Thursday, 07 January 2010

• Economizing 101: Question The Paradigm

  
  

  
  For Christmas this year I was gifted a much needed staple that is becoming an annual tradition: white athletic socks. 
  
  I understand that socks may be a minor expense to most but when it comes to penny pinching I am one of the world's top experts. I have been lucky enough to have been born with an overly active urge to hoard or be obsessive and one of the things I can focus on is small change and terribly minor, usually unnoticed details. In regular language, I can be overly detail-oriented and I'm cheap.
  
  I have gone through the year slowly releasing these white socks one by one as they have developed holes in the heels or toes. In the hard and cold city, you can't monitor the amount of bleach that someone else uses to do your laundry so things that go to the wash and fold tend to deteriorate more quickly than they probably should, and socks and underwear are the first things to go.
  
  I jumped for joy when I unwrapped my present and discovered a whole bag full of crisp, white, soft and cottony athletic socks, and immediately told myself I would make a ritual of removing the sock drawer,  finding all of the strays and mismatched pairs, and discarding them if they were cruddy and/or possibly delegating some to cleaning rag status and putting them under the kitchen sink.When I actually started to do this I had the most brilliant of ideas! Why, I asked myself, am I thinking of socks as if they are a pair of items joined at the hip? 
  
  I realized I could save a few pennies if I simply trained myself to think of socks as individual items and started inspecting them one by one. I mean, they aren't in pairs of left and right or anything. Then, instead of discarding unacceptable pairs of socks, I could be looking only for the unacceptable single sock, and just replacing that with a new one! This way, I'll have my bag of new socks and be able to dole them out one at a time to get the maximum use out of each and every sock!
  
  Before this, did I ever stop to not think of two socks in a pair as a double entity? They aren't! They are individuals and just because you have two feet (well, most of you anyway) doesn't mean your socks inherently come in pairs as well. I mean, think about this: If someone were given the death penalty for murder, and they happened to have a twin—why kill them both, right?
  
  So this year, I'm going to go through my sock drawer and discard individual socks, replacing each lost sock with a new sock for its partner. That actually makes the most sense, doesn't it?  
  
  Instead of wasting an acceptable single sock, you end up in the long run with more socks than you would have and get the most bang for your buck!
  
  It makes more sense to match a brand new white athletic sock with an old sock that is still "good enough to be wearing," thus creating more pairs of socks with the new socks—instead of discarding "still good enough" socks just because their mates have gone bad.
  
  Have you ever rethought the way you wore or used a product to save money?
  
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