So, let's backtrack through the year and talk about the wonders of utils. You know what utils are right? What. You don't remember?? So shameful.
Utils are a unit of measurement for the utility of a good or service. Measuring a good or service's utility is the same as measuring the usefulness a person finds in them. So, while the infinite number of utils Alyssa can find in eating another donut, someone like Zoe, who doesn't love donuts as much, can find a significantly smaller number of utils in said donuts.
Now, while we all may poke fun at Alyssa's obsession with the wonderful sugary, fried circle pastries that are donuts, we could all sympathize. There are always some foods in this world that you just really question yourself, "Do I really need to buy another one? I only have enough money to get home, but that's more than enough to buy another one.... I'm gonna buy another one." Okay let's hope you don't actually get stuck in a situation like this, but there is always one delicious food item in this world that will really make you question your self-restraint. And I was faced with such an ordeal, and failed. Miserably
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| Just look at them!! So cute and delicious |
Have you ever had a macaron? They're not always amazing every time you try one, but once you've found a good one. Wow.
Here's the real lesson in this blogpost: learn how to control your obsessions or else you'll almost, almost, spend lots of money you don't have.
So, when I went to San Francisco this past summer, I had the pleasure of walking around the boardwalks and checking out all the need stores and restaurants. Well, just my luck that I found this cute little pastry shop called Miette Patisserie, which is french for Crumb Pastry. How cute. Anyways, I saw jars and jars full of different flavored macarons for only $1.50 a macaron. And these macarons looked soooo heavenly. Really, the $1.50 for these nicely sized macarons was not a bad price, so I bought around 6 macarons, 1 of each flavor. I won't describe to you the amazing, deliciousness that were these cookies, but let's just say, after eating those macarons, I bought about 5 dozen more over the period of 3 days left of my trip. Yea. Like I said, it was real bad.
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| Shameless advertising for my most favorite dessert shop ever. |
I tried controlling myself from buying more macarons, I really did. But really, let's look at this in a utility standpoint! I had only a scant number of days in a city that requires many hours of air travel, these macarons were relatively cheap, and wow they are so freaking good. I don't know about you, but that's quite a number of utils I can get by buying another macaron. Well, decision paralysis may have been... some sort of factor in my choice to buy macarons. I was thinking about all those non-price affecting factors for my reasons to buy another macaron, that oh look at that, I'm already buying another dozen.
Economics can be a kind of dangerous thing wants you understand it. Trying to reason with yourself to buy more macarons by analyzing utility really is just not good for your money when the utils are off the charts.
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| Shhh... logic is not welcome when macarons are on the line. |
Okay, but that wasn't even the really bad part. When I got home from San Francisco, and finished the dozen of macarons that I had bought to bring home to Texas, I was so obsessed over these cookies that I googled the restaurant and found out YOU CAN SHIP MACARONS. But uhhh, one small problem. There's kind of a shipping fee, that kind of requires a plan to ship it, in kinda of a short amount of time. It kind of cost like $60 to ship about $12 worth of macarons....... I'm so glad I have some basic understanding of self-restraint, because wow was I heavily weighing the pros and cons of buying those macarons. To be fair, those utils, they never lessened. They're still very, very high.
In the end, I didn't spend $72 for a dozen macarons, but did I really almost consider that the utility of getting a dozen macarons flown from San Francisco was really worth it? Hecks yea I did.
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