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livYesterday I bought a £100 pair of trainers. I didn't actually spend quite that much, they (or at least last year's equivalent) were reduced to £60 in the January sale, but still. It's hard to think of myself as the sort of person who makes that kind of purchase, partly because really, I can get perfectly adequate trainers for £10, what could possibly be worth an order of magnitude more? And partly because I am actually spending serious money on, of all things, running, which rather belies my self-image as a couch-potato.
If it hadn't been for my friends convincing me that getting a gait analysis done before choosing shoes is worthwhile, I would have been absolutely certain that it's a scam. I mean, it's a perfect marketing technique, making the customer go through a big palaver so that they're emotionally committed to the purchase and there is social pressure not to waste the salesman's time. And claiming to offer an individualized good which, although mass-produced, is in some sense supposed to be matched to the customer's personal needs. And lots of technobabble about the amazing features of the shoe that are supposed to magically enhance your running ability. It's practically a textbook example of how to get your mark to fork over ten times what the product is worth!
If I think of it as 50 books, I feel like a fool; how can trainers come even close to giving me that much pleasure for my money? If I think of it as a couple of months' gym membership, well, ok, that starts to feel a bit more like a proportionate investment. And if I think of it as the price of a return ticket to London, well, I spend that kind of money several times a month without really thinking about it, because that's the best way available to me of having a social life in addition to a full-time job.
I was particularly reminded of this because coming home on the train, I was woken from a doze by an argument between the ticket inspector and the guy sitting opposite me. The passenger had an Advance ticket and was trying to travel on a different train from the one his ticket was valid for. The ticket inspector insisted that the passenger pay a full single fare from London to Manchester, with no discount for his student railcard. That is a really swingeing amount of money, over £75. When the inspector absolutely wouldn't budge for arguments or pleas, the student offered his debit card and paid up, but he was visibly really upset, and spent the whole rest of the journey fighting back tears.
I seriously considered offering to swap tickets so that he could use my open ticket and I'd buy a single instead. But half-awake, I couldn't really think of a way to propose this that would satisfy the draconian inspector and also not embarrass the young man. The thing is, I remember very well being a student with £80 a month to live on after accommodation. I know viscerally how that feels, when one mistake with travel plans means nothing to pay for social life or pleasure for the rest of the term. And in lots of ways I was lucky to have that £80 a month (and somewhere, deep-down, the knowledge that my parents wouldn't let me actually starve if I really screwed up the budgeting.) I didn't have to borrow to attend university, my parents covered my rent during term and allowed me to stay in their home during the vacations. Plus my university and my city provided plenty of social and cultural opportunities that didn't cost money, making the tight budget a lot more bearable. In fact I never really felt short of money during that phase, I just had to plan carefully.
Student poverty is totally different from actual poverty. (Except when it isn't, of course; plenty of students genuinely are poor and don't have a parental safety net.) It seems like a lot of right-leaning chattering classes are confused about the difference, though. They remember living on a tight budget as students or perhaps as new graduates or newly arrived in London, and they are full of excellent money-saving tips and don't understand why actual long-term poor people can't just make money (such as state benefits) stretch in the way they did when they experienced a related, but actually totally different situation.
In some ways, if I'd been awake enough to think quickly and help out the student, it would have been a pointless gesture, a show of empathy for someone who is (I assume, though you can't always tell by appearances) basically like me, someone who probably won't suffer any worse consequences than a sad few weeks for the sake of that £75. If I'm going to distribute that sort of money on a passing humanitarian impulse, it would have been more useful to give it to one of the homeless people I passed between the running shop and the station, or indeed to a charity that addresses real poverty.
I still feel a little weird that in the decade since I graduated I have become so rich that I can in fact just blow £60 on a pair of shoes without making much of a dent in my lifestyle. Or indeed on a train ticket, but really the problem is that train tickets are absurdly overpriced. There are so many tricks and tiny T&C small print details set up to trap passengers into paying the "walk-on" fare, which is almost always utterly exorbitant. For the customer, if the train is late or cancelled or rerouted or whatever, at very best they might get a refund of half the fare if they jump through a lot of hoops and accept their compensation in the form of vouchers which, guess what, can only be used for overpriced walk-on fares purchased at the station and not for any sort of only-available-online special deal which might bring the journey into the vaguely reasonable price zone. But if the customer changes their plans in any way for any reason, or even misses a connection through no fault of their own, they suddenly have to pay a swingeing fine of a full-price single ticket in addition to the reduced price ticket they've already bought.
My brother the poet expresses this much better: If you suspect it, report it. That's a video with his performance of his poetry as the audio track, and works well as a whole piece beyond just the words of the poem. I'm happy to transcribe it if you can't watch videos, but I don't want to put the transcription right here, because he has a book out and I don't want to hurt his sales, that wouldn't be very sisterly of me!
If it hadn't been for my friends convincing me that getting a gait analysis done before choosing shoes is worthwhile, I would have been absolutely certain that it's a scam. I mean, it's a perfect marketing technique, making the customer go through a big palaver so that they're emotionally committed to the purchase and there is social pressure not to waste the salesman's time. And claiming to offer an individualized good which, although mass-produced, is in some sense supposed to be matched to the customer's personal needs. And lots of technobabble about the amazing features of the shoe that are supposed to magically enhance your running ability. It's practically a textbook example of how to get your mark to fork over ten times what the product is worth!
If I think of it as 50 books, I feel like a fool; how can trainers come even close to giving me that much pleasure for my money? If I think of it as a couple of months' gym membership, well, ok, that starts to feel a bit more like a proportionate investment. And if I think of it as the price of a return ticket to London, well, I spend that kind of money several times a month without really thinking about it, because that's the best way available to me of having a social life in addition to a full-time job.
I was particularly reminded of this because coming home on the train, I was woken from a doze by an argument between the ticket inspector and the guy sitting opposite me. The passenger had an Advance ticket and was trying to travel on a different train from the one his ticket was valid for. The ticket inspector insisted that the passenger pay a full single fare from London to Manchester, with no discount for his student railcard. That is a really swingeing amount of money, over £75. When the inspector absolutely wouldn't budge for arguments or pleas, the student offered his debit card and paid up, but he was visibly really upset, and spent the whole rest of the journey fighting back tears.
I seriously considered offering to swap tickets so that he could use my open ticket and I'd buy a single instead. But half-awake, I couldn't really think of a way to propose this that would satisfy the draconian inspector and also not embarrass the young man. The thing is, I remember very well being a student with £80 a month to live on after accommodation. I know viscerally how that feels, when one mistake with travel plans means nothing to pay for social life or pleasure for the rest of the term. And in lots of ways I was lucky to have that £80 a month (and somewhere, deep-down, the knowledge that my parents wouldn't let me actually starve if I really screwed up the budgeting.) I didn't have to borrow to attend university, my parents covered my rent during term and allowed me to stay in their home during the vacations. Plus my university and my city provided plenty of social and cultural opportunities that didn't cost money, making the tight budget a lot more bearable. In fact I never really felt short of money during that phase, I just had to plan carefully.
Student poverty is totally different from actual poverty. (Except when it isn't, of course; plenty of students genuinely are poor and don't have a parental safety net.) It seems like a lot of right-leaning chattering classes are confused about the difference, though. They remember living on a tight budget as students or perhaps as new graduates or newly arrived in London, and they are full of excellent money-saving tips and don't understand why actual long-term poor people can't just make money (such as state benefits) stretch in the way they did when they experienced a related, but actually totally different situation.
In some ways, if I'd been awake enough to think quickly and help out the student, it would have been a pointless gesture, a show of empathy for someone who is (I assume, though you can't always tell by appearances) basically like me, someone who probably won't suffer any worse consequences than a sad few weeks for the sake of that £75. If I'm going to distribute that sort of money on a passing humanitarian impulse, it would have been more useful to give it to one of the homeless people I passed between the running shop and the station, or indeed to a charity that addresses real poverty.
I still feel a little weird that in the decade since I graduated I have become so rich that I can in fact just blow £60 on a pair of shoes without making much of a dent in my lifestyle. Or indeed on a train ticket, but really the problem is that train tickets are absurdly overpriced. There are so many tricks and tiny T&C small print details set up to trap passengers into paying the "walk-on" fare, which is almost always utterly exorbitant. For the customer, if the train is late or cancelled or rerouted or whatever, at very best they might get a refund of half the fare if they jump through a lot of hoops and accept their compensation in the form of vouchers which, guess what, can only be used for overpriced walk-on fares purchased at the station and not for any sort of only-available-online special deal which might bring the journey into the vaguely reasonable price zone. But if the customer changes their plans in any way for any reason, or even misses a connection through no fault of their own, they suddenly have to pay a swingeing fine of a full-price single ticket in addition to the reduced price ticket they've already bought.
My brother the poet expresses this much better: If you suspect it, report it. That's a video with his performance of his poetry as the audio track, and works well as a whole piece beyond just the words of the poem. I'm happy to transcribe it if you can't watch videos, but I don't want to put the transcription right here, because he has a book out and I don't want to hurt his sales, that wouldn't be very sisterly of me!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 11:48 am (UTC)I can see the point of trying to make value-for-money judgments across entirely different kinds of good on some kind of basis like that, but I have to imagine that if I were to attempt to judge value for money by comparison to books then almost nothing would pass the test except books themselves. Because they're so cheap and have such enormous reread value, in terms of pleasure per unit money, I think books are a very extreme outlier!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 11:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 12:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 12:36 pm (UTC)[1] The message I get from reading Poor Economics is that a lot of the people who live on $1 a day have enough food to survive and do some work long-term, but not enough to really flourish, in that if they ate more they'd be able to do more. In Poor Economics there was a case of someone who scrimped on food in order to afford television; it seems there's a certain level of boredom at which you'll accept some hunger in order to stave that boredom off.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 08:04 pm (UTC)And yes, there's a Maslow-style hierarchy of food needs. It's simplistic to say I have to spend money on food or I'd starve, it's more like I have to spend money on food or put up with a lot of inconvenience and a reduced social life.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-15 08:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 12:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-01-14 08:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 07:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 12:19 pm (UTC)ROFL!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 12:27 pm (UTC)I think, as well as providing pleasure, books stave off boredom. Also, reading the right books creates connections with people, it gives you something to discuss, so they can help stave off loneliness too. Furthermore, if you were restrained from buying and reading books, you'd be frustrated, so arguably they stave off frustration too, though that one looks a bit more tenuous - what if books hadn't been invented?
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 08:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-15 02:45 pm (UTC)(doesn't anything that consumes your time in a way that is pleasing-to-you stave off boredom though?)
Running also often done in groups (although that's optional) so can help with the loneliness also.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 12:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 12:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 08:19 pm (UTC)The thing that reduces the p/m ratio for me is not the cover price of the book, but the effort (which I could express as a cost equivalent) of storing or disposing of books I only want to read once. Roughly, storing books is supposed to cost approx £1 per book per year, whereas physically getting rid of books I no longer want requires quite a time investment, possibly even more than £1/book/year equivalent.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 08:12 pm (UTC)If I'm being sensible about buying the trainers as opposed to converting the price into obviously ridiculous units, the point is that doing as much exercise as I reasonably can has pretty good odds of improving my long-term health. Good trainers as opposed to crappy trainers means my exercise is not limited by pinching and blisters and potentially wrenching my ankle or knees. And the amount of pleasure I'll get out of the resulting better fitness, hopefully throughout my lifetime, probably is greater than the amount of pleasure I'll get out of a year's worth of books, or at least roughly comparable.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-15 05:16 pm (UTC)Then you can read more books.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 02:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-01-15 02:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 11:53 am (UTC)Bought (and the previous anthology).
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 12:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 11:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 12:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-01-14 08:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 01:56 pm (UTC)Ba*d. That was what National Ex-bloody-press did when they were running the East Coast line, and it resulted in me having to spend £110 on a new ticket on top of the £48 I'd already spent, thanks not to my missing my train, but to King's Cross removing trains from departure boards three minutes before they go, *growl*.
I'm not the only one who had steam coming out their ears over this, and when the government took the franchise off National Express, they acceded to public demand and changed the rules so the money you'd already spent was deducted from the price of the replacement ticket. Shame on Virgin as greedy exploitative ba*ds if they are not doing this too.
And even that's just the best you're going to get nowadays. Twenty years ago, your rail ticket said you had to take the train you had booked for, but I never once got hauled over the barrel for taking the wrong train (though this may not have been the case had I been older and presumably richer).
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 08:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-15 10:02 am (UTC)I hate railway ticketing. I usually end up paying the walk-on fare because I'm really just Not Organised Enough to plan months in advance which specific trains I'm going to be taking.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-15 02:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-21 11:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 02:55 pm (UTC)I also saw a much nicer version of the train guard situation play out recently: I was on a train to Scotland and the woman opposite had misplaced her seat reservation, without which her ticket (which she had) wasn't valid. As soon as it became clear this was a problem, several people in the seats around asked the guard if she would accept the email showing the booking and reservation, and all offered the use of their smartphones and laptops for the woman without the reservation to pull up the email with her booking details. The guard was happy with that, and people were happy to help, and the woman was happy not to have to pay another £90 or so on top of the ticket she'd already bought.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 08:42 pm (UTC)I think I need to put running shoes in the mental category of shoes, not the category of random exercise-related gadgetry. I would rather spend money than wreck my feet and legs, or fail to keep up my healthy habits because I let bad shoes be an obstacle.
Argh, prescription charges! I am glad you managed to talk yourself in to getting the inhaler you need after all. I find it especially hard to spend money to fix a problem that I've caused myself by being careless.
I am glad to hear a train story with helpful fellow passengers and a ticket inspector prepared to be flexible!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 05:41 pm (UTC)I graduated almsot three years ago and sometimes I just hesitate when buying something and think "wow, are you seriously just spending 50€ on swimming gear" or "seriously, self, 90€ a night for a hotel?". But on the other hand, I also work 40 hours a week, the husband does more like 60, we can afford it, and I am really not going to stay in hostels anymore if I can help it :D It's all about priorities, though - I spend quite a bit on food and sports and travel, but have yet to shell out much money for furniture or a car.
Nice shoes, by the way! They will probably last you a year or maybe even longer.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 08:50 pm (UTC)And you're right people have different priorities for discretionary spending. I think things that are genuinely going to help improve my health (even though I could manage without if I needed to) are worth shifting to the top of the list.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 09:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 09:29 pm (UTC)Like, if the only way I can get an affordable ticket is to plan my itinerary with military precision weeks in advance, why should I expect to put up with service disruptions massively upsetting said carefully planned itinerary? According to the operators' own statistics, about 1 in 5 journeys is more than an hour late, and their "refunds" are incredibly stingy, since the come in the form of vouchers for half the cost of the original ticket, and which can only be used for expensive walk-on tickets bought in person at the station ticket office. If I'm an hour late, I fork over twice the cost of the original ticket. If the train company makes me an hour late, they give me half the cost of the original cheap ticket, at considerable inconvenience, to be offset against the full price ticket, so probably a quarter of the actual fare. Even though I can afford it, this set-up makes me really resentful.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-15 10:49 pm (UTC)But I'm not sure that I agree that the ticket inspector ought to charge the walk-on fare minus the cost of the advance ticket for cases like this. I think - though I could well be wrong - that the whole point of the advance ticket system is to address the problem that trains are often extremely full at rush hour but almost empty off-peak. If you allowed people to book advance fares and then get that money off a walk-on fare if they ended up on a different train, what that incentivises is people booking an advance ticket on the off-chance that they can take that train but with the back-stop option of taking a different train and not paying any more than if they'd taken the different train to begin with. So, the train company is still faced with the problem of overcrowding on some trains but other trains being empty. If you're trying to spread your customers over the whole day, you need to make advance tickets significantly cheaper and need to make it punitive to change your mind.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-15 09:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-15 02:31 pm (UTC)