I don't know when you decided to turn this into a class war. I've worked service jobs, my early years involved food stamps, and I spent my freshman and sophomore year eating beans'n'rice and driving a $600 Suzuki Samurai. Do us both a favor and ditch the OWS rhetoric. The part you're missing is that you'd buy a used Toyota "because they won't break often and gets decent mileage" but you have no problems paying $13 every year for a mouse that's going to break - every year. Why not save a shitload of coin by buying a used Yugo? Or a used Suzuki? Or a used Mitsubishi? Oh, right - because they're shitty and they break a lot. So let's talk about your $20 table - the resale value of a $20 Ikea table is zero. The resale value of a $400 Oak Barn table used to be $100 - still a screamin' deal. But now it's $50 because why not buy a piece of shit from Ikea for $20? So now fewer people are buying the Oak Barn table at all because it's worth nothing the minute you take it out of the showroom. Now Oak Barn is out of business. Hello Ashley Furniture. So back to that mouse - no, fuck it. Let's talk about something that people actually buy used. Used to be if you were getting started in music you bought a Mackie 1202. Wasn't great, worked like a tank, cost $300. Then Behringer decided they could knock off a 1202 for $200. Then Phonic decided they could knock off a Behringer for $160. Then Alesis decided they could knock off a Phonic for $99. Then Monoprice decided they could knock off an Alesis for $80. And see, the thing about the Mackie is you used it, you grew up, you needed something better, so you sold your Mackie to somebody else. The things wandered from indie piker to indie piker, often going through six or seven bands before they were finally too beat to shit to power up. The knock-offs? People just throw them away. I can say with authority that the sound quality of a Mackie that's been beat to shit by six garage bands still dusts the fuck out of a Monoprice mixer. I know - I listened to it at NAB. But it's not new. So let's call this what it really is - "I'm poor but I like sparkly new shit." That's fine. My problem, my objection to this whole line of thinking, is that when you sell sparkly new shit to people who don't give a fuck about quality, you drag the entire chain down and create an assload of waste. This isn't "poor me, I work a service job so I can only afford $13 for a gaming mouse" because you either spend more (or steal more) than that on games every month. Environmentalism isn't a luxury, it's an imperative. The fact that you've managed to justify your exemption from it because the people you buy from aren't making you think about it isn't a sign of your wisdom, it's a sign of your selfishness. You talk like I've never had to scrimp or save for anything in my life, when the fact of the matter is I was offered the exact same fifteen credit cards as a college freshman as you were. I'm sitting at an Ikea desk I bought ten years ago, looking at effects processors I bought out of The Little Nickel before Craigslist even existed and even twenty years later they sound better than the new cheap shit. Because they were built to last. You really want this to be a "rich/poor" thing. It's not. It's a priorities thing. Companies like Monoprice know that you don't prioritize quality because you've never encountered it. And as far as they're concerned, with any luck, you never will. And that saddens me.
I'll start with this first. We are not in disagreement that environmentalism is necessary. It is. I like the ability to survive on a planet without drastic environmental changes, I like not seeing trash on the streets and I like getting good gas mileage. Those are all very nice. They are practically more expensive than most people can afford to pay, because most of the environmentally friendly items are new. Things will probably change in 10 years when the first and second generation of eco products makes its way on to the secondary market, but right now if you want a solar panel or a hybrid car that's not new you're going to have a harder time finding it for less than a regular car. When's the last time you passed a Prius on sale for under $4000? Maybe 3 months ago, maybe 4, our neighbors offered us an SUV, some white Ford or something for ~$4,000. 80,000 miles, good condition, they just didn't want it and knew it wasn't going to make it at the dealers, not anymore. Cheapest Prius near me? $4,500, 200,000 miles. More expensive, more likely to break. Not worth it (we didn't go for the SUV either). Otherwise the prices quickly hit $10,000. Here's the crux of the problem: Why would I buy a $10,000 car that's better for the environment when I can get something that's worse, but cheaper for me by a whole lot? The mouse is ultimately irrelevant at this point; its a mouse, if you're at the income level where you can't afford a gaming mouse you just don't buy it. A regular mouse is just fine; if you spend $100 on a gaming mouse when you can't afford groceries then there is something wrong with your priorities anyway. Same with buying a gaming mouse for $13.97. Other things you can't really avoid, things like food or clothes, furniture, utilities. When you get to IKEA and you see that table for $20, you know that the product you are getting is worth $20. It will last a couple of years, maybe longer if you are careful. It will last much less time than a much nicer table, like Oak Barn, but in the moment that difference is irrelevant. I think what's happening here, and what I have a problem with, is that you seem to be assigning blame in reverse. Customers very rarely go out of their way to shut down a business. They just buy whatever they think is going to be the best for its price, however they judge "best." Looking at them and going "man fuck these people for buying the cheaply made products with mediocre quality" is like blaming someone for taking a shit. Its unpleasant to smell, but its the job of the toilet to mitigate the reek of ass. People are always going to try and live well, and if they find they can have a higher standard of living by buying cheaper goods they are going to do exactly that. Going back to the speakers for a moment, its like blaming the indie bands for not buying the Mackie 1202 when the Alesis is half the price. Of course they're going to buy it: its half the price and more than half the quality. I'm doing a few other things while typing so excuse how scatterbrained this post is getting, but I have to emphasize that the quality gained for the price does not match. The IKEA desk might be $20, but it is a functional desk. It's 1/5th the price of the Oak Barn even if its only half as well made. Same with the mouse. Same with the keyboard. Same with the food. Same with my speakers. Same with my monitor. They're cheaper than their quality. My desk is actually pretty nice, but if I had to choose between buying it at even used price for $100 or buying a $20 IKEA desk, I will choose the IKEA. When I start making actual money, I will buy the nice desk and the organic food. I think part of this argument is us angrily agreeing with each other.Environmentalism isn't a luxury, it's an imperative. The fact that you've managed to justify your exemption from it because the people you buy from aren't making you think about it isn't a sign of your wisdom, it's a sign of your selfishness.
You spend three paragraphs talking about cars and then attempting to use your arguments on computer mice. You don't get to do that. A car is a durable good. Durable goods are amortized by the IRS. When I buy a Mac Pro, my accountant lets me write it off on a schedule over three years. When I buy a house for investment, the number is something bizarre like 27 1/2 years. The point being that even the government recognizes that durable goods are expected to last a while. What we're talking about is consumables. or, more specifically, the erosion of products that WERE durable goods but are NOW consumables. Note how even Wikipedia believes consumer electronics to be durable goods? Do you think Monoprice believes that? Therein lies the argument. You are endorsing a shift from durable goods to consumables without recognizing that there is a difference between the two. Without recognizing that those incapable of crafting durable goods are at an advantage when you settle for consumables. Without acknowledging that something that is used for ten years is always better than something that is used for one year from the simple standpoint of entropy. The mouse is not ultimately irrelevant. The mouse is the crux of the argument. Monoprice takes my durable good and resells it to you as a consumable. As a consequence, you argue that there is no place for durable goods in your life. As a consequence, those who craft durable goods must now not only compete against those selling durable goods, they must also compete against those who sell consumables. And they will lose. Know how many electronics manufacturers there were in the United States in 1981? Know how many there are now? Used to be "made in Japan" was crap, then "made in China" was crap then "made in Vietnam" was crap. Yet we still buy the crap. The Japanese are reaping the whirlwind right now, just as we did in the late '80s. That's all you, bubba. I'm not accusing "the consumer" of anything. I'm accusing you of short-sightedness because you see a false equivalency between your $13 consumable and my $100 durable good, and you use that false equivalency to explain away all the external costs of your choice. My beef initially started out with Monoprice - you took it on when you somehow decided that there wasn't that much difference between something designed for performance and something designed for price point. Things really got hairy when you decided to make it about those poor, poor kids who can only afford $13 gaming mice. Consumers will buy whatever they're dangled in front of them with the justification of "it's cheap." That's WalMart in a nutshell. However, it's unusual that you get an argument that it's somehow the virtuous choice because poverty. I was talking about "stuff." You're the one who brought up "service jobs." You keep asserting this. That's all it is - an assertion. You have fabricated a justification out of thin air that something that costs less must be a better value because you want to believe it to be true. You've made no arguments and presented no evidence to back up this claim. You can emphasize it all you want - you haven't justified it, you haven't defended it, you haven't explained it, you've just asserted over and over again that things that are cheap are a better value than things that are not. Considering my argument has been - from the get go - that this is not the case (with links and attribution) I feel the need to call you out on it - wanting it does not make it so. You've also swept the entire argument of externalities under the rug rather than acknowledge it beyond "but I'm poor." Let me bring it back up to the front: if we taxed the import of cheap shitty goods to cover the externalities, cheap shitty goods would suddenly become "vaguely discounted shitty goods." Do you think people would still buy them? Now - you can try and make that me somehow blaming the poor. I'll warn you, if you do I'll cease to be nice. I have argued, am arguing and will continue to argue that the problems of cheap knock-offs are caused by externalities and that the way to deal with externalities is to internalize them. Buy recycled. Buy used. Buy less. And yes - in our consumer culture, that's not typical behavior. But then, most consumers don't think their choices through. You on the other hand are here arguing five comments deep for it. You're being held to a higher standard. So we're back to "I'm poor but I like sparkly shit." Again, that's fine. I think you're an idiot - If I had the choice between an $800 new Ikea table or a $800 used Noguchi I'll go with the Noguchi every time. Fuck - a top-end Ikea office chair is $500. I paid $600 for a brand new Aeron C with leather armrests and a lifetime warranty. It happened to be made in the USA. Not only is it in the MoMA, it's 94% recyclable. So. Tell me how the difference between the $500 Ikea chair and the $600 Herman Miller chair is more than $100 worth of value. Use numbers and links. Because wishing won't make it so.I think what's happening here, and what I have a problem with, is that you seem to be assigning blame in reverse.
Going back to the speakers for a moment, its like blaming the indie bands for not buying the Mackie 1202 when the Alesis is half the price. Of course they're going to buy it: its half the price and more than half the quality.
I'm doing a few other things while typing so excuse how scatterbrained this post is getting, but I have to emphasize that the quality gained for the price does not match.
They're cheaper than their quality. My desk is actually pretty nice, but if I had to choose between buying it at even used price for $100 or buying a $20 IKEA desk, I will choose the IKEA. When I start making actual money, I will buy the nice desk and the organic food.
I think I've gone and lost this argument. I'll concede it. I will say a few things though. No? 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. I'm not saying that this decision is moral, that its good consumerism, that its the best decision, but its the more practical one with the resources I already have. If I had the money to choose between a $500 IKEA and a $600 Aeron C chair I would go with the Aeron C because its a much better value for the price. But if my chair breaks tomorrow and I just need a chair to sit on, then I'm going to buy from IKEA since its $40 versus $80. I won't even attempt to find one at Herman Miller since their prices are well above $100. What the IKEA chair is is a chair. I can sit in it. It supports my weight when I am at a computer. I do not have to stand. It has arm rests and can turn around. It is not nice or pleasant or fun, but its something that will last at least a few months and performs all of the functions that I require out of it. Let's compare the values here then, because I still believe I have a point here. I'll illustrate it with a recent purchase. I just bought a headset, because I realized I actually don't have a microphone of any kind for my PC, and that's not very useful. I looked around Amazon for some deals and settled on a Turtle Beach Z11. It is a headset that is not trash. The microphone works, the padding is fine, and I'm not forced to constantly eat the microphone. I checked the price of another headset, this one from Astro. $100. Are my Turtle Beaches worse? Of course they are. But are the Astros two and a half times better? No, of course not. They're headsets with better features and better production, but not by that much. That's more of what I'm getting at, and its why a tax on imports would negate the reason I have for buying cheaper goods. If my Turtle Beaches were $60, I would have bought the Astros, because at that point I'd rather just have a better headset. But for $40? I'll take the cheaper model; I can put that money away. In the meantime, I have a product I can use. Its really not, and I apologize if somehow I communicated any sort of virtue or morality here. Its not about which is the better for my soul, its about what's a more practical decision. Durable goods like a really nice mouse or chair are great, but they are usually not something practical when you just need a product to perform a function. Most of the time that's all I want. I would like a pen to write with. I would like a chair to sit on. I would like some clothes to wear - though oddly enough the cheapest clothes down at good will are the most durable and at this point he most fashionable so fuck all if I know what's going on there - and so I don't really feel the desire to make a big purchase because I don't expect the product to last forever. I expect it to last long enough to be useful. I once spent $30 on an MP3 player from China. The touch screen was awful, there was no brand of any kind, and you could feel how cheap it was. You could barely operate it, and it came with a document called "HUMOR.TXT" that was nothing but poorly translated jokes. It had neither wireless nor anything else. I bought it because I was about to go work for Wal-Mart as an overnight shift and wanted to have something to listen to. The thing lasted 3 months; by the end of the 3 months I had saved enough money to buy a smart phone and just put my music on that. It works much better - though apparently Motorola is about as durable as a chinese MP3 player - but that $30 spent on the player was preferable to the $70 I would have had to spend on an iPod. 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. If you buy something expensive, something that might appear nice, and it turns out you got something defective, you could have blown quite a bit more than that. Its why I didn't risk it with the iPod. Sure it was better, but I'm glad I didn't get it, because in 3 months I ended up replacing it with something better anyway. I still lost, because you are right that a higher quality product is ultimately better. It'll last longer because its made better. But seriously if my chair breaks tomorrow I'm just going to buy that shitty IKEA one because the only thing I'll pop $600 on this point is a new laptop, which I will be needing soon as both of its speakers are fried and the hardware is out of date. Last little addition, speaking of my computer. I will never understand why people my age insist on buying Intel processors for gaming. Yes, the processor will last longer. By the time you start to notice that, the processor is already three years out of date, and you're either looking at a new computer or have already swapped it out for something better. This is also the most I've argued about buying stuff in my life.As a consequence, you argue that there is no place for durable goods in your life.
You have fabricated a justification out of thin air that something that costs less must be a better value because you want to believe it to be true.
However, it's unusual that you get an argument that it's somehow the virtuous choice because poverty.
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: 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. 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. ...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.I think I've gone and lost this argument. I'll concede it. I will say a few things though.
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.
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.
This is also the most I've argued about buying stuff in my life.