exactly which software performed what tasks? Absolutely. That place should rightly be filled by Android and matched with the particular hardware design that that geek has chosen for their particular needs/fetish. I don't think the iPhone is where it belongs.
It may be the height of irony but I can see the iPhone becoming the phone people refer to when they say "Dammit, all I want in my smart-phone is to be able to make calls, surf the web, email, mapping, music, games and movies! I don't want to have to mess with all that other crap." in the same way purists today say "I just want a phone that makes calls."
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
This story concurs with my own observation; I take the Broad Street line in Philly from Center City and go pretty far north every day; there are many apparently low-income people with iPhones and iPod Touches. It actually amazes me.
But unlike the article, I never thought the iPhone/Touch were chosen based on frugality; rather, I think they are status symbols, vulgar displays of wealth like knock-off designer clothes and cheap bling. There are much cheaper devices, or combination of devices, available.
The article is more like industrial cheer-leading, which apparently concludes that the iPhone has become a necessity. Please!
Normally, I'd wait for a non-AC to make the point, but since you're probably going to get modded up, I'll just have to snuff it out right here:
Are you retiring in the next year to two? If not, them you have nothing to worry about.
Right, because I wasn't planning on using the money in my savings account until I turn 65, is that it?
Okay, so let's just look at the "long-term" savings accounts. Given the recent downturn and the still-pathetic earnings yields, the stock market over -- yes, the long term -- will probably return 5% nominal, since it first has to make up the ~40% downturn. (The 10-year S&P fund return was 4.5%/year *before* the recent downturn, and even that isn't enough to cover the taxes+inflation+volatility. Even in a tax-advantaged account, that's not a good deal.)
So, in exchange for giving up most of my wealth when it's most valuable to me (at a young age), I get to have a whopping 1% inflation/tax/volatility-adjusted return by investing till 65.
If your personal time discount rate is more than 1% -- which it is for almost everyone -- it just doesn't make sense to save, I am now sadly forced to admit. So frankly, I can't really criticize people who took advantage of way-underprice interested rates to buy durable consumer items. Show me risk-free interest rates (money markets) of 8% real, and I will change my mind.
Btw, anyone notice how the reasoning I'm responding to is sounding more and more these days like, "oh, don't worry man, the roulette wheel can be kinda mean, just keep playing, you'll make up your losses, totally, the guys in suits have it all figured out."
Now before you get really down on the system, keep in mind, you'd be worse off (less money, less control, watching much of your money paying for shit you don't want, and money going to the politicians' buddies) if the Government took care of everything for you.
Relevance to what I actually posted, please?
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
$25-50,000 annual income isn't "low income". It's middle income, since real median income is about $25-50,000.
--
make install -not war
I thought the same thing (minuscule market share), until I saw that in Q4 2007, the iPhone had a 30% market share of smartphones.
It's since dropped, but I have no idea what's happened since the 3G model came out. Point is...it's not remotely minuscule; they're second or third.
The other point: the market is pretty diversified between Palm, Windows Smartphones, Palm OS, Symbian, and others (like the Sidekick, running Hiptop OS.) If several companies colluded and blocked Opera, THAT would be an anti-trust action.
Please help metamoderate.
He never said black. Bling is a slang term, and is used in the hip hop culture, which as also spread to white, latino, asians and other races. It's now a universal theme. There is no racism here, you're just being over-sensitive.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
"If you want to be rich, sell to the poor. If you want to be poor, sell to the rich."
Task Mangler
It's easy to be smart with money when you have a lot of it, you have more choices. Compare the price per ounce of orange soda vs orange juice sometime. Healthy food costs more than unhealthy food, that's why you see all those slender affluent women in the suburbs (plus they have the money and time to excercise) but when you head down to less affluent areas you see more overweight women. No money for healthy food, no money or time for regular pilates and yoga.
Did you know that the government requires "food stamp" (they're now debit cards though) recipients to take a class in how to spend their food dollars before they get their benefit? They say things like "buy healthy food, buy fresh fruits and vegetables, don't buy junk." but every recipient knows that if they followed that advice their benefit wouldn't last the month.
It's folks like you that cause politicians to talk about helping the forgotten middle class? How can the middle class be forgotten when everyone talks about them and wants to cater to them. It's the poor and lower class that are truly forgotten. When's the last time you ever heard a politician say, "hey let's index the minimum wage to inflation and the CPI and make it retroactive to 1980" or "Let's increase the "food stamp" benefit so that people can actually afford to follow the food buying advice we give them." or "Hey lets tighten up labor laws so we don't have grocery chains hiring teenagers because they can: pay them less, know they're less likely to unionize and are less likely to complain about sexual harassment or bad workplace conditions."
I know a few in that last category. Our household just barely falls into the lower middle class category, but because we're careful we're on track to retire at the age of 55 (comfortably). Save your money people, live cheaply. You'll be very thankful for it later.
Recommended reading: "Rich Dad, Poor Dad"
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
Perhaps they don't have all of the costs you describe because they live within their means. $25k per year is over $2k per month. In my case, for example, I make $1900 per month, spend $850 on {mortgage, utilities, property taxes, maintenance} (I live in an expensive area), $400 on food, nothing on a car, nothing on gas, nothing on tuition, next to nothing on clothes, and minimal amounts on entertainment.
Which means each month of my $1900, I have $650 of overhead that either goes to savings, or electronics projects.
We don't all have your expenses. If I wanted to afford $70/month for a phone (I already pay $30/month for just a regular cell phone, so only a $40/month marginal increase, btw).
Article- "Opera's engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple won't let the company release it because it competes with Apple's own Safari browser"
Slashdot- "So what. It's their phone, they can do whatever they want. No one ever said the iPhone would run every app. Uncle Steve is just acting in our best interests"
But what if......
Article- "Opera's engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Windows Mobile, but Microsoft won't let the company release it because it competes with Microsoft's own IE browser"
Slashdot- "Christ on a cracker! Is there no end to their greed? Apple would never do anything like this! It's my phone! I bought it! I should be able to do whatever I want with it! Information wants to be free! "
That's why I just come here for the girlies....the discussion has just become way too predictable :)
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
Sorry, but technology doesn't always make life easier; don't need fluff I won't use.
"jPhone" or iPhone shuffle??
1 button phone: answer/hangup; hold for power
1 slide switch: silent mode; during conversation it turns on speaker mode
Voice recognition: RECITE numbers to dial them
Speaking interface: like voice mail menus- I never want to mess with options so its no big deal to wait for a talking interface whenever I want to setup speed dial or see the last call's number (it does have a tiny screen.)
simple ring sound; if custom just have it record your own with it's mic
Water resistant: sound quality often sucks anyhow
Simple small B&W display; wrist watch like; callerID
2 AAA NiMH batteries: new batteries shouldn't cost more than the phone! (I don't care if I have to swap batteries it doesn't have to charge them; I'm not that lazy...) /. is the wrong place to talk simple but I'm shocked nobody has made a phone that doesn't go in this direction.
At least this is more Star Trek: push button, speak name of person to speak to - and it calls them; perhaps using other people's tracking info you can ask it where somebody is and have it speak an answer as well? It could speak their name when they call (known people only.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I live in a neighbourhood which is rapidly gentrifying - So you have a mix of 'poor' people, middle class and upper-middle class. It's interesting to look at the houses when I walk my dog in the evening - The houses which would be branded as 'poor' - Junk in the yard, unmowed lawn, shabby house, almost always have a 50" flatscreen glowing away in the front room, showing hockey in high-def. Then I go home to my ten year old 28" CRT television with analog cable.
I had no problem eating well when I was a poor college student. For me it was easier to eat well when I was poor because all the pre-made frozen/boxed/canned meals were unaffordable. Now I have to work quite a bit harder to avoid the temptation to simply let Tombstone and friends do all my cooking for me.
The poor people I know who eat like crap don't do it because they can't afford better. They do it because they have no willpower. They not only eat junk food, they eat out for junk food. Nobody who can afford to eat regularly at McDonald's is going to have problems affording healthy food.
And really, I don't buy your argument at all. Eating healthy is harder if you're a lazy poor person. But potatoes, beans, and in-season vegetables are all cheaper than junk food.
Oh, and food stamps? I don't live in an area with a lot of food-stamp recipients. But the last time I saw someone use food stamps at my local grocery store, she was buying two large bottles of Odwalla juice, clocking in at something like $15 total for perhaps half a gallon of juice. Obviously she's having no trouble affording healthy food!
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
This is just another sad example of the American tendency to live beyond one's means. This is another symptom of the disease that is eating this country: financial illiteracy.
You give them too much credit. Another problem is that people who are on welfare, who need help buying groceries, may be buying these phones. Well, we are buying these phones for them in essence. That symptom's disease can be described as "we deserve everything but we don't want to pay for it so let the government help us do everything". Maybe that would be considered financial ignorance or dependence?
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
You're guilty of extrapolating from one incident and assuming much about her lifestyle. Could have been a one time splurge you know. Would you want to eat beans and rice for every meal every day?
I would not, but I would never ever spend any money on anything made by Odwalla.
I make close to six figures and I would never even consider spending $15 on juice.
So I don't care if it's a one-time splurge or a regular thing. Either way it says nothing good about her. From the poor people I know, a lot of why they remain poor is because they frequently make "one-time" splurges. Years later they still have no money, and they wonder why....
Food stamps are paid for by tax money. That woman essentially spent fifteen dollars of my money on something I personally consider far too expensive to purchase even though I almost certainly make far more money than she does.
It's simply terrible financial planning.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
I just fucked my girlfriend bearback
I hope that was supposed to be "bareback", because otherwise your girlfriend is really fucking hairy.
Well, your bullshit answer doesn't really fly with me. (How comparing an Escalade to an iPhone makes any kind of sense is beyond me? But it got modded +4 Insightful, so I'll bother responding.)
Almost all the satisfied iPhone owners I know who purchased one for PERSONAL use, vs. business use, fall into the wage category mentioned. ($25K - $50K salaries)
None of these folks are interested in driving big, flashy SUVs, though - nor could most of them even afford the gas or personal property taxes on one!
The people complaining that the iPhone isn't as "open" as some Nokias or other smartphones completely miss the point. MOST customers are interested in what a phone lets them do, easily, out of the box. Once they're sold on that, and own/use the phone for a while - they get familiar enough (and maybe even bored enough?) with what's on it that they become motivated to install additional applications. Unlike other phones, the iPhone already uses the iTunes music store as a delivery mechanism -- a tool the "masses" are largely familiar with using already.
Once again, ease of use and "quality of presentation" trumps pure "feature set". This is why Apple is continuously successful, despite some of the "geek" types and cheapskates panning everything they do.
And as others pointed out, the iPhone really isn't that expensive a device in the grand scheme of things. Most people earning $25K to $50K annually that I know already spend more on a monthly cable bill than what the phone subscription costs. Most iPhone games are what? About $5 each? That's sure cheaper than those $60 Playstation 3 and XBox 360 titles that the same demographic buys quite a few of.
Really, I don't see this at all? About the ONLY time an app for the iPhone was denied by Apple on what was obviously an "arbitrary" decision was that useless "Pull My Finger" app. (If you ask me, Apple's biggest mistake here might simply have been letting too many other "lame" apps through. Banning "Pull My Finger" makes sense to me, if they're thinking "Hey, this isn't something that shows off our product in a positive light. People are going to see this and think the quality of things you can buy in our store is much lower than it really is." But they missed another dozen or so apps that needed to be given the boot too. Maybe they were too generous?)
Just about every other time, it amounts to someone trying to release an app that would have wound up offering some kind of functionality that duplicated something Apple was working on and secretly planning for a firmware update, or encouraged people to stop using the default app Apple included for the task in question.
(Oh, and there was the "tethering" app, which seems to have been killed off only because AT&T wouldn't go for it, despite Apple trying to work something out to bring it back.)
This might piss off the minority who really wanted to use Opera as their browser instead of Safari, on their iPhone. But trust me... 99.9% of iPhone users don't really care.
Nobody who can afford to eat regularly at McDonald's is going to have problems affording healthy food.
My sister, her baby and her baby's daddy used to live with me back when I was first out of college. I asked her to help out by paying some rent and she told me that she was so broke that she had to eat at McDonalds. That statement almost caused me to choke on my ramen.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Here's a hint--Geeks aren't mainstream. So even if every geek gets an android phone, the android phone will still be the niche product--not the iPhone.
Umm, no.... The point is, if a person can afford to spend $60 for a console game, then they can obviously afford prices like 99 cents or even $4.99 for a piece of phone software.
My iPhone purchase was never about it being a "status symbol". I simply have owned several "smartphones" in the past, because I like the idea of my cellphone also being capable of doing web browsing and checking my email on the go. I don't need to see some full-blown "Flash enabled" web site. But I might want to look up info on a restaurant or hotel before I go there, see what current online pricing is on something before I buy it locally, etc. The iPhone BLOWS AWAY the older phones I used, some of which I paid more than my iPhone for when they were new. Treo 650, Treo 600, Kyocera 7135, etc. etc.
And honestly, it pisses me off in the pit of my stomach that you somehow feel privileged enough to get to critique a poor person's purchasing decision just because you make more. But I understand it is ignorance.
Well then you have misinterpreted me. I'm not criticizing a poor person's purchasing decision just because I make more. I would criticize anyone who buys two jugs of Odwalla juice at $7+ each. It's a dumb decision made by dumb people. But in this case not only is it dumb but she demonstrably cannot afford it. And she is using my money, and the money of all other local taxpayers, to fund this rather ridiculous luxury.
My main point being, food stamps obviously help people out a lot. Eating right is cheaper than eating junk food, so the argument that people on food stamps can't afford to eat right is junk. And if people are doing well enough on food stamps to buy gourmet juice, then the argument is really junk.
You're perfectly correct that everyone makes mistakes and goes on unnecessary splurges. And you're perfectly correct that poor people have far less margin for error. But that's precisely why they should regulate themselves much more carefully. Sure, it's only human to screw up. But when your income is sufficient to eat well and healthily but you can't because you instead spend your money on McDonald's and fancy juices and Doritos, well you certainly can't blame society for your failings.
In the end it's about responsibility. Do humans screw up? Sure. But that doesn't mean you can just go off and blame other people for your screwups.
I imagine there are plenty of poor people who are able to control themselves well enough to avoid buying ridiculously expensive juice. There are plenty of poor people out there who work hard, spend frugally, and live as well as they can in their circumstances. Honestly I think it's an insult to those folk to talk about them as being in the same situation as a person who uses government food support to buy vastly overpriced luxury items.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
We're talking about Apple's rejection of applications which are deemed to "compete" with Apple's own functionality, or even planned functionality. Here's a (probably incomplete) list of higher profile apps that have been rejected by Apple, for various reasons.
Regarding Opera's rejection -- if Microsoft could have locked users into using only Internet Explorer on Windows, they would have. Once IE had killed Netscape, most internet-savvy people were even okay with using IE. Just because most of us are okay with Apple, and Safari doesn't suck, doesn't mean that Apple is justified in locking its users into its choice of software.
Don't blame me -- I voted for Roslin.
and why is it ok for Apple to reject an app because they were working on something similar themselves? Or because an app was more functional (for some users) than the built-in app? Both cases are as evil as denying Opera's browser, all worthy of antitrust investigation. This is about choice and I would prefer to decide which app works best for me rather than Apple making that decision, thank you very much comrade.
Yes, I own an iphone and love it, even though I am growing irritated that I can't use TCPMP to watch flv, avi, mpg2, etc. When the bar of irritation reaches a certain level then I will likely jailbreak.
Mike O, KT2T
Dr. Pangloss, is that you? I thought you'd been hanged in Lisbon!
Are you adequate?
"antitrust investigation"
Just what monopoly does Apple have that they are unfairly competing in? They surely don't have a monopoly on phones... even smart phones.
There is no antitrust issue here until the _only_ viable phone you can buy runs OSX with Safari. As long as there are plenty of competitors in this space... you are free to go somewhere else with your dollars.
I'm not saying this is a good decision by Apple... but it is _their_ decision to make and the government has no say in it.
Friedmud
I carry both a Blackberry for work and an iPhone for personal use. My iPhone is the furthest thing from a status symbol -- it's my life in my pocket. My Blackberry is just an annoyance.
I consider them roughly equivalent for email, largely because the Blackberry makes up for the awkwardness of its interface by having powerful filtering options and copy and paste.
For absolutely any other kind of use, from calendar to notes to Web usage to games to RSS, the iPhone blows the Blackberry away. Its screen is bigger and easier to read, its UI allows me to look up information *way* faster, its WebKit-based browser is actually usable in the non-WAP world, and it has much better graphics performance for games.
good question, since when does discrimination = racial discrimination?
Fattier meat isn't a problem for eating healthy, you can often remove a lot of that depending on how you cook it, and even if you can't, simply use less. In the end, meat is completely optional anyway.
You're correct that juice is more expensive than soda, but water is cheaper than both. Juice is also completely optional. Tap water is completely serviceable, and even if our hypothetical poor people somehow live in a place where the tap water is undrinkable, filters or cheap store-brand bottled water bought in bulk will still undercut soda by a huge amount.
Dessert is also optional. See where I'm going with this?
As for potatoes, beans, and vegetables being cheaper, I try to buy my vegetables for $1/pound or under, and always manage no more than $2/pound even on expensive weeks with no sales. I could easily manage less if I cared to eat more of my less preferred vegetables such as cabbage. Potatoes I rarely even see at over $1/pound, and often pick up for significantly less. Can't remember what I last paid for beans as I don't buy them that often, but it's in a similar range and they have the distinct advantage of being dry, and so weighing less for the same nutritional value.
And let's not forget rice. I buy good rice in bulk for fifty cents a pound. If you don't insist on stuff with Thai writing on it then you can get it for a fair bit less.
I can't recall ever seeing junk food sell for $1/pound. Most of the time it's more like $3-4/pound. Now I'll admit that they probably have more satiating power due to being mostly solid with little water content compared to vegetables, but even so I don't see it ever being cheaper to feed yourself on junk food.
As for Odwalla, do you believe the label on everything? "Health food company" means that they have realized that the people who were hippies in the 60s are now well-off but still gullible and are an excellent source of revenue, and that a lot of their children have inherited these traits and are also an excellent source of revenue. Drinking Odwalla doesn't make you healthier. It makes you poorer and more pretentious, nothing more. If you really want to get healthy, skip the insanely expensive orange juice and just eat the orange. Yes, oranges are expensive, but at the typical price my local store charges, oranges are still significantly cheaper than Odwalla.
I don't know any poor people who would spend $15 on juice either. I just saw one once. But I do know people who are poor or simply not very financially well off (but not to the extent that I'd call them poor) who suffer from far more financial difficulty than they need to because they tend to buy stuff like that, even if they don't go to that extreme.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
There is always one of you in every argument. Honestly, do you actually see racism in that comment?
-- Posted from my parent's basement
Oh please. I cook from scratch constantly. And I do it for two reasons: first, I like to cook and I like the results. Second: it is vastly cheaper than buying everything pre-made.
I know what cheese costs per pound. About $4.50 when I buy it.
I wanted to inject some actual number into this, so I went to peapod.com and checked it out. They should be fairly representative, despite being a delivery service, as my impression is that they simply charge the same prices as the Giant stores which run the service.
The best price I could find on Kraft Mac and Cheese was $5 for 36.2oz, about 14 cents/oz. It contains 12 servings at 390 calories for about .1 cents per calorie.
Next up, store brand elbow macaroni, 16oz for $1.29 or 8 cents/oz. It contains 8 servings at 218 calories for about 0.08 cents/calorie Of course I would not limit myself to macaroni and would choose any pasta if I really wanted to save money, but this seems to be the best price for pasta on peapod.com anyway.
And now cheese. In the interests of preserving our health, I'll skip over the "cheese food" and go for the actual big chunks of real cheese that Giant sells for $4.33/pound if you buy it 2 pounds at a time. Packaging says 24 servings at 110 calories which works out to 0.16 cents/calorie.
So per calorie the Kraft package is a bit more expensive than the pasta and a bit less expensive than the cheese. Of course the Kraft package is mostly pasta, not cheese. It probably has some other stuff besides just cheese for the mix, but on the other hand there's absolutely no requirement to produce an identical meal to what you get from a box, just a serviceable one. Elbow macaroni and some cheese on top is not particularly nutritious, but it's at least better than the Kraft box. To cut costs further, substitute rice ($4 for 5 pounds on peapod, half that cost or better when bought in bulk from a better place) for the pasta. Put those savings into some carrots or other cheap vegetables and you still have a meal that costs less and is not horrendously bad for you. It may not taste as good, but so it goes.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.