Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Time v. Money

I grew up in a small town of 13,000 people in New Hampshire. Every Saturday morning, my mom would take me with her to about 3-4 grocery stores all over town to get the week's groceries. It would take the whole morning to do this. For my mom, schlepping all over town was justified because one store had fresher fish, another store had rice on sale, and yet another store had bananas on sale. While no doubt, my mom was looking for the freshest foods and ingredients, having grown up during the 1940s in Malaysia and going with her mom daily to the open air markets, she was also looking for the best prices. But, I bet she never thought that while she was saving 10 cents here or 20 cents there on a couple items, she was actually spending more on gas and even more in time.

But a lot of us do this. Like driving around searching for the cheapest gas. I do it all the time - the gas station near my house isn't the cheapest, but the one near my son's daycare is pretty cheap, if I go a different route there and if I remember to get the gas. Of course, that's the challenging part. I forget and then I end up going to the station near my house anyway.

The old adage is that you pay for convenience, right? Well, I guess part of the convenience part of things is saving time. Wait, how much time did I just spend on the internet looking for the best deal for printer ink (BTW, I think it's this site, but who knows?), when I could have just picked up some cartridges the next time I go to Target, which is one of my regular stops anyway. Really, is the $4 I saved on ink and $1 I saved on gas really worth spending all that time looking for the best deal?
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