The Price Per Use: a $60 pair of shoes worn 200 times, or a $30 pair worn 20 times — which one is actually cheaper?
Setup: two shoes at the shop. Pair A — $60, tough, ugly, lasts years. Pair B — $30, beautiful, flimsy, gives up after 20 wears. Everyone picks one BEFORE the math (A or B + one sentence why). Gut vote, no calculator.
Worksheet Q1: write the price-per-use formula on paper — price ÷ number of wears = cost of each wear. Then compute Pair A: 60 ÷ 200 wears = ? per wear.
Worksheet Q2: now Pair B: 30 ÷ 20 wears = ? per wear. Write both numbers BIG, side by side, and stare at them for five seconds.
Worksheet Q3 — the real round: each person names one thing we actually own (shoes, school bag, bike, sofa, that robot vacuum) and GUESSES its cost per use — high wear winner or low wear drain? No looking anything up, pure instinct.
Round: revote — same question as the start. Who switched? The gap is 10× … does anyone STILL defend the $30 pair? Last argument standing wins the floor.
Pair A wins 30¢ vs $1.50 — 5× cheaper per wear
Here's the reveal. Pair A: $60 ÷ 200 wears = 30¢ per wear. Pair B: $30 ÷ 20 wears = $1.50 per wear. The $60 shoes — the ones that looked 'twice the price' at the till — cost one-fifth as much per wear. Five times cheaper where it counts: every morning you slip them on.
Now the trap, and it's a beauty. Your eyes do a check that feels like math but isn't: '$30 is smaller than $60, so $30 is cheaper.' Sticker price answers 'what does it cost to own it?' — but you wear shoes about 200 times, and each of those 200 mornings is its own little purchase. Price per use answers the question your life actually asks: what does one USE cost? And there's a bonus hiding in the arithmetic: the cheap-flimsy pair needs a second pair to cover 200 wears — ten of them, $300. The $60 pair bought all 200 mornings for $60.
Per-use thinking quietly rewires real decisions. School bag: $20 that sags by term two vs $50 that survives two kids — that's 60¢ a bag-year against dollars. And the flip side so this doesn't become a slogan: never let 'price per use' become the excuse. The $600 'pro' scooter used four times costs $150 a ride — expensive cheap stuff in reverse. A library card, on the other hand, serves hundreds of books at roughly zero per use: the per-use king costs almost nothing at the till. The rule isn't 'buy expensive' — it's 'count the USES'.
Which is why you lost your gut vote if you picked B. Sticker price is a snapshot; price per use is the whole film. The cheapest object in the room is often the one with the biggest price tag and the longest life — and the store will never point that out, because $60 of shoes sold once is worth more to them than $300 sold over four years.
Next purchase bigger than $10: divide the price by honest uses — and let THAT number do the arguing.