Ian M Rountree

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The Semantics of Price

May 26, 2010 by Ian 5 Comments

Yesterday I did something fantastic. I mean really mind-blowing, from a personal perspective.

I bought clothing from Old Navy.

This is mind-rendingly awesome for two reasons: primarily, I was amazed I found clothes there I liked. Secondarily, I fit the clothes.

Let me put this into context for you. Price for clothing goes by tiers. Everything between size “air” and size “high average” costs average price. For a pair of pants in the late 90’s, this was anywhere from $15 to $40 – and that’s if you wanted the good pants. When you’re the size I was in high school, you’re not even in the “Dear lord, what do you eat” category – I spent most of the end of my school days broaching a 50 inch waist, wearing size quadruple-extra-large shirts, and taking whatever I could get for under $100 per article.

That’s right. When I was in school, most guys bought cars. I bought pants. That’s a big difference.

I haven’t fit 42″ waist pants since I was fifteen. That’s 1997, folks – twelve years of paying well over $70 per pair of pants I needed to replace. Clothing quality is going down, and prices are going up. This means if the average person of my size bracket buys five pairs of pants per year, they spend between five thousand and seven thousand dollars on pants alone in fifteen years. Someone in the air-to-average bracket spends theoretically three thousand dollars buying the same amount of clothing. That’s a possible difference of $4000, in fifteen years.

Some people buy cars. We buy pants. I won’t even mention shirts, socks or, gods forbid, underwear.

When you’re overweight – or even just large, I’ll never wear anything smaller than a 38, due to bone structure alone – you don’t get certain choices. Yesterday, I bought the largest size available in both pants, and shirt. I happened to be lucky enough to have noticed the relative sizing, try the clothes on, and be happy with them. Shirt and pants cost me what a shirt usually does. A shirt, one shirt. Singular. The pants were basically free.

When you’re looking at financial choices, it’s easy to feel hosed into certain corners – credit cards, vehicle maintenance, housing costs, personal or student debt. It’s worth remembering sometimes, that some financial considerations we really don’t get visible choices on. I now get to cut a basic cost of living in half, just because I’ve been active, eating better, and paying attention to myself.

Now that I’ve got pants, maybe I’ll finally be able to buy the damn car.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: cars, choices, finance, pants, pigeonholes

A Definition Of Value

January 6, 2010 by Ian 1 Comment

Anyone for tea?Everything has a price tag these days. How do we decide what has value? In a culture where anything can be acquired for a sufficient amount of money – land, real goods, art, ideas and other intangible objects, even integrity – how, or perhaps why, do we insist on assigning a flat numerological factor to anything?

Anil Dash asserted yesterday that having a million Twitter followers isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. How Kim Kardashian gets paid $10k per tweet, I have no idea, but it seems to me this is where the entire followers system falls down.

Commerce demands an objective sense of value. There isn’t a lot of bartering going on in western culture, at least on the business scale. Set prices help us get some indication of what went into the production of a product, or what will come from the hiring of a service. We look at ten nearly identical computers and decide value based on brand and price tag. We look at quotes from contractors and decide based on price and reputation. Often, we can trick ourselves into thinking it’s entirely a play for getting the most value out of each dollar we spend, but again, by what method do we demarcate the value of each dollar we spend?

Think about this: You have some vacation coming up, and you’ve got a few options, assume you have the budget for any of these following, and for the sake of argument, let’s say they all cost the same amount of money. The less pressure here the better. Here we go:

  • You can spend a few thousand dollars going to an all-inclusive resort with your partner, have an excellent week of recovery and recouping from the stresses of a busy season at work;
  • You could instead rent a car and a digital SLR camera, take a road trip across the country, load up on breathtaking pictures and souvenirs, and fly back home loaded with more booty and less of a headache;
  • Or, you could fly to another continent (assume there’s a seat sale) and backpack for a week, stay off the grid, maybe take a few pictures and enjoy some exotic food.

How do we decide between these three obviously appealing options? With a lot of consideration, if we’re smart. But it requires something western culture often fails to train into us; a sense of relational value. Which one of these three dream trips gets our vote requires a lot of bartering with ourselves. Perhaps I don’t like taking pictures. Maybe my partner has a desperate yearning to see Spain. Or maybe we’ve done one or two of these options, and all we’re left with is the third.

How we make these decisions relies heavily on personal value, and that’s the kind of thing business and commerce is simply not set up to handle. Here’s the kicker; neither is much of what we do online.

There’s a pendulum effect we can see clearly when we’re dealing as a society with new modes of communication. Just like learning a language, adapting to a new process goes through a number of stages; incomprehension, misunderstanding (or incomplete knowledge), savvy, exploitation, and fluency. We go through various fields of “I can’t do this” to “Others can’t, I win by default” and settle in the middle on “everyone can, hooray!” – but it takes time, and critical mass, to get the pendulum to stop, and a lot of interference to ensure it stops in the middle ground. That’s objective value, that’s where we are right now. Everything online is a transaction. You follow me, I follow you. I tweet, you retweet.

It’s not conversation. It’s not bartering. It’s exploitation, and it’s right in the middle.

Oddly enough, incomprehension, savvy and fluency are all on the side of socialisation. Incomprehension and misunderstanding fuel exploitation, and demands objectivity to be corrected; this is a good thing, because objectivity is great for commerce, but very bad for people. It doesn’t leave any room for personality. And with all of the hype around the human business and personal brands – all of this oomph moving us away from the middle, away from mediocrity and towards individualising the world, we need room for relational thinking. Without which relationships are transactions, and transactions are nothing but ephemeral.

On a bizarre side note, this happens to be entry number 100 on this blog.

Photo by Richard0

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: anil dash, bartering, choices, commerce, misunderstanding, objectivity, relational value, relationships, savvy, socialisation, society, the middle, vacations, value

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