The Dollar Rule vs. Wii Fit
One of our on-going series will pit the Dollar Rule against our own purchases to see how we spend our dollars. In this one we cover the very popular Wii Fit game for the Ninetendo Wii game console.
Along with thousands of other Ninetendo Wii users, we loved the idea of Wii Fit. Having played Wii Sports (the game that comes included with the Wii) quite a bit it was easy to see how this game console had the potentially to give you a real workout. Although the Wii Fit has been somewhat hard to find in stores, we called around and found a Target that had just gotten a shipment and were able to get there in time to snag one off the shelf.
The retail price for the Wii Fit was $89.99. Fortunately we have a few standard tricks to help defray the cost.
One of the reward sites that we use is MyPoints.com. Basically you get emails with ads that you can read for points. You can also buy things through their partner merchants (a very large list that includes hundreds of stores or web sites like NewEgg.com, Best Buy, Target, eBay, and lot more.) to rack up more points. In our case, we had enough points to get three $10 gift cards for Target. So with $30 in gift cards plus some leftover credit on a free pre-paid credit card we got from a local car dealership, we managed to buy the Wii Fit for around $45 out-of-pocket.
(We actually also got our Nintendo Wii for around $100 (vs. the $250 retail price) in almost the exact same manner, except with a much bigger handful of gift cards!)
The Wii Fit game is designed to gradually let you unlock new exercises or mini-games as you progress. It also maintains a personal of your Wii Fit activities, to help keep you on track. As with many goal setting activities, it helps to keep a log or journal of your activities, whether it's losing weight (Weight Watchers advocates journaling) or some other endeavor.
It's all designed to keep you doing the exercises, even if in small chunks of time. As you get better at the exercises, they also unlock harder difficulties in the mini-games and more repetitions allowed in the strength or yoga exercises (like more push-ups or tricep lifts, etc.). The game notices when you hit 30 minutes of activity in a session and gives you a little congratulations message each time you reach it.
So per the Dollar Rule we need to use the Wii Fit for at least 1 person-hour per dollar to make it a worthy purchase. We've got four people in the family, so it should be easier to reach DRR of 1.0 than with just one person, although only a couple of us are regular users. We've had the Wii Fit for about a month now as of this writing. Fortunately the Wii is good about tracking your play history, so I was able to graph out our Wii Fit usage.
The shorter orange bars are the daily usage minutes. The taller blue bars are the cumulative Wii Fit usage time.
You can see how on the first couple days we racked up quite a lot of time on the Wii Fit. We got it during Memorial Day weekend, so we were able to spend much of each day on the Wii Fit. But once the holiday was over usage leveled pretty quickly into more periodic usage. Sessions on the Wii Fit now tend to be only 20-30 minutes long now, enough for a short workout.
In the second graph, the break-even points (one for the retail price and one for our out-of-pocket price) are overlayed on the graph to show how far we are from DRR of 1.0. If we calculate our time using the $45 we paid, then we're quite close to the break-even point of 2700 minutes (60 min x $45). Another 21 or so half-hour sessions and we'll reach our minimum DRR of 1.0.
However, if we go by the full retail price, then we're not even halfway to the break-even of 5400 minutes. But hey, this is only the first month of ownership. Even with 111 half-hour sessions need to reach DRR of 1.0, if we get 3 sessions in per week that's only 37 weeks (less than 10 months). So less than a year overall. But I have a feeling we'll be making use of the Wii Fit for a lot longer than just a year. Certainly we'll get more longevity than some of our other Wii games (which we'll pit against the Dollar Rule later in this series).
So in a relatively short amount of time, at least based on the current usage rate, the Wii Fit is looking to qualify as a Dollar Rule-worthy purchase, not even counting the health benefits of the exercise we're getting. But again, one of the reasons we make use of the Dollar Rule is so we don't have to try and measure something (i.e., health benefits) that's not easily precisely measured. We could go by amount of weight lost perhaps, as a metric, but with the Dollar Rule we don't have to.
It's great for solo play or some even multi-player play. One of the Aerobics exercises is a two-player jogging session where you can run side-by-side. The other mini-games of course, are great for competing against each other (high scores are global) plus you can see how good (or bad) your friends and family are at the hulu hoop.
Whether the Wii Fit is a fad or will be a real trend remains to be seen. But if you have the opportunity and think you would be a regular user of it, we highly recommend getting one.
Trackback URL for this post:
Tags:
- George's blog
- 1108 reads
Post new comment