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Buy it for life: Durable, Quality, Practical
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y agoOne thing I have found, is that buying stuff that is supposed to last for life, ends up making the possessions own me, instead of me own the possessions. Especially with kids, when I have disposable objects, I don't have to worry if they trash it, or get it dirty. I don't have to worry about losing it(I can order a replacement on Amazon that will be here in 2 days). With long-lasting products that are for life, I find I worry about cleaning them, organizing them, and protecting them. Maybe to total cost of ownership is less for the more durable product, but you only have to lose it once or damage it once for the savings to go away.
- alexpetralia 5y agoReminds me of: "The things you own end up owning you."
- loldk 5y agoOne thing I have found, is that buying stuff that constantly breaks down and becomes useless, ends up making these posessions own me, instead of me own the posessions because I constantly have to reorder new ones. Especially with kids, when I have a long lasting products, I don't have to worry about coughing up a ton of money over the course of a few months or years just to keep replacing them, and I don't have to worry if they trash it, or get it dirty because I know it's covered. I also don't have to worry about losing it because me and my family are responsible and rarely lose things, mostly because the higher quality and warm fuzzy feelings we get from spending money with a moral company, we tend to all value the things we own much more. As such my kids tend to clean, organize, and protect them without needing as much discipline, and our friends and house guests also respect us more because we take good care of ourselves and our investments. So not only is the total cost of ownership less for our more durable, reliable products, but we also all feel very secure and happy about the small purchases we make because they provide so many benefits it feels more like an investment in our world and each other. However, when it comes to disposable and poorly made products we lose all of that before we even buy the product. p.s. we also don't have to spend nearly as much time shopping or searching for good products because we can place a reasonable amount of trust in the companies we are familiar with, and whose products are tested and kid/spouse approved. p.s.s. it feels amazing knowing we aren't enabling immoral businesses and their employees, who would turn around and lobby against important rights such as the right to repair our own belongings.
- lupinglade 5y agoOn the other hand, crappy knock-off products aren't going to be the right tool for most jobs and will fail when you need them most. The trick to not being owned by your possessions is to only own what you really, truly need. Further, buying low-quality throw-away type products ends up supporting the greedy, lazy low-quality manufacturers. We all end up with only junk for choice. And as @desine already commented: all this junk ends up in the landfills, oceans, etc.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y agoDepends what you use them for. > The trick to not being owned by your things is to only own what you really, truly need. I don't think that is quite right. Let's say you need a button down shirt for work. So you only buy 5, custom tailored shirts out of high quality materials. You have bought a minimal amount, and you really do need those shirts. When you are eating, are you not worried about getting ketchup on your shirt. If kids come up to you, are you not worried about them getting your shirt dirty. Are you worried that your washer and dryer are being too harsh for your shirts. If on the other hand, you just get a bunch of ok shirts on Amazon or WalMart. You just throw them in the washer and dryer without thinking about it. You eat and play with your kids, knowing if your shirt gets dirty, stained, or ripped, it is not a big deal, you will just get another one. I think the true key to not having your possessions own you is easy replacability. If you can easily replace them, then you can use them without worrying about them.
- lupinglade 5y agoShirts are more of a disposable product, they normally don't last very long. So the difference between the cheap knock off and proper quality isn't that significant. Although you probably don't want to be wearing the cheapest alibaba shirt to an important business meeting.
- christiansakai 5y agoI think this is just a mindset issue. Which is non issue.
- desine 5y agoWith no disrespect (especially with children, I know their destructive tendencies well enough), this sounds like a shunning of responsibility, and irks me. Our cheap, disposable consumer goods are ending up in landfills, our plastic waste has permeated every square inch of the earth, and we continue to justify these destructive habits. If you need something, you should care for it, you should maintain it, and you should commit to a certain level of care. Not caring about your possessions and seeing them as disposable validates the business models of shelling out crap quality products and the further destruction of our environment.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- imiric 5y agoI was about to post a similar comment, but you summed it up nicely. The landfill reality and the pollution they cause, especially from e-waste, is devastating: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-behind-e-waste-dump-africa-180957597/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-...
- bigmattystyles 5y agoWe should charge the disposal cost upfront at the point of purchase. I know it’s political suicide but it would solve quite a few issues.
- fwipsy 5y agoMaybe not so far-fetched. CA charges an ewaste recycling fee already when you purchase certain items.
- mavhc 5y agoTax everything the amount it costs to clean up the pollution it causes, from electricity to food. 2 side effects: people will make things that produce less pollution, and people will make cleaning up pollution cheaper
- m463 5y agoyeah, there should be some products where "buy it for life" might be... just don't buy one. Do you really need a cast iron frying pan? They seem to be over-represented in this category because they don't break. But iron in your diet is not that good for you if you're male because it accumulates. Another thing to be wary of is "buy this best stuff" lists are easy money, people will curate your lists for you, then you just link to amazon and hoarding behavior does the rest.
- fnord77 5y agoperhaps we all have too many possessions.
- tracer4201 5y agoSome of the product listings are not great. I see non stick skillets that I know won’t last than a year or two with moderate use. Otherwise I like the concept.
- chaostheory 5y agoI agree with you. It looks like it made it onto the site because it has a lifetime warranty. Still, I’m not keen on eating flakes of PFAS aka Teflon as these types of products wear out
- darksaints 5y agoThe hexclad pans do not use teflon. And you're expected to season them...the non-stick nature is actually very similar to carbon steel.
- bushbaba 5y agoIt’s always amazed me that high carbon steel / cast iron / stainless steel pans aren’t more commonly used. You literally are buying it for life. They cook the food way better. And a small amount of oil is all that’s needed for eggs and other non stick applications
- lupinglade 5y agoThey cook the best too - a good carbon steel pan is worth its weight in gold. Non-stick is utter garbage in comparison - and you're cooking on plastic and eating pieces of the coating. Food cooked on carbon steel or iron tastes so much better.
- float4 5y ago> and you're cooking on plastic and eating pieces of the coating There are actually ceramic non-stick pans, in which case you'd be eating sand if I understand the concept correctly.
- ilovecaching 5y agoInstead of BFL, I only buy products that I'm ok with getting destroyed or products I have a laid out upgrade plan for. Example: All of my pants are Levi's 501s. I can get them for 50-60 bucks, which is nothing. They last a really long time, but they're not made in America nor do they have a lifetime warranty. BUT I don't have to worry about spilling stuff on my pants or going through the tedious process of filing warranty claims every time a button breaks. I just get on the app and order a new pair. What's more important to me is narrowing down the list of brands I buy from so I spend less time thinking about shopping and more time being productive.
- dehrmann 5y agoYou should see how much made in America Levi's cost.
- mikestew 5y agoYou’ll be buying them used, because they’re no longer made: https://www.heddels.com/2019/09/levis-no-longer-producing-501-jeans-america/ https://www.heddels.com/2019/09/levis-no-longer-producing-50...
- JohnCohorn 5y agoIt hurts me a little to see “50-60 bucks” for jeans referred to as nothing. I now grudgingly buy similar $50-60 Levis or Eddie Bauers because my wife likes them better than jeans that cost half as much. Looks some common basic jeans at Walmart are still ~$15 which is amazing since that’s what I remember paying for them like 15 years ago.
- wyager 5y agoOne really nice thing about safety-critical activities is that the equipment tends to be made to extremely high standards and usually lasts a very long time. If you buy equipment for climbing, shooting, scuba diving, etc. you can reasonably expect that it's made to a very exacting standard (almost certainly in the US, Japan, or Europe) and will last many years (with well-defined consumable components and maintenance requirements).
- artificial 5y agoIs this the Reddit board turned site or a separate venture?
- emre 5y agoSeparate venture (I'm not affiliated, just really like it)
- artificial 5y agoCool good to know and thanks for the clarification!
- thih9 5y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25558941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25558941
- dang 5y agoAlso these threads: Show HN: I calculated the monthly cost of ownership for products - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26525183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26525183 - March 2021 (2 comments) Show HN: Summarizing product reviews into simple bullet-point lists with GPT-3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224784 - Feb 2021 (41 comments) Review broken products instead of new ones - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25810708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25810708 - Jan 2021 (121 comments) Show HN: Recurring reviews to track the whole lifecycle of a product - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25558891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25558891 - Dec 2020 (61 comments)
- chakerb 5y agoI genuinely dont understand the reason behind hijacking right-click (long press on phone). I'm using a slow internet, and I'm used to open multiple tabs so I can only wait for one and then go through all of them. So I'm eager to understand if this is done to stop people from copying from the site or there's another reason behind it.
- dylan604 5y ago>So I'm eager to understand if this is done to stop people from copying from the site Disabling right-click for this purpose is like a lock on the front door to your house. It only keeps the honest person at bay. If I want to see the details of the site, there's no stopping DevTools. Hiding images div backgrounds or under click blocking divs is just a mere inconvenience. If the browser is displaying it, it can be gotten to in DevTools
- varenc 5y agoI don't think right click is disabled? It's just that a bunch of the "links" aren't semantic <a> tags so you can't open them in a new window. (they're just <div> tags with onclick handlers) I think this happens often in single-page-apps just because developer don't care or don't think about this use case. It's frustratingly common. For example, Apple's online store does it too: https://www.apple.com/shop/accessories/all/cases-protection https://www.apple.com/shop/accessories/all/cases-protection No way to right click the various items and open a bunch of tabs.
- edoceo 5y agonot using semantic HTML for links is a bigger sin than hijacking the right-click IMO. Maybe even worse than scroll-jacking
- gumby 5y agoWorks if you click the name of the case. I'm on Mac Safari FWIW. Doesn't work on the image because they want that to click through the carousel. I think they are wrong (a regular clic can do that, plus they have navigation arrows). But at least you can shop in the normal fashion, if you click on the text
- zmmmmm 5y agoIt's been an interesting evolution as I have aged to observe myself going from one end of the spectrum to the other (mainly, as I've accumulated more wealth). I'm now at the point where I crave quality at just about any cost because it's abundantly clear to me that buying crap is bad value. Many of the few high quality things I bought early on in life are still with me and I love them. But so is a huge amount of the garbage I bought earlier and I hate it. So where I used to go into shops and look at all the expensive items with scorn and think "what idiots must there be who buy all these things that are twice the price!", now I go in and actively try to find out "but is there an even more expensive one I could get with higher quality?"
- lupinglade 5y agoIt's not always the price too, often enough the higher quality item can be cheaper, just less of a fancy package maybe. A lot of companies blow all their budget on advertising and packaging instead of product quality and research. Knowledge is key. Especially be careful in stores like TJ Maxx, Home-sense and such -- lots of lowest quality fancy packaged junk to be had there.
- jack_pp 5y agoOne example I'm aware of is headphones. A while back everyone thought Beats are the best because they were expensive and had good marketing but really they were shit and you could get much better quality for less price
- colanderman 5y agoAt the same time, in keeping with the theme of the article -- spend the $75 for a good (i.e. well-regarded for your use case) pair of headphones if you enjoy music. It is absolutely night and day compared to $10 crap.
- megameter 5y agoI've swung towards the cheap end and am currently wearing some basic Sony over-ears. I have more expensive gear. The value here is not really in the audio quality - which, apart from the most strenuous audio engineering flat-response-and-detailed-image-needed cases, is fine, really - but in being light and cheap and embracing that quality. It rattles a little when you hold it, but it's made to withstand a few drops, and it won't pressure your skull or force your neck out of posture with hours of use. The cable is soldered in but sturdy. The $75 ones I've used always tend to end up with issues because they don't have these qualities. The cables are still soldered but of a lower thickness, and the rigidity of the frame makes them disconnect more readily. They pinch your ears and crush your skull. The quality is better but not enough to matter in everyday use - a good DAC and a low-noise environment makes more difference.
- ekianjo 5y ago> Thinkpad X200 I clicked on Go to Shop, it leads to Amazon with a search for "thinkpad T series" and nothing related to the X200. Useless. https://www.buyforlife.com/products/185/thinkpad-x200 https://www.buyforlife.com/products/185/thinkpad-x200
- golemiprague 5y agoI can see why someone would like to buy a long lasting tools or pots and pans but for cloths or electronics it is just a waste of money. Fashion changes and electronics advance too rapidly, you don't want to get stuck with something for too long.
- fnord77 5y agono electronics products on that site offer a lifetime warranty. I'd argue there are almost no "buy it for life" electronics. Same with clothing except maybe outerwear.
- iib 5y agoInterestingly enough, RAM seems to have a lifetime warranty, as discussed on other places on the web [1]. Of course, lifetime warranty does not mean the lifetime of the buyer [2]. [1] https://www.quora.com/Why-does-computer-RAM-have-a-lifetime-warranty https://www.quora.com/Why-does-computer-RAM-have-a-lifetime-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warranty#Lifetime_warranty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warranty#Lifetime_warranty
- auslegung 5y agoI’ve found a wonderful exception for clothing: https://www.woolx.com/pages/about-woolx https://www.woolx.com/pages/about-woolx. You aren’t replacing your entire wardrobe with them, but I wear their shirts 50% of the time and their boxers 100% of the time.
- fnord77 5y agoSome cheapo Harbor Freight tools last a lifetime if you only use them a couple times a year. No sense in buying something very heavy duty when it won't see much duty. I feel like "buy it for life" is just a different kind of (hipster?) snobbery.
- dylan604 5y agoThere are tools for weekend warriors, and then there's tools for the "professional" built for daily use. I often repeat the phrase "buy it nice, or buy it twice if not thrice". I've done the buy it cheap to get 'er done type of thing, and I've also bought the good item because it was going to make a shitty job that much easier.
- jonwest 5y agoAnd the tools they’re listing, Milwaukee Hammer Drill, for example, offers no warranty at all and wouldn’t be what I would consider to be “high end” either. Just seems like a purposely placed product rather than a legitimate BIFL item.
- bombcar 5y agoMilwaukee does offer a warranty and will repair out of warranty but any battery tool is by definition not a buy-it-for-life as the battery will wear out (and better tools will come). My rule is buy so that when it dies I’m not sad. That varies for different pieces of equipment.
- steverb 5y agoThe thing to remember with battery powered tools is that you are not just buying a tool. You are buying into a battery ecosystem. Plan accordingly. Fortunately, you can buy batteries for most popular tool brands long after the brand stops supporting them, and in a pinch you can buy adapters to make brand a batteries work on brand b tools
- bombcar 5y ago
- Scene_Cast2 5y agoI like BIFL-type items for some categories of products, but not others. Some of the recommended items are great. I love high-quality skillets, knives, rice cookers, etc. For other items, I've seen an overly high focus on "specs" in the BIFL community, where the durability comes at the price of being uncomfortable and bulky. With shoes, it would be using X leather here, using Y sole stitching there, etc. By comparison, I want light-weight shoes with soft / no heel counter, that weigh less than the recommended leather bricks. The bloody blisters I got from "quality construction" forced me to figure out what I personally need in a shoe.
- jay_kyburz 5y agoI'm a video game guy, so I tend to see things in video game terms. Some things are consumables and some things are permanent upgrades. Some clothes are consumable, underwear, t-shirts. jeans. I buy conformable, well fitting and cheap, with no expectation that it will last. I don't think too much about it. (A $5 t-shirt will not last as long as a $50 t-shirt, but there is not _that_much difference) Other clothes, I now know, if I choose carefully can last 20-30 years. My winter jacket that I only wear 2 months of the year is at least 20 years old. My belt that I wear almost every day is at least 15 years old. Sometimes I find myself doing an insane amount of research trying to find the perfect product, but its a kind of procrastination because I don't actually really need any more stuff. The backpack I take to work everyday is a little ratty, and I have spend a lot of time looking at backpacks on the web while watching TV.
- varispeed 5y agoThis is such a great idea. I love working with high quality tools and it is not always easy to find something among so many brands these days.
- treetoppin 5y agoI love quality tools and products, especially when you have taken the time to find what works for your specific use case or body type. That being said, I started slowly shifting to an attitude that, to paraphrase an over quoted movie, "on a long enough timeline, everything is a consumable". The biggest factor isn't so much buying something for life, but buying a product that 1) matches the lifespan of my usage 2) won't frustrate me with its quality 3) will last a length of time somewhat in line with the improvement cycle of that type of product.
- Meph504 5y agoSo, does no one else see this as a referral gimmick site? I don't see anything on this site that is really buy for life.