Hey you! Yeah, you hunched over the smart phone. How about giving the opposable thumbs a rest and joining the real world?
No, I’m not advocating renouncing your phone forever. (God knows, I’d be lost without my iPhone.) But I am suggesting that buying apps is financially illogical. With each purchase, you’re training yourself to do what you should never do: buy on the fly.
In short, you’re becoming a full-fledged member of Generation App.
Some purchases alter your definition of prudent spending. Apps — those little bite-sized programs you can buy for your phone or computer — are a perfect example.
Look at it this way: When a smart spender considers a major purchase, he or she shops around, gets the best price, tests the product if possible, and inquires about warranties and guarantees before taking the plunge. If you were about to buy a book or a piece of software online, you’d read reviews. Shop for the best price. Maybe talk to a few people you trust who have used the software or read the book. Then you’d buy.
But people do very few of those things before buying an app. Why? Because Apple and its developers price apps so low that no one seems to care if they’re getting good value for their money. If the app turns out to be crap, you delete it and move onto the next app. All you’ve lost is 99 cents.
I was talking about this recently with J.D. Guess what he confessed:
I’m a perfect example of Generation App. I’ve bought a couple dozen $0.99 or $2.99 apps because they were so cheap that it didn’t matter if I ended up deleting them, which I did. And I think this is why Apple is so successful: With the iTunes store model and the App Store model, they’ve basically gone for micro-purchases, which cause little pain individually, but which can add up over the long haul.
And add up, they do.
But that’s not my chief objection to buying-on-the-fly. I hate how it subverts financial best practices, so to speak. The person who gives himself a pat on the back for stopping to pick up a penny thinks nothing of springing for a shiny, untested app. Why is it smart to save a penny one minute, but okay to discard ninety-nine of them the next? Because mobile app pricing trains us to think: “Prudent spending is the way to go for some purchases — just not this one.”
I’d argue that once you make that concession, you’re relinquishing some hard-won frugality. If $1 is trivial, what about $2, $3 or $5? That sounds like shopping momentum to me!
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