This time of year many shoppers are looking for value. They want a rock bottom price on all the things they purchase. They go to great lengths to find the lowest price on whatever the next big ticket item is for the year. Some stores try to add the extra incentive to get you to buy certain standardized priced items at their store by increasing the value you get for the same money you would pay for that item in any other store.

If the hot item is a $300 game system, the incentive might be a free controller, a free game, or a gift card good toward a future purchase in their store. Shoppers go along with it because they understand they are getting more value for their money. The stores do it because they can and it works. They know that if they get you in their store you will likely buy something else besides the items you came in for and they have literally millions of chances to tempt you into spending more money than you planned to when you walked into the store.

The problem with all of this perceived value is that it convinces us to spend money we don’t have, that we can’t afford and that we haven’t even earned yet to get these great deals that only come around once a year. I’ve been there too. When money was super tight it was the only way we could afford to give gifts to our relatives. Even if the gift was supposed to be a set price limit, like say, ten dollars, we want to give as much as we can for the set amount we could spend.

I used to get up super early on Black Friday and venture out to a few stores. There were even years I dragged my kids along because Hubby had to work. I spent hours pouring over the stack of ads in the Thanksgiving Day paper, making lists of the places I’d like to go, what time they opened, and what I’d like to get there. Sometimes you knew you couldn’t be in two places at the same time so you had to decide which place was going to give you the most value for showing up early and what the chances were that the item you wanted to buy would still be there if you weren’t one of the first few to enter the store after it opened.

These days, buying gifts for everyone in our family for Christmas each year has become a chore. Many of the people we feel we MUST buy for we barely see the rest of the year. We aren’t quite sure how old their kids are or what their interests are. Is it any wonder we often opt for gift cards so they can just pick what they want? Anything else feels like a consolation prize type of gift and we know the recipient won’t be any happier getting it than we were buying it. It seems every year there are more people we don’t really know added to the list, live-in significant others, new babies, etc. It all kind of makes you wish you could just travel for the holidays to some quiet location and just hide out from the world.

I wish we could all value the Christmas holiday for the birthday celebration it is meant to be and just make a donation to the charity of choice and go back to enjoying spending time together without all the stress and cost of gift shopping and the disappointment of knowing your gift was not well thought out or well received and that it will end up being clutter in the recipient’s home or donated to charity eventually. Nobody seems to take the time to return gifts anymore, because it is such a hassle. Where is the value in that?

This post is part of the weekly Five Minute Friday link-up!
The prompt this week is: Value
The assignment: Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation. Just write.