@db4690: “I certainly hope you’re joking . . . ?! 
” Well, I was looking for a short way to say this because I didn’t want to go too far off-topic, but here is the long version. The calculator is mostly a metaphor because most of the math I can do in my head. But the “unit-price” tags tend to vary from store to store. Supermarket “A” will list the ‘price per ounce’, supermarket “B” will list the ‘price per pound’, and supermarket “C” will list the ‘price per each’. Sometimes you see this with items like soap, the price per ‘each’ will be lower, but the bars are 1/2 an ounce smaller than the other store. Hence math is necessary. Once during a conversation with a co-worker, I mentioned that most 18 ounce peanut butter containers have been downsized to 15.6 ounces, and most 64 ounce orange juice cartons have been downsized to 59 ounces, and he had the same exact look on his face as an 8 year old kid who has just been told that Santa Claus isn’t real.
I try to pay attention to stuff like this, and I have changed the brands of stuff I buy on several occasions because of this kind of stuff. Whenever I’m in a store, if I see stuff that I use, even if I’m not there that day to buy that item, I make a mental note of the price and compare it in my head to what it costs at the store I do buy it at, always looking for a bargain.
Its a state of mind, and when you live your entire life that way, you can’t just turn it off. I was trying to help my mother save $1.59 on a carton of pudding cups at a time in her life when her out of pocket medical bills were over $3,000 a week. My mother even though her faculties were failing at that point saw the ridiculousness in this and pointed it out to me. I couldn’t explain it beyond just saying I guess I’m just wired that way.
I totally get the post @GeorgeSanJose made about his co-worker who came into 10’s of millions of dollars and bought a very high end car and took it to Costco for tires probably because it didn’t occur to him that he didn’t need to go to Costco for tires. (Although I guess he made that post in another thread.) I remember reading an article about self-made millionaires where one guy who was supposedly worth north of $20 million said his wife still bought 2-ply toilet paper and took it home and unrolled it to make 2 one-ply rolls from 1 two-ply roll. When you grow up without a lot of money, that kind of thing becomes a way of life.
In regards to @Bing 's most recent post: I do very physically demanding work, for a company that becomes increasingly impossible to work for every year. A lot of the people I work with live hand-to-mouth lifestyles, some of them well into their 50’s and 60’s and can’t afford to retire or even take a few days off because they don’t have any money even for next month’s bills. I don’t want to be 60 or 70 years old, limping around eating oxycontin pills like tic tacs, going in to work thinking, gee, I sure hope I can work fast enough to not get fired this week so I can collect another paycheck and not be homeless this month. I want to be long gone and forgotten from there by the time I turn 60.
Of course most of my colleagues take the opposite attitude, “I work hard for my money, I want to enjoy it TODAY.” Me, I work too hard for my money to hand it over to some finance company, and. . . . aw, heck, I don’t want to get too preachy and off-topic. Oops.
