I don't know when you decided to turn this into a class war. I've worked service jobs, my early years involved food stamps, and I spent my freshman and sophomore year eating beans'n'rice and driving a $600 Suzuki Samurai. Do us both a favor and ditch the OWS rhetoric.

The part you're missing is that you'd buy a used Toyota "because they won't break often and gets decent mileage" but you have no problems paying $13 every year for a mouse that's going to break - every year. Why not save a shitload of coin by buying a used Yugo? Or a used Suzuki? Or a used Mitsubishi? Oh, right - because they're shitty and they break a lot. So let's talk about your $20 table - the resale value of a $20 Ikea table is zero. The resale value of a $400 Oak Barn table used to be $100 - still a screamin' deal. But now it's $50 because why not buy a piece of shit from Ikea for $20? So now fewer people are buying the Oak Barn table at all because it's worth nothing the minute you take it out of the showroom. Now Oak Barn is out of business. Hello Ashley Furniture.

So back to that mouse - no, fuck it. Let's talk about something that people actually buy used. Used to be if you were getting started in music you bought a Mackie 1202. Wasn't great, worked like a tank, cost $300. Then Behringer decided they could knock off a 1202 for $200. Then Phonic decided they could knock off a Behringer for $160. Then Alesis decided they could knock off a Phonic for $99. Then Monoprice decided they could knock off an Alesis for $80.

And see, the thing about the Mackie is you used it, you grew up, you needed something better, so you sold your Mackie to somebody else. The things wandered from indie piker to indie piker, often going through six or seven bands before they were finally too beat to shit to power up. The knock-offs? People just throw them away. I can say with authority that the sound quality of a Mackie that's been beat to shit by six garage bands still dusts the fuck out of a Monoprice mixer. I know - I listened to it at NAB.

But it's not new.

So let's call this what it really is - "I'm poor but I like sparkly new shit." That's fine. My problem, my objection to this whole line of thinking, is that when you sell sparkly new shit to people who don't give a fuck about quality, you drag the entire chain down and create an assload of waste. This isn't "poor me, I work a service job so I can only afford $13 for a gaming mouse" because you either spend more (or steal more) than that on games every month.

Environmentalism isn't a luxury, it's an imperative. The fact that you've managed to justify your exemption from it because the people you buy from aren't making you think about it isn't a sign of your wisdom, it's a sign of your selfishness. You talk like I've never had to scrimp or save for anything in my life, when the fact of the matter is I was offered the exact same fifteen credit cards as a college freshman as you were. I'm sitting at an Ikea desk I bought ten years ago, looking at effects processors I bought out of The Little Nickel before Craigslist even existed and even twenty years later they sound better than the new cheap shit.

Because they were built to last.

You really want this to be a "rich/poor" thing. It's not. It's a priorities thing. Companies like Monoprice know that you don't prioritize quality because you've never encountered it. And as far as they're concerned, with any luck, you never will.

And that saddens me.