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AT&T Lowers Data Access To Just $500/GB
GMGruman writes "No doubt in a move to demonstrate how having fewer carriers (once it buys T-Mobile) will be good for US cellular customers, AT&T has announced lower data pricing for customers not on contract: On a per-gigabyte basis, GoPhone users will only pay $500 rather than the previous $5,000. Such a deal. The pricing is indeed lower, but even the best option for such users is five times more than regular customers pay. And given that pay-as-you-go pricing is what the poor and people living paycheck to paycheck use, the result is those who can afford the least still pay by far the most."
there isn't an industry in as sore need of regulation
most of all, i am quite tired of paying the same mandated data plan price for rural 2g
...is, of course, a necessity of life (in addition to cable television).
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"And given that pay-as-you-go pricing is what the poor and people living paycheck to paycheck use, the result is those who can afford the least still pay by far the most." What a silly comment. First, I doubt that people who are poor and use pay as you go generally have smartphones, and if they do, they are far less likely to be data users. Second, we are not at the point where smartphones with data are a can't-exist-without-it commodity. If you are this poor, should you be wasting money on any data plan? Certainly data prices from mobile providers are shockingly high, but this is a silly "think of the children" style fallacious appeal to emotion.
Gasp! The thought of all those poor people who can't afford to use their smart phones, tablets, and netbooks is almost too much to bear... Get a little perspective.
T-mobile web day pass is $1.50/23hr, unlimited access.
Canada:
TELUS: $50/gb
Rogers: $30/gb
Let them charge as much as they want! All the better for companies like MetroPCS and the pay-as-you-go shops. Walmart has a $45 30day unlimited everything plan: http://www.walmart.com/ip/Straight-Talk-Unlimited-Text-Talk-and-Web-Access-30-Day-Service-Card-Email-Delivery/15443344 This isn't discrimination against "the poor and oppressed" like the summary implies, it's more like a stupid tax for someone who can't find a better deal.
"those who can afford the least still pay by far the most."
could perhaps more accurately be written:
"those who typically use the least get charged the most per unit."
or shortened to:
"you save money if you buy in bulk."
Of course, I'm not defending the outrageous rates—just the melodramatic language.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I, for one, applaud AT&T's 90% cut in price. Moar kool-aid please. This stuff is delicious!
Virgin Mobile has two Android phones which get you unlimited data for $25/month. It's far and away the cheapest smart phone data plan in the US. Who cares what T does when we have VM?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The Internet is supposed to be only for looking at web pages, no access to actual video or audio content. Want to play a multi-user game? Ha! Not if significant network traffic is required!
250 GB limits on their AT&T U-verse connection (does not apply to your cable subscription). Some have reported upwards of 4000% errors on their data meter (when AT&T's numbers are compared to those collected by DD-WRT routers).
2 GB limits on their data plans for smart phones.
Obviously they already prevent any pre-paid access to the Internet.
I never did hear if they ever disabled the fiber optic splitter they installed so all their traffic went directly to the NSA.
Seriously, these guys are the biggest threats to the Internet yet.
Nobody who is poor or living paycheque to paycheque NEEDS mobile data. I would argue they don't need cell phones at all but that's neither here nor there.
Tell me, where is the nearest payphone booth? I don't know what it is like where you live but here in Canada, the only payphones that seem to still exists are in airports and shopping malls. It is expected that almost anyone can have a talk and text cell phone. Mobile data is not something that the poor should consider even using.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
And given that pay-as-you-go pricing is what the poor and people living paycheck to paycheck use, the result is those who can afford the least still pay by far the most."
Anyone who agrees to AT&T's contract is a moron - or any cell phone provider in the US for that matter.
Those contracts are soooo one sided that the mafia are looking into getting into the cell phone business but they wont because they're afraid of the other providers.
I for one refuse to have a cell phone in my name. When the US cel carriers start being fair to the consumer, then and only then will I consider getting one.
Pay as you go?!? Please! They suck even worse!
US cell carriers are scum - there are no exceptions.
NEW: $25 FOR 500MB $5 for 10MB (previously $4.99 for 1MB) $15 for 100MB (previously $19.99)
It is only $500/GB if someone were to sip 10MB at a time. Although the price for the best deal ($50/GB) is still way higher than those on contract.
The problem with pay as you go data in the US and Canada is that tourists visiting have to pay through the nose whether they decide to roam or try to go "pay as you go" during their short trip.
It would be much better if the AT&T and the HSPA carriers in Canada offers day passes for tourists or even some sort of week pass at a reasonable price with a "rental" sim like you can get in Japan.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
T-Mobile is way cheaper... oh wait...
Not only that but you know what...
Let the "poor" pay for it. Just like they pay higher interest rates and a higher percentage of bank fees. I pay my bills on time, never carry over a credit balance, never overdraft and never go over my credit limits. When congress forced "bank and credit reform" a few years ago, it actually hurt people like me because banks have to make their money somehow so they took away some benefits like cashback %, started charging monthly fees for things that were free in the past etc. Well, that's out of my pocket now. My good credit and good financial management was rewarded by the banks with perks at the expense of those that were careless and I liked it better that way.
Remember that market prices are not set based on cost. They are set based on willingness to pay (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willingness_to_pay). All large corporations set their prices this way, based on economic and business theory.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
Nope. It isn't a question of credit; it's a question of payment and price. If the unwashed poor have bad credit and they pay up front with their Go Phone account then they should pay the same rate as anyone else since ATT is incurring no risk by taking their money ahead of time. Or perhaps given the fact that they are prepaying and in fact extending credit to ATT maybe they should pay a little less. Or you could just rip off the poor. You could do that.
I have to wonder what is wrong with the US. Not that Europe is perfect, the roaming rates for most data plans is criminal.
There, fixed that for you.
In your defense, I think everyone read that word with a sarcastic tone of voice anyway. $500/GB is /lower/ ? Surely you must be joking.
>>pay-as-you-go pricing is what the poor and people living paycheck to paycheck use
Perhaps Canada is different as far as the efficiency of pay as you go pricing levels (I doubt it),
but I've had a pay-as-you-go phone for years. I buy my phones up front. No contract & pay as I go.
It suits my usage patterns much better than a plan.
And yeah, the data rates are so wrong I can't wrap my head around it. No argument there.
This argument is looking at it the completely wrong way. Whether you need it or not, should you have to pay $500/Gb? Poor or not?
I'm really not sure why people still do business with these companies.
Because almost every option is equally bad.
My usage is infrequent and much cheaper with prepaid than with a subscription.
Overseas, I could use prepaid data too: enabling flat-rate data for a period of a day, a week, or a month would deduct from my balance exactly the same cost as post-paid subscription amortized over that period. There was no cost penalty for using prepaid. I did this because my usual data use was to use my work and home Internet connections, but I would enable mobile data on the occasion where I could not, e.g. due to travel or an Internet outage.
This is simply a restricted market in the US, where they are trying to force users to subscribe and pay for service they don't use. All of their pricing structures have the same bundling tricks which force you to pay for things you don't want, in order to get what you do. A competitive market would cause these commodities to be sold unbundled, and the big networks are using monopoly power to avoid that. They don't want to have to compete, as they have dreams of subscriber revenue dancing in their heads.
Actually, just the opposite is true, in a way. Let's say you want to spend money on shoes. You could buy a $40 pair of Converses. I've done this plenty, they fall apart in a year of normal work (I walk up the stairs and up a 1/3 mile hill to my office job 5 days a week). Or you could spend $150 on a pair of military issue (Matterhorn, Bellville, etc; I have Bellville 770, $145 shipped from Botach) boots, waterproof (GoreTex with breathable canvas, not to mention the leather), insulated (200g/m^2 3M Thinsulate), made of quality leather that you can spend 5 bucks a year to maintain (black leather obviously means shoe shine, but rough leather treatments exist too). They'll last you 10 years maybe, maybe more, if you're walking in them a lot (homeless, bike/walk to work, etc), and keep your feet warm, protected, and dry.
More often you see people spending money on shit like Uggs ($150) or Reeboks($100), funny enough these don't hold up to heavy-duty use. The soles fell off my Reeboks after a year! They're hollow, after they wear a little the glue starts giving out and you start getting holes and such and find out there's a large honeycomb structure inside. Uggs don't hold up to anything, at all, and they directly tell you this (not for "heavy walking" or rain or snow). Despite that, poor people buy 'em.
My mom has gone through ... who knows how many $50-$80 juice machines. They break in a year under daily use, sometimes less. I suggested a $200 juice machine of better quality, but the Wal-Mart special is a favorite and shelling out so much money over and over seems like a deal to them. It's odd because they had an Oster Regency kitchen center for like 25 years before the motor wore down, which should have hammered the "Buy Better Shit" thing in.
In some cases the ROI is immediate: socks at $8/8 pair vs (decent, not overpriced quality-fucked designer!) $20/3 pair, the $8 ones will wear down QUICK under normal use and even faster under strained use, getting holes and in general providing no cushion after just weeks; I still have 3 year old pairs of socks that are just now starting to thin out, just a bit, but they still provide cushion and they're long discolored. In other cases, the ROI is slow: appliances that last a year or two, versus decades-lived ones that cost two or three times as much.
It all adds up. That cheap-ass washing machine you bought that needs constant repair after one year and replacement after five is you paying for it 3 times in 5 years; buy one that costs twice as much instead and lasts a decade. Stop buying crap you don't need, just for a little while; buy yourself a $100 chef's knife or a Wii or a luxury couch later, after you've saved up a little money from not having to replace/repair shit constantly. Yes it's hard to save up to get out of the consumerist society, but once you've made that first little victory it becomes that little bit easier. You did it once, do it again... and again... and again, until you get out of that damned hole and find some sunshine.
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"...those who can afford the least still pay by far the most."
That's true almost everywhere in Capitalism.
Here in India, you pay $2.45 for a 1GB chunk. Larger chunks, cost even less. 5GB goes for just over $6!! Pay-as-you-go is all fine if one sticks to small data transfers, but in the long run, is certainly not worth it. Works out to many times the cost.
I understand that fewer players in the market tends to resist cost reduction, but seriously, $500 per GB is ridiculous, right?
What am I missing here?
Geekism is your _only_ God!
~Stop talking sense man! People might hear you and learn that they can live without the latest gadgets, or even realize that they don't need the highest levels of all services available to them. If that happens their bank accounts might fill up, their anxiety might go down, and they won't have to use shopping/services as a security blanket in their unfulfilled lives. Stop trying to undo 100 years of marketing already!~
And to whoever modded you off-topic, forget them. The hardest thing about railing against corporations which screw us: learning that it's not rape when we're helping them.
I suspect that $50/GB is really not that terrible, comparatively, with month-to-month plans, if it doesn't expire and you can actually use the entire GB you payed for.
I say that, because I'm pretty sure that most folks on month-to-month plants don't really use as much bandwidth as they're paying for every month, and in the end, most of the contract folks are paying at least $50/GB too.
Nobody who is poor or living paycheque to paycheque NEEDS mobile data. I would argue they don't need cell phones at all but that's neither here nor there.
Tell me, where is the nearest payphone booth? I don't know what it is like where you live but here in Canada, the only payphones that seem to still exists are in airports and shopping malls. It is expected that almost anyone can have a talk and text cell phone. Mobile data is not something that the poor should consider even using.
The grand parent was talking about MOBILE DATA.
You are talking about PHONE CALLS.
See the difference?
Text is not considered mobile data. Even el-cheapo feature phones have text. Email, web surfing, multimedia are mobile data.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Now, I think these prices are absolutely still outrageous, but does this mean that they're also willing to drop machine-to-machine (web-connected sensors) rates by 90% as well? Christ I hope so...
I'm a 6-figure making Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go (month to month fixed price) customer. I lay out $25/mo for an unlimited data plan and 300 voice minutes. I use the data plan like a rented mule - voice only occasionally.
Only chumps pay more. Cell phone contracts are for the weak-of-mind who think that their modern-day beeper is some kind of status symbol.
The poor need mobile data access? I assume that the rich elite in government will install this mandate, while the middle class pays for it.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
AT&Terrible has always sucked! This just goes to demonstrait how much they suck! I am mad as he|_|_ that they are trying to buy t-mobile. I left AT&T for t-mobile because of their terrible pricing and customer service. T-Mobile has competive pricing and the highest customer service rating in the industry hands down. If they succeed in purchasing T-Mobile I will leave and I can assure them that a lot of the customers like me will. T-Mobile's unlimited plan that includes every phone (land lines and cellular), data and text is only $90 a month in my area which is a little more than Sprint but it includes landlines. I know that plan will all go away if AT&T gets their way and that should not be allowed. It clearly will stiffle competition!
Hey that's capitalism for you.
You don't like what you're being charged go elsewhere because to regulate what companies can charge is Marxism.
Or so I've been told by the libertarians, tea baggers, and republicans.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
A modern example of the Sam Vimes "Boots" Theory of Economic Injustice and touching on the Ramkin extension, well done.
Many are looking at the pricing plans from the wrong perspective. AT&T's goal isn't to charge per bandwidth. They want to split the users into groups based on their intended usage, then charge the perceived value to each group.
$5 for 10 MB targets people with dumb phones who just need simple information like sport scores
$15 for 100 MB is for smart phone users who use it mostly for email
$25 for 500 MB is for smart phone users who casually surf the web
If you want to use more data, AT&T prefers you to get on a post paid plan
You can still argue that the prices are too high, but there is some reasoning to AT&T's pricing model.
Summarizes to "I'm not rich enough to shop at Walmart". Ever buy a set of drill bits from China, and have them literally unwind themselves? Been there, seen that. Suddenly, Enco and McMaster are the cheapest way to drill holes.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Even el-cheapo feature phones have email, web surfing, and multimedia, though.
"Has anyone else noticed that they are all actually the same industry. The cheap and easy transference of data..."
You've made an ever so slight typo. I think you were trying to say "expensive and intentionally obfuscated".
Keep in mind that they charge these rates even in areas where AT&T Wireless is the /only/ internet provider, such as most of rural Oklahoma and Kansas, and they receive federal money under the FCC's rural broadband program to provide it. Coincidentally, everyone who had an unlimited plan in those areas where AT&T is receiving rural broadband money got booted off and weren't told about this until receiving five-figure data bills.
Furries make the internet go.
LOL. I pay â5.99 / month for an unlimited data plan:P WTF is this shit.
0x or or snor perron?!
And if you can't afford to live near a library, fuck you!
How about don't tell the poor what they need and don't need?
I live in central Europe and my smart-phone has a pre-paid card with a 1GB data option enabled for 10 EUR (~14 USD) a month.
That's by far enough for e-mail chat and the occasional map. And I can get rid of it anytime I want (just don't have to extend it for the next month).
I'm always fascinated to hear the comparison from the new world.
So, which telco do you work for?
Furries make the internet go.
couldn't afford FOOD. Who gives a flying rats ass about smart phone rates for the poor.
Not all life is cyber. Extra Income
The reason that many people use a prepaid cell phone plan is because they need/use it, and it's cheaper for them. The reason that many people prefer contract plans is that with the amount (and features) that they use, it's cheaper for them. You don't think that someone who uses a lot of data on their phone, no matter what their income level, might notice that they'd save money if they switched to a contract plan? Or are you suggesting that low-income people are just too stupid to read a bill, and can't help but be hoodwinked?
The data rates for GoPhones may be exorbitantly high. You might argue that they're too high, and I won't disagree. But this stuff about income levels is all sorts of bullshit. What if AT&T decided to charge a million dollars per gigabyte? Would you lament the fate of those poor indigent souls forced to pay millions of dollars to watch YouTube videos on their phones? Or would you simply expect them to either get contracts, or go somewhere else?
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
That's OK, I'm sure the banks are winning big on the bankruptcy law change.
The one that lowers the risk to banks on existing balances (in the end it should all even out with slightly lower interest rates, but the law change applied to existing balances, adjusting the terms of money already lent).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I will say that it better not cause problems during off peak times.
I generally expect/accept I get 50-75% of bandwidth peak, and 100-125% off peak. But if off peak was so congested that an extra 3gb/day killed it (30minutes to an hour) peak usage would be very very slow.
Note, I don't think prices (50+/month for 16/4mbps) are fair, but I do find the ratio of advertised to available bandwidth in my area acceptable. I don't want to pay T rates ($300/month for 1.5/1.5mbps) just for the garentee. I get that pace from comcast even when torrenting during peak usage times.
I do think it's unfair that internet+tv is only 1.4x therice of either alone, the damned cable is run already, it shouldn't cost any different to them if I have TV or not (perhaps some few dollars/month to send and process mybills)
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
And if you can't afford to live near a library, fuck you!
If you can't go to the library, go over to a friend's house.
How about don't tell the poor what they need and don't need?
Beggars can't be choosers.
literally that is. dont excuse the rough wordage - screwed is not enough for this :
in turkey, up to 6 gb is $30, and per each 1 gb afterwards they charge $30 afterwards. (over the 6 gb quota)
we have 4 mobile carriers. there are those among them who even provide cheaper. you people are really, really being fucked in the apex of fine capitalism. in the land of the free. ill remember this next time when a right wing republican or libertarian or something blabbers about 'free market' in america to me.
oh boy. hahahaa.
Read radical news here
Yeah, it was much better when the banks were making their money off of the people who could least afford it.
Maybe instead you should be pissed off that banks have decided that their customers should be a large source of their income, rather than their investments.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Suck.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Prepaid 3G on Sprint's network: $25 / month, 300 minutes, unlimited data.
To blog is sublime
Screw your credit up so bad that you can't afford a deposit on service? Well, who's fault is that? I'm only sympathetic to those just getting started who don't have credit histories.
Obviously, you've never been a victim of identify fraud, and you also ignore the fact that the poor exploit their children's clean credit slate, creating a cycle that's hard to break. I've seen a numerous times a family rack up an electric bill or gas bill during the winter, couldn't afford to pay it, have the service disconnected and the bill applied to the parent's credit, only to re-open the account under the minor's credit. To make matters worse, getting fraudulent things off your credit takes a lot of time, energy, money, and effort that the poor simply can't afford to waste, so they keep the cycle going. Now data access, I'll admit, is a luxury; however, more and more transactions are occurring online because it's cheaper to do business via the internet than via a brick-and-mortar store, so if one is to progress in society, they're going to be at a disadvantage than those who don't have such high costs, when a lack of internet exists. It's not that it's impossible to NOT be poor, it's just VERY DIFFICULT to pull yourself out poverty, especially if it's where you started.
I know of the "sam vimes boot" theory but I must have missed the "ramkin extension" care to fill me on on what that was.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
i'm in canada and i have a booth on the corner of my street
i see them all over the place
It's very difficult to measure quality of a product before purchase so we have to rely on reputation.
Unfortunately this means the benifit to a company of reducting cost/quality is immediate and the cost is years down the line. This makes it very tempting for companies to reduce quality either to get through bad times or just plain to make their figures look good this quarter so the CEO gets his bonus. Further big retailers (who don't really care about their suppliers long term) are constantly trying to push suppliers to reduce prices.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
With Usage Based Billing, I will always be charged the same amount.
Most usage based plans do charge a single rate for simplicity but there is no reason all usage based plans have to be like that. Just as phone and electricity tarrifs can have an off peak rate there is no reason not to have them for internet plans too.
I don't see how charging a data user based on data volume is any different from charging a phone user based on time spent on the phone. In both cases you have an imperfect but practical system for splitting the charges for a communication resource among the users of that resource in rough proportion to the ammount of that communication resource they are using.
In the past we have always paid for internet via the size of the pipe, not how much data comes through.
With consumer broadband what you are really paying for is the ability to use part of a very large pipe with mobile internet which pipe you are using part of is even changing continuously.
For a while ISPs just charged all home users with the same speed of final connection to the same ammount, buisness users paid a bit more. This worked ok for a while sure some users used more of it than others but it was within what the ISPs had planned their networks to deal with and TCP dealt reasonably well with congestion. Then bittorrrent came along and became the bane of the ISPs life by simultaneously allowing users to maintain high data rates continuously AND using large numbers of connections at once which meant it didn't play very nice when congestion did happen. The ISPs had three choices
1: spend a lot of money on building infrastructure to satisfy the small proportion of customers who are heavy torrenters
2: kick the heavy torrenters off the network
3: resort to dirty tricks to try and deprioritise, throttle or even outright block bittorrent
4: move to a charging model that makes the heavy torrenters pay in proportion to their higher usage thereby either stopping them from being heavy torrenters, driving them off the ISP or bringing in more money to spend on infrastructure.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
That Sybil Ramkin could live twice as comfortably on half the money that Vimes spent because she was rich.
AT&T Ripoff As You Go? :)
the result is those who can afford the least still pay by far the most
My kids have "low resources". Their data plan is like the one described in this post. So they've disabled data access.
In the end they still pay much less than I do for my "high-end mobile plan"
When I was a kid I could live without a computer, a mobile phone and the Internet.
My kids have all of this, except data on the mobile. Should they cry about that?
What I mean is those outrageous data plans can be understood as "no data plans", and not "high prices for the poor".
Optus Australia had (until a few months ago) plans that were 15 cents per KB over the limit. I'm on one, with 500mb of data allowance... heaven help me if I go over that.
Thanks for restating something I've been saying for a long time: If the Internet is a series of tubes, well, then, let it be a series of tubes already!
Build the tubes, then let private carriers (AT&T, Joe Bob Internet, etc.) pull their wires through.
No monopoly, and also no ugly wires on telephone poles that get homeowners' associations angry.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Owning a smart phone with a data plan isn't a human right. Don't want to pay that much for the data plan? Don't. Live without it. Billions do it every day.
BULLSHIT!!!! Try slapping an AT&T SIM into an unlocked smartphone and see what happens. I guarantee that within 10 minutes of connecting to a BTS, you WILL get a text saying that an unwanted data plan has been added to your account. It doesn't matter if the phone is configured for data or not, as soon as an IMEI shows up that matches a qualifying smartphone, they are going to slam you into a data plan.
You then have to wait until the end of the billing cycle and contest this with customer service to have the unwarranted charges removed from your bill. Even if you request that data NEVER get added to your bill, eventually it will happen again!
Craftsman is a good buy. It's re-branded from some other tool maker I don't know; someone told me once, but also assured me that said tool maker is well known for making good tools. With Craftsman, you buy a wrench and what you get is forged steel instead of stamped; this means the steel flexes better and springs back to its proper shape, rather than snapping off under extreme torque or deforming permanently. All their tools are of this type of quality; they're also of a price absolutely off the scale of Harbor Freight, but if you plan to use a Harbor Freight tool more than once then buy two.
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iven that pay-as-you-go pricing is what the poor and people living paycheck to paycheck use, the result is those who can afford the least still pay by far the most.
Nobody and I mean Nobody *needs* a wireless data plan. Its nice to have but you can certainly get by without one. Its not like it puts you at a real disadvantage in most cases either. That might change someday in the future but right now not having a web browser in your pocket does not yet deny a person many economic opportunities.
A carrier is a business there is far more administrative overhead in dealing with month to month customers and they lose the benefit of certainty about continuing revenue. They absolutely should charge more for contract free plans.
Finally if a person's financial situation is such that they can't work a cellular contract MRC into your budget than you should probably not be allocating any of their evidently limited means to wireless data, its was probably better when they were totally priced out.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
It is my belief that everybody has a little flex. We all get lazy, we all buy fast food, it's never just the dollar menu. Shoes happen to be something the homeless generally wear through and generally buy a lot: you see them with $80 Nikes because the sole on a $40 pair of Converse All-Stars is a Vibram sole that outlasts the shoe by about 10 years, while the shoe itself starts to wear out after a month of that kind of life style. The Nikes actually last several months, a year at best. If they suffered a little longer between buys, with shoes that are barely holding up but at least somewhat protect the feet (better than being barefoot), they could get a $150 pair of military boots and be done with it. Sure that's $80/year maybe, but that's a hell of a lot of money to these people.
That's an extreme example. People who can actually (barely) make their rent are less extreme, and have other options; but it still applies. They can dig themselves out into a comfortable but poor lifestyle; it's unfortunately a daily struggle, in the same way you struggle to become fantastically wealthy. It's not so bad, though: when they actually reach goals like that, it doesn't really matter that it's the goal of "buying a washing machine that won't break in 2 years" or whatever. One burden is gone, and they have claimed victory by their own hand; it's the same feeling you get when you pay off your $30,000 car and decide never to go into car debt like that again.
Wealth is really a factor of person. I have a $150 Shun Premier Santoku, an excellent knife with a VG-10 steel core exposed at the blade and stainless cladding along the body, hand-hammered and hand-forged. A $40 Victorinox is also an excellent knife, will hold its edge for months, will take a new edge easily, and generally will do the same job. If a poor person buys a good Victorinox chef's knife, learns to use it and keep it well maintained, and cooks much at home, they will have satisfaction of person (by the validation of cooking well, daily) without buying expensive $1000 23 piece knife sets. They will also save money preparing their own food.
I bought a $450 bicycle and have been upgrading parts. It's a hybrid road bike (i.e. city bike) with no suspension, so I added a $150 seat suspension and am putting on a $150 leather seat. For the $1000 that went in, I can get to work in 60 minutes instead of 40, 8 miles away. It's cheaper on gas, cheaper than a car (I have one of those too), and more demanding of me personally than of my wallet. You can finance bicycles too, in fact the shop I went to would finance anything above $500 total purchase with 0% interest for 6 months. If a poor person works at like McDonalds or something, probably 3 miles away, he can bike there and lock his bike up (or even bring it inside). Or he can find a bus pass, or (most likely) buy a $2000 used car that he has no idea how to maintain and that breaks so often that he's dumping $500 in every 3-4 months to keep it running, plus insurance. If lifestyle permits, then buying an expensive bicycle is cheaper than buying a more expensive car, and will keep you healthy.
And there is the Ramkin Extension again, isn't it? A $1000 bicycle, holy shit are you rich? Yet these poor fuckers will turn around and buy a $2000, $5000, etc used car that costs an assload to maintain because they have no idea how to shop for or maintain a car--unless their shit-pay job is being a mechanic, in which case they're likely doing extremely well buying $1000 cars that they throw another $1500 into and make run for 5-8 years, and feel quite satisfied and proud as they drive down the street (you've seen these people, they know what they did and it feels good 'cause they did it).
Of note, my bike won't pay for itself; I ride it to work 2 days a week. If I get more endurance maybe I'll do it daily; it'll take roughly 160 total days of bike instead of car to make back the $1000 (completely in fuel costs) I spent on the bike, and I've currently logged 2. But then, I'll also be in much better shape, and have the ability to handle a bicycle well.
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I'll make sure to say that when I see someone outside your door begging for an iPhone. It's like, you can make do with a Droid Incredible, dude!
Nobody asked you to pay for anything. I just asked you to stop being a dickhead about it, but you obviously didn't hear me.
but it seems several other countries have far better cell/internet services then our own. Not to mention lower monthly service charges and better coverage. Maybe someone should actually try thinking of the enduser then the profit margin.
Joe Investor