You step into the supermarket with a few coins and the intention of buying a cold drink. It's a pretty simple task, which should take just a few minutes. Unfortunately, supermarkets are bastards at tempting you. When you step inside, you're bombarded with specials and hot deals at every turn. Buy two chocolate bars and save 50 cents. Take a dollar off these freshly made bread rolls which expired yesterday. Buy one and get one free whole energy drink and you don't have to sleep tonight. Buy this beef we overweighed, and you can take this free recipe so you can impress your girlfriend and hide the fact that your only culinary skill involves a microwave, and a fork.
Perhaps the most cunning little supermarket trick is the fuel voucher. The golden number is thirty. Thirty bucks spent and you're on your way to petrol savings heaven! Four cents a litre off your next fill-up? Yes please! You'll save a good dollar or two at your next trip to the pump, and as daddy first taught you when a five cent coin first felt like a pot of leprechaun gold, it all adds up.
There is one problem however. When you go into the supermarket with that one single drink in mind, you end up buying all this other stuff. So you buy an extra thing or two and now the supermarket run will cost you about $10. No matter, you have a credit card to make up for the feeble few coins you have in your pocket. But oh no, cheap Berocca ... and cheap baked beans. Now the cost balloons up to $24. But that's ok because the stuff that you're buying is stuff that you need. If you don't buy it now then you'll just end up getting it some other time.
Now the real problem starts. $24?! Oh man, I'm so close to that $30 mark. I just have to get that voucher. So now you find yourself going up and down each aisle looking for useless crap to make up the remaining six bucks. You find things that are totally unnecessary and you try to justify its necessity and/or usefulness.
Hey, this chocolate milk is on special, and I need calcium. Who cares if it expires today? I can drink the whole two litres in the next minute, fill up on a week's worth of calcium and save a few cents on my petrol! Mmmm my bones feel stronger just thinking about it.
The really silly part of it is when you're lining up to pay for the petrol a few days later. You hand over that fuel voucher to the overworked store attendant, and you read the receipt given back to you that shows the enormous saving of $1.64.
And you actually believe that you've saved money from the whole exercise.
