What I want to know is what happens when "ordinary Americans" can't afford even "cheap goods"?
I'm almost certain I know the answer to what you are asking. Not to your question exactly, but to what is likely to have motivated it's asking.
Any economy has up and downs. In US History we typically call them "boom and bust" cycles. However, and interestingly, that term has fallen out of current vogue. But go back to say, 1950, 1940, 1930, etc, etc. and every man on the street would understand it and expect it as a natural state of affairs.
There are times when most people in an area have excesses to spend, and they do, and times when an area is, well, illiquid. Hard times. Can hardly afford cheap goods.
Ideally we learn and grow from experiencing both kinds of times, while -- of course -- being desirous of minimizing the hard times.
You may recollect the William Jennings Byrant "No Cross of Gold" motto. He was a demogogue, a man who wrecked much long term havoc on our nation, yet his call then had some honorable basis -- he called for the Federal Government to enable more liquidity in one of those hard times, by allowing a silver standard as well as a gold one.
If he wasn't throwing his own honor into the fires of demogogery and self-aggrandizment and power he might have produced a finer body of work without the havoc he left to us long term.
His greed for such demogogue's power made him more wrong than he was right. Still ...
Liquidity is needed in such times.
But we are super-liquid now. We have papered over every corner of the known universe with fiat dollars.
Where will that new liquidity come from?
* * * * *
The boom-bust cycle is ancient. Ancient. Many thousands of years. The problems we are experiencing are NOT "new under the sun". Human nature has it's constancies. Very constant.
How have super boom-bust cycles been solved in the past -- that is, reliquified after a period of super-liquidity?
Always by re-money-tization of a sort. That is by coining a new standard currency.
That's NO light thing, to replace in whole the money system. For people hold all sorts of debt and contract valued in the old currency. When it happens it is radical. War, National breakdown Calamity, insurrection.
I've only found one suggestion of a alternative that may work, but really needs some serious adaptation of which I have not imagined, and which in all integrity needs to be codified in the Constitution, but certainly would need some trials before doing so. (Almost as if I'm proposing a possible Constitutional Admenment for two hundred years from now.)
That is the concept of the Jubilee Year, and perhaps the Sabbatical years as well.
In any case what the Biblical Jubilee makes regular, happens anyway but instead in havoc and chaos and calamity, when the time of a super-bust cycle comes on.