Time versus money

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It is Sunday. Let’s say you need to buy an item. It cost $2 from the local shop which will take 30 minutes by bike to go there, get the thing and come back. You can go tomorrow when the shop opens. Alternatively, you can get it mail ordered and it will be delivered to you by tomorrow, but will cost $3 for delivery for a total cost of $5.

Do you go get it or do you get it delivered. Does your answer change if the shop is further away and you need to drive there and back to get it. Let’s say it still takes 30 minutes in total and there are no costs (you can use the company car and fuel is paid for you).

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Are you reading misbehaving by richard thaler? :wink:

My answer: I would order it. Time > money.

You could also add the question: does your answer change if the product in question costs 2000$ instead of 2$? JND (just noticeable difference)

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I would spend the 30 minutes biking because I don’t do anything else anyway (except hang out on this forum) and could use a little exercise :wink: . And apart from that, shipping costs in Switzerland are not $3 but more like CHF 7.50 + CHF 5 small quantity surcharge.

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That’s why I included the second part where you don’t get exercise and isn’t the tram where you could do something else in the travel time :wink:

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I am not. This was a real-life conundrum I faced yesterday :wink:

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I’ll ride my bike to pick it up. My reasoning is the opposite of @dr.coffee’s:
Health > Time > Money. If you’re not healthy, time is useless and money won’t help you enjoy life :slight_smile:

I’ll take the car to buy this item. The reasoning here is that I need this item on Sunday, whereas delivery will require me to wait an extra day at an additional cost.

I would have the same reasoning.

I don’t take the size of the item into account. When asked whether the reasoning would be the same for a $2,000 item, I focus on the value of the item and not its size. If it were a piece of furniture, I would have it delivered if it didn’t fit in a car (for example). If it fits in my car, assuming I have a car, I would go and pick it up.

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You mean “when a shop closer than 30 mins by bicycle opens”? Otherwise it just looks to me like you just don’t need the item all that much, there’s no urgency and you can incorporate that one item to your regular shopping. On the question: depends on my need. If I have guests coming in 2 hours and I am missing a key ingredient for the food I want to serve I will schlep out to get it, cursing my bad planning (“he who has no brain has legs”, we say in Greece), if it’s a luxury/greed (me/kids/wife really crave eg a bite of chocolate) I’ll probably still get it because I want to and can.

There’s a Denner in my neighbourhood that’s open 365 days/year, 7:00-20:00 regardless of Swiss holidays, weather, aliens, that guy and his workers are ALWAYS there. They always do VERY brisk business on Sundays and long weekends :wink:

What I am wondering about is this: there are independent cornershops in Greece, and if I remember correctly in the UK too, which operate outside the regular shopping hours of the mainstream shops and sell at a markup, sometimes a painful one (10-30%). Now obviously these are independent so they can charge whatever they like to people who are in need or are incapable of planning, whereas a franchise (of Denner, in this case) needs to maintain pricing consistent with the rest of the chain.

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Your question reminds me this nice test about how much is worth our time in different situations (*): https://www.clearerthinking.org/tools/value-of-your-time-calculator

*e.g. you are queuing for a free gift card, it takes 1 hour to get it, how much has to be worth the gift card?

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“Click start.”

“You failed since you are wasting 10 minutes of your life on an online quiz.”

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If I can bike, I’d definitely go. If I had to use the car, even if free, I’d order. Something in between would be if I could go by free public transport, probably leaning towards ordering in that case.

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In my question, the shop is closed on Sunday and opens Monday so for simplicity, we assume you get the same item whether it is delivered or you have to fetch it (assume you pick it up after work from the shop or the letterbox).

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It must be Denner Partner, which is not exactly the same. An idea for Barista-FIRE, anyone? You can also withdraw your 2nd pillar, I guess.

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that!

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Please note that they ask for an email adress to send you the results. Also, the questions are all of the kind of “if you were doing more or less of what you’re doing for your job now, should you be paid a bigger, lower or the same hourly rate as you currently are?”

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I guess it’s on top of the daily fitness activities, right?

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This is an interesting question. Because it does make a shift for me, which is totally illogical!

Somehow, I find it unreasonable to spend $3 shipping on a $2 item, but $3 on a $2000 item would be OK.

But in absolute terms, it is just the same.

In the end, I ordered the item for pick-up but got it when I had to make another errand so it was on a stop for a multi-stop run, so it didn’t waste too much additional time. Sadly, I did it by car, so no extra exercise.

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You could download the SimpleLogin browser extension to generate a random account.

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