Purchasing Power

As spring finally arrived at the end of May, I took one of my all too infrequent trips to the Maltby Street market area...
No, this isn't yet another post extolling the virtues of buying local: apart from the honey, I don't think much for sale in Spa Terminus can be classed as truly local, it's in central London ffs. However I'm not going to apologise for the pleasure I get from shopping there and judging by the numbers of other middle class foodie cliche types, I'm not the only one. For me, buying good food is a pleasure: seeing it and smelling it, the anticipation of cooking and eating it. However, I understand that not everyone feels the same. I know people who view all aspects of the food consumption process as an inconvenience to be endured for the shortest amount of time possible. I pity them in my patronising middle class foodie way, but ultimately if they think there are more important or interesting things in life than food, then good luck to them. I will continue to get my thrills at food markets.
For me it is part of my weekend entertainment, so I am happy to go and spend money that I would otherwise spend on a football match, because the amounts involved are similar. And I need to have a decent amount of money to spend because these sorts of markets are expensive right? Well, they're not cheap, but as my butcher never tires of pointing out on Twitter, neither are supermarkets. Indeed the last time I went to Maltby Street, my spend was slightly more than I might spend in a trip to the supermarket, but then I had bought slightly more of certain things than I might on a normal trip to the supermarket; I was stocking up. At the time though, it occurred to me that I had spent a lot of money, which is a thought that rarely crosses my mind at the supermarket, or at least isn't so persistent. The only obvious reason I could find for this (and this may well be obvious to everyone else) was the fact that in order to do my shopping at the market I had to make several financial transactions instead of just one.
Experts in managing personal finances are always encouraging us to use cash instead of cards, as it gives us an understanding of the value of the purchases we make. I would add that in buying our goods individually or in small batches we become strangely more aware of the total value of our purchases. This is another product of the sorts of economies of scale I'm always banging on about: if we consider adding an item to an already large supermarket shop, its cost appears insignificant against the much larger cost of the total shopping bill. We will therefore add items to our shop safe in the knowledge that they will make little difference. Of course if we were to add up all these 'insignificant' extras over the course of a month, we'd probably quickly become aware that they were actually fairly significant. But we don't add things up that way, we only see them in their immediate context, which is why, when our immediate context is a single transaction for a small number of goods, each item appears much more costly. For some reason this makes us believe that markets are expensive and supermarkets are cheap even when much of the evidence is entirely contradictory.