Basic Economics

But saying that you need resources is not the same thing as saying that you need cash money.

There's an old saying in the engineering business, that slightly changes from one area to another. A fairly common form is:

better, faster, cheaper - pick two

• We can do a better job, and do it really fast - but it will cost you more money.
• We can do it really fast and save a lot of money - but the quality will be poor.
• We can save money and create a high-quality product - but it will take us a long time to get it done.

• If you keep the quality the same - doing it faster will cost more money.
• If you keep the speed the same - improving the quality will cost more money.
• If you keep the cost the same - doing the job faster will compromise quality.

If you don't have a lot of money to spend, you can compensate by investing more time.

False Economy

Example #1 - Henry Haunter wants one set of monster hands for his spook house. He sees a set for $7, but is a very thrifty man. Henry finds a way to build a set using discarded ballpoint pens (free!) and coathanger wire (free!) to make a set of hands. It takes Henry an hour to make the hands.

Example #2 - Gary Ghoul wants an electric chair execution in his haunt. A famous prop company sells one for $5,000. Gary builds an electric chair for $75 in materials. It takes him three days.

During the week, Henry and Gary work together at Billy's Casket Emporium, making the princely sum of $10/hour. Who's the smarter haunter?

The materials for Henry's hands were free, but the hands cost an hour of his time. Since Henry gets $10/hour for his time at work, one can assume that his time is worth $10 per hour. The "free" hands cost $10, when he could have bought them for $7. Perhaps not a good deal.

Gary's electric chair took three days. If a working day is 8 hours, and Gary makes $10/hour, Gary's labor for this project is worth $240. When you add the cost of materials, the electric chair cost $315. Since buying the thing would have cost a lot more, Gary's decision seems pretty good.

This example is oversimplified, of course.

• Buying a product has additional costs for taxes, and shipping. I wonder how much it costs to truck a crated electric chair halfway across the country?
• Buying something has hidden costs: your time for shopping for the right product and time required to go to the store.
• In both cases, the time expended is only worth $10/hour if somebody is willing to pay for it.
• There are also benefits of doing it yourself: you gain knowledge (perhaps the next set of monster hands only takes 20 minutes to make).

Haunting On The Cheap

Time comes in two flavors: the actual time you spend doing something, and the time on the clock. Let's say that you apply a coat of paint to something. The object is small, so it only takes 5 minutes of effort to apply the paint (in fact, let's call that form of time "effort"). But the paint takes an hour to dry. Since you can't move on to the next step until this time is past, you need to count that, too. (You could call it "clock time", or if there is a lot of it "calendar time". Computer folks sometimes call this "wall time", perhaps because both clocks and calendars hang on the wall.)

Come to think of it, there is another form of time that can be traded. You can buy bread from the day-old rack at the grocery store. It was really great bread yesterday; it's usable today; but tomorrow it will be stale. What you are trading off here is the anticipated useful life of the thing you are buying. Perhaps we should call this "lifetime".

The distinction between different flavors of time is important, because each different kind of time can be traded for money in a different way. Different kinds of time also differ in flexibility.

• "effort" - This is the classic question of "Can I save money by making my own?" If you need a lot of effort to compensate for a huge lack of money, you have the flexibility of taking a leave of absence from your day job, or getting some volunteers to help.
• "lifetime" - This might involve buying a can of latex that is past its expiration date. In order to make this kind of exchange work, you might want to switch your schedule around so that latex projects get done first, before the material becomes unusable.
• "wall time" - One form of this is buying props at the after-Halloween sales. This offers no real flexibility - If you start a month before Halloween, there's nothing you can do to get the post-Halloween prices.

Spreading Out The Load

But monitor them closely - You don't want your haunt to fail because the volunteers flake out. Pick helpers who are as dedicated as you are.

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