When you fish, you generally get a much better deal than what you get in the store. I mean fishing licenses are cheap, and the cost to rent a fishing boat for one day are relatively cheap compared to what you would pay if you bought the fish.

However, what amounts to $30 - $50 saved will cost you a full day worth of time, coming up barely meeting the minimum wage for your labor, if that. So why people do it? Well, because they don't consider it work. People actually enjoy fishing. The actual fish is only part of the pay off.

Maybe thats why people pick their own apples.

You're right, of course, that people enjoy fishing, and that they fish for pleasure more than to save money on fish. So much so that many don't even keep the fish they catch. But as a money-saving exercise, I'm not so sure. Even if you're going to eat all the fish they day they're caught, $50 buys an awful lot of fresh fish. And if the catch ends up frozen, then it's hard to believe you're going to save any money over the frozen fillets that are widely available for $6 to $10 a pound. Maybe I'm just not much of a fisherman, but I wouldn't say an average trip yields five pounds of cleaned fish. Which is all beside the point, really. Fishing and apple-picking are things people do for fun, not to get a good deal on apples.

$50 for fresh fish only works is you're buying somthing like tilapia....and not at Whole Foods or Central Market.

Used to go fishing all the time in MN for walleye. Moved to TX and was excited to see that Central Market had fresh wild cuaght walleye in the fish department.......was shocked to see it was $19 a pound.

Going fishing for trout here in WY is much cheaper than even paying $9 a pound at the local Safeway.

Plus, I like buying fish at Whole Foods (compared to someplace like Safeway or Albertson's, even if I pay twice the price) since they have very stringent wild fishery sustainability rules and environmental criteria that has to be met for farmed fish.