There are a lot of things we purchase that aren’t cheap, but we buy them anyhow. This could include your house, your car, or even your coffee from Starbucks. None of those are a great value, but we consider those expenses to be worthwhile.
In thinking through what things cost, though, a few seem very underpriced for what they deliver. Market forces and competition have forced them to stay low, which is a win for all of us.
Trash service
The trash company we use (and love) isn’t the cheapest around, but they’re still an incredible value. At $72/qtr for trash pickup, that’s just $5.53 for each one.
Imagine making this proposal to someone else: “I’m going to leave a bunch of trash in front of my house. I want you to get a big truck and come and pick it up. Do this every week at the same day and time, and I’ll pay you $5.53 for it”.
That’d be crazy! For a single person to handle a single house, even $50/pickup would hardly be worthwhile. The economies of scale and competition help bring that price down to something that is just unbelievably inexpensive, and I love it.
Fiber internet
The other one that comes to mind is our internet service. We pay AT&T $70/mo for 1GB fiber to our house, with essentially no downtime ever. That’s $2.33/day for us to use internet service on five computers, four phones, and a variety of TVs, tablets, VR headsets and other devices. We stream movies, play games, write blog posts, and it just flies. For $2.33/day? That’s amazing!
I’ll still gripe (even if just internally) about many of the bills that I have to pay, so I try to even that out by appreciating how amazing some of these services are for just a tiny fraction of the cost of what their value is to us.
