I often hear, “You should never cheap out on a good office chair, shoes, underpants, backpack etc…” but what are some items that you would feel OK to cheap out on?
This can by anything from items such as: expensive clothing brands to general groceries.
Oh yeah, I’m not saying always go for the high end, mid range is often perfectly fine. I’ll highlight I’m talking about non-consumable products which you will rely on.
If it’s something consumable, the low-mid range often has minimal practical variation due to market forces. If it’s not something you’re going to rely on, you don’t need to care too much if it’s gonna break itself or whatever you’re using it for.
Excuse the tautology, but anything you’re relying on, needs to be reliable. If the low end is reliable enough for that, market forces unfortunately dictate that a worse version must be made for cheaper, because that it-doesn’t-need-to-be-reliable demographic is not currently being saturated.
It’s kinda away from my original point, but it’s also very important—if we can afford it, we should be buying the longest lasting versions of everything we need, we generate an unreasonable amount of waste currently due to the proliferation of planned obsolescence and disposable consumerism. It’s not a bargain in the long term if we turn the planet into an oven.
The whole point is that “value for money” is not constant across products or kinds of products. The post is asking to optimize value while minimizing cost. It is a reasonable enough question to have legitimate answers.