Wealth & Money Quote by Kin Hubbard

A “bargain,” in Kin Hubbard’s formulation, isn’t a price tag so much as a small act of theater: the customer’s thrilling suspicion that they’ve outsmarted the system. The ellipsis does a lot of work here. It mimics the conspiratorial pause of someone leaning in to share secret wisdom, then delivers the punchline that deflates our self-congratulating logic. Hubbard turns a sacred consumer word into a diagnosis of human vanity.

The intent is classic early-20th-century newspaper wit: take a supposedly objective term and show how it’s built on perception, not math. A bargain isn’t “cheap”; it’s “cheap enough to feel like a win.” The store doesn’t have to be losing money. It just needs to look like it might be. That’s the subtext: consumption is driven less by need than by narrative, and the most potent narrative is victory. Hubbard’s joke lands because it catches the reader mid-fantasy, exposing the ego that’s tucked inside the purchase.

Context matters. Hubbard wrote in a period when mass retail, department stores, and modern advertising were rapidly professionalizing persuasion. “Sales,” “markdowns,” and “loss leaders” were teaching Americans to interpret shopping as strategy. His line slyly flips the power dynamic: the customer believes they’re fleecing the merchant, while the merchant is selling the feeling of fleece-the-merchant. It’s cynicism with a grin, and it still maps cleanly onto today’s “limited-time” deals and algorithmic discounts: the bargain is whatever convinces you the house is taking a hit.