penny’s worth
“Why are you wasting your time picking up a penny?”
It takes me two seconds to bend over and pick up a penny. Its value, one cent. Is it worth the two seconds of my time to pick up a penny? How much is my time worth? If it takes two seconds to pick up a penny then I’ve just made one cent in two seconds, 30 cents every minute, and $18 an hour. This is the annual salary of a personal assistant, which works out to be roughly $31K a year. If I weren’t bending down to pick up the penny would I be working instead? If I were “on the clock” while picking up the penny, wouldn’t I be double-dipping? I could be making my normal income plus the $18 an hour from my penny-pinching endeavors.
What if the bending down to pick up the penny has more value than the cent it represents in the market? Does this action represent a value system in the person bending over? What does this say about the person?
A jar of coins sits beside my dresser. It’s a 3-liter Paisano jug-o-wine bottle I’ve fashioned into a piggy bank. The neck fits quarters perfectly and can hold a couple hundred dollars in coins of the silver sort. A friend watched as I dropped coins into the jar and said, “Are we back in World War II?”