Cheap

“ But paying is part of the game of life: it is the joy of buying that we crave. Go down into the dark markets of the town. See the long, narrow, sordid streets lined with the cheap commodities of the poor. Mark how there is a sort of spangled gaiety, a reckless swing, a grinning exultation in the grimy, sordid caravanserai. ”

“ I cannot always sympathize with that demand which we hear so frequently for cheap things. Things may be too [548] cheap. They are too cheap when the man who produces them upon the farm or the man or woman who produces them in the factory does not get out of them living wages with a margin for old age and for a dowry for the incidents that are to follow. [Applause.] I pity that man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth or shapes it into a garment shall starve in the process. ”

“ But just wait till you get the clothes and the idea of cheapness goes like dew under a July sun. All there is cheap in the transaction is the suit. The material is very cheap, cheap to the point of flimsiness, and the making—heaven help you—it is thrown together. ”

“ Have you any cheap ones? This is cheaper. There is a proverb which says:— Good things are not cheap: Cheap things are not good. This is business talk. You want to sell dear, So of course you say this. ”

“ I have to sell cheap goods. But of course if I sold more of them I'd have more money and then I could pay my bills. [146]
"But there, my dears, this isn't any fun for you. You came to get your pennies' worth of candy, and I'll pick it out for you. ”

“ "What is there that is cheap now? Everything is dear. There is nothing in the world that is cheap except trouble; you can get that for nothing, the trouble of the world!" ”

“ But Nature, looking graver, lays her hand upon his arm.
“Put by your purse, boy,” she says, “my price is not a price in reason, nor is gold the metal that I deal in. There are many shops in various streets where your bank-notes will be accepted. But if you will take an old woman’s advice, you will not go to them. The thing they will sell you will bring sorrow and do evil to you. It is cheap enough, but, like all things cheap, it is not worth the buying. No man purchases it, only the fool.”
“And what is the cost of the thing you sell then?” asks the lad. ”

“ Money often costs too much, and power and pleasure are not cheap. ”

“ Cicero said: "Not to have a mania for buying, is to possess a revenue." Many are carried away by the habit of bargain-buying. "Here's something wonderfully cheap; let's buy it." "Have you any use for it?" "No, not at present; but it is sure to come in useful, some time." ”

“ Finding that sundry speculators were accumulating and hoarding up provisions in anticipation of a season of high prices, they hastily decided, first of all to put a stop to such "selfish iniquity." In their eyes the great thing to be done was to make things cheap. ”

“ He means, that perhaps the cheapness is apparent only, and not real; or the bargain, by straitening thee in thy business, may do thee more harm than good. For in another place he says,
"Many have been ruined by buying good penny-worths." ”

“ Imagine her, with her fatherless, hungry children by her side, plying the needle late into the night, for the pitiful sum of seventy-five cents a week, as I once did. Imagine her, with this discouraging price of her eye-sight and strength, creeping forth with her little child by the hand, peeping cautiously through the glass windows of stores, to decide unobtrusively upon fabrics and labeled prices, or vainly trying to read human feeling enough in their owners’ faces to insure her from contemptuous insult at the smallness and cheapness of her contemplated purchase. ”

“ The dictionaries define this adjective as meaning, bearing a low price, or to be had at a low price; but nowadays good usage makes it mean that a thing may be had, or has been sold, at a bargain. Hence, in order to make sure of being understood, it is better to say low-priced, when one means low-priced, than to use the word cheap. What is low-priced, as everybody knows, is often dear, and what is high-priced is often cheap. ”

“ It is upon this account that goods sold by retail are generally as cheap, and frequently much cheaper, in the capital than in small towns and country villages. Grocery goods, for example, are generally much cheaper; bread and butchers’ meat frequently as cheap. ”

“ Do not despise it because it is cheap, and everybody may have the luxury as well as you. Common things are cheap, and common things are invariably the most valuable. Could we only have a fresh air or sunshine by purchase, what luxuries these would be ”

“ If a man was hard to move in any way and was mean to me I came at him with prices. If he treated me gentlemanly and gave me his confidence, I robbed him—that is, I got the full marked price, while the other fellow bought goods cheaper than this man. ”

“ These, and most other things which are sold by retail, the way in which the labouring poor buy all things, are generally fully as cheap, or cheaper, in great towns than in the remoter parts of the country, for reasons which I shall have occasion to explain hereafter. ”

“ Crape and woolen goods of the finest quality are very expensive, but a cheaper article will wear miserably; there is no greater error in economy than purchasing cheap mourning, for no goods are so inferior, or wear out and grow rusty so soon. ”

“ And you'd feel cheap, wouldn't you, if you had to come back after you ran away because you didn't have enough money? You take this, and you can pay it back as soon as you please after you have seen the old bookstore man. ”

“ Meantime, however, such money as you do have, you want to spend wisely, and the vast majority of you spend it very unwisely indeed.
In the first place, a great many of the simplest and most wholesome foods are cheap—often because people do not know enough to value them. ”

“ Few men before me but have found in the course of their lives more than once that that which was cheapest when measured by mere price was the dearest when they were without money and employment, or when their products could find no market, and, finding it, commanded no price at all commensurate with the labor required to produce them. ”

“ 'I sold myself,' said Mr. Bumble, pursuing the same train of relection, 'for six teaspoons, a pair of sugar-tongs, and a milk-pot; with a small quantity of second-hand furniture, and twenty pound in money. I went very reasonable. Cheap, dirt cheap!'
'Cheap!' cried a shrill voice in Mr. Bumble's ear: 'you would have been dear at any price; and dear enough I paid for you, Lord above knows that!'
Mr. ”

“ It would have been cheaper for us to have written our bills on gold-leaf, and for tea, to have drunk melted jewels, like the queen I read of once; cheaper and better, a thousand times, than the bloody cost we are paying now. ”

“ Throw not my words away, as many do;
They're gold in value, though they're cheap to you. ”

“ II. That the responsibility for some of the worst evils from which wage-earners suffer, rests with the Consumers, who persist in buying in the cheapest markets, regardless of how cheapness is brought about. ”

“ Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever be the price one has to pay for it. ”

“ If you hire it for less I'll be hang'd. Nay, your Neighbour Chremes offer'd me a Field, and asks for it—How much? Just as much as you ask for yours. But it is much better. That's a Lye. I do as they use to do who cheapen a Thing. Do you keep it yourself at that Price. What, do you cheapen, ask the Price, when you won't buy any Thing. ”

“ The newer and truer romance will be the romance of cheapness. It will address itself to the truly imaginative task of realising what is the real worth (a worth running into millions) of the penny cup of coffee to the tired pedestrian at midnight or the pennyworth of tobacco, to the poor man in his half-hour holiday. ”

“ I'll work as cheap as the next one if ye'll gi' me a cheap house to live in and cheap beef and bread. I doant care for money in the savin's bank, or a house that they tax all out o' sight. When I'm old I'll go to the poorhouse, I will ”

“ As the commoner [Pg 14] kinds multiply, and the common people learn to use them as daily food, the finer kinds will bear proportionally higher prices; and cheapness is one of the steps to profit in all things that are consumed in the community. ”

“ But I ought to beg pardon of the Genius of American cheapness, who so kindly presides over the making of most of our manufactures, and under whose shrewd tuition we are fast beginning to believe that cheapness in the first cost of an article, is the main point to which our attention should be directed! ”

“ The world grew cheap, as worlds must. ”

“ In this principle, that the great mass of the people will read as they buy, lies the secret of the enormous success of the weekly sheets of that great epoch of cheapness which began about twenty years ago. ”

“ I remember one time we were in Lamesa, when I was eleven years old. I had spent all my money except a dime. I wanted to buy a pocketbook to put my money in. There were four stores in town that sold pocketbooks and I went to all of them but it was of no use. The cheapest one any of them had was ten cents. Now, if I spent my dime for one, I wouldn't have any money left to put in it. And if I didn't buy one, I was apt to lose my dime. What should I do? ”

“ Whatever is found to gratify the publick, will be multiplied by the emulation of venders beyond necessity or use. This plenty indeed produces cheapness, but cheapness always ends in negligence and depravation. ”

“ And in addition, it is an understood fact that it is cheaper to cater for a large number of people—buying, cooking, and serving wholesale—than it is to cater for a small number of people, say a family. ”

“ According to the political economists of the school of Adam Smith and Leon Say, cheapness is the word in which may be summed up the [42] advantages of unlimited competition. But why persist in considering the effect of cheapness with a view only to the momentary advantage of the consumer? ”

“ In the second, the cheapness is a local accident, advantageous to the local purchaser, disadvantageous to the local producer. It is one of the first duties of commerce to extend the market, and thus give the local producer his full advantage. ”

“ They denounce cheapness, and it appears that they do so because they want to sell dear. When they buy, they buy as cheaply as they can. They say that they want to raise wages, but they never pay anything but the lowest market rate. ”

“ To find a cheaper room, to take one more girl into her room, to spend a few cents a day less for food—these are the near-hand economies that first present themselves to the girlish mind. This is on the economizing side. ”

“ This time we look beyond the rosy-cheeked, healthy country lad, bred amid the beauties of God's fields and nourished with unadulterated home products, to the pale, nervous, over-worked girls who spend their days filling these bags. In an ill-lighted, ill-ventilated room, in a great dusty, dirty city they work feverishly for ten hours at the rate of four cents a hundred bags. ”

“ When they find that an ox was formerly sold for a few shillings, and the price of a quarter of corn calculated in pence, they are led to envy the supposed cheapness of those ages, and to bewail the distressing dearness of the present. Nothing however can be more absurd than the whining complaints founded upon such facts; for since the cheapness of living depends not so much upon the price given for every article of prime necessity, as upon the means by which, to use a common expression, the purchase p. ”

“ So far as they are wanted for purposes of luxury or the arts, the demand increases with the cheapness, in the same irregular way as the demand for any other commodity. So far as they are required for money, the demand increases with the cheapness in a perfectly regular way, the quantity needed being always in inverse proportion to the value. ”