"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... 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. ... 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 a 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."

"This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness."

- Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

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Dollar stores, even when they're actually giving you low prices (and not just charging $1 for 1 of something that you could get a 3-pack of for $2 elsewhere), are often selling lower-quality versions of the products they sell—sometimes versions specifically made for them, but without any visible difference in packaging.

Yes, being poor is expensive and people just don't seem to grok that

Take energy. I'm not rich but I'm comfortable, my energy is paid for in an efficient way, I can shop around easily for the best rates for my lifestyle and so on. But if I had no money they'll fit a pay-per-use meter, they charge more money to fill that meter, if I can't fill it or forget to then the power goes out - and it's inconvenient to use it.

Years ago now I had a dispute with the water utility. I refused to pay, so, they eventually concluded that fixing their error was too difficult so they just created a new account starting from zero and wrote off all the costs for the disputed period entirely. If I'd been poor, they'd have threatened to cut off the supply (they're only threatening, fortunately it's not actually legal here to cease supplying clean water to poor people like they're not even animals) and sent scary people to demand payment.

> are often selling lower-quality versions of the products they sell

Clothes brands do this too.

Clothes at the outlet store aren't the same as clothes at Dillards, what's stocked at a struggling Macy's in a relatively poor area may be different from what's available for the same brand at Macy's in Manhattan, and all that may not be the same as what's in their flagship stores.

Sometimes they make it semi-obvious provided you learn their secret label language (Polo by Ralph Lauren, Chaps by Ralph Lauren, Ralph Lauren Purple Label, and about a half-dozen other major variants, for example). They do this so they can sell shit to unsophisticated consumers at a large mark-up for the name, riding on the reputation and clout of the good versions of what they sell (elsewhere, at even higher prices).