Your post is generally correct, Tom, but of course no discussion between thee and me would be truly satisfying without the injection of sociopolitical commentary. Heeeeere we go!

My jumping-off point is the assumption visible behind your description of toasters that last a hundred years versus a week that there's a linear relationship between price and quality (commonly judged in terms of product lifetime). This is incorrect, because every product is burdened with fairly uniform fixed costs that are independent of intrinsic characteristics of the product such as its material, design, and QA processes. These externalities include such common factors as transportation, packaging, and general business overhead burden; and somewhat flexible but not quite linear factors such as advertising. The result is that the relationship between price and quality is distinctly nonlinear. This nonlinearity is in fact the concept of value.

Now, let's take two notional toasters that fall somewhere in the realistic middle between the extremes of a hundred-year versus a one-week toaster lifetime. Toaster A is a top-of-the-line model, say a Krup or Brunn, costing $50, and which you can expect to last ten years (it has a ten-year warranty, as a result of the work of our notional manufacturing engineers). Toaster B is the K-Mart BlueLight Special, costing $20, and has only a 90-day limited warranty. But let's be generous and assume that because its manufacturer couldn't afford top-of-the-line manufacturing engineers to bowdlerize quality, it might accidentally last two years, if you're lucky.

I'd buy the $50 Toaster A because I recognize the difference between value and price, and I can afford $50 for a toaster. But many people have little money, and have to buy the $20 model regardless of whether they understand the tradeoff. Toaster B breaks in two years; they buy another for $20. Two years later, etc....lather, rinse, repeat, and in the course of ten years the poorer person has had to spend $100 for toasters.

You might say that this person has bought one notional toaster on the installment plan, and has paid $100 for it. Compared to my $50 toaster, this person is paying an effective interest rate of 100% on the financing. That would be illegal usury if the transaction were explicit, but because it's hidden behind poor product quality, nobody notices <hyperbole>.the cruel exploitation of the poor by the big bad corporation that sold it to him</hyperbole>.

There are additional side-effects to consider too, such as the additional packaging material used by the excess four notional toesters, that goes into landfills and drives up municipal waste disposal costs; and the additional energy used to transport the four additional notional toasters as well as four more trips to K-Mart, both of which contribute to energy scarcity and drives up the cost of energy for everyone. In fact it's not just the poor who suffer because of poor product quality, but all of us do indirectly.

The long-term social consequence is that low-quality products purchased by those who can't afford better makes it harder for low-income people to get ahead and get out of poverty. They pay a hidden "poverty tax" that makes many of their purchases--and not just notional toasters, but a variety of real products such as clothing and furnishings--actually more expensive than those affordable by those with a higher income level.

Free-market capitalism is a harsh master, don't you think? Sure you do...and I hope you've enjoyed this enlightening little essay.