Consumer Society
Cheap is Expensive
Especially when you don’t know what you don’t know
I used to live in Jamaica and one of the many things that struck me about the place was that there is a saying for just about anything that could happen in the course of a day. Understanding these no nonsense, home spun wisdoms is helped by an understanding of a little bit of patois, because typically they lose something in translation.
There is one that sticks with me constantly, especially when I am making buying decisions:
The mean man goes to the market twice.
Mean, in this case, signifies “cheap”. In other words, what you save in money, you will spend in other ways.
In other other words, don’t get too excited about a deal that you think you are getting. It’s never as good as it sounds and is possibly even too good to be true.
This is especially true when you don’t know exactly what you are buying or worse, why you are buying it.
And if this little chestnut of wise old man knowledge wasn’t enough, it was just the other day that I read an article by Charles Amemiya in which he outlines a lifetime of experience with this very concept.
