The Real Cost of a Television

Last week I bought a new TV for our living room. It was a somewhat spur-of-the-moment purchase after the old one started to glitch—about five minutes of research and ten minutes in Best Buy to purchase it. 

I thought the installation would be just as quick, but when the set arrived on Thursday morning, I discovered that it didn’t fit our existing wall mount. So, instead of having it set up before the day got started, I found myself rushing to the hardware store between meetings to buy the bolts and washers needed to retrofit the mount. 

Since my kids haven’t been hitting the weight room as much as they should be, I had to enlist a friend to help me lift the TV into place, which could only happen later in the evening. Still, I imagined that, once the TV was on the wall, I’d just turn it on and start watching. The last time I bought a TV, all one had to do was plug in the cable cord. Instead, I spent 20 minutes looking up the Wi-Fi and streaming service passwords before it was even functional.

Then, as soon as I opened Netflix, a message popped up prompting me to upgrade to its Premium plan to take advantage of the TV’s higher screen resolution. 

I went into the TV project with a “one-time cost, trivial execution” mindset. By the time it was complete, I had already spent $8 at the hardware store and committed myself to an extra $7 per month to Netflix in perpetuity. Even excluding the opportunity costs of my time and my friend’s, those additional costs were already set to grow to a meaningful percentage of what the TV itself cost.

The experience reminded me that almost everything we take on—whether a new possession, project, or activity—comes with operating, inventory, and maintenance costs that we tend to underestimate before committing to it.

A somewhat trivial example is a living room coffee table. The price at the store is clear, but the cost of the time spent dusting it every week is not. The coffee table even costs us while just sitting there, because we have to walk around it every time we get up from the couch. Surely the table has value, but these are the overlooked costs of ownership. 

This pattern occurs at work as well. 

Imagine having three projects that each require just one hour-long meeting with a customer sometime in the next year—but you don’t know when. The direct cost of the project sounds trivial, making it easy to say Yes. However, the problem with the projects is that they take up space on your to-do list each week, and you need to carry them in your mind, regardless of whether they require direct effort. 

Storing the projects in your mental inventory carries its own cost, as their presence on the to-do list means your list is never complete. If it were a physical item in a warehouse, we’d charge it rent, but projects like these live rent-free in our heads! 

Recently, I spoke with a leader whose organization was considering building a technology product for the first time. Like my purchase of the TV, she was mostly focused on the initial cost to build the product. But as we talked, it became clear that the majority of the costs would come after it was “complete”—a development team to fix bugs and release new features, a product team to keep up with customers’ needs, and a customer service team to help users resolve issues. 

She realized that very quickly, those ongoing costs would exceed the cost of building the product in the first place, and by taking them on, she would be fundamentally shifting the way the organization operates. Soon, these would stop being “new project costs” (where there’s an obvious choice about whether to incur them) and become “normal” operating expenditures—something everyone takes for granted when doing the annual budget. 

And that’s the danger. 

The extra $7 per month for Netflix will soon disappear into the larger bucket of our household utilities, which is rarely scrutinized, rather than being tied to the specific TV choice. Similarly, once one gets used to a weekly trip to the dry cleaner, it blends into the normal set of errands they “have to do,” rather than being factored into the cost when buying the next article of clothing. Or, when one signs up for an ongoing volunteer opportunity, interruptions to evenings and weekends become a “normal” part of their life.

Operating, inventory, and maintenance costs are both easy to understand and easy to ignore. But when we underestimate them, we’re more likely to end up with commitments we regret. 

The simple solution is to think through these costs before saying Yes to new activities. A former boss once told me that the total cost of any technology product is roughly ten times the cost to build it. That sounds like a really good ratio to apply to anything we take on. 

The new pair of jeans isn’t just $50—it’s $500 worth of our time spent washing, folding, and storing them. 

The new project isn’t just 20 hours of work—it’s 200 hours worth of direct work, meeting scheduling and calendar chaos, emotional labor in managing all of the characters involved, and mental space that could be used elsewhere.

And saying Yes to the one-hour weekend commitment is really saying Yes to an interruption of ten hours of potential relaxation. 

I don’t regret buying the new TV—the picture is amazing, and the sound bar lets me play music at fantastic volume and bass (sorry, neighbors!). But identifying the total cost of ownership would have made me pause just long enough to ask whether I was ready to live with everything that comes with it.