12.02.2011

What price convienience?

Things have been busier than normal around here.  Not super busy, but, 'having to go to the storage unit to get our Christmas Decorations Out, and then leisurly decorating the apartment, until we got a phone call from a friend 'sorry about the late notice, but I need a break for the weekend and I was hoping I could come visit you guys' sure we would love that!(and we would!) but now we need to finish decorating and get things cleaned up again' busy.  Things haven't been winding down until past 9 in the evening, at which point I feel more like snuggling with my wife on the couch that ranting about all that is wrong with the world. 

Today is different though.  Today my wife has herself a doctors appointment at 10:30, and so rather than go in for a few hour on Friday, just to leave and then most certainly NOT go back in at 1 in the afternoon, it seemed the perfect justification to take the whole day off.   This 'every other Friday Off' schedule has spoiled me...now I'm taking using a 1 hour obligation where I need to ride herd over my kids as justification to take the whole day off.

Since we need to make a few dishes to bring to a Christmas/Bunko Party Saturday evening, I found myself at Win-Co bright and early this morning, and my thoughts turned to paying for convienience.

I am as guilty of this as everyone else, and often times it just comes down to what I've got going on with my life.  There have been times I have bought a few boneless 'In-Bag' Pork loins, and brought them home to slice them in to pork chops myself to save 50 cents a pound, and there have been times I have bought pre-cubed stew meat, because it just didn't feel worth my time to cube up a rump roast. 

One example of this 'paying for convienience' that I just don't get is this increasing fascination with 'K-Cups'.  For those of you who haven't seen these before, it's a little self-contained plastic cup, that you load into your single-shot brewing machine, and in a matter of seconds, it procudes a cup of coffee, or cocoa, or even tea or apple cider now. 

My mother-in-law had one of these one of the times we went to visit her in Connectiicut, and don't get me wrong, it is a DAMN convienient gadget...it produces a hot, tasty beverage lickity split.  But, it's not cheap...for an actual Keurig Brand Personal Mini-Brewer, you are talking $99 at Target right now, as opposed to under $30 for many different types of normal drip machines.

Then there is the price of the 'cartridges'  Today at Win-co I saw a 12-pack of Folgers Cartrdiges for $5.88, and a box of cocoa cartridges were 12 for $4.88  Conversely, a big can of Folgers was $11.71 for 240 servings, and then $5.72 for a 43 serving container of Swiss Miss Cocoa, with mini-Marshmellows. 

Before I do the math, I am going to apply a correction factor...the serving size on the Folgers is a 6oz cup, and the Swiss Miss an 8-ounce cup.  That's a tiny serving...I measured on of my coffee cups, and before cream and splenda, I'm putting about 10 ounces in each cup...so, correcting for that we get:

.49 for a K-Cup of Folgers, vs. .08 a cup of home brewed Folgers, and then .40 for a cup of cocoa(with NO mini-marshmellows) vs. .167 cents a cup of Swiss Miss. 

That's a pretty huge difference...but what really blows my mind about all this math is how expensive hot cocoa is...who knew that all that sugar was so expensive...

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