I made this while taking a class called Useless Machines.
One of the machines we looked at was Claude Shannon's Ultimate Machine: a wooden box with a switch on top. You flip it on, a little hand comes out, flips the switch back off, and disappears.
That's the whole thing.
I liked how something so simple could make an everyday interaction feel a little strange. It wasn't trying to be useful or solve a problem. It was more of an experiment with an idea.
That became my starting point for this project.
I kept thinking about the phrase "time is money."
We say it all the time, but prices rarely feel like time. When I'm looking at something that costs $20, I see $20. I don't naturally think about how much of someone's time that amount represents.
So I wondered what would happen if I made the phrase a little more literal.
I needed a consistent way to convert dollars into time, so I used the US federal minimum wage: $7.25 an hour. It's not representative of what everyone earns, and certainly not a living wage, but that's also what made it an interesting reference point. It's a federally defined dollar value for an hour of work.
What would Amazon look like if every price were measured against that hour?
I built Spent, a Chrome extension that converts Amazon prices into the amount of time it would take to earn them at the federal minimum wage.
$12.99 becomes 1 hr 48 min.
$239.99 becomes 33 hr 6 min.
The extension doesn't change anything else about the shopping experience. You can turn it off at any time and the original prices return.
I wasn't trying to tell people what they should or shouldn't buy. I was mostly curious about whether changing the unit would change how a price felt.
The amount is exactly the same. It's just expressed in something a little easier to picture.
"Time is money" is such a familiar phrase that I wanted to see what it would look like if an interface took it literally.