Cause and effect: Useful habits that aren't that really useful at all

How much time would you waste to save £12.99?

I’m laughing right now as I used to live my life this way…

• I’d spend an hour looking for coupon codes to save £5 on a purchase.

• I’d queue up for an hour to get a free McDonald’s Burger.

• I’d shop for 2 hours to save £10-£20 on an item that costs £100.

• I’d spend hours signing up to freebie sites to get a load of samples for free, then get loads of junk email thereafter.

What

a

waste

of

precious

life.

As I type this, I’ve bought two foldable pushchairs for my daughter because I bought one initially from Wowcher. This item from Wowcher cost an additional £12.99 to post, but then, I saw a version on Debenhams with free postage. I was internally outraged! How dare they charge so much for postage!

So I bought the free postage version and requested to cancel the paid postage version, but they posted it already, so now I am frantically trying to cancel the additional pushchair. We’re talking about a £49.99 foldable pushchair here, all to save £12.99. Idiotic.

⌛ Time wasted:

• Live chat to Wowcher - 15 minutes, in dribs and drabs, taking my attention away from more important issues.

• Bouts of micro frustrations - 10 minutes.

• Thinking about it and how to resolve it - 20 minutes

• If I have to pay to return one of the pushchairs, take it to a depot etc… 30 minutes.

That’s 75 minutes of my time wasted to save £12.99 that’s £10.39 per hour, below minimum wage in the UK. Not to mention other people’s time and residue frustration on my end for being a fool.

The funniest part is that the company that provides the product is the same distributer for Wowcher and Debenhams, so they will be sending two pushchairs to my home. Hirix International Limited.

This little tale isn’t about two pushchairs and saving £12.99, it’s more about awareness of cause and effect (plus unconscious decision-making). I did all of this to myself, I can’t blame anyone. Yes, I can be annoyed at the customer services for not cancelling my order when I requested, but if I wasn’t so driven by these deep-seated beliefs of saving money, none of this would happen.

Of course, all of this is going on in the background, my so-called subconscious mind, so there I am, living my life, doing this and that, and then I get tangled in “Pushchair Gate” and it adds another level of stress in my life that needn’t be there.

Like I said at the start, I used to live my life like this. I was very shy and anxious as it was, then doing all of these little things that add to the stress, it felt like life was punishing me, but in hindsight, if I slowed down a bit, I would have seen the folly of my ways sooner, perhaps.

More often nowadays, I think to myself, what is the simplest solution?

For example, I needed to buy my dog some specialist dog food as he had a UTI, I found it on Amazon for £19.99 or Pets at Home for £15. I would have had to travel to Pets at Home to collect the food or wait a few days for delivery, so I decided to get it from Amazon for next-day delivery. I paid £4.99 more but it saved me time, which is more precious than money.

Later note: They did send both pushchairs in the end.

I am in the process of sending one back for a refund. I supposed I got a lesson from it all, and a Substack post.

Let me know what silly things you’ve done like this in the comments, don’t be shy.

Best wishes,
SLART

Cause and effect by SLART.