I'm not poor anymore, but I was for about a decade while I was in grad school. I had nothing. I lived in an expensive city, always with a roommate, and rent was about 70% of my monthly income. Food: rice, braising meat, fish, liver etc. Recreation: walks and watching free documentaries. If a long distance phone call coming up, needed to go in the budget. I always had to buy the small, expensive version of everything because I didn't have enough money to buy the larger, more economical packages. Friend wants to go out for dinner: put it off for a couple of weeks so I can budget for it. Dates?: I couldn't afford to go on them and didn't want anyone to get close enough to me to find out just what a shambles my life was. My luxury was having a dog (and she is still with me, and now has a little sister). But honestly, sometimes I just needed to take my $5/day for food and just go to a cheap restaurant ($20=no food for 4 days, but I used the leftovers for the next day), just to feel like I was part of society, to taste something different after weeks of rice, liver, fish, and stews. Sometimes I didn't eat. Sometimes I just needed to go out with friends and drink because I couldn't stand being alone or drinking alone. Sometimes I didn't have enough money to go home for Christmas, but as an adult and not wanting anyone to know, I just said that I was too busy to be able to come home. So, should a poor person be buying that McDonalds or alcohol? I don't know. You don't know. They might be just like me, scrimping on everything and just need to have something different. Maybe something else is going on. Whatever the case, the optics of being poor to someone who isn't and the reality of being poor are often two different things.