People who are too lazy to ammortize will spend a lot more money in the long run. The perfect example is the hilarious subsidized cell phone market in the US.
Pay Too Much for everything
11–20 of 170 posts
Re: Pay Too Much for everything
#12One has to differentiate. There are things that are worth to have once and for life. But most things I gladly buy cheap - because I know I can dispose them later and not a fortune is lost. What If I spend much money on fashionable things that I like, but dislike in 2 years? I rather swap out most of my cheap stuff over the years rather than worry what will last longest and if I might still like it and so on.
Re: Pay Too Much for everything
#13As always with the "Do and get " articles, there is an obvious question: why doesn't everybody do that? I cannot speak for other people but here are my reasons for not always going for the quality over price.
First, I obviously cannot always afford the high price. When I bought the car I had checked the failure reports and decided it just wasn't worth paying an additional few months salary to get the failure probability down 2-3 percent a year (checked other parameters too, similar conclusions.) And yeah, I waited till a good deal was available to me.
Second, getting a quality item might cost even more of my personal time - finding out which one is actually good and searching for a local vendor isn't exactly free.
Third, maybe I don't even want an expensive item that lasts forever. Suppose I want to get into photography but don't really know if I'll keep this hobby. I'd intentionally google "cheap beginner dslr" and stick with the findings. Chances are that by the time it needs replacement I'll be ready for a more fancy gear or bored with the new hobby. Win-win :)
Re: Pay Too Much for everything
#14I don't agree with most of this. The idea that price equals quality has long been used by merchants to extract money from consumers, not extend value. Sure it's true of some products and some companies, but overall I'd argue that at best, more expensive things aren't close to being relatively better - by any meaningful measure.
A $300 meal isn't 10x better - in terms of taste (subjective obviously) or nutrition - as a $30 meal. A BMW 3 Series is a better car than a Ford Focus, but looking only at the practical reasons to own a car, it's not even close to having twice the value.
In a lot of cases, brand names bring no value other than the brand. And while that can have a placebo effect, it's not more value. Medicine comes to mind as a great example. You are paying more for marketing and packaging than you are for R&D. The recent thread on memristors even highlighted that R&D costs are 1/100th of total cost, with marketing taking the lion's share.
Quality items appreciate while cheap items depreciate? No consumer good should be viewed as a financial investment. If something does appreciate in 50 years, it'll be more about luck than anything else.
Re: Pay Too Much for everything
#15> My favorite pair of jeans gets worn 10 times more often than my other jeans. If I did away with the other jeans, I could afford to buy more of those things I really love. This took me embarrassingly long to realise. Instead of buying clothes because they were pretty nice and on sale, buy only what you absolutely love, and pay full price. Instead of having "favourite underwear", get rid of everything that's not your…
huh. my jeans usually fail through use; they don't usually languish.
The thing is? I have some costco brand jeans I bought during the first dot-com that I still wear. they were under $15. Actually, at the same time I bought a bunch of designer jeans. The designer jeans all failed (at least one of them catastrophically... dramatically ripping the crotch wide open as I lifted a server in front of something of a crowd.) within a year of purchase.
My experience has been that expensive things are not always better. In fact, expensive clothing is usually designed for rich people, who don't need to lift things or trace cables through crawlspaces, and who will want clothing of the new style next year anyhow.
Clothing designed for working people is usually much more durable. And yeah, you can sometimes get increased durability by buying something more expensive within that sector? but the nicest dickies brand work pant is on par with the designer jeans they sell at target, price-wise.
So yeah, in general? if you are selecting for durability in clothing? the price signal is actually the opposite of what you want to look at.
Re: Pay Too Much for everything
#16> My favorite pair of jeans gets worn 10 times more often than my other jeans. If I did away with the other jeans, I could afford to buy more of those things I really love. This took me embarrassingly long to realise. Instead of buying clothes because they were pretty nice and on sale, buy only what you absolutely love, and pay full price. Instead of having "favourite underwear", get rid of everything that's not your…
More to the point you will actually get more wear per dollar.
Re: Pay Too Much for everything
#17I definitely disagree. Maybe sometimes, paying twice as much gives you something that lasts ten times longer. Or maybe, you will pay five times as much, and get something that (hopefully) lasts a bit longer.
I use a lot of earphones, and they tend to break quite fast. Once or twice, I decided to move away from the usual 15$ models and pay 60$ for better brands, with good reviews, and everything. Did they last longer ? Of course not. They sounded marginally better, but nothing worth the price..
The thing is, price is an indicator of positioning. It's a marketing tool, and it's generally not correlated to quality. Buying the very cheapest is usually not a good idea, because the manufacturer probably did everything it could to actually beat competitors and propose the lowest price. But other than that, that's pretty much all you can know in advance.
Knowing what items are made of good quality and will last longer (and therefore are worth paying an extra for) is very hard. So, my reasoning on that is that I prefer to spend less money on something, since on average, it will live just as long.
Re: Pay Too Much for everything
#18One has to differentiate. There are things that are worth to have once and for life. But most things I gladly buy cheap - because I know I can dispose them later and not a fortune is lost. What If I spend much money on fashionable things that I like, but dislike in 2 years? I rather swap out most of my cheap stuff over the years rather than worry what will last longest and if I might still like it and so on.
Indeed. Since the article mentioned cell phones: I would say on average, it costs about $200/year to own a smartphone (service not included). $6000† if you maintain that for 30 years. Yet I cannot imagine paying $2,000 for a smartphone that will provide uninterrupted service for 30 years. It is far cheaper to have the single upfront cost, but the technology progresses so rapidly that your device probably won't even work with the communications systems of the day by then. It makes a huge difference on what you are buying.
† Realistically more like $15,000+ if you start to include the costs of not having that money, but we'll keep the calculations simple.
Re: Pay Too Much for everything
#19Partly true, but I guess most of don't buy new things when the old ones are totally worn out. It is more like we just some new stuff for a change, not necessarily because what we have is broken. So it doesn't automatically save you money.
Re: Pay Too Much for everything
#20I think what the article is trying to say is "Buy the best quality that you can afford". Unfortunately the Author has completely conflated Quality with Price.
Higher price != Better Quality (not always anyway)