Right, but that has nothing to do with your compensation during work hours. I was specifically objecting to OP's:
> If you're in tech, the value of the time you spend driving to the store will probably be higher than all the tools you'll buy while you're there.
Implying that if you're not in tech (read: don't have a high salary) then your free time is not worth as much. I think most people value their free time like you described, not measured in terms of dollars, and certainly not proportional to how much they make in their day jobs.
How much you're willing to pay to have things done certainly has a very direct relationship to the amount you've got left over at the end of the month. Pretending that's not true because you can't literally weight up hourly rates isn't very useful.
> If you're in tech, the value of the time you spend driving to the store will probably be higher than all the tools you'll buy while you're there.
Implying that if you're not in tech (read: don't have a high salary) then your free time is not worth as much. I think most people value their free time like you described, not measured in terms of dollars, and certainly not proportional to how much they make in their day jobs.