Common Cents # 15 - Long lasting verses disposable.

Common Cents # 15 - Long lasting verses disposable. 

We spent some time with friends this weekend, outside and social distancing, of course. We were discussing the value of buying things that will last a long time, maybe a lifetime, verses items that are essentially disposable. This borders on the idea of investing verses spending that we’ve been speaking about these last few weeks, but mainly the ideas reveal wise spending verses foolish spending.

The examples in question for each extreme are a Danish leather chair in our living room and a white straw hat. We paid $425 for the chair in 1973, the equivalent of $2,450 in 2020 dollars. For us, just out of college and still paying off student loans, that was an absurd amount for a piece of furniture, except that we loved everything about it.  However, 47 years later, it is in a prominent place in our living room and still looks just like it did the day we brought it home in our ’73 Saab. The same model chair is in the Nelson-Atkins Museum as an example of mid-century modern design in the Contemporary Art wing, and ones like it regularly sell on eBay for around $1,000. At the time, we could have bought a nice chair for less than $100 that would have been adequate but ordinary, and discarded a long time ago.

The second example is a straw hat I bought at Target last month. The funny thing is that there was a review of this hat on Target’s website. The reviewer said that the hat was poorly made and literally fell apart in less than a year. The reviewer declared that this is OK, because he just buys a new one every spring. I figured I could do the same thing. It is a disposable hat as far as I am concerned.

So, we bought a chair knowing we could have it our whole lives, and a hat, fully knowing that it probably won’t make it until next spring. Which was the wiser purchase? These are the kinds of decisions we make all the time. Do we go for quality at a premium price, or buy something cheap that will serve our purpose for a while and then be thrown away?

It comes down to how much we are committed to the item, what we are asking it to do for us, and how owning it impacts our daily life. If I like having a different kind of hat every year, I will be glad I didn’t spend a lot on this one. But if, over time, we decided we didn’t like the style or the craftsmanship of the expensive chair, the decision would be a lot more painful.

Knowing what we like and what is important to us, understanding what we hold as important in all that we purchase makes for wise decisions and dollars and sense in the long run.