It was a real bike - a 27" red Miyata 10-speed. The Peugeot my grandfather had picked up at the flea market only a few years earlier was too small. And it couldn't stand up to the Miyata's coolness factor. The Miyata was so cool it actually had side-pull breaks. Yeah, it was that cool.
Being only 15 years old, I wasn't exactly flush with cash. Neither were my folks, for that matter. But they both worked, and our house was off the beaten path. I lived a mile from school and two or three miles from my closest friends. So if I was to have any sort of life out side of the house, a bike was required.
My dad offered to pay half the cost of the bike. He built houses, so I scraped up my portion helping him at job sites on the weekends. I gathered scraps, moved lumber, helped on concret pours, dug a lot of ditches, and generally did whatever needed doing. After a few weeks I'd accumulated my half, and we went to the bike shop to scoop up that Miyata.
I was rather excited to have this sterling piece of machinery at my disposal, so I told my dad I'd meet him at home. What kid with a new bike wouldn't immediately want to break it in? After tearing all over Aptos, I arrived at the house with a ravenous hunger and a grin a mile wide. "So what's the dollars to miles ratio?"
He'd caught me off guard with that one. "Uh, I guess it's something like 175 to 10. So that's $17.50 per mile or so." He just nodded.
A week later he asked me the same question. "Let's see, I've been riding it to and from school every day, and I went to Scrub's on Saturday. I'd say it's 175 to 36." It took me a moment to calculate that one in my head. "That's almost $5 per mile." He lifted his eyebrows, but said nothing.
This became a game with us. I rode that bike for years. For most of my college existence there was no car, only the Miyata. When my parents came to my apartment on graduation day, Dad saw the Miyata and grinned. "Hey, what's the dollars to miles ratio now?" I did some quick guesstimating. The figure had to be on the order of 4 cents a mile, and that included the cost of a replacement wheel and tires and inner tubes over all those years. Not too shabby.
I've incorporated the dollars to miles concept as a yardstick when I'm thinking about making a large purchase. It helps me frame how something will actually be used. Is this something I'm buying on a whim, or will it be used and enjoyed long enough to make it worth the money? Most of the time the actual measure is dollars to hours of use.
This is particularly helpful for entertainment purchases. I tend to use going to the movies as a baseline. On a per-hour basis going to the movies is rather expensive. Assuming you take in a matinee and don't buy much popcorn, you're still easily looking at $7 or $8 an hour. My current favorite iPhone game is Zombie Gunship. It cost me $1 and I've probably put 10 hours into it so far. That's 10 cents an hour.
Using the dollars per hour metric, paperback (or electronic) books almost always provide great bang for the buck. A good book also may even get read twice, which doubles the value.
One of the things I like about the dollars per hour approach is that as long as you're looking at the value of something that requires your attention (such as a book, a bike, a computer, or a game), you can compare one purchase to another in a relatively straightforward fashion.
For example, I could spend $300 on the complete Battlestar Galactica on Blu-Ray (67 hours if I watch every episode once), or for $80 I could buy The Lord of the Rings on Blu-Ray (11 hours if I watch it once). That's about $4.47 an hour versus about $7.27 an hour. But after watching every single episode of Galactica I doubt I'd be in the mood for a re-watch any time soon. The Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, deserves a full viewing once a year. Let's call it three viewings for the sake of argument. That makes $4.47 an hour versus about $2.42 an hour.
Even $2.42 an hour pales in comparison to a good meaty book, even one you blaze through. It probably took me five hours to read David Benioff's City of Thieves, but the book only cost $8, so we're looking at $1.60 an hour.
None of these calculations takes into account any sort of qualitative measure. Even if someone paid me $4 an hour to watch Laverne & Shirley, I'd feel cheated. Looking at the value of a purchase in terms of hours of enjoyment isn't something I take too seriously, but it's a fun way to apply a sanity check before making an impulse buy.
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twitter: @erikschmidt