Wednesday, August 17, 2011

haul-y shit: haul + economics lesson

I had a dream about dying my hair and decided to follow that dream (because I'm not too old for dreams yet).

My dream hair had four (or was it five...?) different colors.   Horizontally sectioned from the top, lavender/white, fuchsia, violet, dark purple, navy blue/purple (it was five).  I think it's a merger between the rainbow hair I've been seeing on Fuck Yeah Fantasy Hair and when, in Howl's Moving Castle, Howl tells Sophie that her hair "looks like starlight".  Plus, I'm hoping to do something rad enough to warrant a submission to FYFH.

So anyway, I already have a dece collection of dye but it's been about 10 years since I've dyed my entire head so I knew that I would need MOAR DIE.  Because my dream colors are mostly very similar, it is unnecessary for me to procure one dye for each color since they can be mixed.  (That wasn't the economics lesson: YOU ARE NOT OFF THE HOOK.)
dece/semi dece hair dye collection, should you require proof

So I set out, into the sunset (actually away from the sunset- the mall and Sally are east of here), to Worth, IL to visit SALLY BEAUTY STORE/SOMETHING.

Is this worthy of a haul post?  Probably not.  I bought more Manic Panic in Hot Hot Pink, some blue mixer/toner/compliments (they discontinued the violet one, WHY?!), some blades for this razor I bought that I'll probably never use, and some clips.  I don't even remember what it all came out to.




Then, I thought "maybe Hot Topic has some dye on clearance..." so I hauled ass to the Chicago Ridge Mall, returned something to Bed Bath and Beyond, and walked across the stupid mall all the way to Hot Topic.

It was steamy in there.  I mean, really just unbearably hot.  I was sweating up a storm.  There were so many people in there too.  God, it sucked.

So they had that horrible shopping incentive where clearance items were buy-one-get-one-fifty-percent off (if I ever use that phrase again, I'm going to say BOGO50).  So I felt like I had to buy four things, in similarly priced pairs.

Here's what I got: an Invader Zim tank top, some Raw dye, a shitty eyeshadow that I didn't know was shitty til I got home but I kinda had a clue, and some socks for my bff.



The total on the receipt: $28.34

BUT... is that truly the total cost?

Nope.  In economics, the total cost is the explicit costs + the implicit costs.

Let's break it down.  I am a business, Rora LLC, and what we do here at Rora LLC is make me happy.  We make purchases of raw resources (generally in the form of make up and clothes) in order to produce said happiness.

The exchange of $28.34 for the resources (input) for my hair dye project and general happiness was an explicit cost, as was the gas I had to put in my car to get there, mileage deductions etc etc.

$28.34 isn't too bad for what I got, but there were very high implicit costs.  There was the cost of my well being, since I had to listen to the absolute worst music while I shopped.  There was the cost of my time (there's another economics lesson there, but let's not get into that now).  Implicit costs are the costs that don't usually end up on balance sheets: the owner's labor and time (but not salary, that's explicit), resources that are already owned, etc  and implicit costs can be (but aren't always) hard to put into monetary terms.  But I would estimate that I just spent a million dollars on four items from Hot Topic.


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