The article misrepresents the federal reserve study it uses to make it's case. It claims that the federal reserve study implies rich "have more leisure time so they get to know prices and deals well".
But this is nonsense. The federal reserve study doesn't study rich and poor at all - it studies the unemployed vs employed. Specifically, the article shows that unemployed people spend less time shopping than employed people. Is the article really claiming that unemployed people have less leisure time?
In fact, the article actually claims that reduced working time causes a (small) drop in shopping time.
You're straight up wrong. Read the piece. Quote below:
"For instance, total shopping time for households with an income between $100,000 and $150,000 (category 5) is 5 to 7 minutes greater (per day) than average shopping time by an individual in a household with income in the $0 to $24,999 bracket (category 1). After controlling for various individual characteristics (column I), this is robust to including both time and state (columns II and III), as well as labor force status dummy variables (column IV)."
He's wrong to say that the study only looks at employment status. It looks at income and a number of other factors as well (mainly, income and time spent working).
However, he is right that the article's conclusion is mis-represented:
"Overall, we don’t find much evidence in favor of a negative correlation between income and shopping time, particularly comparison shopping possibly motivated by locating better prices. As a matter of fact, whereas total time spent purchasing goods and services is about 20 minutes per day, the component of shopping time devoted to comparing prices and products seems to be extremely low in the data. It is about 4 seconds a day on average, given the large number of respondents declaring zero. Moreover, nonparticipants and the employed spent more time than the unemployed in this activity. This may indicate that most of the effort made by consumers in the goods market is unrelated to uncovering better prices."
"The results indicate that a 1 minute decline in market hours is associated with a 0.04 minute decline in shopping time."
The correlation between income and shopping time is simply not caused by leisure time. This should hardly be surprising - leisure and income are inversely correlated (i.e., the poor have lots of leisure, the rich very little).
> leisure and income are inversely correlated (i.e., the poor have lots of leisure, the rich very little).
Do you have any data for that? I rather doubt that it is very solid if it exists at all. There are a large number of poor people working more than two jobs and more hours than the rest of the "middle-class". Additionally, many of the jobs from the upper end of the middle-class tend to often require longer working hours.
But this is nonsense. The federal reserve study doesn't study rich and poor at all - it studies the unemployed vs employed. Specifically, the article shows that unemployed people spend less time shopping than employed people. Is the article really claiming that unemployed people have less leisure time?
In fact, the article actually claims that reduced working time causes a (small) drop in shopping time.