Saving Cents Doesn't Always Make Sense

On the Rifftrax app there's an old short "educational" film called "The Grocery Witch."  I think it's from the early 70s and it involves a witch using magic to convince everyone to save money by doing things like putting sugar on corn flakes instead of buying pre-sweetened cereal, making your own pudding instead of buying cups, making your own oatmeal instead of instant, seasoning your own rice instead of buying pre-seasoned rice, and breading your own zucchini instead of buying frozen.  (No, I hadn't heard of breaded zucchini either before this.)

In theory those are great ideas to save a few bucks, but the reality is for most of us, we'd rather spend the little bit extra for the convenience of frozen or pre-packaged items.  As the riffers pointed out, making your own pudding is kind of annoying if you want to put some in your lunchbox for work or school.  Sure you can use a Tupperware-type container, but then you've got to make it the night before so it has time to set and put it in the container and wash both the container and the bowl and all the other stuff you used to make it with.  The time and mess and all that for most people isn't worth saving a few cents versus buying a pack of Jell-O cups or other cheaper brands.  Especially if you buy a generic brand in bulk the "savings" are pretty minimal.

I was reminded of this when I got an old-fashioned shaving brush/soap set from Amazon Vine.  It was free so it didn't cost me anything but really it seemed the cost outside of Vine and the time it takes to make the lather and such isn't really that great over just buying a can of cheap shaving cream from Walmart or a "dollar" store or whatever.  Especially since I don't shave a whole lot, basically once a week, so I've had the same can of shaving cream for a couple of years.

One time the stores were out of frozen French fries so I bought a bag of potatoes from Walmart and made my own in my air fryer.  If you slice a couple potatoes up fairly thin and put a little oil and salt on them, they taste pretty good--most of the time.  There is kind of a learning curve to how to cut them and how long to cook them and so on.  An obvious drawback is that potatoes will start getting eyes and stuff after a few days while frozen potatoes can sit in the freezer for a long time.

During the lockdown in 2020 when it was hard to get fresh groceries, I got a thing from Amazon Vine to make my own almond milk.  It worked but it was really slow and cumbersome.  Better are "milk bags" you can get from Amazon for like $6 for a pair of them.  Almonds and coconut I got in bulk from nuts.com so they weren't too expensive.  Still, it's a bit messy and time-consuming, so once I could easily pick up prepackaged milk again, I did so.

I do cold brew my own coffee when it's warm outside.  That's something else I got from Amazon Vine so no real cost to me except for the coffee grounds--and sometimes I get those from Vine too.  It can be a little messy with the grounds but usually it's a lot cheaper than buying cold brew from a supermarket or Starbucks or McDonald's

Recently I got a machine from Amazon Vine that makes egg bites like the kind you can get from Dunkin' Donuts or Starbucks or Tim Horton's.  It is a little messy and time-consuming, but it's a lot cheaper than going to a coffee place or buying frozen biscuits like I had been doing.  Plus it's less carbs and stuff than biscuits or croissants or English muffins.

Anyway, the point being that a lot of the time while we can do things ourselves, the cost benefit is not usually worth it.  We'd rather pay a little more for the convenience.

When it comes to publishing books, some people would rather pay for the convenience of someone else doing the editing, formatting, cover, and marketing.  And more extreme people say you have to do that not even as a matter of convenience.  

As I've talked about before, though, those costs can really add up.  You can easily shell out $5-20,000 just to put a book out there.  The likelihood of making those costs back is slim to none.

My operation works well enough with very few costs.  Sometimes I buy a cover image but even that's just a couple of bucks since I buy the smallest size and usually buy in bulk.  I do my own editing, my own formatting, and my own marketing with a free newsletter.  The website hosting on Wordpress and 1and1 is really the most expensive part of my operation and probably fairly useless too.  I mean if you want to talk about convenience it is nice to have a web presence, but I can't really say how many people actually use it.  From the counter on the Planet 99 Publishing site, not that many, just about 2800 in however many years since I set the counter up.  The most valuable part of the web thing is so I can give books to newsletter subscribers, though even a lot of that is done through MailChimp and Prolific Works.

Anyway, the important thing is to consider whether you want to pay the cost for the convenience of something.  If it's something you can do yourself with little muss and fuss, then it's probably better to do it yourself than to pay someone.  But some people lack confidence about editing or covers, so they're much more comfortable paying someone to do it.  Those who say you HAVE to do it one way or another, though, are just idiots.