Breaking the Price = Quality Assumption

I've continued to be intrigued by a short article I read a month ago in Newsweek; the article told of two studies involving wine tastings. The first, conducted by writer Robin Goldstein, involved blind tastings of more than 500 wines by 500 tasters ranging from novices to wine experts. The wines ranged in price from $1.50 to $150. Wines were encased in brown paper bags so that the tasters didn't see labels; they simply rated the wines on merit, not perception. The result? Cheap wines often outperformed their $50 counterparts.

A similar study in January had tasters rating wines in which they were given both true and false prices for the wines (in other words, a $50 wine was told to be $5). The result? Testers almost always preferred what they thought to be a higher-priced wine.

Purely in the name of research, I recently revisited "Two-Buck Chuck," or Charles Shaw wine available only at Trader Joe's. This wine has gotten a lot of buzz since it was introduced several years ago, and I often see people buying cases of the bargain vino. This product began as a $1.99 bottle on the West coast, but here in Indiana, it's $2.99, so technically "Three-Buck Chuck." I'd tried, I believe, a Merlot years ago and thought it was horrid. Armed with the knowledge that I might have dismissed the wine simply based on its price, I recently tried a Shiraz. And, you know, I liked it.

I then remember reading an anecdote in a magazine, although I have no idea where I read it. Likely, it was one of the pieces of wisdom I gleaned from Glamour magazine back in high school. But here's the story: A woman with a flagging jewelry business found that no one was buying her pieces. So she asked her assistant to reduce the prices by 50 percent. The assistant instead accidentally doubled the price. The result? The pieces sold out. Consumers felt that the higher-priced items were more valuable.

I found myself doing this same thing last week when out with a friend, who also has a newborn. We stopped at Baby Gap, and I was contemplating a clearance-priced cotton sweater for Sylvia. I scraped back the "$6.99" clearance sticker to see the item's original price. If it was $29, I'd feel like I was really getting a bargain, and feel more compelled to snatch it up. If it was $19, I'd feel less so. The original price, however, didn't change anything about the sweater: cotton, striped, cardigan-style. Either it was worth $6.99 to me or it wasn't. The original value placed on it by executives at The Gap shouldn't affect that value.

In watching our budget, this is one area I find where I need to be extra diligent: Purchasing items based on their value to me, not assuming that higher prices mean better quality or more desirability.

The first wine study, by the way, resulted in a book called The Wine Trials: 100 wines under $15 that beat $50 to $150 wines in brown-bag blind tastings. The book, which published earlier this month, might be worth reading, but Amazon is currently sold out. I suppose everyone's looking to be more diligent about disassociating price from perception!

The Agony of Defeat: Book Diet Over

A rather embarrassingly short time ago I mentioned that I'd been on a Book Diet: No more purchasing new books until I worked through some of my backlog. Oh, the life of an addict. Today, I'm sad to say, I broke the diet, so the ticker at the side of the screen has been reset to zero. But hear me out.

Max attends a magnet Montessori school here in town, and like most public (and private) schools, they have year-round fundraisers to subsidize their budget. A few weeks ago I packed up a couple big bags of books to donate to the annual book sale. The sale was yesterday and today, and I stopped in to look. Just to look. But with 25-cent books, I had no chance of making it out of their book-free.

In the end, I splurged and spent 75 cents: Cokie Roberts' Founding Mothers for me, a book about Mount Everest for Max, and a Max and Ruby book for Tommy. My book was a hardcover, lovingly inscribed for Mothers Day 2004 "with all our love and admiration." I felt the book needed to be rescued. Really. A Mother's Day gift discarded to the community room at an elementary school?

Meanwhile, on the way guiltily back from Max's school, I spotted a huge yard sale and scored two all-wood classic-style kids' chairs for Sylvia. Ever since I saw the magnificent but out-of-my-budget table and chairs sets at Lilipad Studio, I've been dreaming of finding a second-hand set and painting them myself. I'm especially drawn to this butterfly set:

Now I just need to acquire a wooden table and some painting talent.

It's my last day of maternity leave (are the tears smearing the type as you read this?), so I'm going to get off the computer and enjoy my last day dedicated to Sylvia. She's sleeping quietly, but I'm thinking I might need to wake her up and make her entertain me for a while.

Finance Games: The Non-Food Diet, with Drink Recipe

The word "diet" is not my favorite, as I'm typing this a month and a half after having a third baby. But humor me.

The New York Times published an interesting article Sunday about what they termed the Recession Diet. The crux was that over the past year, more so over the past several months, the combination of economic uncertainty and high gas and food prices has significantly changed spending habits. More people are going for generics, eating in, and embarking on lower-priced home renovations.

This made me think about a recent non-food diet I'd put myself on: Books. Phil and I both work in publishing and love love love books. We give each other books for presents, buy books on the bargain table we're sure we're going to read some day, give ourselves a little pick-me-up by purchasing a new book on the Times bestseller list. When I started my maternity leave, I took a look at the books on our shelves and the number of my books I'd bought or been given or received at trade shows, and realized it would be a year or more before I read through the backlog. So I put myself on a diet.

I made a few guidelines. I don't consider myself cheating in the following situations:

• A book is given to me.
• The book is truly necessary. So I don't consider a recent purchase of What to Expect the First Year, which replaces the one I gave to Goodwill after we were "finished" having kids, to be cheating. Determining what is "necessary" rests solely on me.
• The book is purchased with a gift certificate, so doesn't cost me anything.

Since I started my book diet, I'm on my fourth novel that I owned and had never read. Shameful. Note the new ticker on the side of the screen.

Meanwhile, Max, Tommy, and I all came down with strep this week. Three doctor visits, three rounds of antibiotics, feeling crummy. Last night after the boys got to bed, I was feeling poorly and fondly remembering my pre-kids, pre-nursing days when my good friend Kitty passed on a hot toddy recipe, passed to her by a priest. Kitty said it was the best thing for colds and other ailments -- knocked you right out, and when you woke in the morning, you would likely be feeling better. She was right. Like the sleep aid commercials warn, however, you have to be able to devote yourself to a chunk of sleep, which I haven't been able to do in the six years since I've started having babies. So let me pass it onto you, in case someone out there is a little sickly and better equipped to drink warm alcohol:

Hot Toddy

Go put on your jammies. My remembrance is that you'll have energy maybe to brush your teeth before hitting the hay; you might as well be dressed for bed. In a mug, pour a decent amount of honey (maybe a couple tablespoons), the juice of one lemon, and maybe 3/4 inch of bourbon. Fill the mug the rest of the way with hot water. Feel better.