The paradox of thrift
Oct. 27th, 2023 02:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: poverty, corporate bullshit, (fairly mild) food, (arguably) discourse, (arguably) venting]
[Mastodon; Dreamwidth; Wayback 1; Wayback 2] (by badlogic@mastodon.gamedev.place; h/tsiderea)
>>But on average, a consumer pays more if they buy the product every week, as the discounted price has been increased. The average is higher than before.
Oh, it's worse than that.
>>The real price for the consumer is the average of the regular and discounted price.
This is only *sometimes* true. It's true for highly perishable foods, people living paycheque to paycheque, and people getting the extreme pointy end of the privilege-of-property stick.
Otherwise, the real price *is the sale price*. The "full" price is effectively a convenience fee paid to buy the item off-cycle; buy on the *store's* schedule, enough of it to last until the next sale, and in exchange receive the real price.
Billa Milka Alpenmilch--I looked this up--is a chocolate bar. It's non-perishable. An Austrian version of me would almost never pay full price for it. (Canadian!me has nine bags of chocolate-covered almonds on a shelf in her dining room for this exact reason (well, that and not getting fucked over by just-in-time shit).) Which means if you lower the full price and raise the sale price, in practice that's a straight price increase.
---
One commenter on Siderea's post says "We need this in Canada", and at first I wasn't sure why I recoiled. It *would* be nice to have price-comparison/sale-tracking tools instead of always having to keep everything in your head (and not getting to know the price history of things you only just started buying).
...I think my groceries are probably being subsidised by people who shell out convenience fees on everything. In much the same way that--as a fast-food worker--if people used their resources efficiently I would be out of a job, if people used their resources efficiently I suspect I'd have a substantially higher grocery bill. Nobody wants to level the playing field, when they're the one winning.
The real price isn't the average of the regular and discounted prices. Not yet.
[Mastodon; Dreamwidth; Wayback 1; Wayback 2] (by badlogic@mastodon.gamedev.place; h/t
siderea)>>But on average, a consumer pays more if they buy the product every week, as the discounted price has been increased. The average is higher than before.
Oh, it's worse than that.
>>The real price for the consumer is the average of the regular and discounted price.
This is only *sometimes* true. It's true for highly perishable foods, people living paycheque to paycheque, and people getting the extreme pointy end of the privilege-of-property stick.
Otherwise, the real price *is the sale price*. The "full" price is effectively a convenience fee paid to buy the item off-cycle; buy on the *store's* schedule, enough of it to last until the next sale, and in exchange receive the real price.
Billa Milka Alpenmilch--I looked this up--is a chocolate bar. It's non-perishable. An Austrian version of me would almost never pay full price for it. (Canadian!me has nine bags of chocolate-covered almonds on a shelf in her dining room for this exact reason (well, that and not getting fucked over by just-in-time shit).) Which means if you lower the full price and raise the sale price, in practice that's a straight price increase.
---
One commenter on Siderea's post says "We need this in Canada", and at first I wasn't sure why I recoiled. It *would* be nice to have price-comparison/sale-tracking tools instead of always having to keep everything in your head (and not getting to know the price history of things you only just started buying).
...I think my groceries are probably being subsidised by people who shell out convenience fees on everything. In much the same way that--as a fast-food worker--if people used their resources efficiently I would be out of a job, if people used their resources efficiently I suspect I'd have a substantially higher grocery bill. Nobody wants to level the playing field, when they're the one winning.
The real price isn't the average of the regular and discounted prices. Not yet.
