But ponder a little while (and I am willing to ponder anything late enough at night) and it becomes apparent how the ready availability of free stuff can erode morale. It's a known fact, of course, that we prize highly that which costs us dearly. Scarcity, or even the appearance of scarcity, causes us to hoard resources, while abundance encourages us to live it up. And even my efficient nature is struggling against the impulse to grow callous and lax in the face of apparent plenty. It's becoming harder and harder to wrestle with extracting the last few dregs of toothpaste from the tube when there are two dozen fresh tubes in the drawer, and last week I tossed out half a spoiled loaf of bread with far less gnashing of teeth than would have occurred if it hadn't been free to begin with.
There are a couple of reasons why I still won't give in and be a totally wasteful consumer. For one, I'm not sure how long this spate of feasting will last - I keep thinking that the deals must dry up sooner or later - and I don't want to have gotten too comfortable at an unsustainably high standard of living when reality sets in again. For another - well, I still don't like wasting things, even if wasting free stuff hurts me less. That's just my personality, and quite possibly those feelings would erode entirely given enough time - many people seem to have no qualms about tossing away things which cost them little effort to acquire.
I wonder whether this is an attitude that we're seeing challenged and shaken up by the recent climb in grocery prices. Perhaps American consumers were getting too spoiled by low prices of
cheap goods, and that had a lot to do with the wasteful consumerist mentality that ran so rampant. So is this rise in gasoline and milk prices really a blessing in disguise? An unwanted lesson in character development?
I've also been re-thinking a lot of my opinions on the importance of maintaining a low cost for goods and services. Well, my evolving opinion on Wal-mart is a post for another day, but in short, I've come to see the value of high-priced, quality merchandise. As Ma Ingalls would say, 'Enough is as good as a feast.' All other things being equal, and in a free market where the end price is a natural result of supply and demand, why shouldn't it be just as good to spend a given amount of money on fewer but higher-quality food items that will all get eaten, as to spend the same amount on far more stuff half of which ends up going to waste?
(I had to toss in the remark about the free market as an expression of my irritation at the ongoing farm subsidies, which make corn syrup so cheap to produce and hence so readily available. So now cheap and deadly high-fructose corn syrup is in everything, but it's an artificial construct, because it really wouldn't be that cheap otherwise.)
2 comments:
Amen to your last comment....
I have come to believe in higher quality purchases, the best over the cheapest. Sometimes this means less but I think quality has its own reward. But I still try to find the best for the best price, or with a coupon.
Waiting on your Walmart post!-rlr
I do believe that conservation of resources is a more core part of frugality than getting stuff for cheap or free, so I understand what you are saying here. On the other hand, sometimes cheap is necessary. It's my opinion that my mil's quest to serve only high-quality food to six teenage boys resulted in some very skinny, hungry boys. And as I watch our grocery bill escalate before anyone makes it to grade school, I'm thankful for some cut-price grocers even though I regret not being able to buy everything organic. (I do have to avoid additives, anyway, which increases costs enough as it is.)
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