Real vs False Economies
You Get What You Pay For*
*Except When You Don’t
Saw it on the tube
Bought it on the phone
Now you’re home alone
It’s a piece of crapCrazy Horse and Neil Young: Piece of Crap¹
It’s kind of funny when you hear people say things like, “You get what you pay for.” It’s not terrible as a rule of thumb, but I have not really seen that it is always true. For instance, years ago, someone gave me a Mont Blanc fountain pen. At the time, those things retailed for $300 or so. I hated it. I appreciated that someone thought enough of me to give me a decent writing instrument, but the pen itself? One of the worst pens I have ever used.
I still remember trying to use that thing. I had been using fountain pens for several years at that point, and knew what I was doing with it, but that pen fought me at every turn. The worst was the nib, and how it would scratch the surface of the paper. The pen resisted gliding over the page, instead trying to dig in. After a line or two of writing, the nib would have collected a substantial clot of ink-soaked wood fiber, and be blotting ink everywhere. I have used cheap drugstore-purchased disposable fountain pens that gave me a better writing experience.
So much for the counterpoint.
I was raised in a family that bought everything cheap. Cheap cutlery, cheap power tools, cheap cars, you name it, my parents would find the cheapest, crappiest version of it.
It drove me nuts, even as a kid. I remember in high school, doing a small bit of home repair using my parents’ cheapo electric drill. The worthless thing could not put a hole in the 4x4 pine beams I was trying to drill. I had to force screws in using arm strength because of that weak drill.
Another time, we were eating dinner. It was steak night, and we all had wooden-handled steak knives. My steak knife came apart in my hand. The handle split apart lengthwise. It didn’t cut me, but it did irritate me. I mean, how difficult can it be to design a knife that has enough structural integrity to not split apart when cutting a piece of meat?
My mom went through a furniture refinishing phase at one point. She actually retrieved a dining room table & chairs from a neighbor’s trash pile and told us she was going to “refinish” it. In the case of that table & chairs, “refinishing” it translated to putting a tablecloth over it and trying to forget it was someone else’s trash. That was the most wobbly, rickety table I have ever seen. One night as we were eating dinner, I nearly fell on the floor because my chair fell apart under me while I was sitting on it.
My experience with cheap crap was not confined to growing up. When I was in graduate school, I interned on a Navy research station in San Diego. I was in charge of a small PC lab. We had a couple of servers and about a dozen workstations. I did routine maintenance on those machines.
My boss had provided me a set of hand tools, bought from the lowest bidder, no doubt. I was trying to use those one day to open a computer case. I managed to strip the end off a Phillips-head screwdriver, break a wrench, and snap the handles on a pair of pliers. I wrecked those tools with hand strength alone. I looked closely at those tools, and they were made of cast iron. The most useless hand tools I have ever seen.
I could go on, but these examples state my case, that going cheap is a sure path to frustration and possibly personal injury. I can’t do anything about what my employer chooses to provide in the workplace, but I can decide for myself what I want to use.
It is not really always financially feasible or even practically advisable to get the most expensive version of everything, but I have learned some tricks on spotting quality, and balancing financial considerations with a desire for quality. It really starts with deciding how you are going to be using the item under consideration.
If the intended use is a one-off project, it may be worth it to either borrow a tool or adapt one for the purpose at hand. Sometimes a cheap solution is the best one. For instance, I rarely cook large pieces of meat. With a household of two, a 20-pound turkey does not find its way onto the menu very often.
If I cooked big meals all the time, I would invest in a high-end roasting pan. Given that there’s just the two of us, on the rare occasion that I need a roasting pan, I will just buy one of the cheap aluminum disposables they sell in grocery stores. That comes with the added bonus that it does not require cleaning. I can just fold it up and toss it in the trash.
On the other hand, I am very particular about cutlery. I only use Zwilling²𝄒³ kitchen cutlery. It’s not the priciest. You can pay as much as you want for knives with big snob appeal, but you will not go wrong with Zwilling. The high-grade forged German steel holds its edge well, never rusts, and I have never had one break on me. You will pay for them, but they are worth every penny.
At my last job, I worked as a receiving clerk in a stockroom. I used to make bales of cardboard frequently. That meant cutting baling wire. My employer, cheapskates that they were, had given me a set of wire cutters that were too small and improperly cushioned. They would bruise my hands, never cut properly, and were generally horrible.
My solution was to find something better. Sure, I shouldn’t have to, since it was for work, but it was my hands that were getting bruised, and when has an employer ever spent an extra cent to make an employee’s life better? I settled on the Irwin⁴ brand as my favorite line of hand tools. Pricey? In terms of price for the tools, yes, but what is it worth to you to have a tool that gets the job done, won’t break, and doesn’t make your hands hurt?
As it turned out, that set of wire cutters was one of the best purchases I ever made. They would cut baling wire like string. They could even cut through nails with ease, and just about anything else that would fit between the blades. I carried them everywhere, and used them constantly. In terms of price per use, they were really very cheap.
While in graduate school, I drove a beater car. It was awful. That car broke down constantly. I was in a terrible position with it though, because since I was a student with a part time job, I could not get approved for a car loan. That beater car cost me, in an average month, around $400 in repairs. I had friends with new cars whose car payments were barely more than half that.
The bank would not loan me the money to buy a new car because they thought I would default on a $240 car payment, yet I was routinely paying $400 monthly to maintain an old oil-burning lemon. The stupidity of that just made my head hurt to think about it. The car we have now is paid off and rarely gets driven. Repair costs are negligible, and it still has a new car smell. So much better.
My point in all this is that when deciding on how to allocate money for equipment, it is more useful and productive to let the purchasing choice be driven by utility. It would be silly to spend top dollar on a roasting pan that gets used once every five years. It would be equally pointless for someone who never cooks to spend $200 on a chef’s knife.
When making purchasing choices, perhaps we should try thinking in terms of how the item is going to be used. If I am on vacation and need a set of headphones, I will probably just buy some cheapies at the local drugstore and toss them in the trash when I am done with them. For long term personal use at home, I’m buying Bose⁵.
This line of thinking holds for general problem solving as well. A job I had years ago required that I create a set of spreadsheet reports every morning. I arrived at work at 8:00 AM, and had to prepare 21 reports by 10:00 AM. If I only needed to do that once, I would just do it manually.
Since it was an everyday thing, I wrote a set of scripts to do the heavy lifting for me. That was less time pressure for me, as the reports would be done in a few minutes, leaving me more time to do other things. Those scripts took a nontrivial amount of time to write, however, and it would be counterproductive to automate a one-time task.
Really what I am getting at with all this is that we need to decide for ourselves what something is worth in terms of true cost, as opposed to shelf price. Cheap wire cutters versus their pricier cousin? Which is better, a tool that abuses your hands, or a tool that works properly and causes you no pain? Drugstore kitchen knife that rusts, won’t hold an edge, and disintegrates in your hand, or a good quality knife that costs more up front, but that will last you decades and provide flawless service?
When making a purchasing decision, quality decision-making balances immediate cost outlay against long-term utility. If you are only ever going to make one bale, maybe those cheap wire cutters are all you need. The same reasoning applies to any consumer purchasing decisions.
Oh, and that Mont Blanc that drove me to distraction? I sold it on Craigslist. A local medical doctor who was into collecting high-end writing instruments offered me $150 for it. I considered it win-win. The last fountain pen I bought cost me $40, and I love it.
