Tom Peters was out running errands when he realized he had left his wallet home. Fortunately, he had stowed some cash in the glovebox for just such an occasion.
As he quickly depleted the reserve, he noticed something. "I, doubtless like you, pay for stuff with plastic," he writes in his blog at TomPeters.com. "There is many an 'ouch' in the process. But the credit-card 'ouch' is a far cry from peeling off $138 at the grocery store, $37 to fill a ... Subaru, $77 at one of my ordinary stops at the book store and a couple of others. One's sense of the true cost of living goes up by an order of magnitude."
Peters believes the lesson can be applied to business, where it's all too easy to lose track of what supplies and other elements of your day-to-day operations actually cost. His recommendation: Choose a month, and pay in cash whenever possible. You might be surprised to learn that you're not as comfortable with your overhead as you thought you were.
The Po!nt: Peters states: "After paying the office supply bill in $20s, I'd bet a pretty penny or 10 that the next month would inaugurate an era of tighter purse strings."
Source: Tom Peters! Web site. This post created a real buzz. You can read it in its entirety by going here.
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