The other day I paid $18 for a cheeseburger.
Now, was it a delicious cheeseburger? Yes, it was. Did it have a fried egg on top? Yes, it did. Two slices of thick-cut applewood smoked bacon? Again: yes. A side of waffle fries? Oh my goodness yes.
But still, eighteen dollars is a damn lot of money for a cheeseburger. In fact, one of the nice things about cheeseburgers is that you can count on them being $10 or less – if you’re at a fairly upscale joint and it’s all $30 steak and coq au vin, you can still order a burger and eat on the cheap (and then call attention to that fact when it comes time to split the check).
But then I got to thinking: is $10 really the value I place on a burger? Well, no – that’s just the (approximate) value that the market places on burgers, based on the cost of ground meat or whatever. But I think the value we place on various things is unduly influenced on the value the market – i.e., everyone else – places on them. So when I was initially put off by the $18 burger, what I was really thinking was, “That’s way more than most people usually pay for a burger.” And when I decided to order the burger, it was because I’d said to myself, “Hey, I like burgers more than the average guy, and this is the Cadillac of burgers. It’s worth $18 to me.”
When you judge the price of something to be “too low” or “too high,” what you’re really saying is that the price is lower or higher than you’re used to paying. The reason I was so stunned by the $18 price tag was that it was about twice what I normally pay for a burger, not because it exceeded my own personal burger-value.
So this New Year, I’m going to pay more attention to my burger-values. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop looking for the best deal on stuff – I may be willing to pay $4 for a gallon of milk, but if the convenience store down the street sells it for $2.69, I’ll make the trip. And it doesn’t mean that I’m going to refuse to pay $5 for a tiny bottle of cumin if that’s the best price I can find and I need to make chili.
But it does mean that I’m going to stop letting price tags tell me what everything is worth to me. I’d like a new videogame system, but I’m not willing to pay the $300 they’re asking these days; until the price comes down, I’ll just read books or something. Likewise, $9 may be more than any reasonable person is willing to pay for a pint of beer, but if I find a bar with some obscure Belgian ale on tap, I’m shelling out for the good stuff.
Now, this approach to spending money probably won’t save you much in the long-run. But as long as you’re paying what you think you should, you’re not going to come home feeling guilty about anything you bought – or didn’t.
So how about you? Where have you been spending too much or too little, and what’s going to change in 2010?
