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Idiom: Bang for your buck
Not many regular people earning an average wage can afford to spend money like water anymore.
We’re all looking to get the best bang for the buck.
Simply put, this means we want to get the best value for our money.
Now, you may be wondering why is a dollar, a US dollar, that is, is called a buck.
Well, there are a few possible scenarios.
The explanation that I first heard was that it comes from the habit of trading animal skins for goods that you need.
Back in the day, there was no such thing as a US dollar.
Therefore, people required some other form of currency.
Deer skins were relatively common and very useful.
A male deer is called a buck.
If you traded two buckskins for some corn, you could say you got the corn for two bucks.
This is just one possible explanation.
If you’d like to know some others, you can click here to read a Huffington Post article from 2018.
Once again, I’ve deviated from the main topic and gone off on a tangent about something completely different.
I think it was worthwhile, though, because, hopefully, you learned something you didn’t already know.
We all want to get the best bang for the buck even though we live in Japan and use yen instead of US dollars.
It’s been a funtastic time to be a consumer in Japan.
Since I came here 20 years ago, Japan has been in deflation.
Prices have been steadily dropping or rising exceptionally slowly.
I feel I get the best bang for my buck here in Japan.
Living in Japan today in 2019 is cheaper than it was for me to live in Vancouver, Canada, as a university student 23 years ago.
Back then, I paid C$400 for one room.
Now I pay C$500 for the mortgage on a whole house.
If that’s not a good bang for the buck, I don’t know what is.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 77.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.