Festival sales have started! Newspapers have full page ads blasting ridiculously low prices into your eyes and TVs into your ears! Every item you don’t require is on sale! Yes, you heard it right; don’t require!
Have you ever realized that what you need you’ve already got, and what’s on sale and discounted and flashing their most gleaming, shiny faces are what you most probably don’t need?
“Dad can I buy the new iPhone?”
“What’s wrong with your old one?”
“It’s old dad!”
And that is what lies behind much of our buying. We feel what we have is old.
I love comfort, and will not compromise having a comfortable journey, tasty food and all the good things in life, like a room with a view in a hotel, and not one which overlooks the next hotel, or someone’s balcony.
But, if the car I have is old but comfortable. If the hotel I’m staying in has bed coffee delivered to my room in the morning but doesn’t have a health club, I’ll take it. I have enough fitness centres where I live, and do not need to spoil my holiday, running on a treadmill, when I could be strolling leisurely on a beach!
And, if my washing machine or fridge is a tard old, but works efficiently, to hell with what visitors say when they see it, or comment on my TV screen.
It doesn’t matter, because my life doesn’t revolve round what they think of me, and if what they think of me, is based on what I have at home, or the four wheels that serve me, then they’re wrong friends I have, and I need to change them, not my car or TV.
‘Thrift’ was very much part of American culture, as the nation grew, and on thrift, did it become the most powerful nation in the world. For fourteen years billionaire Warren Buffett drove the same car. Was he laughed at? No people admired him for his thrift.
Something I learnt from my dad while in business, was that there were two ways to make a profit, either by increasing the price of a product, or reducing the cost of making it. Likewise, there are two ways to becoming wealthy, one, by earning more and more each year, or two, by keeping your spending down.
So, as festivals dawn on us with seductive sales and discounts, look around your home, take a realistic drive in your car, then decide whether you really need to spend.
Thrift is a profitable idea..!
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Well Bob, we need to keep up to the Jones next door don’t we, so spend the money your have as a surplus!!!
We are being sold everything, from FMCG to religion…. It’s all about making a killing on someone elses expense.
There is no time to sit back and think of the obvious- which business will give discounts and not make profits?
So sales are finally business strategies 🙂
The youth of today don’t seem to know anything about being thrifty. Can’t actually blame them due competition between peers in everything.
Our generation is the last one to understand thrift! ,