Black Friday Bullshit abounds. Okay, you can “save” $150.00 dollars if you can get in on Black Friday and get one of the 5 available TVs. You stand on a sidewalk in line for 8 hours (at least) in order to get in with no guarantee of anything. So, how much is your time worth? Figuring my hourly wage, I wouldn’t save a dime. Add to that the fact that standing on a cold sidewalk for 8 hours is hard and nasty work as far as I’m concerned.
How about the people who go out on Thanksgiving to get an early start? Hey, they don’t have time to give thanks for living a United States lifestyle that is one of the very richest in the world because they are too busy greedily coveting more.
However, I can purchase something at Target online and they’ll set it aside so I can go pick it up later in the day. Some stores are being a bit more reasonable.
To be fair, when I was younger I knew a lot of people that braved these Black Friday sales because it was the only way they could afford to get their children the things they really wanted for Christmas - and I saw for myself how weary they got throughout the year of constantly having to say no to their children, not because they didn’t want their kids to have the school trips and the modest amounts of new clothes and electronics they asked for - but because they as parents simply couldn’t afford them.
I agree that a lot of people play the Black Friday game out of greed, but when they are playing the stupid game to buy gifts for other people it’s different. Most of my animosity is reserved for the stores that make low income people go through this Hunger Games bullshit in order to get decent prices on gifts.
All time spent working, every single second, is time you are doing something for money instead of whatever else you’d rather be doing. So you’re sitting in an office or driving a cab or shelving groceries or flipping burgers or whatever instead of watching TV or taking a nap or reading a book or playing a game…
So if you’re doing a different activity instead of what you want to do, it is the same as working. Because that’s what working is; giving up your time and putting in effort away from what you like.
If you spend 4 miserable hours and save $50 on an item, when you normally work $20 an hour, it’s a bad financial decision.
The only reason to hate this argument is if you lack training in economics. Look up the definition of “opportunity cost” sometime. I didn’t get a lot of worth from my brief time studying Business Administration in college, but that stuff stuck with me.
In 1985, my mother went out and purchased Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots, for me for Christmas. I barely remember most of the presents I received over the years, but that one left a mark not only because I wanted it badly but because my mother went through the effort to get it. I don’t have children, but if I did, and I wasn’t well off like my parents were when I was a kid, I think I’d make an effort to go out on Black Friday just to make sure I could give them something nice. You’re right, there are probably a lot of people who go shopping that day because the savings are too much to pass up. Thanks for helping me see this through a different lens.
The last time I went shopping on BF was because I was at my in-laws, bored as hell, and nobody could make up their mind about what to do. So I just said, “I’m going to Branson for BF. If anyone wants to come that’d be super.”
And that right there is the error. I may get paid $20 an hour at my job, but my job is not 24/7. I get paid for the hours I’m required (or allowed) to work at my job. I’m not paid $20 for every hour that I exist.
Furthermore, it’s not it’s the hour itself that’s worth $20. No, my employer is paying me $20 for the amount of work I do in one hour. If I’m instead doing some other type of work, then that hour of work is worth something different. Like, imagine I have two jobs. I get paid $15 an hour for one, and $20 an hour for the other. Is the first job a bad financial decision? Even if it’s the only other part time job available to me? No. No one would say you have to be paid the exact same amount at every job.
And, no, taking an average doesn’t really work, either. Because then I’m getting paid the same either way, whether I work or not.
Sure, if I spend 4 hours doing something I hate in order to save $50, then you can argue that I’m working for $13.33 an hour. But whether that is worth it is entirely a subjective decision. It’s not based on how much I get paid per hour doing completely different work.
I’m sure there are business contexts where this makes sense. If you would make $200 an hour if your computer is working, and it would take 3 hours to fix, but you could buy a new computer for $500, then you should definitely do the latter.
But if Johnny wants to take that computer home and fix it in his spare time, it doesn’t matter that he gets paid $100 an hour at work. He can work on it for 6 hours if he thinks it’s worth it. You may say he’s working for $83.33 an hour. But maybe that’s more than his weekend time is usually worth to him. He’ll get more out of it than he would just lay around, after all.
Totally irrelevant. What that $20 is worth to your employer and the reason you’re paid $20 is not a factor in decision-making. That’s the mistake you’re making. All that’s relevant is your perspective, what your time and effort is worth to you. Your employer is not involved in any way with the decision to go to a Black Friday sale so forget their needs.
This is part of what I learned in microeconomics as a business major, how to make these decisions. Here’s a page to help explain it. As it says, “think like an economist”.
Opportunity cost refers to what you have to give up to buy what you want in terms of other goods or services.
Bolding mine. All that matters is the value of your time to you, not anyone else.
You need to determine what it’s worth to you to give up that time and to do what’s needed. All that matters is your perspective.
Let’s put it this way. Let’s say your boss said, “Look, we have an opportunity if you want to make some extra money. I know you have Friday off since it’s the day after Thanksgiving. I need you to get up early and go stand and wait outside a building and get in line behind a bunch of people well before sunrise. Then you’re going to have to go into the building and struggle to find a particular item, and a bunch of people will be trying to get it so be quick and aggressive. Once you have it, you’re going to have to wait in another line to be let out. This whole process will take hours but you’ll get $50 cash immediately. Are you interested?”
If you normally make more an hour than that, doing something less awful, unless you’re desperate for every little bit of money you can make you’d be silly to agree to that job. Better to be an Uber driver on the side or something.
If you could be working those hours. If you are being offered only 40 hours a week and have no opportunity to work more, it might be worth it. If you have a piece of shit car or no car at all, you can’t do Uber and there is probably a large set up time to even start being an Uber driver. You could either make nothing during those hours posting on the internet or make a little at the mall.
This “all time has a real monetary value” idea is how we get bonkers cost/benefit analyses of highly dubious road construction projects.
This new $30 million overpass will save the 10,000 people who drive over it 2.5 minutes per day. The median income is $20/hour and thus it provides $3 million per year in time savings. Over the 30 year lifetime of the bridge, it will pay for itself 3x over.
That is standard practice for road projects, and it’s 100% fraud. People may value their time at that $20/hour rate, but this bridge costs real cash money to build, let alone maintain. Nobody is collecting extra salary on those saved 2.5 minutes per day. Even if they did, the government only collects a fraction of that in additional tax revenue to actually pay for this bridge. What looks like break-even at 10 years won’t come anywhere close for nearly a century, and the bridge won’t last that long to begin with.
Huh? No, that’s what you said. And exactly what I was debunking.
If you spend 4 miserable hours and save $50 on an item, when you normally work $20 an hour, it’s a bad financial decision.
That’s what I disagree with. What you normally work for would be what your job pays you. And that does not determine the worth of the hours when you would be unable to work that job.
That’s the flaw: the business logic assumes that you could choose to make that money at that time. But you often can’t. There often isn’t a money-making opportunity available to you at that time.
It’s entirely possible that saving $50 is the most cost effective thing you could do with your time at that moment. It’s also possible that saving that $50 is the difference between getting the item or not getting it at all. And you may value getting the item for reasons beyond its monetary value.
Not all hours are worth the same amount. Heck, going a step further, not all work is worth the same amount. Maybe, while you don’t enjoy waiting in line on shopping, you do like it more than doing more physical labor. That can also factor in.
Sure, go ahead and come up with a monetary value for your time to determine if you think that something is worth doing. But do it specifically for that situation, based on what opportunities are available at that time. Don’t base it on “what you usually work for.”
When we were buying a house 20 years ago I was making $50/hour (though I was salaried and working a lot more than 40 hours, so the effective rate was lower). I was willing to pay $200k more for a house, which would cost $10k a year in interest, taxes and insurance to save 20 minutes of commuting time each way (about six miles shorter commute). I computed that to be $62.50/hour or $55 after accounting for gas, maintenance and depreciation on the car. My wife was a telecommuter so her commute wasn’t impacted.
Ten years before that when my wife and I both commuted we would not have made the equivalent choice, because at that time we couldn’t afford an extra $100k for the house. Effectively we were taking on a $15/hour part time job to commute 40 minutes a day 240 times a year even though we were making $30+ per hour.
Basically the value of your “free” time is not strictly a linear function of your wage rate. If you have a high wage rate, you may not be willing to give up your free time even for an effectively higher rate on cost saving activities. While when your wage rate is lower, you’d take on clipping coupons or shopping the sale items at four grocery stores a week for an effective wage rate even lower than you’re getting paid. Because those tasks are very flexible and available, while getting a second job or more paid hours at your first job may not be feasible.
OW! LoL Well, I don’t consider it “free time” if you are trapped in a line in the frigid cold for 8 hours, so that’s how I view it. I really think we are in the realm of “subjective” here, so you shouldn’t be so hard on me.
The example I first remember hearing was that Michael Jordan shouldn’t spend four hours mowing the lawn of his large estate because he could just work 10 minutes more to pay for a lawn care service to do it. Even at the time I thought, no, he can’t “just work 10 more minutes” because that’s not how basketball works, that’s not how most jobs work, salaried or hourly.
Yes, we all place a value on our time, but we don’t spend that value in real cash money by doing an activity we don’t enjoy. Conversely, we don’t make real cash money by not doing those activities either. We’re not paying ourselves a wage from our own pocket like some LLC that sold its assets to a shell corporation that rents those assets back to its parent to get a tax write-off.
Well, i bought a new computer monitor on a black Friday sale. It was exactly the monitor i wanted, and they were charging $50 less than they usually do. And i bought it by clicking the same buttons on my laptop that i would have clicked if i bought it any other time. So i don’t think it was a lie.
Now, maybe if I’d waited until after Christmas, it would have been even cheaper. Or maybe it would have actually sold out. Who knows. But I’m using my new monitor and don’t feel cheated.
I think some of the appeal of the in-person frantic shopping is that some people enjoy “hunting”, and it’s kind of fun to maneuver to get a good deal on something nice in a physical store. You may hate waiting out in the cold, but at least some of the people doing that are getting a bit of entertainment.
But it does suck that some people are pressured into doing that because it’s the only chance they have of affording the thing.
Yes, we’re not literally making money for ourselves, but as a rule of thumb, it’s not a bad measure to use to determine if something is worth doing yourself, paying someone else to do, or just not doing in the first place. “You spent an hour to save five bucks. That’s not even minimum wage” is a decently objective measure to use to run a sanity check on some things.
There may be other, non-monetary reasons to do, or not do, a thing, but a quick comparison to your regular wage isn’t a bad idea.
Funny story: I actually did this for years. I decided to grind at Amazon for a while and committed to signing up for work anytime I didn’t have something, anything scheduled for my time off. Admittedly, most people couldn’t do that, but Amazon was always looking for help and their Flex-time phone app means you can work pretty much anytime of day in 4 or 5 hour increments.
Actually, Jordon made most of his money from sponsorship and his various business deals so he could very well more “just 10 more minutes” on getting more deals.