Twenty Something Sense

I was at dinner last night with a friend when I was presented with the following options for Margarita’s:

1.  Large – 22oz. $8

2.  Super – 28oz. $9

3.  Mega – 32oz. $10

4. Pitchers – 72oz. $29

My mind quickly honed in on the Mega-Margarita as it was only a $1 more than the super and you got an additional 4oz.  My friend was also going for a Margarita so we looked at the Pitcher option, but quickly noticed that although you do get quite a bit more (enough for several Margarita’s) the price seemed to be a bit high.  Let’s look at this a bit closer.  Just like grocery stores show you the unit cost, you can quickly come up with the following unit costs:

1. Large – $.36/oz

2. Super – $.32/oz

3. Mega – $.31/oz

4. Pitcher – $.40/oz

No I did not bust out my calculator on the table to assess the situation, but with the numbers above in the menu its pretty clear to see that $29 for essentially 2 Mega Margarita’s should be around $20, not $29.

Is this a bit extreme – perhaps, but this same process or type of thinking can really save you a lot of money along the way.  As food and beverage is likely to be your second highest spend category per month you can quickly make up some ground by simply looking at what you are paying for when volume matters.  Perhaps you have your favorite type of deodorant where you are not willing to change, but take bottled water for example.  Does the label really matter?  Check out how much you are paying per oz next time before you toss it into the cart.

Another quick example is back at the bar where they are running 2 specials – one on a crappy domestic bottled beer for $3 and one on a decent import draft for $4.  Most would quickly jump to the $3 deal as it is $1 cheaper.  But if you do the math, you’re paying the same amount per oz – go for the better beer!