The Price of Getting There

Umm... my first article, right? Let me think.

While I’m thinking, it’s currently 12 a.m. here. I’m on my laptop after just upgrading its RAM to 24 GB. My mum asked what I needed that for. Excuse me—my friends in the US have 32- and 64-GB gaming PCs. You want me to keep using 16? Of course not.

Okay, now I’ve thought of something.

Has anyone ever ordered something from Amazon because it looked cheap, then got to checkout, added the delivery fee, and watched their hopes of buying it—or getting their parents to buy it—go up in smoke? The advertised price isn’t always the full cost of getting something.

The cost of the journey

I remember one Sunday morning in Rwanda when my mum wanted me to go and get bread at 7 a.m. She gave me 2,000 RWF. I asked for extra money because I needed transport. She looked at me and said, “The bread is 2,000 RWF. If you spend 500 RWF to get there and another 500 RWF to come back, that’s basically half the price of the bread just for transport. Does that make sense? You learnt economics—is it economical?”

And that’s when it clicked: when people want something, they can focus so much on getting it that they forget to count what they have to give up along the way. The price tag is only part of the cost. You have to count the journey, too.

A queen’s price

Chess has a version of the same trade-off. A queen is usually valued at about nine points. A rook, a minor piece, and a pawn add up to about the same. Sometimes players get so focused on taking their opponent’s queen that they give away more than it’s worth. If you trade pieces worth more than the queen to capture it, you may end up in a worse position.

Piece values are only a rough guide—chess is more complicated than addition—but they can help you pause and think about what a move really costs.

Count what you give up

Before you commit to something, ask whether the cost of getting it is worth what you’ll get back. Count the transport, delivery, time, effort, and anything else you might be giving up. Make your decisions economically.

I’m not telling you to scam anyone; getting caught is an expense too.