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A friend of mine shared this receipt from her local library which shows how much money she's saved by using it.
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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How much money is she spending that just the savings add up to 60'000? Or is that just an error and that's the joke?
It’s the price of the books she would have bought otherwise.
But she wouldn’t have?
Before Netflix I wasn’t buying hundreds of DVDs per year. It doesn’t make sense to claim that use of a service, even a free one, constitutes “savings” based on hypothetical behavior where you would have bought all the content individually at list price.
I understand your argument but my rebuttal is a simple no.
It’s highly offensive to those without hands, can you please stop being so ableist?
at least 6 people got wooshed here
Maybe they didn't get wooshed, they just thought it was a dumb joke.
Eleven even. 🫸🏼
Are you effectively demanding someone argue with you? How Boomer.
That’s the thing, in a lot of cases you’d simply go without whether you wanted to or not. They use “savings” to illustrate how much it would have cost to buy all those books on their own, that’s it. They clearly wanted to read those books but they wouldn’t be able to afford them without a library. If they had the money to spend on them I’m sure they would have but they didn’t and that’s literally the whole point.
Not being able to afford something and not wanting that something are different and calling this “savings” is fine and makes complete sense.
—
Example: I’ve seen 1085 episodes of One Piece. Without Crunchyroll(and it’s low fees, compared to buying box sets I’d never rewatch) I’d never have been able to see all that content. I would have wanted to, but I couldn’t.
Or to mirror your own words more: Before Crunchyroll I never would have seen it as without the service to offer these savings I’d be shit out of luck.
Before Netflix there were such obscure things called libraries.
Remember Blockbuster?
I try not to. I worked there twice.
Why’d you go back?
The first time was fun because I had a good manager and Netflix was still seen by them as the upstart and not a real competitor.
A couple of years later and things at a different location under a coke head manager made for a very different experience.
How does someone working at blockbuster afford a coke addiction?
Fencing stolen goods between our store and a GameStop that was run by a former district manager of Blockbuster, plus her husband was a cop.
Why does everyone assume books equals novels. The books loaned might have been text books or even journals.
Children's books mostly.
They wouldn’t have spent 60k on books over that time, they’ve only saved that much because the books were free. If they had to pay for the books they would have been more selective and less liberal in the amount.
Spending $150 a week is just a lot of money to spend on books, it’s only that much because of the free price tag, so it’s extremely disingenuous to use that amount as people wouldn’t realistically spend that.
A more realistic metric would be used books (also reflects the quality of all but brand new fresh books which are a rarity obviously), but you can’t quantify that price, so yes using new is disingenuous, but go off on a rant I guess? I think it’s a great idea, but let’s not kid ourselves that people would actually be spending that amount on books. It’s great for a feel good story though, I’ll give you that.
Do used bookstores all charge the same prices these days?
“We made a pretty lie. You may commence with feeling good now”
It's just semantics.
"Save" often just means receiving whatever value free of charge.
I’ve not seen it used that way
Amazing.
I prefer to buy books to own. But books are expensive, so if a particular book feels like it's not something worth the money to keep, I just borrow it from the library instead. That's literally money saved for me. Yeah, you could argue that if the library wouldn't have been an option then maybe I wouldn't have bought the book at all, so no difference there, but it's still the difference between reading the book for free or not reading the book at all.
Oh so just one grad school text book.
My partner is in the Lit world and you drastically underestimate how much some people can read. If they are an avid reader and a long-standing member I can see it. Especially If they're using the retail price to calculate that it adds up quick. hardcovers can easily be $40-60.
She also has a kid and has been going with the kid to the library since he was born to check out a bunch of books every week. He's in grade school now... I want to say he's 10?
$6996.99 per year is $134.56 per week. If you get 5 books per week, that's $26.91 per book. Given the picture includes a single book costing $19.95, that feels very reasonable. Maybe it's 6 books a week, maybe some books are more expensive.
That's a very consistent habit though.
They literally go every week and she and her husband and her kid all use it, so it would add up.
I go to the library every week with my kids. We usually have 20-30 books checked out at a time. 5 books per week is nothing for a whole family.
Yeah that's definitely where that amount is coming from if it's been well over a decade. Books are actually really fricken expensive!
Especially children's books in terms of a per-page ratio. You check out 10 children's books, because your kid will get through them all in a few days, that could be $200 worth of books.
With children's books most of the page count will be in illustrations. You'll go through them very quickly.