Poverty penalty

Encyclopedia : P : PO : POV : Poverty penalty

The poverty penalty describes the phenomenon that poor people tend to pay more to eat, buy, and borrow than the rich. The term became widely known through a 2005 book by C. K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

An earlier exploration of this was a 1960's sociology study published as The Poor Pay More which examined the ways in which retail patterns and a lack of consumer options allowed marginal retailers such as door-to-door salesmen, "easy credit" storefronts and the sale of installment credit agreements to extract profits from low-income buyers, with fewer options and less sophisticated consumer habits.

References

• The Poor Pay More by David Caplovitz, 1963.
• The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits by C. K. Prahalad, 2005. ISBN 0131467506

 

---

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.