Saturday, June 02, 2007

What's that again?

I really don't like the phrase "The more you spend, the more you save". Huh? It doesn't make any sense. Say you can buy one shirt for $5 and you can buy two shirts for $8 or three shirts for $12. You can say it's a good deal ONLY IF you actually need three shirts. Otherwise, if you go for the $8 -- spend more to save more -- you actually spend $3 more than you otherwise planned to and if you go for the three shirts, then you've spent $7 more than you planned to. You didn't actually save money; you spent more. You just got what you were looking for for less, but in more quantity and my guess is that most people don't actually need the quantity necessary to 'save more'.

My cable company just sent me a letter that said if I bought one of their packages for $56, I would actually be saving money. Which makes no sense because my current package cost me... $0. And it's even more nonsensical because I don't have time for 160 channels and so in theory, if I 'saved' by buying their $56 package, I'd actually be paying more because out of those 160 channels, I'd probably watch less than a quarter, so I'd be paying more for the channels I was actually watching (I have a whole theory on 'cost per use' which I'll tell you about another time). So it makes no sense. They try to package it as savings, but it's really not. If you're not going to use it, it's not a savings.

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