This meditation is likely to be abstract, philosophic, and a bit weird - but I think I may be onto something that would render a more dependable and accurate assessment of the motivation of buyers and sellers in the marketplace: the substitution of time for money in our consideration of various factors.
In commercial considerations, money is the standard of measurement: every thing and every activity is reduced to a monetary value, entered into the accounting ledgers, and presumed to explain everything perfectly. Except it doesn't. Money is an abstract concept, and "a dollar" represents different things to different people on both the supply and demand side, across different locations, and across different times. It really is quite sloppy and leads to many misconceptions, contradictions, and paradoxes.
Instead, translate money into time. A thing costs a certain amount of money because a certain amount of labor goes into its fabrication and provisioning. Even when a producer buys a physical component to add to his product (flour), the supplier's cost of that component deals with his own labor costs (the labor to raise and harvest wheat, grind it to powder, package and deliver it), and any materials that supplier uses are representations of the labor costs of his own suppliers.
Perhaps it's easier to understand from the consumer's side: the money that a consumer uses to purchase items he wants and needs is gained by the time he has spent at his own work as a laborer. If a person earns $10 an hour, a $5 purchase represents 30 minutes of his time; if a person earns $30 an hour, it represents 5 minutes of his time. The money-price is the same, but the amount of time the money represents is different to each of those customers.
It is not that people with a lot of money spend it less discriminately or have different needs - its that the money-price represents a smaller amount of time. In that sense, the $30/hour worker considers a $5 item with the same lack of discretion that a $10/hour worker would regard an item that costs 83 cents. The price, in terms of time, is paltry.
This is likely where the convenience of obtaining an item enters into consideration - regardless of what they earn on the job, both individuals might spend an hour minutes to get to a store, buy an item, and return home. This levels the field a bit, because when convenience and cost are combined, the $10 worker must invest 90 minutes and the $30 worker must invest 65 minutes to obtain it (a difference of 72% is still significant, though less than the 300% difference when money-price is considered alone).
It also levels out differences between markets: an American worker who earns $10 an hour and pays $5 for a meal is spending more money, but the same amount of time as a third-world laborer who earns 50 cents and hour and pays 25 cents for the same meal in his locale. In that light, the histrionic objections to low wages in developing nations is entirely unwarranted.
The difficulty in chronitizing rather than monetizing costs is in the disparity in wages of the buyers. Our sense of equality and fairness is largely satisfied when all customers pay the same money price, regardless of what they earn - but again upset when we recognize that the same money price represents highly disproportionate time prices for different consumers.
It's also highly unlikely, given our cultural fixation on money, that accounting systems can be converted to a chronitized method of measurement. We really don't care that we earned a "profit" of ten minutes on the sale of an item, but want to know how much money we have made.
It does become significant in terms of personal finance: where a person is considering their budget and the price of things in terms of money rather than time. The explanation of why people with a lot of money buy more things and pay higher prices seems more logical when you recognize that they might be spending the same amount of time to buy a "luxury" version of an item that less wealthy individuals purchase an "economy" version.
It is not that having more money makes them regard the money itself as less valuable - it's that it takes them less time to earn more money. And when you consider time given rather than money, it works out that that the $30/hour worker exchanges an equal amount of his time (two hours) for a $60 shirt as the $10/hour worker exchanges for a $20 shirt.
This makes the consideration of price, in the retail sense, much less subject to seemingly unknown factors - but it does make the mathematics a great deal more complicated when price expressed in terms of time fluctuates according to the income and financial resources of each individual customer.
Don't mistake this for a revisionist consideration of pricing: it would be ludicrous for a retailer to ask each customer how much they earn in order to set a money-price for an item to be equal in terms of time for the individual shopper. But it would be (and is) quite natural for a consumer to consider what he spends as a percentage of his total income and select a retailer or an item that offers a price that represents roughly the same proportion of time.
That is, the $10/hour worker who seeks to spend 25% of his income on rent will seek an apartment that lets for $400/month whereas the $30/hour worker, seeking to spend the same 25%, seeks one that lets for $1,200/month. The same for the vehicle they drive, the clothing they wear, the food they eat, and any product or service they consume.
When retailers seek to supply a given market, they seek to satisfy a given price point to accommodate the capacity of a given income level. Each product is tailored to the purchasing capacity of a given income bracket - so that in aggregate, sellers provide range of choices to suit a range of incomes, resulting from a range of wages. That is, when a retailer decides to stock $20 shirts and $60 shirts to accommodate the price sensitivity of different shoppers, what he is really doing is providing each the ability to choose an item that represents an amount of time that is proportional to their income.
To focus only on money prices is to ignore a necessary relationship between money and time that has a significant impact on consumer behavior in terms of price sensitivity. Were the consideration more explicit, it would likely help clarify and add more certainty.
As such, a retailer who is seeking to price his merchandise in a given area has to consider the price sensitivity of customers in an area, and that is difficult to do based on the household income of customers in an area. If you translate cost into time, and determine that customers are willing to give about 20 minutes of their own labor in order to purchase a given item, then determining what price to charge can be done by considering their income in terms of time: if the ZIP code areas that a merchant wishes to serve though a given store average out to $15.87 per hour, then the proper price for an item that represents 20 minutes labor would be $5.29
My thoughts on this matter are beginning to unravel - too much at once to coordinate it all - and I likely need to break off typing and do some thinking to reorganize and reconsider them. But I have the sense I'm onto something here, and that chronitization can be useful in untangling some of the problems where monetization obscures the real cost of things.
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