What joy there is in finding a good deal!
I just snagged a 26 oz. box of salt for $2 that will last me a year or more. I’m seeing prices two and three times that online.
To be sure, it is not the super fancy this-and-that salt that became fashionable 10 years ago. I recall visiting a high-end mall with a spice store with an ongoing salt tasting. The products there absolutely broke the bank but everyone was buying them. It was artisan salt. Only tacky people would buy less.
Remember those days? They seem to be gone.
My new salt is just the plain thing, the blue container with the girl and the umbrella. Whatever. In tough times, luxuries have to go.
A reflection immediately came to mind. In ancient times, salt was so scarce as to take on the properties of money. Roman soldiers were paid in salt. This was true for many civilizations from 5000 B.C. until quite late in history, really until the 19th century, when the product became ubiquitous.
You will understand why the hamster you had as a kid loved his salt wheel so much.
There is thus a sense in which we are all enormously fortunate. We can find a year or two’s worth of salt for a couple of bucks. There was a time when that is what it meant to be rich. We are all rich in that way, even now.
The same is true of oils, particularly animal fats. They have been variously very rare in history. During China’s Cultural Revolution, they became the most valued item. We should never take any of this for granted. Salt and oil are essential for life. There are no shortages of either, for now.
That said, these are austere times and we are all finding our way back to essentials.
There is a broader point and it is about saving money. Once you get the hang of it, and acquiesce to the economic realities of our time, saving money becomes an adventure. It involves shopping, hunting, and comparing, and is filled with victory and defeat, joy and sorrow, and mainly gives a sense of drive and meaning to your daily life.
I often think back to my grandmother on my mother’s side. She grew up during the Great Depression. Her mother made quilts of the leftover fabric scraps from the material with which she made dresses for her nine daughters. The quilts themselves were beautiful. I kept one myself until it finally fell apart and it broke my heart to throw it out.
But even in my living memory, I recall how she made saving money an essential joy of life. She clipped coupons from the newspaper. She went the rounds of stores and knew every product.
She collected what were then called “green stamps” and “gold stamps” from various stores, the rewards systems of their time. She would put me to work filling up stamp books. We would go together to redeem them for various products at the green stamp store. I recall that most of the products available upon redemption of stamps were not really what one wanted.
Still, we would bring boxes of completed stamp books. We would leave with a new toaster or some kitchen knives or something. It felt great, even though none of what we acquired we really needed. The point was not even the products. It was the adventure, the sense that we had worked hard to get the best value in the system we had. The process of saving money alone was a kind of consumption good.
It was clearly an activity she shared with her extended family. Her daughters were the same way. They believed that saving money was the goal. A penny saved is a penny earned. That meant something long before pennies became worth less than the effort to save them. She knew the great truth is that every dime not spent was a dime of earnings. A major goal of life was to live as well as possible while spending as little as possible.
I have some sense that this ethos vanished at some point in the postwar period, as the generation that came of age during the Great Depression entered their dotage and history moved forward.
People like me who came of age in the great prosperity could not understand people like my grandmother. We secretly thought they were slightly irrational, a product of their times, and they had nothing to teach those of us lucky enough to be part of the emergent digital age when riches poured down like manna from heaven.
Still, in good times or bad, accounting is the underlying reality that never goes away. People are being reminded about this for the first time in their lives. They are adapting, throwing themselves into the great hunt for value. This is regrettable on one hand, but, as with my grandmother, it is possible to turn this into a form of recreation and a great deal of fun in the end.
It is a mark of big inflations like we’ve been through, and probably are still going through, that prices become unpredictable from one store to the next. You cannot count on your old estimations but rather need to stay up-to-date on what is expensive and what is a good value. This means looking carefully at per-ounce prices and packaging, and assessing your own sense of value.
Certain realities have already presented themselves. Going out to eat is a huge budget drain. Ordering liquor or wine when you do will nearly double your bill. Eating at home makes the most sense, obviously. Even shopping for clothing changes once you notice that retail prices are all over the map depending on the venue, and what precisely is wrong with picking up high-quality clothing at second-hand stores?
Many people are also taking a closer look at an obvious place to save money: online subscriptions. Do you really need five different streaming services? Not really. Digging through my own, I found a rather expensive subscription to a European financial publication that I had not read in four years and yet I had been paying the entire time. This is just irresponsible but good times tempt one to believe that it doesn’t matter.
For all the awfulness of economic decline, it does focus the mind on fundamentals such as accounting, saving, frugality, and cost consciousness. That generation raised during the Great Depression learned to make sport out of getting by and balancing the books to survive. This instilled great values actually. That might be the saving grace of hard times.
Maybe this will happen to this generation, too. We aren’t there yet, but we’ve surely become more conscious than we used to be. The key now is to find joy in bargain hunting.
