Cheap presents a reduced or lower price than usual.
Cheap is a concept that allows us to classify something that has a reduced or lower price than usual . For example: “These pants are very cheap, you should take the opportunity to buy them,” “This restaurant is not so cheap,” “We are paying very cheap rent for this house since its owner is a friend of my father.”
What is meant by cheap varies according to the time and place. Suppose that a country is going through an inflation process, where prices usually rise more than 5% per month. In January, a phone that sells for 500 pesos can be expensive. However, six months later, that same phone can be offered for 800 pesos . This makes a price of 500 pesos for the product in question now cheap .
Cheapness is also linked to purchasing power . In a nation whose inhabitants have an average monthly salary of $1,000 , a bottle of wine selling for $2 may be cheap . That same product, at the same price, will be very expensive in a region with an average salary of 30 dollars per month .
Determination of cheap
To determine if something is cheap, it must be compared with other elements of its class : it cannot be said that all products sold for 10 pesos are cheap, to name one example. A candy at 10 pesos can be very expensive, while a kilogram of beef at the same price is very cheap.
Therefore, one of the first criteria that we can use to determine whether an item is cheap or expensive is to compare it with others of the same type, taking into account several brands. Very often we find a product whose price does not reflect at all the quality of its materials or the labor necessary for its manufacture, but rather presents an excess that seems to have no explanation, and the cause is usually the use of intellectual properties. pre-existing ones that require payment of rights, as happens with the merchandising of famous films.
Similarly, it is almost impossible to determine whether a work of art has the right price, since behind it lies a series of issues such as the fame of its creator, the market in which it is sold, its age and its rarity. . For this reason, the same music album may seem cheap to an admirer of the author but expensive to a detractor who would not pay a single coin for it.
Services are easier to evaluate, thanks to customer experiences and opinions. However, personal assessments also come into play here that cloud the judgment and can lead to unobjective verdicts. In short, it is not valid to argue that an Internet service is expensive simply because we do not have enough money to hire it or that it is cheap because our old provider charged us more.
To determine if something is cheap you have to compare it with other items in the same class.
something of little value
In colloquial language , something is said to be cheap when it has low quality or little value : “I don't want to listen to your cheap excuses anymore: get to work and stop wasting time” , “The cheap rock of these types of bands seems to me very boring” , “The young man tried to convince the policeman with a cheap argument but he was unsuccessful” .
Cheap arguments , as can be seen in the previous examples, are those that have no foundations and that can be dismantled without much effort to reveal that it is false or manipulated data. Faced with the accusation of not fulfilling their obligations responsibly, a person who excuses themselves in this way cannot justify their attitude, in the same way that after a traffic violation we cannot escape a fine with an unfounded story.