We bought a bunch of wine at Bevmo the other week, because they were having a sale. Buy one bottle, and get another of the same thing for a nickel. Great, right?
Well, two of the bottles we bought on that basis were a nice Italian red. We drank one a couple weeks go with a home-made spaghetti sauce. Tonight, I’m making a frozen pizza. I’m tarting it up with mushrooms and red peppers, and leftover chicken, but it’s basically a thin-crust Albertson’s margherita with the extras that I’m adding.
Here’s the problem. We usually like Chianti, but we don’t have any, and all we have is this other Italian bottle. But I don’t know which bottle it is. Is it the one we paid full price for, or the one that only cost five cents? There’s no way to know, because I didn’t mark them when we bought them. If it’s the full-price one, I’m not sure I want to waste it on a frozen pizza, whereas if it’s only a nickel, it’s a bargain. So should I go with it, or the Trader Joe’s Coastal Cab?
The Trader Joe’s Coastal Cabernet is a reliable “pizza” wine. Consider the regret analysis of choosing the wrong wine. 🙂
Again, another way-back. 1972 through 1975 a group of us from company prez to us lowly engineers got together in _____’s office at quitting time with our “club” to discover the most palatable low-cost vino. I kept records, steamed labels, wrote the results, kept them in a binder. Still have them.
Were there some bad ones? You betcha. The best of the low priced came from Bulgaria and South Africa. $.99 per jug.
I don’t think you’ve plumbed to the root of this agony. Consider: let’s suppose you open a bottle at random, and it’s awful. Well, that would be (you hope) your five cent bottle of wine. You choke it down with your frozen pizza, or use it to poison the possums, whatever, secure in the knowledge that for your next meal, you have your top-dollar wine ready.
But suppose you open the bottle and it’s good. Now what? It could be you’ve opened the five-center, and it’s surprisingly good, leaving you with another bottle just as good. But what if you’ve opened the expensive bottle, and now you’ve got rotgut left? How will you know whether it’s safe to risk the other bottle on your anniversary meal, or rather, the belated anniversary meal meant to placate the murderous spouse? You won’t, so you’ll have to buy something good, and the remaining bottle will be passed down to your great-grandchildren, with each owner speculatively eyeing it before grand State occasions: is this the five cent bottle? Or the good stuff?
If Monty Hall offers to switch bottles, I think logic says you take the deal. Or the goat. Or perhaps both. Myself, I am partial to the offerings of the Bieulieu Vineyard, who have a very plain and frankly ugly label with a giant BV on it, but whose offerings are routinely $6 or less at Albertson’s, and well worth it, for any varietal.
Ummm, just open the bottle and drink it…. Even if the fridge is empty.
Just thinking. Monks survived on just sitting around and drinking beer in there so called “fasting”. Sounds like my kind of cult after all. Could do with less flagellation though.
ummm . . . both.
ummm . . . both.
We have a winner!
Think of it as, there are no “full price” or “5-cent” bottles. They’re al half price. Okay, (half+2.5 cents). Does that help?
Does that help?
You don’t know what you’re talking about. It wasn’t a half-price sale. They sold one bottle at full price, and the other one for a nickel.
You can’t fool me — I was there when we bought them. I just didn’t keep track of which was which.
Well if you lost track of the trajectories, aren’t the bottles now each a superposition of both? The only question is the sign, and I don’t recall if bottles of wine are fermions or bosons. Have you noticed what kind of spin these bottles have?
Rand, you are rationalizing this like a modern (non) liberal.
LOL. Is Friday the 13th the new April 1?
“Buy one bottle, and get another OF THE SAME THING for a nickel.”
Am I missing something here?
I think that some people are taking this post a little too seriously.
Well if you lost track of the trajectories, aren’t the bottles now each a superposition of both?
Sounds like an example of Schroedinger’s Schnapps.
Two words.
Shot glasses.
The only thing I miss about California is not being able to buy wine in the grocery store (and parking lots you can get into and out of…and the aqueducts…and sanitation…but that’s IT). Surprisingly, despite the proliferation of liquor stores here, there are no big-box stores like BevMo. I liked that place for the occasional specials such as you mention.
You drank the regular price one first, Rand. It would be impossible to drink the “second” one first, because you cannot drink two bottles before you’ve consumed one. The marginal cost of the first bottle is full price; the marginal cost of the second was $0.05.
However, those costs are now sunk, and the value of the second bottle is now its resale value, and since you’ve already sampled it, you could better negotiate a fair price for it, something which you couldn’t have done had you not consumed the first one. You can thus include the price of the first one into the cost basis for the second for tax purposes.
How much wine constitutes a bunch?
Titus, that’s just the sort of monetarist neoconservative Wall Street fat cat accounting flim-flammery that brought us Enron, the AIG debacle, and H1N1 flu. What are you, a Republican? A teabagger?
Now what would Obama do? Or Ted Kennedy? Well, Kennedy would have drunk it himself before breakfast and thrown up on the waitress, but let that go. Obama would see this extra bottle not as the source of mere filthy undeserved profit for one white male aerospace industry patriarch plutocrat, but as a means to serve minorities, like women, people of a color other than pinkish-white, union and government employees, and unemployed Gender Studies PhD graduates.
Or green jobs. The bottle is green, after all. Clearly Congress should appoint a Five Cent Bottle of Bevmo Wine Czar, with a staff of 100 attorneys and Chicago consultants, to decide how to best exploit this resource that belongs to us all. You’ll find the bill for their salaries in the mail next April.
Wow, Carl. You’re good at this. A little TOO good…
I know, MfK — he is the Great One. I’ve been duly excoriated. I must repent my bootlicking Uncle Tom ways and do penance in Rev. Wright’s Black Liberation Theology church to continue the war against “whiteness” (or white people, or both, I forget which). I shall return only when I can devote my life to concern trolling and apologizing for O-ba-muh.
This was an old Laurel and Hardy problem. To impress the girls they could only afford one glass of brew for themselves. Stan went first and drank the whole glass. Oliver asked why and Stan replied, “…because my half was on the bottom.”
I believe you are leaving out an important point… did you pay tax? If so, you’re only solution is to transfer half the liquid of each bottle to the other. The trick is to do it without a third container.