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by grrrrrbox
1504 days ago
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Quantity is usually more expensive than quality in the long run, though. This idea has been succinctly popularized by the "boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness": >The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. 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. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory |
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There is some relationship between price and quality (and I find this to be most true with things that are short term consumables vs longer term ones like clothing, home goods, etc). Namely you never get more than you pay for. But even assuming you're not getting less than you pay for (which happens a lot) the relationship is still rarely close enough to linear to work out in favor of anything but the cheapest goods or the cheapest goods that meet some specific criteria or feature that yields longer life.
Rich people's stuff lasts longer in large part because they can afford to over-provision and objects that are getting used at a fraction of "what they're good for" whereas poor people are buying the bare minimum and using it at 10/10ths right out of the gate.
Think about where a clipboard warrior on a construction site goes and what they do. Of course their clothing lasts longer than the general laborer who's climbing/crawling all sorts of places over all sorts of things and moving all sorts of material. They could buy the crappiest boots money can buy and still have them outlast anything the laborer wears.
The wealthy person buys a premium mixer that's more than up to the task of mixing what they want to mix. The poor person mixes bread dough with their Amazon-China special and hopes it's good enough.
The wealthy person pays for delivery or rents a truck. The poor person paid for the bump stops he's gonna use the bump stops.
And by wealthy here I mean HN white collar class people vs mid range blue collar type stuff.