Money And How You Think About It
Paying closer attention to my own habits taught me something about price: whether a number feels fair, outrageous, or like a bargain comes down to the thing itself, the person buying, and the place where the buying happens. Watching HGTV is what first got me chewing on this. A price that counted as sensible for a house in one region looked absurd somewhere else. In certain places you could land a decent-sized home for $200,000 or under. Elsewhere the same kind of house ran $500,000 or less, and in other spots the tag climbed past a million. Rent followed the same pattern, stretching from under $1,000 to several thousand a month, and the steep figures weren't limited to resort towns. Plain suburbs carried them too.
I live on a fixed income these days, so I keep a careful eye on what leaves my wallet. What struck me is that my sense of a good price shifts depending on the category the purchase falls into. Clothes are where I pinch hardest. I work the clearance racks and garage sales and rarely let myself go past five or ten dollars. Yet I'll drop that same amount on a meal out, and for something special I might spend twice as much without flinching. It comes down to the limits I set for myself, and I keep a running tally in my head while I do it. Why does it feel more permissible to spend more on laundry detergent than on plenty of items in the grocery aisle?
Your budget may not be as tight as mine, and you might need to spend more than I do just to keep up appearances. Maybe the higher house prices don't rattle you at all because you've already sunk that much into where you live. So what decides that one kind of thing is worth a certain amount while another isn't? Some of it is plainly personal taste and wanting quality in what you buy. Still, for me at least, the willingness to spend more on this than on that is real, and I wonder how I ended up wired that way. Is it price fixing, the way a carton of soda seems to cost what it costs? Brainwashing? Propaganda? What one person finds acceptable to pay, another never would. And how much of my sense of a fair price is just the going rate where I live versus what the thing is actually worth? Maybe nothing carries worth on its own, and a thing is worth only whatever someone will hand over for it.