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Pay Too Much for everything

allentucker.com

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Re: Pay Too Much for everything

#21

Post by scott_w »

This article is based on a number of nonsensical assumptions:

1) That paying more equates to higher quality. It doesn't. Your £30 t-shirt will fall apart every bit as quickly as your £3 multi-pack from Primark.

2) That you want to have something last a lifetime. Just last weekend, my dad was complaining about having no good jig-saws. Then followed up with "of course, I could buy a good one, but I only use them once every 5 years, so they're knackered when I need them anyway".

3) When you want quality, you can't just borrow it off someone else.

I'm not against paying more for something e.g. my uncle has expensive joinery kit because his day job is a joiner. I simply dislike the mentality of "I must pay top-dollar for everything", before you've evaluated what you actually want.

Re: Pay Too Much for everything

#22

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

The problem with this "buy for life" stuff is that how do you determine what is really a "buy for life" product rather than just an over-priced "brand?"

For example, I could go out and buy a $200 pair of sunglasses but depending on where I buy them they can either be poor quality (e.g. fashion brands, sunglass hut, etc) or exceptional (e.g. fishing shops, sailing suppliers, workman-glasses, etc).

You would expect reviews to give you an accurate way to tell but people often review a product by the way it makes them FEEL rather than about the product its self.

Re: Pay Too Much for everything

#23

Post by mattm »

The highest priced items are that way mostly due to the marketing costs associated with selling high priced items and trying to create the illusion that it is better quality.

Lifetime guarantees are pretty much worthless because most people will forget they have one, lose the item or lose the documents related to it.

Top pay doesn't attract the best people. Top work attracts the best people because the best people have most likely realised that money doesn't really matter if you're working on something that doesn't provide meaning for you.

The sweet spot for quality is to figure out the approximate average price of the product you want to buy and then pay a little above that.

Re: Pay Too Much for everything

#26

Post by PedroCandeias »

I don't think the Op is getting as much love as he deserves.

  Many of the intangible pieces that make up the quality of a product or service
  go out the door when we’re getting a deal. They’re doing a favor and sometimes
  when we bargain, people resent us.
This is absolute gold when it comes to longer business relationships. I have come through to believe that entirely too many fail simply because someone is resentful over terms.

As for the relation between cost and quality, I agree with many here that it isn't clear-cut. But the relation does exist. You just need to be discerning, which is why the Op writes:

  Because we only buy quality, we are forced to wait until we can afford what we
  really want.  That wait time leads to better decisions, and it forces us to
  make due with what we have.
# Edit: formatting

Re: Pay Too Much for everything

#27

Post by rythie »

latch wrote: post #14

I 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…

I'd agree that consumer goods shouldn't be seen as financial investment. However, if anything was to increase in value it's likely to be well the known and high quality "classic" model because it takes a place in history and the company survives, not the cheap knock-off that no one will remember about or cares.

Re: Pay Too Much for everything

#28

Post by morsch »

I wish the article was true. It'd be so nice to simply pay a premium and rest assured that it's an equitable approach: you get an improved product, the retailer gets a higher profit, the distributor, the people actually creating the product get a cut.

The reality is you can't rely on any single of these to be true, and as soon as you're willing to buy something and especially if you're willing to pay 10, 50 or 100% more than the absolute minimum you're the prime meat of the other half of the worlds who make it their business to ensure that it's not an equitable approach.

Re: Pay Too Much for everything

#29

Post by kaolinite »

lsc wrote: post #15
saturn wrote: post #5

> 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.)…

I have a friend who used to buy jeans from Costco. If he was ever with me when I was buying clothes, he would always be shocked at the money I was spending on jeans (I'm not talking designer, I mean £40 high-street jeans, that kind of thing). He would say that I could buy 2 or 3 pairs for the same price at Costco and there'd be no difference.

I challenged him to buy a pair and now that's all he wears. They last longer (his old ones used to rip at the crotch) and feel much nicer to wear. However, you're right, price sadly isn't too good an indicator now. I doubt that spending £100 on jeans will provide much improvement over the kind of jeans I wear but buying slightly more expensive - as opposed to dirt-cheap - is definitely worthwhile.

Re: Pay Too Much for everything

#30

Post by rythie »

cdvonstinkpot wrote: post #24

Looks like an interesting article, but I can't bear to read it. Too much side-scrolling on my Blackberry. Why doesn't the text autofit my screen like other pages do? I'll have to read it when I get home.

It's quite readable on my iPhone in landscape and even in portrait, perhaps you should have bought a better phone like the article suggests?
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