My Latte is Worth It - No Fun Allowed
m50d.github.io
m50d.github.io
In fact, as a European who regularly gets prevented from doing so, you should count yourself lucky that they allow you to pay for it in the first place. Also, I don't know a lot of places where you can even get a decent latte for $2 anymore.
People seem to sweat investing $2 per download for anything, even if they thoroughly enjoy the product, but they don't even think about spending $10 at the coffee shop. It's that kind of disconnect people are trying to address by invoking the latte thing.
Also, I envision the marketer thinking of me as part of a herd of cud-chewing cattle, or worse, like one of the people on the conveyer belt in Relead's god-awful landing page [1]. It's angering in some low-level way. Is this really how marketers think of consumers?
Edit:
> People seem to sweat investing $2 per download for anything, even if they thoroughly enjoy the product, but they don't even think about spending $10 at the coffee shop.
Maybe you'll see less of this if you drop the "less than your stupid latte, dumbass" sales tactic.
Edit 2:
Sorry, that was a really jerk way to make my point, and I apologize below. Leaving it here however to preserve the thread.
Wow, that was unnecessarily abrasive. It's not unreasonable to expect a product to cost something, even if it's virtual. And nobody is suggesting putting the latte analogy as advertisement on the front page of services.
> "What, you waste money on overpriced coffee, why not waste your money here too?!"
That's entirely beside the point. The assumption is that nobody wastes anything. It's an analogy about paying for electronic goods. And just because something does not cost a lot of money doesn't mean it's an impulse buy either.
> And nobody is suggesting putting the latte analogy as advertisement on the front page of services.
But that's exactly what soooo many people do.
It's a well-supported fact that in the absence of other indicators people will use price to estimate the quality or value of a good. That means that if I don't know much about your product offering, your price is one of the biggest things I take into account when deciding how good it is and whether or not to buy.
If you put a cup of coffee in my mind as something with which I should compare your product in such a way as to suggest that my coffee is insignificant, I immediately think of your product as insignificant. If you then go on to tell me that your price is lower than the price of my insignificant coffee, I think of your good/service as lesser.
They choose a compulsory, daily purchase that many people make for a reason and I think Benjamin's arguments are totally valid. I think the psychology here is clearly "It's not enough money for you to think hard about dear, don't hurt your head with the math and just go for it".
Absolutely it's telling the target that this is cheap enough to be an impulse buy that they don't need to think hard about.
[Disclosure: Ridiculously happy Netflix customer since '98 or so.]
I understand what they're trying to say, but it just feels like the wrong way to go about it.
However, I really like the way you phrased it: "It's not enough money for you to think hard about dear, don't hurt your head with the math and just go for it."
Drop the slightly condescending tone and I think that is a winner!
"It's not enough money for you to think hard about it. Don't bother with the Math and just go for it!"
I like this, for whatever reason. It's honest and direct?
The honest and direct way to sell something is to sell the thing on its own merits, not to try to get me to short-circuit my own decision-making.
I view it as investing 40 minutes of my life on top of the $2. There's so much of the free "hilarious, must watch" links to click that I won't even spend 1 cent unless I'm damn sure it's worth it. Not that I'm defending $10 lattes anyway but they are at least 99% predictable.
Perhaps we should replace the "Please rate us on the AppStore" notifications with something like:
Did you get more enjoyment out of this app so far than:
* a latte ($1.95)
* a pizza ($4.95)
* a movie ($9.95) or
* a season box ($29.95)?This would be amazingly hard to translate and adapt for various places where AppStore is present (the whole world).
And still they pirate it, watch or play it for free, and are entertained for X period of time. Or not, but even so, their time has been spent, and their money hasn't.
Even so, $2 isn't a huge loss if what you bought turns out to not have been worth it. And if you worry about the 40 minutes lost, then you need to learn to relax. Time wastage is not a bad thing per se.
Furthermore, the predictability of coffee versus entertainment is not a good comparison. When you buy a movie or book or video game or something you're not guaranteed to like the product. But no one is forcing you to buy it either. So to take it free and then say "oh, didn't like it, not paying" is the lamest thing in the world and I'd be willing to bet that if you could drink coffee before you bought it (so you can decide whether it's "worth paying for") there'd be rampant coffee piracy. You're really not guaranteed to like anything you buy but if it comes in the form of a digital file suddenly people feel like it's alright to "try before you (maybe never) buy". The reason why movie trailers, singles that get played on the radio, 30 second song/video clip previews, and game demos exist is so you can see if what you're thinking of buying fits your taste. Needing the entire thing to decide sounds like such an excuse to justify not paying.
People do need to relax like you said. Have we shoved our heads so far up our asses that 40 minutes spent watching a bad TV show is a sin? I can get on board with the whole being efficient thing but there comes a point where worrying about whether consuming some media for 40 minutes will waste your time is actually worse than wasting the 40 minutes itself. (And can't we tell if we don't like something long before the 40 minute mark? I mean, we can quit watching/listening/whatever when we figure out we don't like something)
And then that quickly turns into a argument supporting piracy.
The transaction cost is also much lower - you don't have to fill out a form, you dig into your pocket and fish out some change. Your pocket carries change without any need for a confirmation email. And you can easily pick between the $5 coffee, the $2 coffee or the $0.50 caffeinated can of sugar water. But however small, these still involve the exchange of money.
The analogy would work if at every door in your city, there was someone handing out possibly mediocre coffee to every morning commuter. Along with a flyer containing some offers that you don't have to take but maybe would consider reading while on the train. You can imagine what this is going to do to the business of the really nice couple who hand-select their beans from fair-trade producers in Brazil and just invested in a $15,000 espresso machine.
It's very difficult to believe that, when you average it out, the fair market price for a movie download is $2. It's, to all intents and purposes free once you've paid for the cost of production.
Now coffee, by comparison, is relatively expensive to make and transport than then pay those little coffee house people to turn the machine on for you. There are a lot more palms to grease in the coffee business. It's not even close to comparable.
And it's not as if coffee sets the price at $2/40 minutes pleasure anyway. You only need a few cups of coffee for the entire day, and then you've got the rest of the experience - at least if you're in a decent coffee shop.
It just doesn't make any sense - the things shouldn't, on what it costs to make, be that expensive. And in terms of pleasure the equation's massively inaccurate.
Perhaps the answer is that people have gotten used to everything being "free" on the internet. May be they think that the cable (or internet) bill is more than enough, and they are entitled to get everything for free online, including movies etc?
The problem is? google provides better email service, for free[1], than most pay providers. I am /exactly/ the sort who would run a for-pay email service; I wrote my first sendmail .mc before I was old enough to drink, (and that was back when sendmail was still a thing) and I've been maintaining mailservers longer than that. Also, I have a reasonable reputation for transparency.
But I don't think I could compete with Google. I mean, sure, I could get you a much more private service, but for what people expect to pay, I just couldn't do as good of a job of actually maintaining the mailservers as google does. Hell, even if I could charge 1998 rates, like $5/box/month (which I can't) I don't think I could do a better job of that than google.
If you really want the full privacy benefits of having private email (e.g. being able to know something is /really deleted/ when you delete it,) you have to run your own mail server. Doing this well is a fair spot of work, probably more than $5/day worth of work (I mean, if you are compensated well enough that a latte is worth $5 more than a drip coffee with milk made at home. It is a non-zero amount of work, and you do have some sort of 'emergency' work every couple of years; something that is broken that is causing mail to bounce. Personally, I rate 'emergency' work as more expensive than the kind I can do on my own schedule.)
[1]I mean, in exchange for whatever monetary value they can extract from running their automated advertising tools against your data.
The gmail web interface has become really annoying of late. I don't think it's an impossible task to do better than them by any means.
Google exposes the mail through IMAP, no? why don't you use your own mail client with the google backend?
I've written support software for and modified open-source pop3 and IMAP software, and I've gotten partway through writing my own SMTP server, but I never even /considered/ writing a client interface for mail. If I'm providing mail service, I will provide you mail service, and give you smtp and IMAP (encrypted, of course) interfaces to that mail service. Heck, I might support an open-source imap to web interface, too, but the way I see it? running the mailserver and running the mail client are two very different things. If you primarily choose your mail provider based on the provided web interface, you are probably not going to be a good customer for me, because I consider the mail client to be outside of my domain as a SysAdmin. Also, I come from an era where web-gateways to IMAP were considered some kind of cruel joke.
I'm not saying that interfaces are unimportant, but it's a very different product than just managing mail servers. I'm good at managing mail servers. I have a difficult time coming up with someone who would be less qualified to write a custom web interface. (I mean, unless the current open-source imap-to-web interfaces are good enough; I can manage open-source software just fine; I'm just not a UI kind of person.)
Personally, I wouldn't expect the sorts of companies that are best at running mail servers to also be the best at writing mail clients. That, and I wouldn't want to give up control of my client to other people, because a lot of what makes up a user interface is personal preference. That, and there's no real advantage to having the same people run the server and the client; IMAP is well-standardized.
As far as I can tell, paying for your email does not get you any real increase in privacy. Rackspace staff can read your email just as easily as Google staff can read Gmail (it's strictly against company policy in both places, but still technically possible). If the FBI issues a subpoena for your email, both Rackspace and Google will be legally compelled to give it up.
When we don't pay for email, we are at the mercy of free email providers. They can terminate our account for any reason, without no appeal whatsoever. It has happened before.
Email is fundamental, it is the one foundation on top of which we do things on the internet. Forgot password, bookings, registration on a new site - every single one of them is via email. And most of us happily trust Google (or Microsoft etc) with our email, without paying a penny. I'm not saying these companies aren't great, or willfully do something bad with our data (they won't - if anything, gmail is really nice, except for UI) - It is just that they have no incentive to help us when we get in trouble (account getting hacked, for example). After all, they are a business, not charity.
Email is just one example. It surprises me that people wouldn't pay for important things (even when they are cheap) but would happily pay for overpriced coffees, popcorns in theaters (huge rip off) etc. Same with those who buy only "branded" items, even though many times the non-branded items are nearly as good and are cheaper.
However, there is a difference from an organizational pressure perspective: with gmail, I'm not really Google's customer. With hosting, I am the host provider's customer. As a result, the nature of the business relationship is more clearly defined and they have less incentive to play fast-and-loose with the "rules". (Excluding legal mandates, unethical employees, etc. which are an equal exposure either way)
It did take me time, but I have realized that emails and email addresses are NOT going away anytime soon, might as well have something permanent.
If you've told everyone your email address is myname@somefreeprovider.com, it's almost impossible for you to move for whatever reason. The switching costs are actually very high. If it's myname@mydomain.com, you can move your email provider at will, and you're unlikely to ever be forced to pay more than $10 per year, which is pocket money for most folk.
So yes, if you don't mind having someone elses company name in your main identity on the web, that's fine (along with all the portability tie in problems and privacy). On the other hand if you want me@myname.com then you'll probably be shelling a little money out.
And fastmail provides other services too, that people might be more used to paying for, e.g. static webhosting with webdav support for upload, custom dns control. Contacts accessible through ldap, distribution lists, sms, detailed control over login including OTPs etc.
I've switched recently and do not regret it. It gives me a lot of the flexibility I had years back when I ran my own mail server, and none of the massive pain.
From an advertising standpoint, the latte example makes sense, because it's something a large chunk of people (in the US/UK) can make a quick mental comparison. In Italy I have seen many similar examples comparing goods and services to an espresso, or the price of going out for a pizza.
It's a given that for many people the 2 bucks spent on a Latte are completely worth it: I don't see why anyone should find the comparison offensive.
It's not like someone is criticising how you spend your 2 pounds. It's advertising. If you don't find the argument valid, just keep enjoying your Latte, and life goes on as usual.
Sure those people exist, but don't forget that not all are like that. I wouldn't even consider spending that much at a coffee shop, especially not regularly.
Meanwhile, that local coffee shop will probably still be standing there in a week, doesn't hold your card info (just swipes it temporarily), and you can go back and pound them in person if they do something wrong.
Yes, your coffee is great and wonderful, it's what you look forward to, etc etc. I'll first say that the majority of people don't have such an intimate connection to coffee, so congratulations for being a special little snowflake. I wouldn't say that with such disdain if not for the fact that you clearly think the world of your coffee, yet can't bother to think for the extra two seconds it takes to realize that there is definitively something in your life you buy regularly, that is of no use to you, that you get more because it's simply there.
I don't even drink coffee and I get this analogy they're making. Most of us on this site are making more than enough money to sign up for dozens of these services per year and literally not give a shit. That doesn't mean we should, but the fact that they are that cheap DOES imply that there is little risk other than to your time(and if you don't have time, why are you on that site? Or here, for that matter.).
And before anyone says, "Well if that's the only argument they have for trying their product, it's justified.", I'd first say that I've never seen someone stupid enough to do that before, and I'd second say that's still bullshit, because your problem isn't with the coffee line, it's that they gave you no information as to what the product is. Come on.
This isn't to say you should try every product there is out there, but this is such a throwaway, worthless, immature argument to make that honestly I have to wonder how you didn't think to yourself beforehand, "Didn't the time it take to write this cost me more than my fucking morning latte?"
I bet the author enjoys writing too: so creating that blog post might cost more than a latte - but the experience of thinking, writing, editing and posting something online provides value to the author. Seems like a reasonable thing to do then!
If you don't think you'd HAVE that experience, then once again: Your problem isn't with the line about coffee, IT IS WITH THE PRODUCT.
He's taking a whole lot of time and tossing it out the window because he's wanting to be passive aggressive toward a product he doesn't think is worth a damn, which is even more inane than vaguebooking.
It seems pretty clear to me that this is not about the product being offered, but about the idea that selling your product by belittling the rewards from a different transaction of similar monetary value is utterly worthless. The line about the coffee is absurd and doesn't add any value to the product being sold.
I don't really think the tone of your comments is helpful in making the case you are trying to put across btw.
You would spend $2 on just a cup of coffee. The entire concept is that a cup of coffee is a minor thing, you buy it practically without considering it's tangible benefit.
It's supposed to shock you into thinking Wow they are right I should spend money on product x since it is less than this thing I buy out of habit more than for its value
You can read it as a statement of "$2 is not very much money at all" - but then I have a problem with comparing unrelated products that simply happen to share a price point.
"You'd spend 20 bucks going to the cinema, why would you not spend the same amount on a garden fork?"
In the end the blogpost was suggesting that you cannot compare your product to a coffee, because you don't know how much I value that coffee beyond that I am willing to spend $2. This gives you no information about how I would value your service, because it is not a coffee based product being served to me with a smile.
When I'm selling my widget I might think that £2 is insignificant, and is the same as a cup of coffee, and billions of people buy coffee every day, so why don't people spend that insignificant amount of money on my widget? Well, emotionally, £2 is not insignificant.
To get someone to give me £2 I have to overcome some barriers. One way is to compare it to something that seems insignificant, such as a cup of coffee.
That might have worked so far, but at some point people are going to catch on and it's not going to be as effective and I'm going to have to find something else to try.
This article is an indication that people are starting to resist the coffee comparison.
But I do hope it doesn't become the new "you're not the customer you're the product", because that's overplayed.
This ain't exactly the maturity high-jump.
Retorted a very angry person, disagreeing sharply with a short, lighthearted post written about how enjoyable latte is.
From the sounds of it, you're a bit out of touch with the common man these marketing lines are trying to reach. If they were trying to appeal to you, they would say, "hey you, come be super negative about other people's ideas! There's an endless selection of directors and producers to call stupid and childish!"
A few bucks a day still matters quite a bit to me. And I love latte. And I really liked the post.
It's a valid argument to make that, to him, comparing product cost to an experience he truly enjoys isn't the most effective way to convert him into a customer. At the very least it's something to consider for anyone who works with marketing.
The point of the article as I read it is not that £2 is cheap - hell I come from a generation where the idea of charging £2 for a cup of bloody coffee seems insanely expensive - but that you're not spending the £2 because it's cheap. You're spending it because it brings you significant value.
Selling yourself on cost, especially comparative cost to a different product/service, is not - in my experience anyway - a terribly effective technique outside of commodities. For just the reason outlined in this article. Sell on value instead.
So that STILL makes his argument nothing more than "I don't think your product is worth the 2 pounds" argument, which still makes the logic of his post absolutely missing the mark.
I'm fairly certain this is why you're having trouble relating to the enthusiasm of the author. I'm not even joking - the reward response to coffee is huge.
That still doesn't give me a good reason to passively aggressively attack a statement instead of a specific product simply because I can't be bothered to see the point the person is making, that 2 pounds isn't very much at all to pay for the wonderful experience of having pudding, so why not see if their product similarly will still have an insignificant price to you while giving you a great experience.
Your comments about it, however, are straight-up aggressive, and I honestly don't understand why.
Coffee gives a guaranteed positive experience - you know what you're getting - and the latte is not the only reason for that.
People are happy to pay for coffee even if there's a fair chance the coffee will be bad. If the service is good, and you get a relaxing place to sit and work, and you get a caffeine hit, that's usually more important than the product. Money spent on coffee is never wasted - you always get more value than the amount spent on the whole experience.
If you buy an app and it's bad - that's the end of your experience.
Even if your coffee is bad, you will likely get a refund or replacement, if you care to spend a second to ask.
If your app is bad - the money's gone and you have no recourse. You might be able to fight your way to a refund (but you probably will view it as sunk cost) and there's no way you'll get a better app as a replacement.
App developers who use the throw-away line "less than you spent on your morning coffee" need to be more aware of what they're comparing their experience to. Apps really don't compare well.
Then it is very stupid to buy it, so the "less than your latte" argument becomes "make a small stupid decision because you made a large one". Not very appealing.
...
>I don't even drink coffee and I get this analogy they're making.
I think those two quotes are related. You don't understand.
...
>I wouldn't say that with such disdain if not for the fact that you clearly think the world of your coffee, yet can't bother to think for the extra two seconds it takes to realize that there is definitively something in your life you buy regularly, that is of no use to you, that you get more because it's simply there.
caffeine is by far my favorite addictive drug. It's special in that most other drugs that are even close to as pleasurable carry with them significant dangers, or, at the very least, interfere with my ability to work effectively. Caffeine is the opposite; not only does it feel good, it makes me far more effective.
Like most addictive drugs, though, the delivery mechanism? it tastes really good to the regular users. And much like old scotch, fans can get something out of relatively small differences in process. I mean, I am okay being actively dependent on caffeine in ways that I'm not okay being actively dependent on alcohol, so price does matter more... I've got a moderately high threshold for "expensive" when it comes to whiskey, for instance, 'cause I'll go through a few bottles a year. If I needed a double to get up every morning, I'd pay more attention to how much the stuff costs.
But yeah, uh, middle-class people regularly paying extra for "special preparation" of their drug of choice is a luxury, to be certain, but it is a very traditional luxury.
I honestly can't think of anything. I shop for food once a month, (mostly online) pay my water bill, buy myself new clothes from time to time, car repairs and fuel, pay my martial arts teacher, obviously I've got to buy hair-care products and stuff like that so I don't look atrocious, I spend a reasonable amount on books. But I can't think of anything I just impulse buy and get nothing out of. I don't tend to impulse buy at all - I'm not the sort of person who walks into a shop unless I know there's something I want to buy in there. I find my money goes much further if I make a few high-value purchases that are really nice.
Heck, truth be told I rarely buy coffee. When I used to work in an office I bought an atomic coffee maker and a hot-plate - which I still have - and we made coffee in the office which was vastly nicer than the stuff at the coffee shop.
I suppose from time to time I go out to eat or drink, but there you're buying a social experience as well as the food and it's not clear to me that your $ to pleasure ratio isn't going to be vastly superior to coffee there.
Some people do waste a large amount of money, but I find it hard to believe it's a universal. What is it you think I'm likely to be wasting a lot of money on?
One can be held, consumed, worn, looked at, etc.
The other is a potentially unbounded virtual expense. This isn't necessarily a logical way to look at it, it's a safe way to look at it because deep down we all know we don't feel the usual lightening of our wallets.
So, I think we naturally set a higher bar for those "virtual" purchases we buy. There's also other factors, like us having foreknowledge of coffee.
Coffee is coffee. Even when it's shit, it's still an okay experience and you still got your performance boost. That app though...who knows. They're all different. It's shiny and I want to buy it, but will I really ever open it?
* In your head, 2 pounds sounds insignificant to pay for anything(because it is). That's why you pay for the coffee. You think it's worth that.
* You immediately associate their product with something useful, that enables you to work every day. You can barely make it without your coffee, and their product will similarly make your life much easier with it than without.
* It wouldn't change people's perception nearly as much as you think. People don't get Starbucks thinking, "It's 2 pounds, what the fuck do I care", they get Starbucks thinking "It's my coffee, I want my coffee"
It isn't about how you feel about your morning coffee. For one, you're not the center of the universe, obviously this comment is meant to be seen by thousands who don't have such a religious experience with their coffee. Second, if Starbucks had a way to magically teleport coffee through the computer screen, it STILL wouldn't change how people look at 2 pounds in relation to getting something they think is worth 2 pounds. These aren't people glorifying coffee, it's people making a value comparison to try and gloss over the risk that amounts to little(2 pounds) more than time.
I see a lot of friends struggle to get the money together for a summer holiday, yet every month they're spending £9.99 on Spotify, £5.99 on Netflix, £20 on Sky, etc. Gym memberships in London can easily run to £50 a month but you can haggle them down, same goes for phones - friends of mine are spending like £45 a month on their latest iPhone contracts.
Not sure what I'm getting at. Just that it's easy to make living a modern life very expensive if you're not careful.
The way I like to think about it is to figure out how big of a nest egg do I need to earn enough of a return to cover that expense in retirement. For example, I would need an investment of $18,000 which earns 4% avg annual interest to cover my $2 daily coffee expense forever.
Its fun to think of all your expenses this way and as you build your investments you can see how much of your lifestyle is paid off forever!
I built a little calculator to do this math for me: http://networthify.com/calculator/recurring-charges
I've yet to see a single early retirement blog deal with the issues of investment risk, inflation risk and longevity risk properly. It's starting to drive me a tad potty. I will literally buy you a [starbucks] cookie and mail it to an address of your choosing if you promise to start using "Expected Annualised Real Return" instead of "average interest".
To be specific about the problem, a 4% annual interest over 4 years could represent: 2%,2%,4%,8%. Those will result in something different to a flat 4% pa. If you are going to have a withdrawal you need to work out what you do in the 2% years, because otherwise you have less money earning interest than expected and your gap starts to widen. Now what if the fed prints a crapload of money to lessen the national debt load, and you are suddenly facing $10 coffees?
Anything other than the risk free rate needs to be treated properly, as a risky return, or we are going to see in 40 years a lot of people who thought they'd saved enough for early retirement, but it turns out they had not.
Disclaimer: I am an actuarial student working in investment at a pensions consultancy. My living revolves around trying to quantify these risks.
Its worth nothing that you could end up with an ever widening gap, but you could also end up with an ever growing surplus if your early years get > 4% return.
I don't think any calculators really deal with this other than http://www.firecalc.com/ (which has a terrible ui -- look for the big red 'Start Here' text and then click the 'Submit' button). Building a user friendly firecalc clone has been on my todo list for while. I'm not sure where they got their data.
With regards to my other calculators on Networthify, I'm not sure how to create a usable ui that reflects this reality.
Also there are at least 2 other big unknowns -- taxes and inflation. So when I'm calculating how much money future-you will have I'm not too worried about ROI. I agree that people need to understand these calculators are just educated guesses. Still -- you do the best you can with the information available. Its better than closing your eyes and not even examining the possibilities. At least you can calculate some worst case and best case scenarios.
-- UPDATE
Oh hey, do you mean there is some sort of formula for expected annualized return?
At it's most basic savings for retirement should be considering things like "what does a 40% drop in the market mean for me?" "What does uncontrolled inflation mean for me?" "what happens if I live to over 100?"
In general, I obviously believe that knowingly flawed models are better than nothing. If you want to demonstrate some of what's at risk, do a single "1 in 200" scenario. So all of the above in one example. Half way into the projection period the portfolio drops by 40%, inflation doubles and you increase the projection period by 20% (pulling a deterministic scenario firmly from thin air). You can fudge the maths a little and simply output 2 sets of figures:
Expected present value || Risky Scenario present value
The risky scenario parameters can be hidden away with the other more advanced things, and you've got yourself a nice output demonstrating what could conceivably happen. There are other ways, but it depends what and how much you want to show.
More than anything though, I just want to see these calculations properly phrased as estimates. Returns defined clearly as real (or nominal, and model inflation). And a mention given to the cost of living longer. For a cup of coffee, no one cares - not even I. We are talking about 80 year olds having to find work to help account for a depleted nest egg. It's really serious stuff.
RE: Edit Annualised return is simply (1.021.021.06*1.04)^(1/4). You are calculating these things based on an expected return on assets, it is important to be clear that it is not an arithmetic average that you are using but a geometric one. I don’t know if you are modelling the withdrawal cashflows (there is no need with a constant rate of interest) which is really where this stuff starts to hit home.
There are a tools like CodeClimate or Creative Cloud that I think people are not using personally because the costs are too high.
I believe, with tools like that, that if you make the 'personal use' fee trivial you get a wider base that will go on to introduce it commercially at work - so you net more over time.
20 years ago, as a student, I made this case to IBM on OS/2, I won 'letter of the month' in the internal magazine - they didn't change the pricing for personal use.
I believe this is a bigger part of why apple has recently won (and why that win is not permanent) than people think. When I was a child? the public schools usually had (presumably subsidized by apple) apple computer labs.
The thing is? it's /hard/ to transition those "personal use" folks into 'business use' folks. outside use as workstations at trendy places, apple /still/ isn't in corporate the way microsoft is. My own company has a similar problem; I don't really have any products appropriate for the 'serious business' customer, save for co-location, and my co-location is ridiculously low-margin, which is the opposite of what you want to do for your 'serious business' product.
When looking at my finances, food is always #2 every month right after housing.
I love my coffee, and I love Burn Notice. Possibly in equal measures. Sometimes I watch Burn Notice while drinking a coffee. Sometimes my children and wife join me. Life is often good.
All the author is saying is that if you are going to compare the price of one item that gives pleasure with another, then you should ensure that they the pleasure to price weighting needs to be the same.
Which, to be honest (when comparing TV series and coffee) for most people - it is!
You don't have to get all romantic in your notions of intangible value from lattes (or the rituals therearound, etc) to justify the idea that you're happy to pay for something with a known reward (even if it is honestly only marginally rewarding), but hesitant to pay for something with an unproven (and possibly negative) reward.
Secondarily, I'd argue that when you fall back to intangibles to justify your actions and expenditures, you should consider (just for the value of the experiment in doing so) skipping them for a while. A month or two or three. Sample new habits and rituals. You might prefer them.
The app store and online purchases, by comparison, have been around for much less time, and have the dual danger of purchases feeling like nothing because you can't see them.
""It's only £2 - less than your morning latte."
I see this a lot, Netflix being the famous recent example. On the surface it seems reasonable; if you would spend this much on a small cup of coffee, why not spend it on our product instead?
But comparing to my morning latte is actually an incredibly high bar to set. What's valuable to me, as a human, is not the coffee itself but the experience. I spend half the morning looking forward to it, and half the afternoon in the afterglow. There's not just a drink, there's a place to sit and relax, free-flowing internet, pictures on the wall, and a waitress who fakes enough interest in my day that I actually believe it. Heck, at the café I'm writing from now the coffee itself is downright awful. But the moment I sat down I felt an eagerness to write. I've got more done in ten minutes here than in the four hours at home preceding it.
A cup of coffee might not be worth £2. But happiness is, and that's what I'm buying. If you want me to buy your thing for £2, it had better bring this much joy into my life. Otherwise, I'd rather have another cup.
[Home](/)"
I think everything you said is true, and in addition, I believe we've been conditioned to be more welcoming to physical purchases. A physical purchase of $10 is a concrete, observable deficit that we can touch and hold. A $0.99 purchase online is virtual...it's an unbounded abstraction with no immediate anchor for our enjoyment to dismiss as a "good buy."
This is a classical example of doing css+js wrong.
Loading the page with js disabled, shows a blank page. Disabling css, shows the content in a nearly non readable way, with extremely long lines. Looking at the source tells me, that its not even HTML.
It is html though, but not really proper html. They're sending the html5 doctype for instance, but not declaring a content type, and I think (but i'm not certain) that the xmp tag is all but deprecated by now.
Because you need to enable javascript from two different sites in order to read a paragraph of text that could have been formatted using the HTML from back in the Mosaic days.
Not so with the $2 downloads. There's a bajillion of them not capped in any way, so the only way to cap this part of the budget is to be aggressively selective about what you pay for.
For a game that you don't play, paying any amount is not worth it. And there's almost no limit to how many of those I can buy using a "latte argument".
On a less serious note, people defend coffee for several reasons, not just because it's addictive. It's been shown to be healthy and sustainable in moderation when it's consumed black. It's associated with productivity which is a mental booster, as well as all the other trendy, bohemian associations it has. And, of course, it has an immediately verifiable wake-up "kick" to it.
I don't drink coffee, but I get why people drink it. What I don't get is why people drink Starbucks coffee.
* Trusted brand (like McD's) * Atmosphere * Free wifi * Status * Crack or some other addictive substance added to the beverages
When I started going to the Starbucks near my old office instead, within a week they knew my name, they know my [custom] drink, they know what I do and what my plans are for the weekend without sounding fake or pretentious and despite being one of the busier locations in the city. For me, it's customer experience, and Starbucks really emphasizes that in their training process. My taste buds preferred the local shop, but my money went to the company where the employees actually looked up at me and smiled and engaged me.
I also know they have really great benefits for their employees and with sites like mystarbucksidea.com, they at least pretend to give credence to the ideas of their customers (although they've implemented quite a few of them, they've been incredibly stingy about buying hemp milk).
Is it really a mental booster, or is it just that people who have morning coffee to "wake up and get productive" get their first "hit" of caffeine for the day and so fight the caffeine withdrawal symptoms? IMHO, the inclusion of caffeine in DSM-5 suggests the latter.
Suggesting that they buy half a dozen and just delete the ones they don't like is met with a look as if I suggested sawing their own arm off.
Predictably their phones are just jammed with apps that they never use but keep because the "paid good money" for.
Assuming you want to simplify spending choices to this degree, be realistic:
If it's Netflix, it's closer to $10 a month for unlimited usage. If it's a latte, it's more like $4 per day.
If you only buy one latte, and only on weekdays, that's in the neighborhood of $86 per month.
So if you accept the idea that you should select the thing that brings you the most "joy" for the lowest expenditure, then unless you plan to get Netflix and then just not use it at all (or if there's nothing on it you want to watch), it's clearly providing more value for a lower investment.
As I said... the whole thing strikes me as a bit silly and seriously presumptuous, but it's also pretty unambiguous which option "wins" if you consider it past "x and y cost the same" without bothering with the frequency of payment for both of them.
You could save money by making it yourself! And then you'd have to:
* Steam milk, and clean the pitcher out after.
* Grind coffee
* Make espresso, then clean the espresso machine. If you have a home machine, that means you had to fill it with water at some point, too.I buy my americanos at the coffee shop.
The only thing on which I almost never count my money is food and drinks. I agree that it doesn't make sense to not have problems throwing money for a coffee that lasts a few minutes while not wanting to spend money on a movie or an app. I get what the author says there, but the experience he describes is only a once in a while deal for me. For instance, I buy Earl Grey tea because it tastes good for the amount of money I put in it. It's less than $0.10 per tea cup, which seems more than fine considering the amount of time I spend drinking it. However, most of the time, the less pricey food/drinks I can find often turn out to be the worst in terms of healthiness. We shouldn't count bucks when it comes to that.
I agree that it's kind of a silly argument to use for Netflix. High-tech services need to market themselves by their inherent value, not by comparison to a commodity.
Since we're on the topic, I would like to point out that drinking coffee in the morning -- while by itself not harmful -- may be a symptom of a harmful roller-coaster schedule where you have to rely on substances to wake yourself up throughout the day. With a healthy schedule, you may as well try apples and an extra 10 minutes of morning exercise.
You know what would really be of a lot of value to me? Agreements between distribution networks to get each other's content when one doesn't have it, kind of like "roaming" for cellphones. If they had such a service, I'd pay the premium every time I want to watch a movie one of them doesn't have the rights for.
I've personally seen many people buy things just because they're shiny and they could. On the app store, this translated them to buying hundreds of dollars of apps just because they were 1. "cool" (i.e. never open them again), 2. well marketed, and 3. trendy. Because they couldn't feel their wallet emptying, they just kept buying and were surprised at the iTunes receipt they later received, shocked really.
That's an extreme example, but it illustrates my point well.
Drugs are incredibly valuable. It's only the ease of creation for alcohol and coffee (relatively) that makes them cheap, but if they were rare we'd pay whatever it took to get them. Their intrinsic value is enormous.
So the pattern has been around for a while.
And there is another thing, talking contrarian: many modern investors, including Jim Rogers and Marc Faber, claim that the future is in agriculture. This is where the big money is going to be made. There are all classical signs of the boom market in the agriculture market: limited supply (weather sucks, less and less water, expensive energy, lack of land, lack of farmers) - and huge demand (6 billion people and growing rapidly). I think that IT hits the law of diminishing returns - free apps available everywhere, or ones that cost next to nothing. But a cup of coffee is 3 bucks. IT head it peak in late 1990s. It's still good, but it's not as good as being in agriculture. So just thinking aloud here - it might get much worse for IT and much better for the agriculture. I mean think about it - 3 bucks a cup of coffee? And what about the cost of other foods? It all goes one way only all the time - up, up, up. Farmers are going to make it big time. While we waste time for startups that don't even get from the ground in 90% cases.
So, what about IT startups in agriculture? Anyone works in these? Are there any?