Plus, being stingy even if you have money benefits those who don't have money. It's why I buy the $0.50 macaroni and cheese instead of the $1.69 version. I don't really care; either would be fine. But I don't want companies to succeed in charging more. I want them to desperately need to cut their selling price in order to succeed.
People buying expensive products (assuming they aren't truly better) are helping screw over poor people. Just slightly.
I love how you make being upper middle class yet stingy to be about helping the poor. You're not buying cheap things because you're cheap and want to keep more of that money (and thus pay less taxes that would go to the poor), you're doing it to save the world!
Many people do things like this out of a genuine guilt over having it better than many others financially and not knowing how to resolve that.
I really liked the solution in the movie Our God's Brother adapted from a play written by Karol Wojtyla in the 1940s in Polish who later became Pope John Paul II.
The $.50 version is barely food. The $1.69 is not much better, and still very unhealthy for you. Have ground beef and a fiber rich low calorie food like brocoli or whole wheat whole grain noodles or something.
Anyway you're not really helping the poor in practice when you do this. Corporations aren't hurting because one guy or even a dozen he inspires through HN stop buying a few boxes of kraft dinner.
If more people did it, and it became a movement, like buying clothes from the thrift store is becoming, then clothiers will shift business focus. Which to some extent they seem to have done over the past 20 years. But only slightly.
I don't agree with the person above you in as much as the way they are doing it is very individualist "vote with your wallet", and yes, you're right that it's very ineffective.
The more effective way is to form a group, call it a "club" or whatever, that does it. The group can then advertise to other people and get more people to join the club. Eventually, it becomes large enough to gain political power. This is called "unionizing" — people with a shared interest joining together for a common goal. Eventually you get large enough to hold the corporations over a barrel, either through strikes or a mass disinterest in buying products, etc.
The only reason we have a 40-hour work week is because of unionizing, it's a very, very effective tactic that is severely underutilized.
People buying expensive products (assuming they aren't truly better) are helping screw over poor people. Just slightly.