Too Much
By Danny Mac
Today, I stopped into my local Walgreen’s for a tasty beverage after my semi-daily bike ride. I walked in the store, headed for the beverage cooler. I saw that Gatorade was on sale…five dollars for five bottles…OR a dollar forty-nine each. What a deal! My first reaction was to grab another one, but then I quickly put it back. I did the math in my head, and it was three bucks for two bottles. I wasn’t going to buy five bottles at once; originally I only wanted ONE, not TWO and certainly, not FIVE.
This practice has been in use by them for years. Let’s say you DO want five bottles of Gatorade; you buy them and only pay one buck a bottle. No big deal, right? But, if you decide you only want one, you will have to pay more for it, or not even get the discount at all. In essence, you are being penalized for not buying more than you wanted in the first place! This usually prompts most people to just go ahead, saying “what the heck!” and just buy the “five for five.” But I’m not most people. I won’t give in. Why?
You see, I live alone, and I really don’t need FIVE cases of soda pop, TEN chicken Kiev’s, or THREE half gallons of ice cream all at once. I have no room for all this stuff, nor do I have the time to use it up before the expiration date. It’s really a waste of money in my case, and I believe it is for most people. They just buy it up because they don’t want to hassle with it. In more than a couple of situations, I’ve seen the quantity price to be more than the regular price! It was their way of raising the price, making it appear that you get a deal. I ALWAYS do the math in my head, so that I know what I’m getting in terms of unit pricing.
Another tactic is to use a number that’s not so easy to divide in your head, such as “three for five dollars.” They think that most people will just accept that is a good deal, and won’t take the time to do the math in their heads, or pull out their trusty calculator if they have one. Let’s do this together…If I have three items, and the price is five dollars, the unit price would be somewhere around… one dollar and sixty-seven cents, rounded up.
OK, I cheated and used my calculator! Good thing I did, because it turned out to be a repeating decimal at least twenty times or so, until it reached seven. Did the calculator get tired and just round it up too? $1.66666666666….blah blah blah…$1.67. But, the original price was one dollar and fifty-nine cents BEFORE the sale. So, did I have any savings at all? Of course not! I ended up paying eight cents more, no matter what I did! I’m not making this stuff up folks! These kinds of things really do happen in retail!
Is eight cents that big of a deal? It might not seem that way, but take that into consideration if your grocery bill is regularly in the several hundreds of dollars range. After a while, eight cents here, ten cents there becomes a dollar here and five dollars there. Remember those big savings? Exactly! Where are they? Not in YOUR pocket! You’ve fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the book, yet again. And so have I.
That’s your mini rant, and I’m Danny Mac, on LG73, Vancouver’s Best Music Mix!