Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/garden/20math.html?_r=1&em
Failing Home Economics
Michael Falco for The New York Times
A CAULIFLOWER CONUNDRUM Flummoxed by variables in cauliflower pricing, Jill Andresky Fraser, a financial journalist, started a blog, EconoWhiner.com, which offers budgeting advice, as well as an invitation to whine.
By PENELOPE GREEN
Published: November 19, 2008
IT was nearly six months ago that Jill Andresky Fraser, a financial journalist, was undone by a cauliflower. Like almost every other household in America, Ms. Fraser’s was starting to embrace a new austerity, and the cauliflower was an early milestone.
Until this year, Ms. Fraser, whose math skills are formidable (she has written books on personal and corporate finance), had always practiced a shopping calculus that balanced time against money. “If there was a choice between the two, I would choose anything that would save me time,” Ms. Fraser said. But no longer. And so it was that she found herself shopping for groceries on the Upper West Side, stymied by the price of a cauliflower ($5) in the first store she visited. A market a block or so away sold cauliflowers for $2.99 each, but a can of artichoke hearts (another item on her list) was $4.99. A third store offered a deal — three heads of cauliflower for $5 — which was a good thing, because it was getting late and the day was disintegrating into the narrative of a fourth-grader’s word problem. Ms. Fraser filled a cart with cauliflower and other groceries. When the cashier rung her up, however, it turned out that the artichoke hearts at this store were $6.99 a can, and Ms. Fraser had bought four.
“So on the one hand I had saved all this money on cauliflower,” Ms. Fraser said, “but probably my family was never going to eat that much cauliflower, and there was the problem of the $7 artichokes. In the end, I had spent more money than I had ever planned. This was a cosmic moment.”
All around the country, at similar cosmic moments, perfectly sound brains have been seizing up like an old car on a frigid day, particularly in the last few weeks. As Americans attempt to perform cost-benefit analyses of their needs and behaviors, they are whittling pennies from cable bills only to squander dollars on gas driving miles to discount stores, or on coupon-spurred splurges for nonessential items, like Cheez Whiz or organizing supplies. Pinched by shriveled retirement and college accounts, battered by ballooning mortgage costs, rent and co-op maintenance increases, and hedging against the possibility that a job might vanish, some are practicing economies that may not deserve the name.
When Best Buy announced its latest sales figures last month, the company reported “an unprecedented drop in consumer buying of items like flat-screen televisions,” said Ori Brafman, a business expert and an author, with his brother, Rom, of “Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior,” out since June from Doubleday Business. “But when Wal-Mart released its report last week, there was a surprise. Consumers had increased their flat-screen purchases. Somehow, because Wal-Mart feels like a bargain store, shoppers who have deprived themselves of luxury items elsewhere rationalized their purchases at Wal-Mart as ‘getting a good deal,’ ” Mr. Brafman continued. “Granted, flat-panel TV’s at Wal-Mart might run a little cheaper than elsewhere, but no financial adviser would include one on his or her list of Items to Buy During Tough Times.”
Americans may be forgoing Starbucks and stocking up on Spam, but they are also making severe “diagnostic errors,” Mr. Brafman said. “They’re stressed out, and using the wrong information” — such as the belief that buying at Wal-Mart equals saving money — “to make a decision, and ignoring all other data that contradicts that decision.”
Kathy Peel, a Dallas-based family manager (that is, a life coach whose niche is training families to run their homes like businesses), said that incidences of feckless budgeting and bad math seem to be on the rise, at least judging from the reports of coaches trained in her system. Leslie McKee, a Peel-trained family manager in Pittsburgh, has noticed a pattern of “people signing up for discount stores that sell in bulk and over-purchasing ‘bargains’ that are so enormous they will not live long enough to use the item,” she said. “Then they call me and spend more money to help them organize it all into mini-malls inside their homes.”
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Failing Home Economics
Michael Falco for The New York Times
A CAULIFLOWER CONUNDRUM Flummoxed by variables in cauliflower pricing, Jill Andresky Fraser, a financial journalist, started a blog, EconoWhiner.com, which offers budgeting advice, as well as an invitation to whine.
By PENELOPE GREEN
Published: November 19, 2008
IT was nearly six months ago that Jill Andresky Fraser, a financial journalist, was undone by a cauliflower. Like almost every other household in America, Ms. Fraser’s was starting to embrace a new austerity, and the cauliflower was an early milestone.
Until this year, Ms. Fraser, whose math skills are formidable (she has written books on personal and corporate finance), had always practiced a shopping calculus that balanced time against money. “If there was a choice between the two, I would choose anything that would save me time,” Ms. Fraser said. But no longer. And so it was that she found herself shopping for groceries on the Upper West Side, stymied by the price of a cauliflower ($5) in the first store she visited. A market a block or so away sold cauliflowers for $2.99 each, but a can of artichoke hearts (another item on her list) was $4.99. A third store offered a deal — three heads of cauliflower for $5 — which was a good thing, because it was getting late and the day was disintegrating into the narrative of a fourth-grader’s word problem. Ms. Fraser filled a cart with cauliflower and other groceries. When the cashier rung her up, however, it turned out that the artichoke hearts at this store were $6.99 a can, and Ms. Fraser had bought four.
“So on the one hand I had saved all this money on cauliflower,” Ms. Fraser said, “but probably my family was never going to eat that much cauliflower, and there was the problem of the $7 artichokes. In the end, I had spent more money than I had ever planned. This was a cosmic moment.”
All around the country, at similar cosmic moments, perfectly sound brains have been seizing up like an old car on a frigid day, particularly in the last few weeks. As Americans attempt to perform cost-benefit analyses of their needs and behaviors, they are whittling pennies from cable bills only to squander dollars on gas driving miles to discount stores, or on coupon-spurred splurges for nonessential items, like Cheez Whiz or organizing supplies. Pinched by shriveled retirement and college accounts, battered by ballooning mortgage costs, rent and co-op maintenance increases, and hedging against the possibility that a job might vanish, some are practicing economies that may not deserve the name.
When Best Buy announced its latest sales figures last month, the company reported “an unprecedented drop in consumer buying of items like flat-screen televisions,” said Ori Brafman, a business expert and an author, with his brother, Rom, of “Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior,” out since June from Doubleday Business. “But when Wal-Mart released its report last week, there was a surprise. Consumers had increased their flat-screen purchases. Somehow, because Wal-Mart feels like a bargain store, shoppers who have deprived themselves of luxury items elsewhere rationalized their purchases at Wal-Mart as ‘getting a good deal,’ ” Mr. Brafman continued. “Granted, flat-panel TV’s at Wal-Mart might run a little cheaper than elsewhere, but no financial adviser would include one on his or her list of Items to Buy During Tough Times.”
Americans may be forgoing Starbucks and stocking up on Spam, but they are also making severe “diagnostic errors,” Mr. Brafman said. “They’re stressed out, and using the wrong information” — such as the belief that buying at Wal-Mart equals saving money — “to make a decision, and ignoring all other data that contradicts that decision.”
Kathy Peel, a Dallas-based family manager (that is, a life coach whose niche is training families to run their homes like businesses), said that incidences of feckless budgeting and bad math seem to be on the rise, at least judging from the reports of coaches trained in her system. Leslie McKee, a Peel-trained family manager in Pittsburgh, has noticed a pattern of “people signing up for discount stores that sell in bulk and over-purchasing ‘bargains’ that are so enormous they will not live long enough to use the item,” she said. “Then they call me and spend more money to help them organize it all into mini-malls inside their homes.”
---MORE AT Link-----
