Which Sunk Cost Is The Saddest Sunk Cost?
This week’s contenders:
• A 7-day unlimited MetroCard ($29), only used four days
• A late-night bodega ice cream bar ($4), discovered the next day, unopened in my bag
• Every piece of clothing I’ve ever purchased, which I now cannot stand
• The perfect-looking peach ($2, who am I), which I was really looking forward to, but was so tasteless and terrible that I gave up and took a nap
---
Previously on The Billfold
---
---
---
I gasped out loud at the unopened icecream bar so that one gets my vote. THAT IS SO SAD.
@redheaded&crazy I can’t decide if it’s the ice cream bar or the clothes. It’s worse if they don’t fit you anymore though.
@Megano! Definitely the clothes are a more expensive sunk cost! I suppose if I opened my closet every day and didn’t like anything in it, that would indeed be sad. But if I opened my bag and found a melted icecream bar in it? THAT WOULD BE TRAGIC. (priorities, i gots them)
@redheaded&crazy The ice cream bar is so sad!
Time spent in relationships is the worst of the sunks.
Unsuccessful IVF? (Not speaking from personal experience, but that’s what I’d imagine would be the saddest, considering the financial, time and emotional investment.)
@Nick :(
The peach. That’s a particular kind of disappointment.
@RocketSurgeon agreed. I was going to say the ice cream bar because it sounds messy, but there’s something about biting into a disappointing peach that always makes me so sad.
The ice cream bar, for sure. My saddest one recently was realizing I was double- enrolled in health insurance (one being SO VERY expensive and really I couldn’t afford it and one being cheap) for a couple months this summer.
But I also had surgery this summer and apparently the first emergency room used the expensive insurance so I guess I’ll see if it covered more? I’m guessing it is actually just hundreds of dollars I’ll never see again.
“Every piece of clothing I’ve ever purchased, which I now cannot stand” – dude, welcome to my whole life. I hate everything I own, even things I used to love love LOVE. It doesn’t help that my boss yesterday asked why I didn’t dress like one of our students who always looks good (and who is also at least thirty pounds lighter and can pull off flowy shirts and high-waisted shorts, I guess?).
Ugh.
That said, the ice cream bar. So sad!
@kellyography I’m doing a clothing swap party later this month to address this very problem… Less because I want to poach new stuff from my friends’ closets, and more because I feel less guilty about getting rid of “every piece of clothing I’ve ever purchased, which I now cannot stand.” It’s easier to say goodbye if I feel like my friends get first crack at it, and might appreciate it more than I do.
@mbmargarita My friends and I do this every once in a while, but nobody wants to come to Jersey and I can usually only schlep one big bag to Brooklyn or Queens. I do love doing them, though, because it always just ends up being a big party where we eat all the snacks and watch terrible TLC television.
I’m gonna go with the ice cream because of the potential damage to the purse. D:
The ice cream, definitely, with the peach a close second. The potential purse damage is what puts the ice cream on top.
2day i did that classic lauren rodrigue move, “Brought lunch but then bought lunch”
Normally I’m pretty easy come, easy go with money, but I :’( over the peach.
Consign those clothes!! You can recover at least a modest part of those sunk costs.
Ice cream bar definitely = saddest…