Subconscious spending.

A lot of things we do are because of our subconscious. We don’t logically think about each of the several things we do in the day. Our subconscious takes 90% of the decisions but we don’t realize it because it doesn’t require any thinking on our part.

Subconscious thinking becomes even more pronounced when it comes to spending or money decisions. Let’s take an example to understand subconscious spending.

Suppose you have locked yourself out of your house and it’s raining heavily outside. So you call the locksmith, and the locksmith opens the lock in a minutes time. Then you ask how much should you pay for it.

The locksmith, to your surprise, asks for 200 rupees for the work of a minute. You question him how’s a minutes work worth 200 bucks.

He explains that he’s been in the profession of locksmith for 15 years now. In the initial years he took an hour to fix a lock, at times he even broke the lock while fixing it. Even then he charged 200 rupees per lock and people happily paid without questioning. Because they saw him working hard and sweating for an hour. So they thought his effort was completely worth 200 rupees.

But now that he has become skilled and more proficient at his job of fixing locks quickly. His customers are reluctant to pay the same amount for the same work.

This is because our subconscious evaluates the worth of a job based on effort, not on the end result. If this locksmith had acted like working hard and took an hour to do the same job then there is a high probability that we would pay without questioning.

Is it logical to pay a higher amount for a job done in a longer period of time. No, it isn’t. But we make many such spending decisions everyday without realizing how far from logic they actually are.

Our subconscious plays a major role in decision making and yet we pay little attention to it.

-ChoubeySahab