Coffee-loving fly.

If you are a die-hard coffee-lover, read on. Even if you aren't one, just read on as well.

While having my usual cuppa outside the law building this afternoon, I pondered over my spending habits since I arrived here in Australia. While it is highly indubitable that I have cut down on unnecessary expenses that I would otherwise have deemed as ‘usual expenses’ back home, I am still quite embarrassed at some of my spending habits. Ironically, the problem was lying right in my hands – yes, that cappuccino I am usually unable to resist whenever I pass by any coffee joint. The only consolation I get out of this is that at least I have stopped being a Starbucks freak, and my $7.50-a-cup Java Chip Frappaccino is now replaced with a somewhat cheaper hot cappuccino.

What I thought about made me realize that it sometimes isn’t exactly about the huge dollars you spend, it’s the teeny weenie bits here and there, and it usually takes some time before you realize that these little bits contribute to a really huge hole in your pocket (something like a huge ozone problem); yes it took me a couple (okay, a lot more) of drinks to realize how much I have wasted.

Next time you step into any coffee joint, realize how intelligently these people are at setting traps for consumers (read: dumbasses) like us to, uhm, step into. The usual pricing you’d see is say, $3.10 for a small, $3.70 for a medium, and $4.20 for a large. Notice how the price changes? And I think this is one of those sticky-papers that dumb flies like me land right on. You step in, looking at a small cup and go, “Ahh, I’ll go medium.” Then, what you do next is ‘subconsciously’ compare the price of the large, and go “Hey! It’s only 50c more, why not?”

Yeah, really! Why not? Why not smack yourself in the face, you dumb fly.

It’s like saying “I’m going to pay 60c more anyways, so why not top another 50c!” Stupid as it sounds, I always end up ‘accidentally’ fall for this. The only consolation I can get from this is that it’s accidental, not that I’m absolutely dumb to realize that spending an extra 50c is in fact, spending an extra 50c, not “getting a better deal.”

If you do the math, (yeah look, a dumb fly about to talk about math here) you find that if you did yourself - and your pocket - a favor by not going large and saving yourself the 50c, or even better, $1.10 by going small, you kind of save yourself an entire cup of coffee by the 5th or even 3rd drink.

This beats those stupid cards that go “Enjoy 10 nice warm coffees and get your next one absolutely FREE!” which I once again, being a dumb fly, fall for without any hoaxing from the staff at the coffee joint. Then again, that’s another story altogether, because dumb flies cannot process too much information within a blog post or their puny-but-mathematically-inclined brains might go ‘pop’.

Buzz off.

Pop!