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Benjamin Franklin, one of the greatest US statesmen, coined the sayings "Never live beyond your means" and "Remember: Time is Money" - Time is Money. Quite a few economists disputed this and there were those who believed that these were "commodities of equal value". And here it is, more than 250 years after this "punch sentence" was coined, researchers in the USA itself found that, in the eyes of consumers, "cold and solid" money seems to them to be more important than time, even their time. Therefore the famous saying does not exactly correspond to reality.
A unique study on this topic showed that consumers find it easier to estimate the value of a product or object using the "wallet" and the money in it, than to estimate it with a time-dependent money equivalent. "People don't have much idea about the time they waste and they easily tend not to attach importance to it - compared to the importance they attach to the money they invest in the purchase of a product or service," explained the head of the research team Prof. Erica Okeda from the University of Washington and her colleague Prof. Stephen Hoch from the prestigious School of Management Wharton Business, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (which maintains a joint study program with Tel Aviv University).
Contrary to previous studies that dealt with this question and focused on transactions based on money transfer, the current study showed that time as a means of payment is not relevant. 360 students took part in the experiments. They were told that "you have just purchased a product that requires you to pay for it - either in 4 hours of work, or in 50 dollars, in one case they were told that the product they purchased was good and in the other case - it turned out to be a defective and bad product.
It turned out that the biggest differences in assessing the value of the product, whether it was good or bad, was when they paid for it with money. They found it difficult to estimate - when they "paid" for it while working. The differences regarding satisfaction with the quality of the product, after purchasing it, were less significant when they were required to pay for it on time. For them, time had less "value", compared to money. The latter seems much more important to them and they were very disappointed when the product or service was defective or of inferior quality, if they paid for it with their money and were less moved by the unpleasant experience - when they paid for it on time.
Prof. Okeda concluded the study: "The average consumer these days has not learned to estimate the price of a product in the currency called time." A report on the research is published in a scientific journal dealing with consumption and economic studies.
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