Yes, and then they throw it out 2 years later and buy a new one.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This trope was a slight exaggeration then and is basically false now. It exists in the modern world mostly to validate purchasing decisions of the middle class.
In an industrial world where most things made in volume are quite cheap relative to incomes quantifiable results per dollar plateau very quickly and beyond that you're mostly for emotion, brand, signaling, etc.
People default to cheap not because they're stupid but because "buy the cheapest thing that will work" delivers very good results when applied to all of one's purchasing. It's the index fund of personal finance. You can do better with specialist knowledge or techniques but that doesn't scale.
I got 10 years out of my most recent Orvis jacket.
That said, I had in to the tailor a couple of times to clean up some tears in the fabric lining.
I wear that thing every day, 9-10 months out of the year.
That one replaced an earlier Orvis jacket, daily wear (even through one cool-ish summer we had down here in So Cal). The jacket is fine, the cuffs are a bit worn. I could have probably had a tailor trim them with leather and got several more years out of it.
My current jacket is identical to the previous one. I managed to find a "new old stock" version of it.
I really like the jacket (as you can guess). It's a "ranger" style, nylon shell, fabric liner, big pockets on the outside, with hand inserts as well, big pockets on the inside, other little pockets I don't use (what do folks put in those shoulder pockets?), zip up hood, jacket has zipper and buttons and a waist draw tie. It will keep the wet off, but soak through in driving rain, which is rare enough to not be an issue.
If it's really cold, I have another long term jacket from LL Bean, or I could just layer under this thing. The LL Bean jacket has not seen substantial wear like the Orvis one has.
My Jeep Grand Cherokee is over 10 years old, and I'm of the mind to keep it as long as I can get parts for it vs buying a new one at $60-80K. I love this thing. It's in excellent shape. The interior controls are all in great shape. Most anyone can keep a motor running and such, it's the interior comforts that drive folks away and are costly to fix. Mine are good, all the buttons button, knobs knob, etc.
Jeeps are not renowned for their liability ratings, but many Jeep owners keep them for a long time.
Though I did just notice my cargo cover has some rubber that's likely disintegrating (it IS 11 years old...), so I may try to hunt that down and replace it.
I disagree. There's plenty of cheaply made stuff that doesn't last very long, and other brands that focus on lasting quality, where stuff lasts a very long time. This is mostly evident in items that get a lot of use.
Yes, and it doesn't just apply to durable goods. Try doing comparison shopping between Costco and a dollar store. I guarantee you pretty much everything at Costco will be cheaper on a per-unit basis than the dollar store. So why do people shop at dollar stores? Because they can't afford the bigger up-front prices of buying at Costco!
Oh, and pretty much all of the durable goods sold at Costco will be much better quality and longer-lasting than the crap they sell at a dollar store, so that stuff follows the Vimes law as well.
I always liked the Boots Theory of Economic Unfairness. Thanks for that!
I find reading his stuff unpleasant, because of the formatting, but the content is usually worth it, so I can switch on Reader Mode.
As far as the subject goes, I used to work for a world-renowned super-high-Quality corporation, and was heavily involved in what it takes to make Really Good Stuff.
It is painful. I think most people here (anywhere, really) would refuse to work that way. It takes almost military Discipline.
But the end result is usually really good, and expensive. That little bit of extra Quality actually adds a fair amount to the bottom line, and drastically reduces the customer base.
Most folks that get really rich, do so, by making acceptable-quality stuff, at a fairly low price, and selling lots of them.
Making top-Quality stuff can make you feel good (and maybe arrogant), but it won't make the kind of money that selling dross does.
Dan Luu is missing the issue of food deserts. If you live in a food desert and you can’t afford a car then you’re not bringing home 50lb bags of beans and rice, you’re feeding yourself Doritos and instant noodles from the gas station convenience store. Never mind bringing home fresh meats and veggies!
Those are both more expensive and less healthy than cooking your own food.
I wish sites like this would develop a shorthand for things like the boot analogy and automatically replace the text with the shorthand. It's an interesting analogy the first time you hear it, but it's not as applicable to everything situation that people pretend that it is.
How do I know the $130 version is any better? Formally good brands have been cost cut to death and can be just as bad or worse as the cheap version. Only difference is the manufacturer collects a higher margin on the perceived product superiority.
There was a time where you knew a Craftsman tool was worth a premium price.
Resale value is probably a better metric, if it's $130 new and $100 second hand while the other one is $100 new and sub-$50 second hand that'll be a fairly good sign that it at least works.
It's still not 100% but it'd at least mean you're going to be out less money in the end if it's a dud for you.
Hah! It's upvoted now but I was really confused by it too tbh and I usually am not; guessing it was either less coherent than I thought and/or someone misread it entirely.
I've once was looking for top-performance windows laptop. Bought a nice Asus ROG M16 for $2500. Expensive? Sure!
But they did cost-cutting, put a crappy wifi card from Media-Tech, which resulted in a daily BSOD. Bought Intel card for $25 instead to fix this issue.
And that's about everything. Take a $50k car and you'll find same cost cutting measures!
>Take a $50k car and you'll find same cost cutting measures!
My step mom bought an expensive Cadillac a few years ago when she retired, the electronically actuated glove box has never really worked well and eventually got to where it wouldn't open at all. The whole thing is a bunch of plastic parts that move together to release one side of the glove box and gravity is supposed make it slowly drop down, but the side that it releases is the far side from the motor that's actuating it, and due to slack in all the plastic parts it doesn't actuate enough to actually release it. It takes like an hour to tear it apart so that you can shave down the catch. Cadillac has had the car for months at a time to fix it and was unable to and also unable to get a new glove box assembly. One day me and my son tore it apart and just shaved the part down ourselves, something neither of the service notices for that common issue recommended.
Cars reveal a lot about this but it's not really specific to cars. Ad-ridden "smart" TVs, etc. The hacker mindset is not really special nowadays as everybody recognizes dumbing-down and cheapening in technology. Hackers used to like having an OS with a `sysctl` for every little tunable for the same reason that anybody should be able to change the spark plugs or battery in your car without spending an hour removing two cowlings and an air intake hose because everything is so tightly packed. My 2014 model car has two separate LCD screens for the driver, yet somehow the interface to deal with a problem is still an idiot light, or wipers waving out codes, and me borrowing somebody's OBD2 scanner. Resetting the battery management system, or the oil change involves obscure codes like pressing pedals or switches in a certain way as if I am trying to open a drug courier's secret compartment, and even then, I do not even have an option of knowing what the oil change interval has been set to. Forget about anything like a live readout, or talkback to my key remote so that I can know that my engine has started. It's these kinds of design issues that are presented as condescending black boxes. It is insulting when Python is taught to schoolchildren now. These things should be performed with care to completion in the face of economic pressure.
Yep! Eventually you might just give up and pick a medium cost one that seems to be OK. Top quality products are like lottery nowadays.
I paid $100+ for a Logitech mouse and thought it is a good enough price, but it broke down in just a few months. Fortunately they gave me a second one, but I don't know how long it lives!
This gets so exaggerated online especially if you rely on reddit to figure out what to get they always recommend the one that is 10x as expensive and they insist cheaper things won't last or work but it almost never is my experience with the cheaper ones when I end up getting them. Maybe it starts out true but the cheaper ones eventually get good enough
It's the same with cell phones the claim is iPhone/pixel will last way longer than the cheap ones but i feel like this get less and less true, not that the quality is going down on the good ones but I know people who are on their 5th year of a $150 one and no problems
Take barbecue gloves. Yes, you can buy all sorts of varieties. Pitt Boss, Crate and Barrel, and others sell gloves in the $30 range. These gloves have enough heat resistance that you can pull a steel handled pan right out of the oven.
Know what works even better and is more durable for half the cost? Welding gloves. You can buy gloves rated to over 1K Fahrenheit for less than $20. Now you've cut your cost but also have the added ability if you wish to rearrange burning coals BY HAND.
I think that one of the things we do in this consumerist society is to buy things that look good instead of things that are functional. You aren't going to find much tupperware in a professional kitchen. What you WILL find are Cambro containers, heating dishes, and a variety of generic food storage containers. They are cooking their food in heavy walled pots and stainless steel pans with metal implements. Most people could throw out about 80% of their cooking pots and pans and never miss any of them. At least baking vessels are far more task-dependent.
Is a Le Creuset dutch oven pretty? Sure. Is it functionally better than a generic cast iron dutch oven? No. And of the two, the cast iron dutch oven is the one where you can buy once and have your great-great grandkids fight about who gets to keep it, because the Le Creuset will almost certainly have developed defects in the ceramic by then. On the flip side, a $300 refurbished Vitamix will beat the pants off of any off-the-shelf blender and last longer, too. But then, that's a professional product.
The problem is that evaluating quality is nigh impossible these days.
So right over me right now I have this big LED light/ceiling fan combination. I've owned I think 4 of them so far, in 3 different kinds.
All 3 kinds look somewhat different yet are built obviously from the same base for the electronics, though those vary somewhat. One model didn't reverse, one does. One model has RGB lighting. Some go by RF and some go by IR. But overall the electronics seem to come from the same place in slightly different flavors.
They're all random chinese brands, old ones tend to disappear and get replaced with a slightly newer ones.
And the problem is that at some point, something in the LED driver of the first 3 died. I tried replacing the chip, but it's some particular weird model that can't be found anywhere online.
At this point I'm half-seriously considering doing my own LED/fan driver board, because it's getting ridiculous. The 4th one is holding up so far though.
but is that true? you're standing in target, looking at air fryers. they're all priced differently. how do you know which is the good one? is it really the more expensive one? highly doubt it. and it's the same almost with everything now. price carries a very low signal.
Honestly, I'd probably look at Wirecutter and Cooks Illustrated, both of which I have subscriptions to. I'm not going to trust them on every product I might buy but for something like air fryers they're probably not going to steer me too far wrong.
