In my (anecdotal) experience the relation between price an quality is not just not proportional - it seems to be completely spurious after a certain minimum-price is reached.<p>You can get very high quality and long lasting stuff for reasonable prices. People who are poor though tend to not investigate products or reflect on decisions they make in that area. This leads to buying overpriced and unnecessary gadgets - often of very low-quality.<p>The shoe-analogy doesn&#x27;t really work in my opinion nowadays that manufacturing is industrialized and automated.