Meaningful Returns

I have, on my keychain, an odd looking piece of metal. I don’t know exactly what it looks like, but whenever I see it I think of a Lego figure’s arm and hand. It’s a bottle opener, and it says PEABODY’S on it, and I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.99 brand new, and I didn’t even buy it–my friend Brian bought it for me.

There is a common misconception that price is the best signal of value, but that’s a lie. Price can be a signal of value, but there are many things of value that are dirt cheap. A good mental exercise would be to think of some of your favorites.

Some of mine are:

• my PEABODY’S keychain bottle opener ($3 slash free, thanks Brian!)
• Eggs (somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.16 and $0.40 a piece)
• Zebra ballpoint pens and mechanical pencils ($5)
• a cup of coffee ($2-$3)
• used books ($1-$10)
• rubberbands ($2 for a bag of approximately 8,000)
• Carl Richards–one of the good guys in the world of money–swears by this ice cream scoop.

I said this would be a good mental exercise, but really this is a life exercise. If you don’t figure out ways to fight the current of a consumer culture which says “PRICE IS THE BEST SIGNAL OF VALUE BUY ME BUY ME” then you will of course get swept away by it.