# Do super-rich people pay attention to prices? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [June 4, 2019, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-super-rich-people-pay-attention-to-prices/835032 "2019-06-04T20:18:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Corry\_El](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ecae2f/32.png) [@Corry\_El](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Corry_El)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2019, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-super-rich-people-pay-attention-to-prices/835032/41 "2019-06-05T17:49:14Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > It takes time to compare prices. I have less spare time than spare money, at least on the level of what I might spend at the grocery store. > > Because people form habits when young, and I had a very low income when I first ran my own household, I am still in the habit of looking at prices in the grocery store. And I’ve wasted tons of time doing that. It’s probably a destructive habit in terms of optimizing my life overall. On the first, absolutely. Plus people’s definition of ‘wasting money’ varies widely. You can see that on any forum about investing which includes super-frugal type people (one of those species often seen on the internet though I don’t know any in real life). ‘I don’t understand wasting money’ can go beyond the opportunity cost of shopping around for a slightly different price for the same thing. Often it takes the form, again usually on the internet, of pretending that higher price point goods give you _nothing_ more than lower price point goods. Which is only rarely true. And as recognized in almost every answer and quoting certain super rich people, you form such attitudes early, then they usually only gradually and incompletely change when they are no longer practically required. But again there are so many variations. Nowadays internet direct delivery premium/organic whatever type food is a common choice in our neighborhood (seems from the trucks around). WholeFoods is a choice. If instead you mainly shop at the ‘normal’ supermarket like we do that’s already ‘paying attention to the price of groceries’ at least relative to those other choices. Although once _at_ the normal supermarket there are more variations: how much you emphasize coupons, specials, national brands or not, etc… And of course compromise in most two or more person households as to the exact style of food shopping. ---
**Author:** ![Fotheringay-Phipps](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d9b06d/32.png) [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2019, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-super-rich-people-pay-attention-to-prices/835032/42 "2019-06-05T19:40:12Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > Nah. Some people buy that because of the brand and only because of the brand, but it’s the ones who don’t even understand how it became that brand; they will never buy anything that’s well-built because it’s well-built, since they can’t recognize that it is indeed well-built. They will never buy something from a first-collection unless and until they’ve been told that designer is an “up and comer” or seen someone they want to mimic wearing that designer’s brand. > > But some people buy some objects from high-level brands because they appreciate the difference in workmanship / specs / results. The one Dior nail polish I had was 5x the price of a normal one; it also lasted 10x as long, and my nails were getting into the same places with either. If I wanted to be able to do my nails once a week every week and have them stay just-so through that time, I’d bother pay for that quality level; since I only do them once in a blue moon I don’t. OTOH, most of the people in the first group [think they’re in the second group](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inGZFan1Y0s). ---
**Author:** ![neutro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/bc8723/32.png) [@neutro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/neutro)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2019, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-super-rich-people-pay-attention-to-prices/835032/43 "2019-06-05T19:43:47Z")
This depends on the person and you can’t really generalize. However, if someone is a billionaire they likely don’t sweat the small stuff too much. A $50 bottle of wine and a $500 bottle are the same price to them, it’s the time they spend drinking one wine over another that is the real value to a billionaire. You end up being constrained far more by time than money. Bill G. has actually talked about this in his books and it’s one of the reasons they prefer to fly in their own aircraft even though that’s really really expensive. To them the time is worth more than the money they spend on things at that level. Keep in mind there is a huge range of wealth out there as well. Guys like Gates are the tip of the top, but there are a lot more people who are worth a few hundred million around. They don’t have to count pennies but multiple expensive homes, yachts, personal staff expenses etc. can all add up and some of them to have to make sure not to overspend even their vast fortunes. ---
**Author:** ![neutro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/bc8723/32.png) [@neutro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/neutro)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2019, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-super-rich-people-pay-attention-to-prices/835032/44 "2019-06-05T19:49:37Z")
> [@aceplace57](#): > > I can’t imagine not doing my own shopping and other errands. I would be miserable in a huge house with servants. I like being independent and doing things for myself. I like being around other people at stores and restaurants. > > Money can buy some things I’d enjoy. A vacation home with a dock on the lake would be very nice. > But the price matters. I wouldn’t be comfortable blowing 15 million for a place in the Hamptons. > > There’s too many other vacation properties equally nice and under 300k. I’d love to own a restored 68 Mustang. Nice ones are under 100k. I wouldn’t drop a million on a Ferrari. > > It comes down to an old fashioned belief in spending money responsibly. It Doesn’t matter if I’m extremely wealthy.There would always be a cap on how much I’d spend on myself. > > I’d enjoy being rich and sponsoring various charities. Much like Bill Gates, I’d want to give back to society. I think this is harder to predict than you think. Your perspective changes and if you are super wealthy a million on a car might not end up being a big deal to you, even if you think it would be now. Think about it like playing a videogame in “god mode” where everything suddenly becomes boring because the stakes have gone away. It takes away the hedonistic treadmill pretty quickly if you can literally buy anything you want. In other words don’t just imagine the you of today having a billion dollars, imagine what the you of tomorrow would be like after having a billion dollars for 10-20 years. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2019, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-super-rich-people-pay-attention-to-prices/835032/45 "2019-06-05T19:55:16Z")
I kind of suspect that it’s not a matter of ever being so rich that they literally don’t care, but that at some point, they’re at a remove from the buying process of most things. For example, I bet that your average super-rich person might have a personal chef, or at the very minimum some kind of household staff that would do their grocery shopping. You’re not likely to see Jerry Jones or Ross Perot wandering around the Central Market by the Park Cities, for example. But I bet that those people are very aware of the price of stuff that they are involved in purchasing themselves. Whether they care much or not, I don’t know. ---
**Author:** ![BrotherCadfael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2019, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-super-rich-people-pay-attention-to-prices/835032/46 "2019-06-05T19:58:49Z")
I recall a muffler chain (possibly Midas, possibly not) advertisement, where an older man in a limo, presumably super rich, invited the muffler guy into the car, and quizzed him intensively about the cost and benefits of the service. The muffler guy answered his questions, and then asked him, “As rich as you are, why do you care about the price?” The rich guy responds, “How do you think I got as rich as I am?” ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2019, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-super-rich-people-pay-attention-to-prices/835032/47 "2019-06-05T21:56:28Z")
> [@Corry\_El](#): > > Buffett obviously gets a lot of personal satisfaction from his high profile image as ‘folksy simple billionaire’. Which, though I don’t know the guy (a lot people think they do based on the public persona but 99.9% of them don’t either) has always suggested to me he lives a lot higher on the hog behind the scenes. And why shouldn’t he, really? Or, even if the folksy public image is close to the truth, again he obviously IMO does that in large part for enjoyment of the adulation it brings. And again why shouldn’t he, he can try to sell any public image he wants to. I don’t GAS but other members of the public also seem to enjoy celebrating his folksy simplicity (supposed or real). Everyone wins. > > But it doesn’t mean Buffett’s public persona is a good general argument for anything, and it’s often used as one. He can do what he wants with his money, but a 6000 sq ft home and a 10 million dollar oceanfront second home is living pretty nice. Granted at his level of wealth, that amount of housing is a drop in the bucket and he is donating almost all his money to fighting poverty. ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2019, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-super-rich-people-pay-attention-to-prices/835032/48 "2019-06-05T22:06:27Z")
> [@phreesh](#): > > People keep bringing up private jets and I find it illustrative that Warren Buffet himself weighed in on this topic when his company purchased netjets - basically a rental car company, only for jets. > > Instead of ponying up for a jet, you only pay for the time you use. So, Warren Buffet looked at how much private jets cost and decided that he should try to save money on that. A lot depends on how often you’re using a private jet to travel, and to some extent where. There probably are people for whom it makes sense to own their own jet because they travel _that much_. For others, something like NetJet makes more sense. Then there’s another tier for whom an occasional charter or first class commercial makes sense. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2019, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-super-rich-people-pay-attention-to-prices/835032/49 "2019-06-05T22:34:09Z")
I recall that in an interview, Jeff Bezos was asked about being rich (this was a long time, when Amazon was just beginning to take off) and he said one of the differences was that he no longer at prices on restaurant menus. I have a friend who is worth $100M. That’s a lot of money and when you go out to dinner with him, he always picks up the bill. But he never travels first class and when he was at his office, he always bought lunch at a canteen in the basement of the math building at Stanford (he was a prof. of CS and a founder of SUN) which cost $4 in 1997 when I spent a month there. In fact I even bought him lunch once. They were prepared by a couple of Vietnamese women and were excellent, BTW. There were 3 Mercedes in his garage and his home had a theater in it. So he spends money when he wants something and is perfectly happy to economize when he wants to do that. He had grown up poor. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-super-rich-people-pay-attention-to-prices/835032/50 "2019-06-06T16:24:09Z")
What I wonder is if there’s a sort of bottom “don’t care” threshold that scales with income/wealth? Personal experience says there is, but I’m not what you’d call “wealthy” either. An example of what I’m talking about is that when I was fresh out of college, I had a fairly low income for about a year until the bonuses came in. I made roughly equivalent to a first year teacher in Texas. And I had a threshold of purchases that cost under about $10-15 were essentially not something I put any real thought into. I almost always had that much cash on me, so I could just buy them. Six or seven years later after graduate school, I was working part time and looking for a job. My threshold was MUCH lower- I think my threshold at that point was probably under $3- I might buy a soda without considering the impact, but that was about it. And now, 15 years after that, my income and threshold has gone up considerably- my current threshold is probably somewhere in the $40-50 range. I suspect it has to do with the financial consequences- I was able to throw down $15 bucks without consideration in 1998, because that was well within what I could handle on an ongoing basis, for example. Does that threshold scale up for really wealthy people? Is someone like Jeff Bezos just saying to his people “Go get me one of those Teslas.” on a whim, or is he still debating whether he needs it, are there cheaper alternatives, does he want a used version of last year’s model, and so on. ---
**Author:** ![neutro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/bc8723/32.png) [@neutro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/neutro)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-super-rich-people-pay-attention-to-prices/835032/51 "2019-06-06T17:16:49Z")
> [@bump](#): > > What I wonder is if there’s a sort of bottom “don’t care” threshold that scales with income/wealth? Personal experience says there is, but I’m not what you’d call “wealthy” either. > > An example of what I’m talking about is that when I was fresh out of college, I had a fairly low income for about a year until the bonuses came in. I made roughly equivalent to a first year teacher in Texas. And I had a threshold of purchases that cost under about $10-15 were essentially not something I put any real thought into. I almost always had that much cash on me, so I could just buy them. Six or seven years later after graduate school, I was working part time and looking for a job. My threshold was MUCH lower- I think my threshold at that point was probably under $3- I might buy a soda without considering the impact, but that was about it. And now, 15 years after that, my income and threshold has gone up considerably- my current threshold is probably somewhere in the $40-50 range. > > I suspect it has to do with the financial consequences- I was able to throw down $15 bucks without consideration in 1998, because that was well within what I could handle on an ongoing basis, for example. > > Does that threshold scale up for really wealthy people? Is someone like Jeff Bezos just saying to his people “Go get me one of those Teslas.” on a whim, or is he still debating whether he needs it, are there cheaper alternatives, does he want a used version of last year’s model, and so on. It all depends on the person. One of my billionaire friends and car collectors still looks at the price / value of buying cars. Also, liquidity is a thing. Spending cash on something is different than other asset classes. You could be worth $200M but not be able to easily write a check for $10M without selling some assets (and paying tax on a gain) etc. A lot of wealthy people have a lot of their wealth tied up. ---
**Author:** ![BrotherCadfael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-super-rich-people-pay-attention-to-prices/835032/52 "2019-06-06T17:24:20Z")
_“Milord Doral 't Guik Dorali should have been a Texan. I don’t mean that the Doral could have been mistaken for a Texan, but he had that you-paid-for-the-lunch-I’ll-pay-for-the-Cadillacs expansiveness.”_ – Robert A. Heinlein, \*Glory Road \* ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2019, 1:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-super-rich-people-pay-attention-to-prices/835032/53 "2019-06-07T13:17:38Z")
I don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all answer. Even the uber-rich have different sensibilities, and the mention above of Warren Buffett is a good example. He is rich because he is a brilliant investor, not because his ego requires him to present an image of being rich. Trump is the opposite. Within any given income level, some people consume to find a good value, some people consume to show how much they can spend. > [@Fotheringay-Phipps](#): > > […]my brother has a theory that people’s conception of the value of money and which things are or aren’t “worth the money” is fixed at a young age, and that people who grew up relatively poor sometimes retain these fixed conceptions even after they no longer make sense in their current circumstances. My dad grew up in the Great Depression. He became a successful business executive and retired with several million dollars after the privately-held company which he had ownership shares in was sold. Once I went to a bakery with him to pick up a birthday cake for his wife, and he said, “Twenty-five dollars? For a _ **cake** _?” (I told the cashier, “Don’t mind him, he remembers when movies were a nickel.”) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-super-rich-people-pay-attention-to-prices/835032.md?page=2)