This post is the first in a series intended to get you (and me!) thinking about some ideas related to frugality and minimalism, and looking at them in light of whether or not the ideas are spreadable and/or sustainable. Today’s topic is “scarcity frugality”.
What is “scarcity frugality”? We already know how I define frugality; let’s look at a definition of scarcity.
Scarcity, in economic terms, is the idea that a resource is limited. Most things are scarce to some degree. For example, the Mona Lisa painting is very scarce – there’s only one in existence. Many people want it, but only one person can actually own it. A slightly more common example might be tickets to a movie – the theater only holds a certain amount of people, so you have to get your ticket before they fill all of the seats in the theater.
Prices do a pretty decent job of keeping things in balance, that is to say the number of seats available in that theater is typically slightly larger or about the same size as the number of people who want to see the movie. On an opening night however, it may be an entirely different story. If a very popular movie comes out you may see lines of hundreds of people buying tickets, sometimes buying tickets to shows hours or even days later in order to get in.
There are certain frugal tricks that rely, by their very nature, on scarcity. For example, lots of frugal people look for meat when it’s on clearance (usually a “use by” for the same or the next day) and freeze it for use later.
Scarcity comes into play when you realize that everybody can’t wait until the last minute to get meat on clearance. In fact, if everybody stopped buying meat that wasn’t on clearance, grocery stores would probably stop selling meat. It’s the larger number of people that pay retail that enable a small number of bargain shoppers to get a discount. The discount is also only had by the first person who decides to buy – once they make the purchase, the meat is gone.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t do these sorts of things; quite the contrary! If you see a bargain on meat, I would encourage you to grab it.
It is to say, however, that a trick like this one isn’t particularly sustainable. You can’t count on the resource being available. By definition, that clearance meat will only be there if they have extra that didn’t sell during the week. If you’re having a party this weekend, you can’t count on stopping by the store on Friday and picking up some clearance hamburger. In fact, if the grocery store learns to plan their meat purchases better, the resource could cease to exist entirely.
It’s also not very spreadable. If you tell five friends that there’s clearance meat at Aldi on Fridays, that means there are now six people on the lookout for the same scarce resource. In this case, it’s a safe bet that several of those people will go home without their discount meat. If it can’t be achieved by six people, it certainly can’t be used as a model for how a neighborhood, city, or country should live.
The key question here is, “if everybody else did this, what would happen?” If the answer is something along the lines of “it wouldn’t work”, you’re dealing with scarcity frugality. Scarcity frugality still yields a benefit, but the benefit can’t be achieved by everybody.
We’ll look at another type of frugality in the next post – stay tuned!