But why would poor people buy the average item?

There’s a certain obviousness to this:

Suncream prices a third higher in April before families jet off on summer holidays

Well, yes. The reason producers charge more at different times of the year is because they can. So that’s solved then.

This though is a very common mistake:

Skin cancer charities have expressed concern that, with the average cost of a bottle of sun cream now at £19.95, poorer families are being priced out of sun protection.

We see this about all sorts of things. The average cost of housing, or average household groceries bill and so on. It doesn’t greatly matter which average is being talked of either, mode, mean or median.

Why would - or even should - the poor even be attempting to buy the average product? We did check this, Lidl offers perfectly acceptable suncream at €3.99 in its Irish stores. At least one of us has stuck the same stuff on grandchildren in other countries.

That is, the affordability of something to the poor isn’t, in the slightest, determined by the average price across the economy. For there are brands designed to extract the maximum from the richer, just as there are those designed to extract a few pennies from those poorer. What matters for availability to the poor is not the average price in the least, it’s the lowest price.

Poor folk cannot, for example, afford the average house. So what? What matters is whether the poor can afford housing, some of which will be smaller, cheaper, in less appealing places - you know, for the poor. The poor can’t afford the average grocery basket - so what? Is the diet affordable by the poor still sufficient?

All of this before we even examine the numbers themselves - someone really thinks the average bottle of suncream costs £19.95 do they?