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Higher-income employees generally have a higher savings rate-to-spending ratio so price increases don't hurt them as much. For example (in an extreme case, but illustrates things easily) if you make $100k after tax and spend $50k annually, a 10% increase in prices will only cost you 5% more of your overall salary. If you make $50k and spend all of it, a 10% increase will cause your costs to go up by 10%.
The savings also multiply in a high-inflation environment, as higher inflation should lead to higher asset prices which higher-income people will likely benefit from more. A high-income person is much more likely to own a home than a low-income person so, for example, as home prices have gone up by ~20% nationally over the last year these homeowners have seen their wealth grow a ton (especially if they leveraged their home through a mortgage and for example doubled their home equity since they only put down 20% and their home value went up 20% in 1 year). Higher-skilled workers (i.e. higher-paid workers) are also likely to have better leverage when negotiating wages than a burger flipper at McDonalds so can negotiate based on this inflation number.
Also, if you think of discount goods there is little area to cut costs when inputs go up in price. It may be easy for Starbucks to keep the price of a drink the same when inputs go up 10% because they're already marked up >100%, but when a product with gross margins of 5% or less has higher inputs costs have to be passed along. That's why Dollar Tree raised prices by 25% ($1 to $1.25).
Talking about discount prices at higher end mark-ups and bulk good is a great point, thanks for the thought you put into this!
…for work or like a dinner party convo?
It's for work, but I'll likely be talking about this at dinner parties too.