Went to Target tonight on the way home. Needed to pick up some cat litter and I wanted to get Shrek The Third too (I have the first two, never saw the third, so it's a bit of a gamble, but what the heck). So I'm back looking at my choices for cat litter. There's a 23 lb box for $9.99 and a 21 lb box for $9.12. I do some quick math in my head trying to determine which one is the better value. And I'll admit, it's taking me a while to do it because the values of the two seem pretty much equal (an employee even saw me staring and asked if he could help). I eventually subtracted the value between the two and examined how much the 2 lb difference was (87 cents). I multiply that by 10 (half of 20) add one a half again (half of 3). And it's over $10 if I do that (but just barely). So that tells me the higher priced box isn't worth it (but man, it's really close). So I get the smaller box, run through the register and get to the car to see that they charged me $9.54 for the box instead of $9.12. Now it's not even close and the box I have is a terrible deal (terrible being relative, since it's now like 42 cents worse (well, really 84 cents since I bought two boxes). Still, we're talking 84 cents here. Not even a dollar (although from what I've read Gaz could go to a car boot and buy like six different star wars items with that, but I digress). Still, I couldn't let it go. I go back into the store and head back to the shelf to verify I didn't somehow misread the price. Then I head to customer service and stand in line for five minutes before getting to the register and getting my 88 cents back (tax included). And as I'm leaving after getting back my 88 cents I'm thinking that totally wasn't worth my time. It is not worth 84 cents to kill almost 15 minutes that I could have been home earlier with the family. But it's like a sickness. Once I knew I had been charged the wrong price, even though it was only 41 cents, I couldn't let it go. What's wrong with me? It was only 41 cents.
5 comments:
It's not so much the 84 cents as it is the principle of the thing. If it is advertised on the shelf as a certain price that is what the price should be. And incidentally I would've made them give it to me free. That's the law (in CT anyway).
You're crazy.
If its that close, get the bigger one (or two of them) so you don't have to go back to the store as soon.
Hold on a tic. Lemme check that math again...
23 lbs for 9.99 = 43.4347 cents/lb
and
21 lbs for 9.12 = 43.4285 cents/lb
so that's .0062 cents/lb ?
or... if you take the cost/lb of small bag and multiply it our for the big (23) bag.
43.4385 * 23 = 998.8555
OR
$9.98.855 rounded to $9.99
They are in effect, the same price (unless you could get some bigger bulk deal at 50-100 lbs, and then you'd save 6 cents).
Perhaps the post
s title should have been "Much ADDo about nothing"?
Or maybe I'm bad at math...
The fact that they're effectively the same price is just setup. The fact that I couldn't let it go when I found out the price rang up wrong is what I was getting at. Hence my dilemma.
ali refuses to let me do general shopping because i don't check the prices! i see something - think 'that'd be nice' 'oh, we haven't had that for a while' 'the boys'd like some of them' and pop them in the trolley. i'm not one for checking prices too closely and hence i've made many mistakes buying stuff i thought was on offer but wasn't. "doh!"
in the given situation i would have probably had the same frame of mind as barry, get a bigger bag as it will last longer. then when i arrive home with it and ali asks how much that enormous bag of litter was i can hold my head high and a shrug of the shoulders proclaim "dunno!".
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