Okay, fast forward to these days and times. This particular shower gel fetches $40/bottle on eBay. So that means that every bottle that I use costs me the same as someone buying it now (forgetting about cost of selling to simplify the scenario) because it represents money for which I could have sold it and, importantly, it would be very easy to sell it since like most everybody else I have an eBay account and could list and sell it without much in the way of complexity or burden. So the $4 that I paid for each no longer seems relevant as what it cost me to purchase – it still costs me around $40 to use one of them. To me that’s kind of weird, although it was fully explained to me in college in Econ 101.
If you have a lot of bottles of fragrances that you bought some time ago, you can see this for yourself. I mean, there’s stuff that sells for more than what you paid, then there’s stuff that sells for waaay more than what you paid. The money we forego hanging onto those items rather than readily selling them represents the cost of continuing to own them. You see, everything that you value can be assigned some dollar amount. How you get to that amount is of course very subjective, but it can be done, at least in abstraction. Getting back to Econ 101, in my class the professor posed an example – would you accept money in exchange for time off of your mother’s life. To the muttering of the class, he pointed out that he had yet to specify how much money and how much time – what about a five million dollars for five days? Then he said, “before you answer, I suggest that you call your mother and ask her.”
I have a full bottle of Tommy Bahama for Men that came as part of a lot that I bought maybe five-six years ago. While I can’t accurately establish my cost now, I would guess with some certainty that I paid maybe $10-$15 for it parsed out as part of the whole lot. I like it, don’t love it, haven’t sprayed it in years. So costs me upwards of $250-300 to hang onto it. And I could, as could most others here, list a bunch of other fragrances that we hold in a similar circumstance.
There’s a current thread about aggressively selling colognes, and I suspect that that person is realizing gains relating to this concept. The implications of thinking this through for every item I own is dizzying. I suppose that I could and maybe should just go with what Carl told Ed Grimes when Grimes found out that Homer Simpson was in charge of safety at a nuclear power plant, “Uh, it’s best not to think about it.” Thanks for reading. 
