The safest way to keep your purse filled with money is to not spend any. A penny saved is a penny earned, can’t argue with that. Yet one must eat and pay rent and give alms. That is where your grocers, utilities, and retailers come in. They have developed ingenious methods to make you feel better while spending.
The Gas Company, for example, will allow you to spread your bills evenly throughout the year. Pay a little more in summer, and a little less in winter. This improves your cash flow, but it is a deception. It does not save you a penny. It just makes you feel better in winter.
My supermarket, on the other hand, really does save me money. They have formed a “club”. If I scan my club card before paying I get a discount, and so I continue to shop there. Which is, of course, what the store wants to happen. They also bundle certain things. If you buy six of the same item the price-per-item drops a little. Cheaper by the dozen, as the saying goes.
Another way to transfer money from your pocket to the cash register is the “save by spending” gambit. ”Sale!” the sign will announce. “Only $8 each, buy one get one free. You save 8 dollars”. By spending 8 dollars, that is. But don’t knock it: the trick works. People love to be took.
Retailers large and small, without exception I believe, also practice a simple form of price deception. They have discovered that merchandize priced at $4.00 a piece will not sell as long as the store across the street offers the same thing for $3.99. There is even a chain named the “99 Cent Store” where everything is packaged so that the unit price comes to no more than a dollar, which in retail language means 99 cents because the word “dollar” is a dirty word, a no no. Any store that tries to sell merchandise in terms of full dollars is sure to go broke very fast. Such is the quaint psychology of the consumer. Shoppers know, of course, that the difference between 30 dollars and $29.99 is only a penny but they love to be duped. Obviously, or why else do price tags everywhere end in .99?
There is an even less rational type of consumer: the fuel consuming driver. If you try to sell him or her a gallon of gas for $2.99 you will be out of luck as long as the gas station a block away sells the gallon for $2.98 and 9/10. This absurd little bit of softheadedness is repeated in cities, hamlets, and truck stops all over the country. We are dealing with a difference of one tenth of a penny. You would have to buy 10 gallons to save 1 penny. And spend a nickel to drive to the cheaper station. We all understand that a tenth of a penny in a retail sale is essentially nothing. But we are creatures of habit, and so we continue the foolishness. Our Chihuahua with a brain the size of a walnut, on the other hand, stops licking the bowl when it is empty. I don’t think she would knock herself out for 1/10 of a crumb the way we carry on for fractions of pennies.
I take that back. She probably would. But then she is only a dog.
©2017 by Herbert H. Hoffman
Picture credit: morguefile.com