I'm a little late to this now-rambling thread, but I would just add one more thing which hasn't been discussed: Opportunity cost & the time-value of money This comes into play in addition to how values are affected by personal taste, connection with the movie, income, scarcity, status, etc...
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While you have a valid point, that time is money and in the end someone who spends time trying to save a penny might end up wasting a dime, you are overlooking a few facts.
1) Your analogies are not really valid unless Brian and Thierry were sacrificing time at a paying job in order to do the search. Just because someone makes $100,000/year, which is equal to about $48/hour (in a 40-hour work week) before taxes and other stuff, doesn't mean they make $48/hour every hour of every day of every week. So it's not like if they spent 10 hours after work doing something they 'wasted' $480. Now if someone took an unpaid day off to spend those 8 hours trying to find a deal on a poster, yes, that would result in an end loss of a few hundred bucks. But as long as they are not missing out on doing something that would make them money instead, nothing is actually lost.
2) Many people in high-income positions spend much more than 40-hours/week working, so the time they have leftover outside of sleeping is quite valuable to them. But only they could put a price on what it's worth. For me, I pay someone $85/month to cut our grass and do the general landscaping. Why? Well first, I hate working outside in Florida. But also, I would much rather pay someone else to do it so I can use that time for other things. It's worth the $20/hour I'm paying them so I can do something else. That might just be sitting around the house watching television. So in that case, one might say that I paid $20 to watch a TV show. But, to me, that was $20 well spent.
3) For many people, saving money (in large quantities) is actually fun. It's not the end result that matters, it's the thrill of the hunt. I personally don't find it interesting to spend an hour or two each week cutting coupons to save $10-20 in groceries, but I will spend hours trying to find slick deals (
www.slickdeals.net) online. Hell, back a few years ago, I spent countless hours during an entire week going after the eBay Doorbusters Christmas promotion. I won't go into the details, but they were dropping random prizes for $1 BINs to whoever could find and buy it the fastest. In the end, it became a scripting contest to see who could access the eBay API fast enough. I ended up 'winning' close to $7,000 worth of stuff. Some I kept, much I gave away (or won for other people in the first place). But while the winning part was always nice, I enjoyed the challenge even more.
