The Good Dad?

Today I tried to teach Pinkie Pie a lesson.  Not in an angry way, just in a learning way.  I might have taught her to be evil.  I can't tell.

Pinkie Pie has been watching a particular Youtuber called Dennis Daily.  She was desperately excited to look at his webpage and wanted to buy a shirt from it.  The shirts were fairly expensive, shipping was a lot, and they were in US dollars, so she was going to have to fork out nearly fifty dollars for the shirt.  This is more money than she has so she scoured the store on the website to find something, anything, to buy.

This is just not a state I get into.  I rarely buy anything that isn't food or transportation and when I do I go out to buy a specific thing I know I want.  I just don't get into a frenzy needing to buy something to satisfy my urge to consume.  Pinkie Pie does do this, and I think she is the normal one by far.

At any rate Pinkie Pie settled on a 'I <3 cats' mousepad.  With shipping and currency conversion it was going to add up to about $29, which seems ludicrous for a mousepad considering she already has a perfectly functional one.

So before ordering I typed in 'cat mousepad' into google to see what showed up.  Dennis Daily's website actually was in the top few on google which surprised me (I guess he is a bonefide celebrity, not that I would know) but also in the top few hits was Amazon.com.

Amazon has everything.  It turns out that in the set of everything there are cat themed mousepads, one of which was just as cute as the Dennis Daily offering.  Amazon, however, was willing to ship to us for a grand total of $9.

I don't like telling Pinkie Pie to skip out on paying the small scale content creator to buy from the multinational corporation, especially one that has a lot of sketchy business practices like Amazon does.

On the other hand I think it is a really good lesson that you should shop around a bit before actually committing to buy something.  In this case the shopping around took about 2 minutes and saved her $20 so it was quite worth it, particularly considering she gets $2.50 a week in allowance.

I don't know if I am on Team Good or Team Evil here.  I saved her money, promoted the faceless font of encroaching dystopia, taught her good lessons about being frugal, and failed to pay someone she wanted to support.

Maybe the lesson should have been "The ethics of shopping are highly complicated and making the right decision is difficult at best."

That might be a lesson for a few years down the road.