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Gasoline isn’t as expensive as you think …At least that’s what Dan Ariely writes his The New York Times editorial “Eyes Off the Price”. His theory is that gasoline just seems so much higher than everything else — like health care, food, electricity and telephones — because of the way we buy it. As he says, “For the several minutes that I stand at the pump, all I do is stare at the growing total on the meter — there is nothing else to do. And I have time to remember how much it cost a year ago, two years ago and even six years ago. Yet I have no such memory about the prices of items in any other category … milk 6 years ago … bread 3 years ago … yogurt last week…
“But I suspect that if I stood next to the yogurt case in the supermarket for five minutes every week with nothing to do but stare at the price, I would also know how much it has gone up — and I might become outraged when yogurt passed the $2 mark.
Also, quantity plays a role: “Maybe if we bought 13 loaves of bread at a time or 15 gallons of milk we might become more sensitive to how much we spend on those items.
“We are ignoring … [other] expenses that might actually have a greater effect on our budgets … maybe we should just learn to examine all our purchases and expenses more holistically so that we see where rising costs make the biggest difference.
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The New York Times,“Eyes Off the Price” by Dan Ariely, July 19, 2008, pg A17
