I think I've gone and lost this argument. I'll concede it. I will say a few things though.

Mature of you. I've enjoyed it, believe it or not. I expected more of you and when you weren't delivering, it was irritating, I'll admit. However, there remains discussion:

I would rather have a durable good, but if the durable good is going to be that much more expensive than a consumable then I'm going to go with the cheaper option if its something I feel I need and its all I can afford.

And here we come full circle to my argument against Monoprice and their ilk: they cloud your decision process to the availability of better alternatives. Consider: that shitty Alesis mixer is $20 more than the shitty Monoprice mixer. You can look on Craigslist and see lots of Alesis shit; you have an idea that it'll maybe last long enough to pass along to some other poor schlub. Each step along the way has been an incremental and negligible decrement; we got to a $80 mixer by starting at a $300 mixer and going to a $250 mixer to a $200 mixer to a $160 mixer to a $99 mixer. Each step we made, we only gave up a little in exchange for a little bit more "value." But as we keep making those steps, we go from something with a 5-year warranty that you can get fixed at Guitar Center to a disposable chunk of dung that they'd rather give you a new one of than even ask for the busted one in return. It's the archetypal "slippery slope" argument but by getting people to fixate on the price, they cloud people from noticing what they lose.

Like with your chairs. You're so focused on price that you didn't notice you're comparing a naugahide chair with a mesh-back chair. Compare apples to apples, and the mesh-back Ikea chair is $90. Still, what you're doing is proving that $80-90 is the going rate for cheap shitty no-name mesh-back chairs. And hey - double the price, get a lifetime warranty. But you didn't even think to look.

Because they'd rather you didn't.

It's a false economy. That's my point. Internal, external, whatever, it still balances out that when you're paying for cheap shit, you're getting ripped off more often than not. I don't know from gaming headsets, but I'm the wrong person to ask - in an industry where everyone wears MDR-7506s, I wear 7509s. I hear more. Which means I do a better job. Which means I get invited back more often. False economy. Take your MP3 player. You've spent $100 on a Coby that's busted and a Motorola you hate. For $150 I'll bet you could have gotten a smartphone you don't hate. False economy.

This is just an errant thought here, but maybe that's one of the bigger appeals to consumer products. They're not good, but because they're cheap its less of a risk. You get a shitty one and you've spent $10. All you've lost is $10.

Right. I run with $10 headphones because I know my sweat is going to soak into the microphone and destroy them in a few months. But it still pisses me off to know that I need to buy three pairs because two of them are going to be dead out of the box. Would I buy $30 headphones? If I could. The problem is this type of consumer thinking means I can buy $10 headphones... or I can buy $70 headphones. So there are very real consequences to it.

This is also the most I've argued about buying stuff in my life.

...but you're thinking about it now, aren't you. And once you start, it's hard to stop.

Sorry for slipping you the red pill.