Time Is Money: Chrome Extension Tells You How Many Hours You’d Need to Work to Afford That New Gizmo

Rob Walker
·Tech Columnist

Just in time for your holiday shopping, here’s a Chrome extension that converts the cost of items sold online from how many dollars they’ll cost you to how many hours of work you’ll need to complete.

Once installed onto your Google Chrome browser, Time Is Money prompts you to enter your income data — either hourly or annual. Then head on over to the e-commerce destination of your choice and call up whatever gizmo, doodad, or whatsis you crave.

Say you make $51,000 a year (roughly the median household income in the U.S.) and you want to buy a new iMac with Retina display. Time Is Money helpfully informs you that it’ll cost 101 hours and 56 minutes of work.

iMac with Retina display
iMac with Retina display

Or say you make $7.25 an hour (the federal minimum wage) and you really want a PlayStation 4. That’ll be 55 hours and 3 minutes of labor, please.

PlayStation 4
PlayStation 4

Note, by the way, that the extension even translates Amazon’s discount claims — you’ll save nine minutes of work by getting that game console from the controversial online superstore.

Time Is Money worked quite seamlessly for me. And now that I’ve concluded that I simply won’t have time to buy any gifts this year, perhaps I’ll even use it to cross-check some of my own material wants now and again.

But I’ll think about that later, after I take my nine-minute break.

Hat-tip: BoingBoing.

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