Today is the official spendy frenzy of Black Friday and it’s time to

… ask yourself some searching questions in the vein of Oscar Wilde discoursing about the cynic

A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

because apparently you must go out and bag yourself a bargain this weekend. So what are these bargains they tell me of, then? I may as well start with what I know 🙂

Bargains I tell ya

So what do we have here? Top left, a shaver, which apparently was ‘worth’ £300 and is now half that. Now the Mail is not targeted at Russian oligarchs, or the sort of bullshit you get in the seat-back in business class, or even the Torygraph’s look-but-don’t-touch Luxury section. So it wouldn’t be unreasonable to imagine the typical Daily Mail Reader on the median UK wage, apparently £517 per week last year. From all the wittering about stagnating wages, automation and damned furreners I don’t imagine it’s gone up that much in the last year. These are apparently gross earnings, so a quick spin on ListenToTaxman tells me

Listen to Taxman gives it you straight

that this fellow gets a gnat’s over £400 per week. So let’s say he runs a 40 hour week then he’s earning £10 per hour. Sadly his commute costs him more time and to add insult to injury the train companies seem to take a dim view of not paying. The FIrestarter did the maths, I’ll assume my punter eats a 25% hit rather than TFS’s 1/3 hit. So our Daily Mail Reader needs to spend an hour working/going to work for every £7.50 he earns.

Righty-ho, so he wants a shaver, call it £150. That’s 20 hours of not seeing his wife and kids… The Ermine is clearly behind the times, I didn’t realise you can spend that much on a shaver. So be it. We have the Nespresso Lattissima coffee machine, yours for £125, that’s 15 hours at work. I’ve already had the rant about how a Nespresso anything is a way to electively pay more for a restricted range of coffee, and produce more needless waste compared to the gonzo filter cone. But here you have to add the extra time to decoke this darned thing, because the combination of milk and heat is a cleaning nightmare, so you have to factor in the extra cost of the cleaning help. Or be prepared to take half an hour over an espresso, half of which is to clean out the milk section. The advantage Starbucks has is they amortize the cleaning over lots of coffee drinkers, whereas drinking 50 cups of espresso a day is going some at home.

So let’s move on to the pretty lady then. Somebody really ought to tell her that winter’s coming, but what the hell. The trusty Ermine calculator tells me that is about 634 of your Great British Pounds for four items of clothing, so she’ll be working a month and a half [ref]Clive is absolutely right, it’s not as bad as that[/ref]a shade over two weeks  to pay for that little lot.

Black Friday is For Fripperies, not Fundamentals

Not so fast –  the time calculation gets worse. All these good people have to live somewhere and presumably eat something, so we really ought to run these calculations using disposable income. The Money Advice Service tells us that the average monthly disposable income is £224 [ref]lies, damned lies and statistics, eh, note the shocking sleight of hand switching from median to average. When it comes to income, it seems the stinking rich lift the average with respect to the median so that £224 is probably an overestimate[/ref]. Mind you, these are the same fellows who tell us that  it’s news to 1 in 100 of our fellow countrymen that you are supposed to pay a loan back, so maybe they fish in murky pools for their punters.

All of a sudden our shaver purchaser is looking at working for three weeks to get his whiskers trimmed, and our summery lady is looking at the wrong side of three months to buy that outfit.

Personally I’m on the other side of Oscar’s cynic.  There are a lot of very clever people out there. They go to work every day to make you screw up your finances by buying shit you don’t need. And Q4 of every year they go into overdrive.

‘just think of your children – buy these loom band kits’

Reminds me of Charlotte Metcalf buying Silly Bandz for Christmas because she couldn’t bear to tell her daughter that she didn’t have any money left. WTF is it with selling overpriced rubber bands to children?

Where’s Tyler Durden when you need him, eh?

God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.

Happy Black Friday, all, and Cyber Monday, two inventions designed to put the consumers of the UK further away from financial independence. We can’t have the people giving The Man the middle finger, eh, so run along and form an orderly queue to buy shit you don’t need. No fighting on the shop floor, okay?