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Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use

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Re: Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use

#31

Post by kurthr »

ozim wrote: post #27
david38 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying cheap in the US is more often due to ignorance of the item, quality, and frequency of future use. Even most poor people, when educated about certain products can afford the quality item or change their habits to not need the item at all.

I wonder what would be example of a product that people would not need at all if educated? I'd say bunch of cleaning chemicals when vinegar does the job or "branded chemicals" simply contain vinegar anyway.

It's cheaper to cut up a chicken than buy chicken breasts. It's cheaper to make your own burger than buy takeout. Of course there's TidePods etc.

That said, there's also the other side. I've seen people prioritize paying down their 3% mortgage with extra payments, because, "debt is bad", when they could be earning 5% on that same money and have a "rainy day fund".

Re: Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use

#33

Post by lepus »

That's one useful metric, but it's also limited - you're still gambling on an estimated number of uses, which can often vary wildly and in ways you can't predict. This is further complicated by variables such as companies taking advantage of your assumptions about quality and lifespan of a product by selling out a product line to another company who will produce it at a lower standard for less for the same retail price and hope you won't know or notice. I once bought socks assuming they'd last a long time but the company silently cheapened out on producing them at some point and they were falling apart after just a couple dozen uses. And they were expensive! There's no guarantee that Darn Tough won't do the same, or that you'll spill sauce with turmeric on them and ruin them the first day you get them, or etc etc.

At some point trying to explicitly micro-optimize all your purchases down to the socks you wear starts to get lost in the noise and you expend a lot of mental effort on things of minimal benefit, but this is a good thing to vaguely keep in the back of your mind for expensive and/or very frequent expenses that you know you'll always be using.

Re: Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use

#34

Post by motohagiography »

When I was a younger cyclist, I felt this way about stop signs. The fine for ignoring one was fixed, rare, and occurred at random, so getting my marginal cost per run sign as close to zero as I could was the rational choice. Penalties that affect your license change those incentives, but arbitrary enforcement rewards noncompliance.

Re: Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use

#35

Post by leptons »

xyzelement wrote: post #10

This really kicked in for me when I bought a grill. The first time I used it, that cost me "1500". The second, it was just 750 per bbq. By the time I cooked a hundred meals on it, it is a 15 bucks per meal. Etc. Longevity is obviously a big factor too

I spent $5000 on the fastest consumer computer available in 2011. It had a 6-core CPU which was pretty amazing at the time. I still use that same computer today as my main workstation. I've put a little bit of money into it over the years, expanding it. Most recently I bought the fastest CPU that would work in that motherboard, a 12-core/24-thread Xeon for $30 on ebay. So even with adding RAM, Hard drives, new video cards, and a new CPU, it's still under about $2 per day, which has been absolutely worth it considering I've made 250x that per day when I use it for work.

I'm due for an upgrade soon, but I don't have too much reason yet to do it. But when I do, I'll spend another $5k to get a monster machine and it will last me probably until I expire.

Re: Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use

#36

Post by IanCal »

Anderkent wrote: post #28
delgaudm wrote: post #3

A fine heuristic if you have enough money to make the choice in the first place. [1]Sam Vimes’s ‘Boots’ Theory of Socio-economic Unfairness, propounded in Men at Arms: "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 hun…

The Boots theory is funny because it's absurd. It's not actually applicable to life in powerty. There is no class of items where if you are poor you spend more on it than when you're wealthy. People in poverty spend more _time_ on things, yeah, but not more money or money per use. You can see some discussion on that from people who actually grew up poor in https://mastodon.social/@danluu/111068036776213383

Hmm, there were many things in the UK that used to have essentially rental kind of options that were much more expensive in the long run (TVs and sofas) as well as energy being more expensive if you were poor (prepayment meters). The last one is still true, but much more limited now.

You don't need starvation level poverty though, remember the comparison point is with a salaried captain of the police. So if the point was "they don't spend more because they can't buy any shoes" it doesn't relate to the original Pratchett bit.

Re: Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use

#37

Post by stavros »

newtom wrote: post #13
mattlondon wrote: post #8

I do this a lot for games, but cost per hour. Some games now are really expensive (£60 etc) but if I get 40 hours entertainment out of it then per hour that is actually pretty good.

This is why I put a lot of games I’m not sure about on my Steam wishlist. Then when a game is “cheap enough” I buy it. If my hunch was right and the game is only “ok”, but I got a few hours of enjoyment out of it for only a few bucks, I don’t have any buyers remorse.

I pirate games, play them, and them buy them (some multiple times, sadly) if I'm still playing after an hour or so. Most games tend to not capture my interest and I only play an hour or two and leave them, and I don't want to be paying 60 currencies per time.

I wish they had a free trial for an hour or two, that would be ideal.

Re: Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use

#38

Post by djhworld »

It also depends on the category of the product and what 'value' you hope to get from it.

For example recently I purchased a Lego set, the biggest one I've ever purchased and it cost £565 (titanic) which is the most amount of money I've ever spent on what is essentially a display piece once built.

However I enjoy the process of building Lego and this set is going to take me months to build, just devoting an hour or two a week to completing a section at a time. So the initial outlay is a lot but breaking it down to

1. the enjoyment of building the set

2. the enjoyment of displaying the set once it's complete as a sort of home decor item

3. the amount of time devoted to it (I reckon it'll take me about 35-40 hours to complete, but it'll be months before I see the end because it's just a lil hobby to do at the weekend)

...the cost almost doesn't matter.

Re: Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use

#40

Post by user_7832 »

Anderkent wrote: post #28
delgaudm wrote: post #3

A fine heuristic if you have enough money to make the choice in the first place. [1]Sam Vimes’s ‘Boots’ Theory of Socio-economic Unfairness, propounded in Men at Arms: "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 hun…

The Boots theory is funny because it's absurd. It's not actually applicable to life in powerty. There is no class of items where if you are poor you spend more on it than when you're wealthy. People in poverty spend more _time_ on things, yeah, but not more money or money per use. You can see some discussion on that from people who actually grew up poor in https://mastodon.social/@danluu/111068036776213383

> There is no class of items where if you are poor you spend more on it than when you're wealthy.

What about something like laundromat fees being higher than the running cost of a washing machine? There's also the concept of "poverty tax".

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