Man, part of me wishes the theory were still true. So many products you spent good coin on and then later find out are in fact no better than the cheap stuff (or worse, literally just rebadged Alibaba products!).
It's never been the case that more expensive products are better, despite better products being more expensive.
Quality isn't the only reason something may be expensive, and costly signaling will always dominate, whether or not the products are of high quality.
Silver isn't a better material for making jewelry than stainless steel; if anything, it's worse. Jewelry's purpose is to show that the owner doesn't care about costs, but it's not the only way. Buying needlessly expensive technology works too, like cars and computers and phones, and the more expensive ones are not known for lasting long, and they are used for much shorter period of time than a cheap version of the same, despite the cheap one being hardier and longer lasting.
This is still true in the margin, but it requires a shocking amount of research to suss it out. You might enjoy the Rose Anvil channel, as it dissects boots (literally) and discusses their quality in depth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vHTlrwHttc
There are cases where spending more gets you a more premium product ... but in so, so many cases it's just like you stated. You spend on luxury, and the "nice" speakers have the same terrible PCB design and fail in 1-2 years, or the "nice" skilsaw ends up failing way too soon, etc. A brand used to be good, but now it's terrible, and you have no way of knowing. It's all a mess.
This is what happens when vendors recognize the boots theory and build it in to their approach. If “more expensive is better,” just price the same item into a higher price bracket and pocket the difference. If you want to be fancy, rebadge it a bit.
I’m just amazed that they don’t even bother to use alternate product pictures.
The other year I bought some Bose exercise earbuds because the cheap ones weren't staying in my ears. They died, warranty replaced them, they died again, I opened them up and the circuit board wasn't coated or potted or anything! The cheap ones were! The premium brand was penny-pinching harder than the no-name brand!
Yeah, I think about this a lot. I currently need a vanity base. There are no businesses doing this within 100 miles of me, as far as I can tell using the information avenues available to me. So I'm shopping semi-identical jpgs with some filters on untrustworthy metadata from Wayfair, Home Depot, Lowes... They're all selling the exact same things. Does it even matter if I pay $200 vs $2000 on these sites? I can't even see what the difference is between those two options.
What about the "craftsmen" on Etsy? Are they even real? Or, I could pay $5000 for an individual, local, physically extant American with a name and face to make it from scratch, which I would love to be able to afford.
So I pick one at random off Wayfair that claims to be made of solid wood and has a price that is neither suspiciously low nor suspiciously high. Maybe I've just bought cheap boots, but it's insane that I don't even know.
It is nice to be able to buy things from actual people who make them. Coincidentally the biggest outfit who make reproduction desks in this country (ie think what an English desk looks like 200 years ago, basically that, except made last month by experts and also the real ones didn't have a place to run cables tidily out of sight) is in my city, so I paid them to make my desk (well, not this desk, the one in my office when I'm doing actual work). Expensive but definitely worth it.
I don't know at all how sure I'd be that what I'd get was good quality if it was turning up from the far side of the country, let alone from China. I know anywhere could make high quality products, but it's much easier to trust it when you can walk there and go see them.
One thing that may help resolve your issue is that while I do agree with the Sam Vimes theory, it is also not guaranteed. There are also scenarios where the $50 boots will last forever, or you can buy $2 boots that will only last five years... but across your entire lifetime will still be cheaper. Or you can account for the fact that you take better care of your stuff than most people and the cheap thing may in fact be fine for a long time. Or you buy the cheap thing twice and maybe in 15 years when you have more disposable income buy the thing that lasts. Or buy the cheap thing and hit the occasional estate sale and eventually find a thing that lasts, but for dirt cheap prices, because you weren't in a hurry because your immediate needs were met and you had the time to wait for a deal.
The meta-lesson of the Vimes theory is really more that you need to think about these things, but it's not guaranteed that the expensive thing will be better in the longterm on a bang-for-the-buck basis. For furniture, there is something to be said for the technique beloved by the just-starting-out set of buying "whatever I scrounged together from garage sales", and there's something to be said for "I outfitted my apartment from Ikea". Yeah, it's cheap and one way or another you're going to pay for that cheapness, but it's so much cheaper than the alternative that as long as you aren't practicing your wrestling moves on the Ikea end tables, you can get a long way with them even if you're replacing them every 10 years.
And, per your last point... at least when you buy cheap, you know you bought cheap. I found myself in need of a dining room table light a few years back. We went to a lighting store and I stood there staring at all the bespoke LEDs that I knew would die and couldn't be replaced, and the multi-thousand dollar lamps that looked nice but I simply couldn't know if they were quality... and ended up buying a $15 dollar extension cord with 5 light sockets on it, bought some light bulbs to put in it, and wrapped the cord around the remains of the previous what-turned-out-to-be-proprietary track lighting. We decorate it for the season with various ribbon things to hide the cords. Because damn it, if it's all just going to fail anyhow, at least I knew I could replace the lights with whatever I wanted, and it cost me less than $100 all in. We've had that for, gosh, I think at least 10 years now, and I've probably cycled the lights at least twice now, but that's probably still under $100 total... all because I simply can't trust the expensive stuff.
Expensive doesn't guarantee high quality, but very cheap almost always means low quality. A £200 pair of boots might be great and last for a decade, or might be overpriced and fall apart after six months. But a £5 pair are definitely going to be crap.
Which is why it makes sense to buy the 5 pound shoes 40 times if they last at least 3 months. Except for running shoes, I just get the Costco ones for $20 to $30 and toss them in 6 to 12 months.
But then you're constantly either breaking in a new pair, or dealing with a pair that's falling apart, and you're lucky to get 1 month of good comfortable wear out of those cheap shoes. And you have to go buy them every three months, and shoe models change constantly so you have to find the current cheap pair that actually fits you.
I am lucky I have a wide range that I find comfortable, because the $30 Costco shoes and the $180 On Clouds are all the same to me. I also don't buy them every 3 months, maybe 6 months at most frequent. Last time was probably almost a year ago, and I got 2 pairs, one to keep nice so they're presentable, and the other for literally anything else, and they look terrible, but still aren't coming apart.
I would say this still holds true but not for singular products. Take Costco for example, long term you save money and you get high quality products. But that comes at the cost of having to spend quite a bit up front to buy in bulk.
Not to mention it also assumes you have the space to store those products.
Costco has a double threat going on... bulk discounts plus a great warranty. because they have so few skus, they can afford to give each product more attention than any other Brick & Mortar store, to say nothing about Amazon and Etsy
That is the main reason I buy from Costco without hesitation. I know that if I got ripped off by a subpar good, I can get my money back. But that rarely happens.
Funds to buy, space to store and also the means to transport the bulk goods. We do most of our grocery shopping on foot or by bicycle which rules out Costco for us.
This is part of why I now tend to go for the cheapest. I do a bit of research of course, but most goods have been commodified (and corners cut). Nowadays the only guarantee you have when paying more is that you have less money in your wallet.
Its a fun thought exercise, but I've found the opposite to be true in most cases. More expensive clothes are usually less durable (depending on the brand). The same goes for appliances, and cars, and phones, and etc. The cheap designs are simple and robust and the expensive designs add complexity and features.
In reality I think there are more forces extracting money from the wealthy and their effete needs. My example is an airplane. The first class passengers are effectively paying 3x as much for the same outcome. The same is true for ovens and shoes and phones and cars.
I have nothing to back that up, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a feature.
If these luxury items are being used by the society (or at least in some circles) as a proxy for 'success'(ie having enough disposable money) it probably would be better if they we also quite fragile. This way you could distinguish between someone who received a expense gift vs someone that has money to always keep buying new items.
I'm not sure how real it this, but I've read somewhere that part of the appeal of expensive glassware was the fact that it was pretty fragile. Serving someone at your house with expensive glassware was a way to tell 'look how much money I've got'.
Just to be clear, I don't think we should get impressed/try to impress people by how much money someone has. But that is a practice as old as time, and it doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.
> The first class passengers are effectively paying 3x as much for the same outcome
Not the same outcome. They show up at their destinations fresh from a good night's sleep, having showered at the lounge. Their back doesn't hurt from trying to sleep upright in a tiny seat or schlepping a heavy rucksack.
If you have enough money you are ok with paying to get those outcomes.
For very long international flights I could see it, but I also see people in the first class seats on shorter flights where it’s hardly worth it. (I assume at least some of them are upgrades.)
I think you're right on the luxury brands being less durable.
To address the second airplane example, we really have to go through all that you're buying. Namely: more leg space, faster airport queue processing, more luggage, better in-flight service. Do I value these at 3x the cost? Maybe yes.
Both me and the richest person on the flight are going to the same destination. They're not getting there any faster or safer. Everything else is a fleeting luxury.
Not saying it's a bad to spend money on temporary comfort, but it's the opposite of the Vimes boot problem.
If you are over thirty and still this strong, then you have my respect and envy. I’m not even forty and even I would say a >7h economy flight (middle seat particularly) can take about two days to recover from.
How much money would you pay for two extra days of life? In the end, time itself is also “fleeting”, if you want to put it that way. But I sure as heck would fork over the money if I had it.
It’s not suitable for air travel, but I treat anything for air travel as disposable. I still use it all the time for car-based travel. It’s larger and nicer than what I fly with.
The funny thing is that from what I heard with the antiques markets (which is admittedly possibly a decade or so old) it is antique luggage of all things which is 'in' and antique furniture which is out relatively speaking to the past.
The grandkids not wanting it may still apply if they are still minors, there would be plenty of time for tastes to shift again.
If you're chasing after the ones that are most well known on Instagram, then you're paying for the logo and getting quality that is not that much better than much cheaper stuff.
If you look for lesser known brands that are more expensive but that expense is because of the materials and craftmanship, then it's often worth the money.
This highly, highly depends. I've never bought a Meile appliance but seen others here swear on them for durability. Le Creuset and All Clad make cookware I've had for decades with no problems or degradation at all and they'll last for centuries as far as I can tell. I've got a 70L pack I bought from the Arcteryx factory store 20 years ago and I've damn near taken it to the moon and back. Virtually every mountain in North America. Had it rained on, dunked into streams, fallen while full of 40 kilos of gear onto sharp rock. Not so much as a single seam has ever frayed and it's just just as waterproof as it was the day I bought it.
And you're overestimating the cost of first class, at least in my experience, and that's kind of a lot of experience. I work in pre-sales engineering and travel a ton. My company won't pay for first class, but I'm 6'2" with ten screws in my spine and always pay for the upgrade, and it's usually between $200-$500, which has never tripled the price and almost never even so much as doubles it. You can sneer that I'm overpaying for nothing, but you try getting into a situation where sitting in a sardine can for four hours leaves you unable to stand up straight for 40 hours when you land. To me, it's worth it. The other option is I die with more zeros in my bank account, which is even more pointless. It's not like I'm failing to hit savings goals because of this.
Same thing applies with cars, by the way. I work from home when not traveling and don't drive very much, but I do own a luxury vehicle, and the difference between that any nearly any rental is pretty stark. It doesn't win on any reliability rating I'm aware of, but I've put less than 20,000 miles on it in 6 years of ownership and don't particularly care about the durability. I care about comfort and my own car is way the fuck more comfortable than the Nissans and Toyotas the rental agencies give me.
"Effete needs" is awfully sneering. I've lived on the back of an Abrams tank for weeks at a time in the past. I lived in the backseat of a 1994 Honda Civic and worked an overnight shift detailing theme park restrooms while putting myself through community college 25 years ago. I can live with little to no comfort if I actually need to, but given the choice and sufficient disposable income that it makes no difference, why the hell would I choose to be less comfortable just so I can brag to all the Bogleheads that my savings account has an extra hundred grand in it when I need five mil to retire anyway? Frugality doesn't push the needle much in the realm of travel and consumer goods. Cheap housing and a well-paying job is what pushes the needle.
Don't be obtuse. Of course you can spend more money without buying better craftsmanship. Some trainers from Prada or Balenciaga will wear out faster than a pair of Aldens.
Consider school backpacks. If you can, you should probably buy a Tom Bihn backpack. It's $400 and will last for decades. Spending more money will buy something fancier, but it won't be better at being a backpack. If you don't have that much cash to drop? Jansport, Eastpak, North Face? They're all the same mediocre product made by the same PE group. And they're still not cheap.
Vimes is talking about being penny wise and pound foolish.
It is not in any way addressing costly signalling, a completely unrelated behavior where purposefully wasteful and highly visible spending on lower-utility products elevates social status, making low-utility products more expensive and more common than equivalent high-quality products.
I love when this comes up and also I see it play out in my life, where my GF prefers fast fashion whereas I buy something from brands I like and I wear it for long (some of the clothes in my wardrobe have been there for 12+ years.. I feel old.)
Also Sir Terry Pratchett is a gem of an author and you should read all of his books. I have read through maybe 25% of Discworld and it's the funniest fantasy series ever.
“Yes, yes,” said Bethan, sitting down glumly. “I know you don’t. Rincewind, all the shops have been smashed open, there was a whole bunch of people across the street helping themselves to musical instruments, can you believe that?”
“Yeah,” said Rincewind, picking up a knife and testing its blade thoughtfully. “Luters, I expect.”
I do the same (wear clothing for a long time) but I only buy the cheap stuff. I bought 1 replacement shirt in the last 5 years and 1 bag of replacement socks in the same time frame.
He definitely grew significantly as a writer over time, and I would agree that some of his early work isn't particularly strong (The Light Fantastic, for example, is relatively bog-standard comic fantasy without any of the depth his later work showed).
If you start reading at the very beginning of the Discworld, you're slogging through the weaker stuff, and it's easy to get discouraged. A smoother path is to pick one of the defined sub-series (the guards are very popular, but my vote goes to the witches) and start along just that track; you'll get to the strong stuff much faster.
My advice has always been to start with Small Gods. It is a standalone book that references but does not rely on any others, and is far enough into his career that it’s fair to say that if you don’t like it, you won’t like his work in general.
This feels like it's becoming less and less true, good quality items are becoming so expensive now or very hard to find.
I do think it is still very true for tools though. It's nearly always worth getting decent ones, they nearly give better results or are easier to use and last so much longer.
I'm a big fan of the Harbor Freight Pareto Principle
If you're a hobbyist or doing something at home, a lot of the times you're gonna buy some random tool and only use it a few times. 80% of the time, the Harbor Freight knockoff is going to be good enough. If you use a tool so much that it breaks, then it's time to spring for the expensive and high quality version.
However you may want to go straight to the nice version for things that have safety implications (skip the infamous Harbor Freight jack stands)
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
The "boots" item feels less true, because expensive doesn't seem to be as correlated with "good quality" as it used to. But the general statement still very much stands.
Things like financial products that charge higher interest rates to poorer people, or services that offer discounts for paying annually rather than monthly are great examples of this. And less direct things, like being able to drive to cheaper shops and buy in bulk, or being able to do preventative maintenance to avoid a cheap fix turning into an expensive one.
It can still apply to individual items, as long as you're careful about what you buy and do your research to make sure you're actually buying high quality boots, and not just cheap ones with an expensive logo on the side.
It's also just broadly true about whole categories. For example home ownership. Most poor people rent, which means having a place to live costs them money, but they get nothing for that money as a result, they just need to keep paying forever.
Utilities, in my country people who aren't trusted to pay for electricity, gas, even water (which you need to live!) in arrears have to pay up front for it, so maybe I use 500 kWh of electricity, and I've agreed to pay 20p per kWh = £100, at the end of the month I get a bill for £100 and I settle that a few days later, if I don't eventually I get angry letters and eventually a court summons. That's electricity I used two weeks ago and I won't even pay for it until May. But if I was poor, I might find my best option is I pre-pay £10 to get 40 kWh of electricity. So that 500kWh would cost £120 and I have to buy it first before I use it and if at any time I forget or can't pay the lights go off immediately that my credit runs out.
>Things like financial products that charge higher interest rates to poorer people, or services that offer discounts for paying annually rather than monthly are great examples of this.
Exchange of future cash flows are not comparable to a one time exchange of goods or services due to the risk of default.
> And less direct things, like being able to drive to cheaper shops and buy in bulk, or being able to do preventative maintenance to avoid a cheap fix turning into an expensive one.
This is a good example, but the best example I can think of is having sufficient cash flow to be able to purchase a home in a higher socioeconomic neighborhood, because if you have kids, you are effectively paying almost nothing for a higher quality education since a lot of comes back to you in the form of equity and your child’s increased chances of financial stability.
The boots theory is a concrete way of expressing the risk of ruin, which is the principle advantage of wealth (though our society has layered on many others): the rich can afford to take more risk, and consequently enjoy more reward. A poor person who buys the $50 boots has a much higher risk of coming up short for something else, and that lapse may have disproportionate consequences. So they go for the cheap boots, which end up costing them more in the long run, trapping them in an endless cycle.
Another way to consider it is through the lens of meritocracy. Consider two poker players of equal skill. Have them play each other until one has lost everything. Run this competition over and over, starting each player with a random stack. Over many trials, the player starting with the bigger stack will win in proportion to the ratio of their stack to their opponent's. Given a large enough ratio, this wealth advantage can begin to overcome greater and greater advantages in skill on the part of their opponent.
In the US, the ratio of the wealth of the top 10% to the wealth of the median has risen from 5.8x in 1963 to nearly 10x in 2022. In the same period, the ratio of the top 1% to the median has risen from 35x to 70x. And the effective advantage is probably much higher, as this calculation does not take into account liquidity: most of a median family's wealth is in their family home.
There's another important aspect of being wealthy that I've noticed myself. The less money you have, the more of your brainpower is spent in conserving it. Figuring out how to make rent this month, balancing your checkbook so you don't overdraft, keeping track of when payday is, looking through the newspaper to see what is on sale at the grocery store, is all time that could instead be spent thinking "how could I invest my money?", and "what are my longterm goals?".
Personally I think it's an inverted bathtub curve.
Some things are so cheap you can't mess it up. Some things are well-made because the manufacturer made a series of quality-conscious decisions that really added up.
The trouble is the middle, where consumers pay the most attention to branding to make decisions. At the extremes, though, brands matter less.
The poor man wants boots. The rich man wants boots. The man in the middle wants Timberlands or Harley-Davidsons or Doc Martins or whatever.
A good example would be modern safety razors. I was looking at alternatives to the King C Gillette and most of the generic branded ones performed similarly to the big three German brands.
Consumer goods have dropped in price, which is good for offsetting inequality. I think the allegory still holds in some other areas (off the top of my head: healthcare spending and renting versus owning your primary residence).
That said, income inequality is probably the much bigger source of unfairness these days.
Re-reading Discworld books today demonstrates how timeless they are. Stories Terry wrote in the 1980s still feel like biting satire against the modern world today.
The books also get better as I get older - I read them first as a teenager and many of the deeper ideas about the human condition went straight over my head.
The way the cult leader in Guards! Guards! manipulates his followers, to give just one example.
Man, part of me wishes the theory were still true. So many products you spent good coin on and then later find out are in fact no better than the cheap stuff (or worse, literally just rebadged Alibaba products!).
It's never been the case that more expensive products are better, despite better products being more expensive.
Quality isn't the only reason something may be expensive, and costly signaling will always dominate, whether or not the products are of high quality.
Silver isn't a better material for making jewelry than stainless steel; if anything, it's worse. Jewelry's purpose is to show that the owner doesn't care about costs, but it's not the only way. Buying needlessly expensive technology works too, like cars and computers and phones, and the more expensive ones are not known for lasting long, and they are used for much shorter period of time than a cheap version of the same, despite the cheap one being hardier and longer lasting.
This is still true in the margin, but it requires a shocking amount of research to suss it out. You might enjoy the Rose Anvil channel, as it dissects boots (literally) and discusses their quality in depth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vHTlrwHttc
There are cases where spending more gets you a more premium product ... but in so, so many cases it's just like you stated. You spend on luxury, and the "nice" speakers have the same terrible PCB design and fail in 1-2 years, or the "nice" skilsaw ends up failing way too soon, etc. A brand used to be good, but now it's terrible, and you have no way of knowing. It's all a mess.
This is what happens when vendors recognize the boots theory and build it in to their approach. If “more expensive is better,” just price the same item into a higher price bracket and pocket the difference. If you want to be fancy, rebadge it a bit.
I’m just amazed that they don’t even bother to use alternate product pictures.
The other year I bought some Bose exercise earbuds because the cheap ones weren't staying in my ears. They died, warranty replaced them, they died again, I opened them up and the circuit board wasn't coated or potted or anything! The cheap ones were! The premium brand was penny-pinching harder than the no-name brand!
Yeah, I think about this a lot. I currently need a vanity base. There are no businesses doing this within 100 miles of me, as far as I can tell using the information avenues available to me. So I'm shopping semi-identical jpgs with some filters on untrustworthy metadata from Wayfair, Home Depot, Lowes... They're all selling the exact same things. Does it even matter if I pay $200 vs $2000 on these sites? I can't even see what the difference is between those two options.
What about the "craftsmen" on Etsy? Are they even real? Or, I could pay $5000 for an individual, local, physically extant American with a name and face to make it from scratch, which I would love to be able to afford.
So I pick one at random off Wayfair that claims to be made of solid wood and has a price that is neither suspiciously low nor suspiciously high. Maybe I've just bought cheap boots, but it's insane that I don't even know.
It is nice to be able to buy things from actual people who make them. Coincidentally the biggest outfit who make reproduction desks in this country (ie think what an English desk looks like 200 years ago, basically that, except made last month by experts and also the real ones didn't have a place to run cables tidily out of sight) is in my city, so I paid them to make my desk (well, not this desk, the one in my office when I'm doing actual work). Expensive but definitely worth it.
I don't know at all how sure I'd be that what I'd get was good quality if it was turning up from the far side of the country, let alone from China. I know anywhere could make high quality products, but it's much easier to trust it when you can walk there and go see them.
> What about the "craftsmen" on Etsy? Are they even real?
Not anymore. The real craftspeople were booted from the site, by the cheap knockoff-spewers.
One thing that may help resolve your issue is that while I do agree with the Sam Vimes theory, it is also not guaranteed. There are also scenarios where the $50 boots will last forever, or you can buy $2 boots that will only last five years... but across your entire lifetime will still be cheaper. Or you can account for the fact that you take better care of your stuff than most people and the cheap thing may in fact be fine for a long time. Or you buy the cheap thing twice and maybe in 15 years when you have more disposable income buy the thing that lasts. Or buy the cheap thing and hit the occasional estate sale and eventually find a thing that lasts, but for dirt cheap prices, because you weren't in a hurry because your immediate needs were met and you had the time to wait for a deal.
The meta-lesson of the Vimes theory is really more that you need to think about these things, but it's not guaranteed that the expensive thing will be better in the longterm on a bang-for-the-buck basis. For furniture, there is something to be said for the technique beloved by the just-starting-out set of buying "whatever I scrounged together from garage sales", and there's something to be said for "I outfitted my apartment from Ikea". Yeah, it's cheap and one way or another you're going to pay for that cheapness, but it's so much cheaper than the alternative that as long as you aren't practicing your wrestling moves on the Ikea end tables, you can get a long way with them even if you're replacing them every 10 years.
And, per your last point... at least when you buy cheap, you know you bought cheap. I found myself in need of a dining room table light a few years back. We went to a lighting store and I stood there staring at all the bespoke LEDs that I knew would die and couldn't be replaced, and the multi-thousand dollar lamps that looked nice but I simply couldn't know if they were quality... and ended up buying a $15 dollar extension cord with 5 light sockets on it, bought some light bulbs to put in it, and wrapped the cord around the remains of the previous what-turned-out-to-be-proprietary track lighting. We decorate it for the season with various ribbon things to hide the cords. Because damn it, if it's all just going to fail anyhow, at least I knew I could replace the lights with whatever I wanted, and it cost me less than $100 all in. We've had that for, gosh, I think at least 10 years now, and I've probably cycled the lights at least twice now, but that's probably still under $100 total... all because I simply can't trust the expensive stuff.
Expensive doesn't guarantee high quality, but very cheap almost always means low quality. A £200 pair of boots might be great and last for a decade, or might be overpriced and fall apart after six months. But a £5 pair are definitely going to be crap.
Which is why it makes sense to buy the 5 pound shoes 40 times if they last at least 3 months. Except for running shoes, I just get the Costco ones for $20 to $30 and toss them in 6 to 12 months.
But then you're constantly either breaking in a new pair, or dealing with a pair that's falling apart, and you're lucky to get 1 month of good comfortable wear out of those cheap shoes. And you have to go buy them every three months, and shoe models change constantly so you have to find the current cheap pair that actually fits you.
I am lucky I have a wide range that I find comfortable, because the $30 Costco shoes and the $180 On Clouds are all the same to me. I also don't buy them every 3 months, maybe 6 months at most frequent. Last time was probably almost a year ago, and I got 2 pairs, one to keep nice so they're presentable, and the other for literally anything else, and they look terrible, but still aren't coming apart.
I would say this still holds true but not for singular products. Take Costco for example, long term you save money and you get high quality products. But that comes at the cost of having to spend quite a bit up front to buy in bulk.
Not to mention it also assumes you have the space to store those products.
Costco has a double threat going on... bulk discounts plus a great warranty. because they have so few skus, they can afford to give each product more attention than any other Brick & Mortar store, to say nothing about Amazon and Etsy
That is the main reason I buy from Costco without hesitation. I know that if I got ripped off by a subpar good, I can get my money back. But that rarely happens.
Funds to buy, space to store and also the means to transport the bulk goods. We do most of our grocery shopping on foot or by bicycle which rules out Costco for us.
This is part of why I now tend to go for the cheapest. I do a bit of research of course, but most goods have been commodified (and corners cut). Nowadays the only guarantee you have when paying more is that you have less money in your wallet.
Its a fun thought exercise, but I've found the opposite to be true in most cases. More expensive clothes are usually less durable (depending on the brand). The same goes for appliances, and cars, and phones, and etc. The cheap designs are simple and robust and the expensive designs add complexity and features.
In reality I think there are more forces extracting money from the wealthy and their effete needs. My example is an airplane. The first class passengers are effectively paying 3x as much for the same outcome. The same is true for ovens and shoes and phones and cars.
> More expensive clothes are usually less durable
I have nothing to back that up, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a feature. If these luxury items are being used by the society (or at least in some circles) as a proxy for 'success'(ie having enough disposable money) it probably would be better if they we also quite fragile. This way you could distinguish between someone who received a expense gift vs someone that has money to always keep buying new items.
I'm not sure how real it this, but I've read somewhere that part of the appeal of expensive glassware was the fact that it was pretty fragile. Serving someone at your house with expensive glassware was a way to tell 'look how much money I've got'.
Just to be clear, I don't think we should get impressed/try to impress people by how much money someone has. But that is a practice as old as time, and it doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.
> The first class passengers are effectively paying 3x as much for the same outcome
Not the same outcome. They show up at their destinations fresh from a good night's sleep, having showered at the lounge. Their back doesn't hurt from trying to sleep upright in a tiny seat or schlepping a heavy rucksack.
If you have enough money you are ok with paying to get those outcomes.
[delayed]
For very long international flights I could see it, but I also see people in the first class seats on shorter flights where it’s hardly worth it. (I assume at least some of them are upgrades.)
Also, checking a bag is not expensive.
I assume that many/most people flying business or first class on shorter flights are either flying for business or churning.
Most of first class is not paying their own money for those flights.
Agreed. But their employers still see value in paying for them. Unless you're referring to credit card churners.
I think you're right on the luxury brands being less durable.
To address the second airplane example, we really have to go through all that you're buying. Namely: more leg space, faster airport queue processing, more luggage, better in-flight service. Do I value these at 3x the cost? Maybe yes.
Both me and the richest person on the flight are going to the same destination. They're not getting there any faster or safer. Everything else is a fleeting luxury.
Not saying it's a bad to spend money on temporary comfort, but it's the opposite of the Vimes boot problem.
If you are over thirty and still this strong, then you have my respect and envy. I’m not even forty and even I would say a >7h economy flight (middle seat particularly) can take about two days to recover from.
How much money would you pay for two extra days of life? In the end, time itself is also “fleeting”, if you want to put it that way. But I sure as heck would fork over the money if I had it.
> Not saying it's a bad to spend money on temporary comfort, but it's the opposite of the Vimes boot problem.
It's true that comfort isn't a permanent good you own a la Vimes. But better comfort is a decidedly different outcome and you argued that it wasn't.
With luxury brands, it depends on what you buy. My mother-in-law still owns and uses 1970s-vintage Louis Vuitton handbags. They are built to last.
A hand-stitched leather suitcase is expensive. It will also last until your grandchildren are dead.
If it was made before suitcases commonly had wheels, you’re still going to want to replace it. The grandkids (if there are any) won’t want it.
It’s not suitable for air travel, but I treat anything for air travel as disposable. I still use it all the time for car-based travel. It’s larger and nicer than what I fly with.
The funny thing is that from what I heard with the antiques markets (which is admittedly possibly a decade or so old) it is antique luggage of all things which is 'in' and antique furniture which is out relatively speaking to the past.
The grandkids not wanting it may still apply if they are still minors, there would be plenty of time for tastes to shift again.
> The first class passengers are effectively paying 3x as much
3x? If only! If we're talking international first class (not US domestic "first"), it's typically 10-12x the price of economy.
Yeah 3x would be a bargain.
It depends on what brands.
If you're chasing after the ones that are most well known on Instagram, then you're paying for the logo and getting quality that is not that much better than much cheaper stuff.
If you look for lesser known brands that are more expensive but that expense is because of the materials and craftmanship, then it's often worth the money.
This highly, highly depends. I've never bought a Meile appliance but seen others here swear on them for durability. Le Creuset and All Clad make cookware I've had for decades with no problems or degradation at all and they'll last for centuries as far as I can tell. I've got a 70L pack I bought from the Arcteryx factory store 20 years ago and I've damn near taken it to the moon and back. Virtually every mountain in North America. Had it rained on, dunked into streams, fallen while full of 40 kilos of gear onto sharp rock. Not so much as a single seam has ever frayed and it's just just as waterproof as it was the day I bought it.
And you're overestimating the cost of first class, at least in my experience, and that's kind of a lot of experience. I work in pre-sales engineering and travel a ton. My company won't pay for first class, but I'm 6'2" with ten screws in my spine and always pay for the upgrade, and it's usually between $200-$500, which has never tripled the price and almost never even so much as doubles it. You can sneer that I'm overpaying for nothing, but you try getting into a situation where sitting in a sardine can for four hours leaves you unable to stand up straight for 40 hours when you land. To me, it's worth it. The other option is I die with more zeros in my bank account, which is even more pointless. It's not like I'm failing to hit savings goals because of this.
Same thing applies with cars, by the way. I work from home when not traveling and don't drive very much, but I do own a luxury vehicle, and the difference between that any nearly any rental is pretty stark. It doesn't win on any reliability rating I'm aware of, but I've put less than 20,000 miles on it in 6 years of ownership and don't particularly care about the durability. I care about comfort and my own car is way the fuck more comfortable than the Nissans and Toyotas the rental agencies give me.
"Effete needs" is awfully sneering. I've lived on the back of an Abrams tank for weeks at a time in the past. I lived in the backseat of a 1994 Honda Civic and worked an overnight shift detailing theme park restrooms while putting myself through community college 25 years ago. I can live with little to no comfort if I actually need to, but given the choice and sufficient disposable income that it makes no difference, why the hell would I choose to be less comfortable just so I can brag to all the Bogleheads that my savings account has an extra hundred grand in it when I need five mil to retire anyway? Frugality doesn't push the needle much in the realm of travel and consumer goods. Cheap housing and a well-paying job is what pushes the needle.
Don't be obtuse. Of course you can spend more money without buying better craftsmanship. Some trainers from Prada or Balenciaga will wear out faster than a pair of Aldens.
Consider school backpacks. If you can, you should probably buy a Tom Bihn backpack. It's $400 and will last for decades. Spending more money will buy something fancier, but it won't be better at being a backpack. If you don't have that much cash to drop? Jansport, Eastpak, North Face? They're all the same mediocre product made by the same PE group. And they're still not cheap.
I do have a decent pair of boots but I doubt I am saving any money over buying cheap boots because resoling them is not cheap anymore.
Vimes is talking about being penny wise and pound foolish.
It is not in any way addressing costly signalling, a completely unrelated behavior where purposefully wasteful and highly visible spending on lower-utility products elevates social status, making low-utility products more expensive and more common than equivalent high-quality products.
I love when this comes up and also I see it play out in my life, where my GF prefers fast fashion whereas I buy something from brands I like and I wear it for long (some of the clothes in my wardrobe have been there for 12+ years.. I feel old.)
Also Sir Terry Pratchett is a gem of an author and you should read all of his books. I have read through maybe 25% of Discworld and it's the funniest fantasy series ever.
This has stuck with me for years.
“Yes, yes,” said Bethan, sitting down glumly. “I know you don’t. Rincewind, all the shops have been smashed open, there was a whole bunch of people across the street helping themselves to musical instruments, can you believe that?”
“Yeah,” said Rincewind, picking up a knife and testing its blade thoughtfully. “Luters, I expect.”
Excerpt From The Light Fantastic
Great author.
I do the same (wear clothing for a long time) but I only buy the cheap stuff. I bought 1 replacement shirt in the last 5 years and 1 bag of replacement socks in the same time frame.
I wanted to like Discworld and read a couple of the books but they're frankly not funny.
He definitely grew significantly as a writer over time, and I would agree that some of his early work isn't particularly strong (The Light Fantastic, for example, is relatively bog-standard comic fantasy without any of the depth his later work showed).
If you start reading at the very beginning of the Discworld, you're slogging through the weaker stuff, and it's easy to get discouraged. A smoother path is to pick one of the defined sub-series (the guards are very popular, but my vote goes to the witches) and start along just that track; you'll get to the strong stuff much faster.
My advice has always been to start with Small Gods. It is a standalone book that references but does not rely on any others, and is far enough into his career that it’s fair to say that if you don’t like it, you won’t like his work in general.
You must have had a very good surgeon then! Congrats!
This feels like it's becoming less and less true, good quality items are becoming so expensive now or very hard to find.
I do think it is still very true for tools though. It's nearly always worth getting decent ones, they nearly give better results or are easier to use and last so much longer.
I'm a big fan of the Harbor Freight Pareto Principle
If you're a hobbyist or doing something at home, a lot of the times you're gonna buy some random tool and only use it a few times. 80% of the time, the Harbor Freight knockoff is going to be good enough. If you use a tool so much that it breaks, then it's time to spring for the expensive and high quality version.
However you may want to go straight to the nice version for things that have safety implications (skip the infamous Harbor Freight jack stands)
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
The "boots" item feels less true, because expensive doesn't seem to be as correlated with "good quality" as it used to. But the general statement still very much stands.
Things like financial products that charge higher interest rates to poorer people, or services that offer discounts for paying annually rather than monthly are great examples of this. And less direct things, like being able to drive to cheaper shops and buy in bulk, or being able to do preventative maintenance to avoid a cheap fix turning into an expensive one.
It can still apply to individual items, as long as you're careful about what you buy and do your research to make sure you're actually buying high quality boots, and not just cheap ones with an expensive logo on the side.
It's also just broadly true about whole categories. For example home ownership. Most poor people rent, which means having a place to live costs them money, but they get nothing for that money as a result, they just need to keep paying forever.
Utilities, in my country people who aren't trusted to pay for electricity, gas, even water (which you need to live!) in arrears have to pay up front for it, so maybe I use 500 kWh of electricity, and I've agreed to pay 20p per kWh = £100, at the end of the month I get a bill for £100 and I settle that a few days later, if I don't eventually I get angry letters and eventually a court summons. That's electricity I used two weeks ago and I won't even pay for it until May. But if I was poor, I might find my best option is I pre-pay £10 to get 40 kWh of electricity. So that 500kWh would cost £120 and I have to buy it first before I use it and if at any time I forget or can't pay the lights go off immediately that my credit runs out.
>Things like financial products that charge higher interest rates to poorer people, or services that offer discounts for paying annually rather than monthly are great examples of this.
Exchange of future cash flows are not comparable to a one time exchange of goods or services due to the risk of default.
> And less direct things, like being able to drive to cheaper shops and buy in bulk, or being able to do preventative maintenance to avoid a cheap fix turning into an expensive one.
This is a good example, but the best example I can think of is having sufficient cash flow to be able to purchase a home in a higher socioeconomic neighborhood, because if you have kids, you are effectively paying almost nothing for a higher quality education since a lot of comes back to you in the form of equity and your child’s increased chances of financial stability.
The boots theory is a concrete way of expressing the risk of ruin, which is the principle advantage of wealth (though our society has layered on many others): the rich can afford to take more risk, and consequently enjoy more reward. A poor person who buys the $50 boots has a much higher risk of coming up short for something else, and that lapse may have disproportionate consequences. So they go for the cheap boots, which end up costing them more in the long run, trapping them in an endless cycle.
Another way to consider it is through the lens of meritocracy. Consider two poker players of equal skill. Have them play each other until one has lost everything. Run this competition over and over, starting each player with a random stack. Over many trials, the player starting with the bigger stack will win in proportion to the ratio of their stack to their opponent's. Given a large enough ratio, this wealth advantage can begin to overcome greater and greater advantages in skill on the part of their opponent.
In the US, the ratio of the wealth of the top 10% to the wealth of the median has risen from 5.8x in 1963 to nearly 10x in 2022. In the same period, the ratio of the top 1% to the median has risen from 35x to 70x. And the effective advantage is probably much higher, as this calculation does not take into account liquidity: most of a median family's wealth is in their family home.
https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/
There's another important aspect of being wealthy that I've noticed myself. The less money you have, the more of your brainpower is spent in conserving it. Figuring out how to make rent this month, balancing your checkbook so you don't overdraft, keeping track of when payday is, looking through the newspaper to see what is on sale at the grocery store, is all time that could instead be spent thinking "how could I invest my money?", and "what are my longterm goals?".
Personally I think it's an inverted bathtub curve.
Some things are so cheap you can't mess it up. Some things are well-made because the manufacturer made a series of quality-conscious decisions that really added up.
The trouble is the middle, where consumers pay the most attention to branding to make decisions. At the extremes, though, brands matter less.
The poor man wants boots. The rich man wants boots. The man in the middle wants Timberlands or Harley-Davidsons or Doc Martins or whatever.
> Some things are so cheap you can't mess it up.
A good example would be modern safety razors. I was looking at alternatives to the King C Gillette and most of the generic branded ones performed similarly to the big three German brands.
ITT: an allegory is read literally
Consumer goods have dropped in price, which is good for offsetting inequality. I think the allegory still holds in some other areas (off the top of my head: healthcare spending and renting versus owning your primary residence).
That said, income inequality is probably the much bigger source of unfairness these days.
Re-reading Discworld books today demonstrates how timeless they are. Stories Terry wrote in the 1980s still feel like biting satire against the modern world today.
The books also get better as I get older - I read them first as a teenager and many of the deeper ideas about the human condition went straight over my head.
The way the cult leader in Guards! Guards! manipulates his followers, to give just one example.
I read them as a teenager, and now my teenaged daughter has started reading them. They are every bit as good as I remember them being.
I see one version being buying more than you need for volume discounts.