I've been making this point for years - indeed, there is an example in my book - but shopping online is not all about saving money, and just today I had cause to confirm this belief.
I wanted a couple of digital pictures printed as old fashioned hold-in-your-hand photos. So I went to photobox [note: this is not a promo for that organization, I'm sure there are dozens of similar services out there, I just happened to have used them before]. At 10.35am I placed the order. At 6.35pm I got an email telling me the pics had been despatched and at 10.20 the next morning they arrived through my letterbox. That's less than 24 hours from order to taking possession. Cost: 10p per photo plus £1.49 postage = £1.69.
The alternative would have been to [a] drive into town, park the car, walk to Boots [or similar] and printed the pictures, return to the car and drive home. The printing cost is around the same and the car park would have been around a pound, time taken about an hour, [b] caught the bus into town and back, walking to the shop [saving the planet?], cost around a pound each way, time taken around an hour and a half or [c] walked into town - cheaper but takes a couple of hours and it was raining.
So there you go - unless I had wanted the pictures in my hand on the same day seems to me that it was £1.69 well spent. Saving an hour or more of my time was worth much more.
I wanted a couple of digital pictures printed as old fashioned hold-in-your-hand photos. So I went to photobox [note: this is not a promo for that organization, I'm sure there are dozens of similar services out there, I just happened to have used them before]. At 10.35am I placed the order. At 6.35pm I got an email telling me the pics had been despatched and at 10.20 the next morning they arrived through my letterbox. That's less than 24 hours from order to taking possession. Cost: 10p per photo plus £1.49 postage = £1.69.
The alternative would have been to [a] drive into town, park the car, walk to Boots [or similar] and printed the pictures, return to the car and drive home. The printing cost is around the same and the car park would have been around a pound, time taken about an hour, [b] caught the bus into town and back, walking to the shop [saving the planet?], cost around a pound each way, time taken around an hour and a half or [c] walked into town - cheaper but takes a couple of hours and it was raining.
So there you go - unless I had wanted the pictures in my hand on the same day seems to me that it was £1.69 well spent. Saving an hour or more of my time was worth much more.
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