Note to self

[pozorvlak]

Suppose you have a choice between buying Item A, which is has quality 100 and costs £100, and Item B, which has quality 80 but costs only £50. Now suppose that you are buying these for Application C, which demands quality of at least 90. If you buy Item B, you have not saved £50 for a marginal reduction in quality; instead, you have completely

Comments

[pozorvlak]

> Of course this assumes that you are using the item for its intended purpose. No refunds on sledgehammers used to crack walnuts, nor nutcrackers used to install fence-posts.

And therein lies the rub. The case I was actually thinking of was buying handwear; an inexpensive pair of gloves that's adequate for walking around town in Edinburgh would probably be totally inadequate for winter climbing in the Cairngorms, but a pair that's adequate for that would be much more expensive :-(.

[gareth_rees]

With gloves you need both. You don't want to go winter climbing in walking-around-town gloves (hands get cold, poor grip on ice axe), but equally you don't want to go walking around town in your winter climbing gloves (hands get too hot, gloves too bulky to put in pockets when you enter a shop).

[pozorvlak]

I think you're on to something there. Though walking around town in Edinburgh has been surprisingly hard on my gloves in the past week!

[necaris]

I'm rarely able to measure quality so precisely and objectively -- can I ask what class of item these were?

[pozorvlak]

Numbers were made up for illustrative purposes :-) But the problem most often occurs with clothing/outdoor gear and electronics.

[pozorvlak]

The deeper point, really, is that the relationship between price and quality is maddeningly nonlinear, and the relationship between quality and utility is even more so, and depends fundamentally on what *you* want to do - just as well, really, otherwise the whole "exchange of goods for mutual benefit" thing wouldn't work at all :-)

[anonymous]

Somehow I think this post would be funnier if you gave an actual example of this happening. Cheap umbrellas are something I would avoid.

[necaris]

Depends on your circumstances, surely? I have an unavoidable tendency to lose umbrellas, so cheap ones are ideal for me...

[pozorvlak]

I consider all umbrellas a waste of money. They may work in some hypothetical place where rain is never accompanied by wind, but I have yet to live in such a place.

Actually, that's a reasonably good example of what I'm talking about. Waterproof clothing may be more expensive than an umbrella, but it continues to work in high wind, can be used on a bike, and allows you to go hillwalking. For someone who lives in the Hypothetical Land of Vertical Rain and has no interest in hillwalking or cycling, an umbrella would be adequate; for me, it wouldn't, and so I'd be wasting my money by buying one.