I was shopping Amazon yesterday for a fairly large order (a budget of $500) and one thing I wanted was some higher capacity USB flash drives. They had 256 GB Silicon Power drives (which is a real brand, not fake crap) at $18 for two of them. But actually during that shopping session the “limited time” offer ended and the drives went back to $22 for the pair. They went from the lowest price per GB (real) flash drives I had ever seen to only the second lowest price per GB flash drives I had ever seen. Which annoyed the heck out of me, and I wanted to hop in a time machine and go back an hour and buy them at the lower price. Rationally I knew it wasn’t rational to be bothered by that, but I think of price differences in percentages, not absolutes. That wasn’t a $4 price increase, it was a more than 20 percent price increase! Meanwhile, if the phone that was my main purpose for shopping yesterday (8 GB RAM, 256 GB internal memory, bundled 256 GB MicroSD card for $250, another modern miracle of pricing) had increased by that same $4 I would have barely have noticed and wouldn’t have cared at all about that less than 2% increase.
Yeah, I can relate: I am bothered by things like that too, to a degree that I realize is irrational.
William Poundstone’s book Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value covers things like this (in perhaps more detail than you’d want).
I tend to not obsess over small differences. Like when someone says that gas is 11 cents cheaper at one station compared to another. Unless you’re driving thousands of miles a month, who cares? That’s a dollar or two per fillup.
Missing sales like that annoys me disproportionately to the dollars involved.
Mostly because I recognize that what probably happened was some manner of dynamic individualized pricing aimed at triggering me to buy before I’d finished my due diligence. In general I’d like all of that dynamic stuff to be absolutely illegal as roundly exploitative.
I’d frankly rather they had never offered the “sale” at all than to have offered it then yanked it away. All they did was tell me they’re crooked. And I don’t like being reminded that so many of my retail counterparties are crooked.
As to @Sicks_Ate’s excellent point about gasoline prices, there’s an xkcd for that. Of course.
Do I obsess over relative prices differences?
In the situation described by the OP, no, not at all. Once an item is purchased I stop worrying about it. If I was happy with the price, I got a good deal. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a car or a hamburger. I stop considering price after purchase, preferring to be happy with my new “thing”.
It drives my wife batty sometimes, but I never look at fuel prices. My truck gets crappy mileage anyway, and traveling for a different price is likely a net loss – so I just fill up at the nearest location where I need it. Even with a 50 gallon tank, it’s not worth using a gallon to save a nickel on the price.
I buy loads of used books. I search for the lowest price - for a good copy. I waste loads of my time going back and forth to sites that charge slightly more but seem to have a nicer copy or better photographs or more information or anything that would make it worthwhile for me the just buy the gooder copy. And when I just hit buy for the cheapest copy what I receive makes me swear never to go for the cheapest copy the next time, even though I often do.
Growing up poor can screw up the rest of your life.
I buy a lot of used books, too, but if I think I’m going to keep it (sometimes I do; sometimes I don’t), condition is most important for me. I almost never go for the absolute cheapest. I also look at the vendor’s ratings.
In general, no, I don’t obsess over small price differences. And I grew up poor, too.
What I have trouble getting past is shipping charges. If the shipping charge is more the cost of the item, I have a very hard time convincing myself to buy it, even if the total cost is small and I REALLY need the item.
I’ve got to give myself a time limit in the grocery store, or I’m stuck doing math in my head (“Now, these are cheaper per box, but those are slightly larger boxes by weight, and these are Buy Seven, Get One Free…”)
One day I was in a hurry and told myself I was going to buy a set list of items and not worry about a few cents difference. I breezed through the store, tossing things with abandon into my cart.
Mentally, I was saying “Free at last, free at last…”
.
My mother obsessed over a three-cent difference. She’d wait to fill up until she found a particular price point. And even change her route so she could drive through Waunadrinkawaukee, Wisconsin because a friend of hers got cheaper gas there a month ago. She’d often ask us what gas prices were like in our town.
The thing is, it’s always relative.
I’ve come across descriptions of purchasing decisions where it’s posited that we have in mind the utility of some item, and as long as the price is less than that, we should rationally buy it.
But I don’t think that’s how it works in a modern consumer market. We’re all making delayed, informed decisions (unless something is trivially cheap) because there are many options available and we want the best bang for our buck.
So yes you get situations like the OP.
I travel often, so I often have the thing of thinking a price is outrageous, merely because it is above the local going rate, even though it’s still crazy cheap compared to home.
I had a neighbor / acquaintance like that. She’d regale us with tales of how this station is always, always I say, X cents cheaper than that station. Both being nearby I checked a time or three and found that simply wasn’t true. In an era of GasBuddy on your phone she’d drive around looking for gas bargains.
All this would not be too bad in isolation; plenty of folks are functionally innumerate. But when I tell you she was a prof who taught finance at a state university system’s flagship MBA school that might give you pause.
My thrift credentials are solid. I was brought up by a single, Depression-baby mom who taught me to pinch every penny, and I used to plan every shopping trip around sales. I had a coupon wallet, and I took a calculator to the store with me to be sure the per-unit price of a name-brand with a coupon was actually lower than store-brand.
So once we got on solid financial ground and I realized I didn’t have to squeeze every bit of value from each dollar, it was an absolute pleasure to ditch the coupons, quit reading the sales circulars, and just buy what I want. I can’t tell you how much I paid for the milk I bought last week, and that still feels more like luxury to me than any diamond necklace could.
You really have to look at shipping costs, because you run into situations you described a lot. I always calculate the price as the total of the cost + shipping. You can get burned overwise. Years ago when I wasn’t as careful, I actually got to the point of hitting the PURCHASE button before I noticed the exorbitant shipping cost.
Yeah, me, too. Depression baby mom (although she wasn’t a single mom) whose parents were immigrants. It was such a relief to look for the best value when buying something instead of looking strictly at the purchase price (that would often end up being more expensive because of poor quality).
I recently saw a situation where the shipping is 450 times the cost of the item!
https://www.amazon.com/Clearance-Titanium-Rotation-Border-Jewelry/dp/B07BC6BDXQ/
And the total price is still cheap!
You run into that sometimes with musical instruments, especially on sites like Reverb. One guy will offer an item for $750 with free shipping and another may offer the same thing for $600 with $125 for shipping. Often I will order the higher cost item just because I think it’s sleazy to do an end run by overcharging for shipping.
I agree completely that gamesmanship with inflated shipping “… and handling” costs ought to be illegal. But …
Shipping musical instruments is not cheap. Between bulky, odd shapes, and fragility you need serious packaging. And UPS, et al charge serious money.
I ended up selling my late wife’s Celtic harp locally because buying the factory shipping box for it was going to cost $400, plus $200 for UPS to ship the new empty box from factory to me, then another $200 to ship the full box from me to the buyer three states away. My local UPS store is very trustworthy & capable and they took one look at the harp and the value and decided that them home-brewing up packaging was gonna be multiple hundreds too.
I could almost have driven the harp to them cheaper. Almost. So I sold it locally.
If you haven’t priced retail UPS for a large or heavy item recently, you’re in for a rude awakening.
Out of curiosity, how much was the harp worth?
About $8K.
The traditional stand-up harps you see in concert orchestras that everyone thinks of as a “harp” are more properly called “pedal harps” and run new from $15K-$30K.
Celtic or “lever” harps are smaller, mechanically much simpler, and are anywhere from $2K to $10K depending on maker, prestige, features, etc.
I don’t obsess over relative price differences. I don’t even think about them. What is most valuable to me is my finite amount of energy, my finite amount of time, and the quality of the object. I will normally pay more money for things that reduce the first two and increase the third. Thinking about small differences in price is, to me, a waste of that time and energy. It gains me nothing. If there is a very noticeable discrepancy in price, that will draw my attention and I make a choice. Otherwise I pick whatever’s closest.