Splitting costs for a babysitter
My 5-year old son comes home to a babysitter a couple days a week. We used to have him at the school's aftercare program but the days were just too long and busy for him. A neighbor, whose son my son plays with sometimes, asked if our sitter could take care of her kid too. I checked with my son and the sitter and both said it was okay so I told my neighbor we could try it. I told her we pay $10/hr but 2 kids would be $12/hour. She said she could afford that. At the end of the week, she paid $2/hr. Her reasoning was that we were paying $10/hr before. She wouldn't pay any more.
I'm pretty pissed and told her I didn't think it was going to work out. Now she's pissed at me. Was I wrong to think that we would be splitting the cost of the sitter in half?
Anonymous
Feb 16, 2010
2 Answers
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3 votes
Wow! Of course you split it. The whole point of volume discounts is to reap savings on the per unit cost. That rule applies for products as well as in this case, a service.
It's unfair of your neighbor to only pay a fraction when in fact the sitter is splitting her time equally between the children. Therefore, the neighbor should pay equally.
I agree too. No one could get a sitter for $2/hr therefore that's not a fair market price to pay for babysitting services. Further, "splitting" should be assumed to be even unless otherwise negotiated. If your babysitter didn't add a couple of dollars to the fee, did your neighbor think she'd found a sitter for free? Sweet! ;)
- andrea, Feb 17, 2010
Anonymous
Feb 16, 2010
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1 votes
... and the logic for the 50-50 splitting is of course that when the babysitter is with only one child, he or she can give 100% of her attention and care to that one child. When there are two, the child who would have been getting 100% attention gets less, as the sitter divides the attention and care between the kids. Why would a family continue to pay solo price for shared care? For the same reason that cab sharing is cheaper for each passenger - every passenger make a compromise on the individual service and as a result pays less. It would be unacceptable to presume that one person would still pay premium price for a non-premium service experience. Anything else is charity. (which has its place and time but this presumably is not it)
Anonymous
Feb 20, 2010
Totally agree!
- Steve Lacy, Feb 17, 2010