Why I always shop expensive, quality products
Idea
Buying high quality products is always cheaper on the long term.
Why?
About ten years ago I was looking for a tablet, as i wanted to have a mobile device to write articles on, however I didn’t wanted to buy a laptop as I didn’t need a bigger device. After some investigation I’ve chosen a cheap android tablet and went home happily with it. At least I was happy until I switched it on. The tablet was randomly slowing down, not recognising touch properly when it was plugged into the power source. I had to bring it back and exchange it. I’ve exchanged for a more powerful model from the same company which had a much higher screen resolution. My expectations were a lot higher too. I was heavily disappointed as this device was also really slow and underperforming. Finally I sold the device for about 20% less than the original price and bought and iPad which I still use today. I bough the iPad as part of another deal, so I got about 30% discount on it.
Cost of buying a cheaper product:
The time which I spent on returning the product and selling the second one
The time which I’ve lost because the device was slow
The frustration because of the cheaper product
20% of the original price
I agree that the initial cost of some products might be quite high, however if you can use the higher quality product for example five years, dividing the cost of the product by five will show a different value and often results in excellent price / value ratio.
Products which I consider as high quality: iPad, my grand canyon AL 29 mountain bike. I’ve biked with this bike more than 10000 kms and it?s still functioning perfectly with the original front fork, original breaks, original frame (of course I’ve changed the parts which needs to be changed from time to time: chainrings, chain, break pads etc.).
One more example: If you buy an expensive leather shoe for 5 times the price of a cheap shoe, however you have to change the cheap shoe every two years and can use the expensive one for ten years, which one is cheaper on the long term? Consider the time you spend on choosing those five pairs rather than the one pair (even if you’re super effective in shoe shopping this takes 5-10 hours vs 1-2 hours). Consider the small cost of maintaining the leather.
