Our society is spoiled on convenience. Long gone are the days when people had to grow all their own food, raise all their own livestock, harvest and kill and cook and store everything for themselves or face the risks of starvation and death. We're even past the days where farmers would trade crops, getting rid of their surplus in exchange for their neighbor's.
No, now we have grocery stores, with every conceivable food under the sun in abundance to make the poorest person in the poorest third world country weep. We no longer trade our own goods, but rather our hard-earned money, for these boundless blessings.
Yet at times, even that isn't good enough. There are a great many of us who can't be bothered with actually buying the raw materials for a meal and then spending our precious time preparing the recipe. No, we swing by any one of countless restaurants and have someone else serve us our food, often in three minutes or less. We don't bother to make our own cup of coffee at home before we leave; no, we swing by the local fast food restaurant, doughnut purveyor, or fancy café and buy the water someone else passed through a handful of roasted and ground coffee beans.
But this convenience comes at a cost, and often it's a terrible one. Let's look at coffee (a subject near and dear to my heart). The same ideas hold true for food, but I only need to demonstrate the matter once.
I have a coffee pot at home. (I also have a cappuccino machine, but that's a subject for another post.) This is not a high-end pot; cost me maybe $50. I make about a pot a day, usually from a large blue plastic tub o' Maxwell House (hey, it's first thing in the morning, and my taste buds can't tell the difference at that hour). A tub o' Maxwell House runs me maybe $7, and lasts me around a month.
Let's assume that any week day, I have a choice -- make my pot of coffee at home, or go get a single cup at Starbucks. I'll even look at brewed coffee -- David Bach can have his latte factor. Two dollars for a cup of coffee, times, say, twenty-three week days, gives us $46 for the month. Compared to my $50 machine and $7 tub o' Maxwell House, I lose out.
Okay, make it two months. Add another $46 for the Starbucks (and I'm not picking on Starbucks here -- substitute Krispy Kreme or Dunkin' Donuts or McDonald's or any place else you choose). That's $92 for 2 months worth of coffee out, versus $64 (one machine for $50 and two tubs o' Maxwell House for a collective $14) at home. The math comes up good on the side of the brew-at-home even sooner if you realize we're comparing one daily 16-ounce cup at Starbucks versus a whole pot of 60 or so ounces at home.
So what's the point here? You're not paying $2 for a cup of coffee -- you're paying $2 for the convenience of not having to make your coffee yourself. Coffee is nothing more than hot water passed through ground beans -- certainly not a $2 beverage in its own right. You're paying someone to use their time and effort to make it for you. The same logic applies to fast food burgers, prepackaged dinners in the supermarket, and even alcoholic drinks at your local bar.
Does that mean I'm against all eating out, against all convenience? No, absolutely not, but when my wife and I partake, it's as a special treat, or to get something we can't get elsewhere. There are some value and dollar menus out there which genuinely offer food for less than we could make it at home. There are sit-down restaurant dishes which taste far better than anything my wife or I can throw together. But we partake of this sort of thing as the exception, rather than the rule.
We have become so collectively lazy as a society that putting a filter, coffee grounds, and water in a coffee pot and pressing "start" isn't worth the money we save over buying it out. We value convenience so much that we're paying through the nose for it ... and not realizing there's a better and more cost-effective way.
The next time you're out, ask yourself if you're paying for quality goods and ingredients, or if you're paying for the convenience. You could save more than you might imagine if you start embracing inconvenience as a way of life.
Anyone else have any things you do which are inconvenient but which save you a lot of money? Please, share them in the comments section!
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