in 2005ish, I went to Sears and picked up the most expensive bag vacuum. I think it was an elite something. 20 years later, I had to change out the hose once because I dropped it down the stairs and its been amazing.
If you take inflation into consideration, high quality products still exist at about the same price. Its just that there are now MUCH cheaper options now.
If you take inflation into consideration, high quality products still exist at about the same price. Its just that there are now MUCH cheaper options now.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … 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. … 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 a 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 was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.
If you take inflation into consideration, high quality products still exist at about the same price.
There’s another side to all this. We used to have appliance and, specifically, vacuum repair shops. Sometimes, the latter were franchise operations by manufacturer/brand. Electrolux and Oreck had stores that also did repairs, to name two. The business model had a lot in common with the auto industry at the time. To me, that stands as a cautionary tale of how things can get twisted around to cost the consumer more money in the long run, not less. I think it’s an important consideration, as old designs/patents were from and for a market serviced on all sides by this business model. But we can do better. If such products were designed to be user-servicable, there wouldn’t be a strong need/want to capture breakage as another revenue center.
So, we can absolutely bootstrap a new “buy for life” economy, but I think the downstream user hassle, repair, and secondary costs are crucial to consider.
Its just that there are now MUCH cheaper options now.
This is the part people keep ignoring. I keep calling it “realizing the actual cost of things.” Nowadays, you can buy cheap, but you’re going to get something fragile and packed-to-the-gills with surveillance and advertising. To get what grandma had (e.g. a refrigerator that runs for 50 years and just keeps food cold), anything cheaper than the inflation-adjusted equivalent costs you in other ways.
Meanwhile, over in the hobbyist and professional tool world, we’ve been saying “buy nice or buy twice” for a long time now.
There are also different standards when you care about the environment. Old school fridges used incredibly bad greenhouse gasses (R22 and R142B) and were significantly less efficient using approximately $250 MORE energy per year than a modern fridge (1750 kWh vs 450kwh) so only factoring in your electricity bill you could buy a $2500 fridge every 10 years and break even and if you got a cheaper fridge like a whirlpool you could get a new one every 5 years for 50 years
Don’t get me wrong there is still planned obsolescence but a lot of the older designs aren’t as perfect as people like to remember them being
in 2005ish, I went to Sears and picked up the most expensive bag vacuum. I think it was an elite something. 20 years later, I had to change out the hose once because I dropped it down the stairs and its been amazing.
If you take inflation into consideration, high quality products still exist at about the same price. Its just that there are now MUCH cheaper options now.
I think the Sam Vimes Boots Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness plays a part as well:
As the saying goes, it is expensive to be poor.
There’s another side to all this. We used to have appliance and, specifically, vacuum repair shops. Sometimes, the latter were franchise operations by manufacturer/brand. Electrolux and Oreck had stores that also did repairs, to name two. The business model had a lot in common with the auto industry at the time. To me, that stands as a cautionary tale of how things can get twisted around to cost the consumer more money in the long run, not less. I think it’s an important consideration, as old designs/patents were from and for a market serviced on all sides by this business model. But we can do better. If such products were designed to be user-servicable, there wouldn’t be a strong need/want to capture breakage as another revenue center.
So, we can absolutely bootstrap a new “buy for life” economy, but I think the downstream user hassle, repair, and secondary costs are crucial to consider.
This is the part people keep ignoring. I keep calling it “realizing the actual cost of things.” Nowadays, you can buy cheap, but you’re going to get something fragile and packed-to-the-gills with surveillance and advertising. To get what grandma had (e.g. a refrigerator that runs for 50 years and just keeps food cold), anything cheaper than the inflation-adjusted equivalent costs you in other ways.
Meanwhile, over in the hobbyist and professional tool world, we’ve been saying “buy nice or buy twice” for a long time now.
There are also different standards when you care about the environment. Old school fridges used incredibly bad greenhouse gasses (R22 and R142B) and were significantly less efficient using approximately $250 MORE energy per year than a modern fridge (1750 kWh vs 450kwh) so only factoring in your electricity bill you could buy a $2500 fridge every 10 years and break even and if you got a cheaper fridge like a whirlpool you could get a new one every 5 years for 50 years
Don’t get me wrong there is still planned obsolescence but a lot of the older designs aren’t as perfect as people like to remember them being
I love buy nice or buy twice. I think Harbor freight gets a pass though.
The second buy can even be the nice one. If you’re unsure how much use the tool will get, buy cheap then upgrade after it breaks.