Say the item is $100, but is now being offered at a 20% discount, marking it down to $80. The seller will tout, scream from the rooftops that you are saving $20. No, you're spending $20 less. You only save the $20 if you allocate your purchase at $100 and put the $20 in a saving account.
I was once buying some clothes in Saks and the sales associate was trying to tell me they had something on sale and I could save beaucoup bucks by buying it. I smiled, declined, and told him I couldn't afford to save that much money. He grinned.
I found it. I remember a quote from Thomas Jefferson on making purchases—another omission in what is otherwise a lively piece. The third president of the United States said: "Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you." You're not going to see that in ad copy for P.C. Richard's, Best Buy, or Apple. Of course the word dear might confuse a 21st century audience. It can mean expensive. On sale doesn't mean you have to have it.
The hook in an A-Hed piece is always the headline and sub-heading.
If Under $5 It's Free: the Logic of 'Girl' Math and 'Boy' Math
More consumers are sharing crafty ways they justify discretionary spending
The thought process is not new. Sharing it on TikTok and podcasts is. Elon Musk should have tried to buy TikTok rather than Twitter, or what is now X.
Math and financial mental gymnastics has been going on for a long time. Young and old, both genders. See Jefferson's quote above. But now we have a father and daughter on TikTok sharing a discussion on how it's worth it to add something you may not need to an online purchase in order to pass the threshold set by the vendor for free shipping.
The daughter Marley Brown, an 18 year-old freshman at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst poster child for the new math, explains to her father, Austin, a finance professional, no less, that $50 for a sweater worn 50 times means that it costs $1 per wear, so therefore it's under $5, and ipso facto it is free!
I've never logged onto TikTok, but I'm sure Marley's father just grins and tells his daughter that she is only unit pricing the frequency of wearing the sweater with its cost; and she's shoving a mythical, optimistic denominator to get a cost-per-wear under $5.
The father, Austin knows his daughter like any attentive father of an 18-year-old and I'm sure explains this, plus the fact that by the looks of her closet she in not going to wear that sweater anywhere near 50! times. She's not going to school in Greenland.
This type of thinking has a name: shopping riddles. If only Gracie Allen were alive today. Her Good Night Gracie explanations for anything, particularly how her family members are related to each other, would get move views than anything. She'd fit right in this era's newspeak rhetoric. I miss Gracie Allen, although I will admit that there are times I tell my wife she is Gracie Allen.
There is another account of someone who bought an exercise bike for $400 in order to help recover from ACL surgery. By his math, saying he's ridden the bike now 4,000 time (a dubious claim I'm sure) it is only costing him 10¢ per ride, and therefore the bike is now free.
The beauty of reading a news piece online is the links they provide, in this case to two milennials on TikTok explaining how spending money can be viewed as making money. If this were true there would of course be no national debt. All that money that would be saved by spending it would be available to spend again. It is a delicious concept. We'd only ever need a single dollar bill because it would just keep itself in circulation buying more and more goods.
If all this were true I should not have to make any mortgage payments for the house I'm living in since I've been here over 30 years. If you divided 30 years by the number of days in 30 years then...
If only my accountant were Gracie Allen.
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