Never pay retail

When I got married more than a decade a go, I was awful with money. Really bad. However, thanks to the patient, long term, financial skills of my excellent wife I've been retrained. Which is just as well really, because as I've mentioned before, these days our house runs on maximum bang for buck.

Now don't hear me complaining. It was a personal choice to be where we are and to take the sizable income sacrifice that went with it. God is good and we don't lack for anything, but we are forced to be very careful.

The upshot of all this is that we work hard to buy things on "special". Any luxuries are bought on special or left in the shop. Same goes for clothes, electronics, hobbies, etc.

Don't get me wrong, we're not mean, but do our level best to see cents are not wasted, let alone dollars. The funny thing is, my family was much like this when I was growing up. Four kids, one teacher's wage and a little extra money from my mother's music teaching at home.

Which took me back to our food supplies, more specifically our vegetable supplier. For a good number of years I remember my parents being part of vegetable co-op with some church friends.

So, every few weeks, we hit the biggest produce market in Sydney and buy boxes and boxes of fruit and vegies. If you timed it right, you could get the boxes that had a few bad things in them for half price or less. It was a boon and we loved fruit too.

We live very close the local shops and on returning from them to cook spaghetti, it hit me that I wouldn't go to all that effort. Then I remembered, our newish, still developing, shopping centre has just had a new fruit market open.

And it got me thinking...

Coz see I didn't just have the urge to turn down regular trips to large produce markets. I was struggling to even want to try this new fruit market. I mean why should I try the new one when our local mega-chain super market stocked all the same stuff? And they tell me they're cheaper too.

That's when it hit me.

Oh geez. I see the issue here. Australia has a duopoly when it come to super markets. In the past few years it's become very problematic. Farmers are being sent to the wall, smaller chains are being obliterated, etc.

What I hadn't counted on was the psychological effect. See every time I turn on the TV, one or both of those chains bludgeons me with ads that tell me the "freshest" food comes from their store. Or in other words; 'the only good produce can be bought in our stores.' Which is of course, hogwash.

The produce in the new fruit market is at least as good and often cheaper. The problem is, along with the convenience of the big chain store stocking fruit and vegies, I've slowly been converted to thinking it's the only good place to buy them.

I wondered, how I could have been so stupid, but really, it's sort of human nature.

Convenience + Advertising = Truth.

Wow, how scary is that? Hmm...