25% More Convenience Expense

Just about any item has a price threshold of acceptability for me (although I often don’t know what that specific price is until faced with a price tag and have a gut reaction). Somehow an extra dollar or even ten cents can make an item no longer desirable for me, yet sometimes I’ll just need something and will buy it regardless of the price.

For example, the other week I went to the no-frills supermarket and they didn’t have the milk I always get in the size I always get, so I didn’t get any milk. A few days later I went to the nearby “regular” supermarket that’s more expensive and bought my milk for 25% more. Granted, fifty cents isn’t a great amount, but because I know the price difference exists, it irks me. I don’t like feeling like I’m getting a poor deal but sometimes it’s a trade-off.

The much busier no-frills supermarket is worth going to when buying many items, but not really worth going to when buying one or two items—it just takes so much more time and energy to drive to, shop in and check out. So I went to the nearby supermarket and paid a little more so I could save a little time. And it was worth it... sort of. [Pause.] What do I want more of, time or money? Ideally, both.

Go-To Food

Sometimes I find the most ordinary things fascinating, like supermarkets. Supermarkets contain a range of items from fresh produce to dry ingredients to prepared foods, and they reflect the preferences of their customers. Going into a supermarket in a foreign country (or even a foreign food supermarket in the U.S.) is an experience for me because while there are often many similarities to an average American supermarket, some differences are quite vast.

A quintessential food I think of for Americans is breakfast cereal. There’s an entire aisle dedicated to boxes of the stuff in flake, puff and loop form. There’s the ultra sweet cereals, chock full of chocolate, “fruit flavors” and marshmallows; there’s the “healthier” cereals with dried fruit and nuts. There’s pretty much every type of cereal imaginable (and some you didn’t think ought to have been imagined)—basically, there’s a cereal for everyone.

In Japan, there was no breakfast cereal aisle. I found cereal on a lower shelf —there were about six different cereal options (and half of them were essentially corn flakes). But they did have a very extensive instant noodle aisle; there was ramen, udon, soba, yakisoba and perhaps some “low fat” noodle options as well. Everyone seemed to eat instant noodles and have their favorite brands and flavors.

Both breakfast cereal and instant noodles have one thing in common: they’re fast and easy to make. When you’re hungry, you just want to eat something immediately, and with cereal you just add milk; with instant noodles you just add hot water. Anyone can do either of these things successfully, so it becomes that go-to meal when you’re just too lazy to make anything else (and there are times I get pretty lazy…).