6 ms·

Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use

75 points by bilsbie 3y ago

liminalsunset 3y ago
I personally use a related version of this, and it's a lot simpler. Cost per month. The biggest factor in buying something for me is typically resale value vs what I pay for it. This is why I always buy the Amazon Marketplace Used items, or used items from local sellers, where available. This way, I mentally only consider the depreciation over the period of time I use the item as the cost. Usually, the depreciation is minimal over a short period, allowing me to buy stuff I don't need just to experiment with it (I keep a budget for this) Then I divide it by the number of months I'll have it， and then compare the value I get from it relative to eating lunch outside ($20), days of work, or something else like that. I'm effectively leasing things to myself. I'll own nothing and be happier.
- robocat 3y ago
  I try that but it usually doesn't work well. For cheap items - it usually costs me more time and effort to sell than the item is worth. I might do it anyway because it helps others. For expensive items the problem is risk - especially due to "the market for lemons". I rarely get market price because I prefer to be honest about the known problems. For example: a car has lots of invisible known issues when you've had it a while. Paying to fix the problems before sale is just not worth it (for multiple good reasons).
delgaudm 3y ago
A fine heuristic if you have enough money to make the choice in the first place. [1]Sam Vimes’s ‘Boots’ Theory of Socio-economic Unfairness, propounded in Men at Arms: "But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet." Men at Arms" [1] https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots-theory-of-socio-economic-unfairness/ https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...
- rozap 3y ago
  It's expensive to be poor.
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    Money follows money, that's how it works. If someone invests 100€ and makes 1% of profit, they got an extra 1€. You can maybe buy a cup of coffee with it. But if a someone invests a million euros and gets 1% of profit, they get 1000€. That's a cup of coffee every day for almost 3 years. Exact same investment, very different outcomes.
    - stevezsa8 3y ago
      1% of a million is 10k. But your point is still valid :]
    - RetroTechie 3y ago
      More to the point: living expenses. If someone starts out with $10k, invests at 5%/y, that's $500/y added. If that person's rent + food + utility bills are $1000/month, that $500/y is 'peanuts', and other income (like regular job) is needed to make ends meet long-term. (ignoring inflation for simplicity) But if starting with $100k, 5% is $5k/y which would cover 5 months/year living expenses. And no worries about losing a job. Starting with $1m, that's $50k/y interest, or all living expenses covered, no need to have a job, AND $38k/y left over to increase capital or do fun stuff. That's apart from effect of increases in the cost of living. So very different effect even if interest % and all else equal. Moving up the ladder from $1k -> $10k -> $100k etc as savings, can take a loooonng time (if possible at all).
    - chii 3y ago
      > Exact same investment, very different outcomes. not exactly the same. The quantity is itself a difference. All investments would have a risk. The $1million investment has 1000x the risk, and thus, they obtain 1000x the reward. So, the weighted reward for both situations are the same per dollar.
angry_moose 3y ago
Cost/use really only works well for things where the results of use are broadly equivalent across price tiers. In the example given, expensive socks and cheap socks are basically the same when new (they'll keep your feet warm, padded, and wick away moisture), the only difference is how long that lasts. For things like tools its often a bad metric unless you truly only need it once. In addition to durability; the ergonomics, cut quality, fidelity, trueness, etc will often be dramatically different across price ranges.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  And do they actually get job done... Hammer drills compared to impact drills...
  - rokkitmensch 3y ago
    Apples and oranges. I need to sink into masonry approximately never, but demand tight bolt-ups on the weekly. I own several impact drivers, and no hammer drills. Give me torque or give me death!
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      I admit impact driver is more of and passion fruit... Not a useless drill...
- ericpauley 3y ago
  > In the example given, expensive socks and cheap socks are basically the same when new (they'll keep your feet warm, padded, and wick away moisture), the only difference is how long that lasts. As someone who swears by high quality wool socks, I’m going to have to hard-disagree on this example.
- wink 3y ago
  My problem is that not all cheap socks wear out quickly and not all expensive socks stay nice. It's a bit of luck and who actually counts? But that's basically the real problem. I want to believe decades ago there was more of a relation between higher cost (but not outright a luxury brand) and quality. Now that is completely random and even if you look for reviews hardly anyone does any "5 years later" tests (except for some maybe paid amazon reviews...)
otteromkram 3y ago
That's a solid plan. I'd add in another factor: gratification. This isn't for all items, but splurging on certain things because it gives you an emotional boost shouldn't be discounted. After all, we only get a precious few trips around the sun...
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
I convert the cost into hours that I need to work. Do you want to trade weeks of your time on this planet for a doodad? Better have good value add.
personjerry 3y ago
IMO if you primarily think in terms of cost per use, you're missing a big step in "financial maturity", because for expenses that are in the reasonable range, I think switching to evaluating based on their value to you is much more effective. Is the $8 Starbucks Frap worth the cost per use compared to a $2 drip coffee? Probably not, but it makes me happy, and the value on that is VERY high, and that value additionally rises proportionally as my income grows.
- kepano 3y ago
  This fits into the "cost per smile" heuristic lower down in the essay: > How much joy can you get out of each dollar? Some things bring lots of joy for a small amount of money: ice cream, sunsets, nature walks. A cheap date can bring many smiles per dollar.
  - nisegami 3y ago
    I think about this whenever I'm spending money on my cat. Some of the highest smiles per dollar I can think of tbh.
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  That only holds when you have unused money. Eg the "cost" of spending $8 doesn't remove another source of happiness, like a few days in Bora Bora. I have a buddy who is constantly buying shit. Every day is a new "thing" and he talks about how he just buys what he wants. Then I'll go on a nice trip or buy an expensive item and he'll be a bit jealous about it - but I actually spend less per year than he does on these things.
- the_third_wave 3y ago
  Financial maturity... now there's a euphemism. You can also turn this around by stating that you have fallen for the marketing ploys which attempt to connect subjective emotions - happiness, fulfilment, accomplishment - to consumption in general and the consumption of 'premium' products in particular whereas others look past such attempts at emotional bribery. Is that $8 Starbucks Frap worth the cost per use compared to four $2 drip coffees? Not if you've seen the Fnords [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fnord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fnord
mattlondon 3y ago
I do this a lot for games, but cost per hour. Some games now are really expensive (£60 etc) but if I get 40 hours entertainment out of it then per hour that is actually pretty good.
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  Games are cheaper for hour of entertainment than pretty much any other class of entertainment/hobby where you normally pay, even if you only play the game for a dozen hours or less. Movies, concerts, going to the bar, fishing, gardening, sports (including transportation/facility costs), etc.
- newtom 3y ago
  This is why I put a lot of games I’m not sure about on my Steam wishlist. Then when a game is “cheap enough” I buy it. If my hunch was right and the game is only “ok”, but I got a few hours of enjoyment out of it for only a few bucks, I don’t have any buyers remorse.
  - Moldoteck 3y ago
    Where I was born, buying licensed games was hard/impossible, so I just used pirated content. Now, even if I can afford to buy, I still try out a pirated version and if it's good, I buy the game in steam(got Witcher & age of empires 4 this way) *(with some exceptions when pirated content gives superior experience, for example AC2/brotherhood where some content can't be accessed no matter how you pay)
  - stavros 3y ago
    I pirate games, play them, and them buy them (some multiple times, sadly) if I'm still playing after an hour or so. Most games tend to not capture my interest and I only play an hour or two and leave them, and I don't want to be paying 60 currencies per time. I wish they had a free trial for an hour or two, that would be ideal.
    - em-bee 3y ago
xyzelement 3y ago
This really kicked in for me when I bought a grill. The first time I used it, that cost me "1500". The second, it was just 750 per bbq. By the time I cooked a hundred meals on it, it is a 15 bucks per meal. Etc. Longevity is obviously a big factor too
- leptons 3y ago
  I spent $5000 on the fastest consumer computer available in 2011. It had a 6-core CPU which was pretty amazing at the time. I still use that same computer today as my main workstation. I've put a little bit of money into it over the years, expanding it. Most recently I bought the fastest CPU that would work in that motherboard, a 12-core/24-thread Xeon for $30 on ebay. So even with adding RAM, Hard drives, new video cards, and a new CPU, it's still under about $2 per day, which has been absolutely worth it considering I've made 250x that per day when I use it for work. I'm due for an upgrade soon, but I don't have too much reason yet to do it. But when I do, I'll spend another $5k to get a monster machine and it will last me probably until I expire.
  - sagarm 3y ago
    Did you overall have a better experience than buying mid range and periodically upgrading components? I'm skeptical. I've probably spent around that much (very rough estimate) on 3-4 builds over the same period, and for most of it I had a i7-6700k (4C/8T). If I hadn't just upgraded from a i7-12700F and RTX 3080 to i9-13900k and RTX 3090 within a year I'm pretty sure I'd be well under $5000. Perhaps I'll put together a spreadsheet with the total inflation adjusted spend for comparison...
    - leptons 3y ago
      The i7-12700F is about 2x the compute power at about 1/2 the power consumption of my current Xeon CPU. The cost to power older hardware is not factored in to my calculations. I'm not also not necessarily getting 2x the work done if I had a CPU that is twice as fast - most of the time the computer is just doing menial stuff. I do have some tasks that max out all cores (no matter how big the system is) and that doesn't run too often, maybe once or twice a week typically. A faster system might save me a few minutes of my time. So far I haven't really needed to upgrade. I don't game, I write software, and about the only thing I'd like to be faster is compiling an IoT/C project that does slam all my cores and slow things to a crawl. But it's rare that I need a full recompile and the old system does well enough. I do also have a 12700F system that my work supplied, and while it's brand new and has Windows 11, it's rare that I find it performing any better or making me any happier than my old computer running Windows 10.
kepano 3y ago
Source: https://stephango.com/buy-wisely https://stephango.com/buy-wisely
jbs8877 3y ago
Posts like this make me think that we rediscover with every generation. Interesting to me that this particular author has found this, but also keenly aware that millions of people (billions?) have reached the same conclusions.
piggybox 3y ago
My ex-manager once told me whenever he decides what to eat for a meal, he prioritizes calories per $.
- xnx 3y ago
  Does your ex-manager drink cooking oil?
  - rokkitmensch 3y ago
    When I was in engineering school, my employed mentors would roast me with precisely this torch.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
motohagiography 3y ago
When I was a younger cyclist, I felt this way about stop signs. The fine for ignoring one was fixed, rare, and occurred at random, so getting my marginal cost per run sign as close to zero as I could was the rational choice. Penalties that affect your license change those incentives, but arbitrary enforcement rewards noncompliance.
- rokkitmensch 3y ago
  Stop signs should really be yield signs for bikes, the cost to actually stop on a bike at every stop sign is ridiculous, and furthermore ruins the enjoyment of a casual ride around the neighborhood. But don't let my kids hear me talking like this...
  - sagarm 3y ago
    I would phrase this differently: cyclists and pedestrians don't need stop signs. Drivers do. We already give pedestrians right of way at four-way stops. It's pretty reasonable to extend that to cyclists.
lepus 3y ago
That's one useful metric, but it's also limited - you're still gambling on an estimated number of uses, which can often vary wildly and in ways you can't predict. This is further complicated by variables such as companies taking advantage of your assumptions about quality and lifespan of a product by selling out a product line to another company who will produce it at a lower standard for less for the same retail price and hope you won't know or notice. I once bought socks assuming they'd last a long time but the company silently cheapened out on producing them at some point and they were falling apart after just a couple dozen uses. And they were expensive! There's no guarantee that Darn Tough won't do the same, or that you'll spill sauce with turmeric on them and ruin them the first day you get them, or etc etc. At some point trying to explicitly micro-optimize all your purchases down to the socks you wear starts to get lost in the noise and you expend a lot of mental effort on things of minimal benefit, but this is a good thing to vaguely keep in the back of your mind for expensive and/or very frequent expenses that you know you'll always be using.
djhworld 3y ago
It also depends on the category of the product and what 'value' you hope to get from it. For example recently I purchased a Lego set, the biggest one I've ever purchased and it cost £565 (titanic) which is the most amount of money I've ever spent on what is essentially a display piece once built. However I enjoy the process of building Lego and this set is going to take me months to build, just devoting an hour or two a week to completing a section at a time. So the initial outlay is a lot but breaking it down to 1. the enjoyment of building the set 2. the enjoyment of displaying the set once it's complete as a sort of home decor item 3. the amount of time devoted to it (I reckon it'll take me about 35-40 hours to complete, but it'll be months before I see the end because it's just a lil hobby to do at the weekend) ...the cost almost doesn't matter.
- kepano 3y ago
  The HN title cuts off the other heuristics that are described: > Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use. Sometimes I consider other priorities such as cost per smile, cost per thrill, cost per externality, and cost per lesson.
martinsmit 3y ago
Ironically, sometimes calculating cost-per-use takes more brainpower than it's worth. Sometimes I get a lot of enjoyment of buying a thing that I know I will love and considering all of the alternatives. Other times, I just defer to what worked in the past.
BooneJS 3y ago
My 10 year old GORUCK GR1 backpack has been around the world and been my only carryon for most domestic flights. Plus it’s my every day commute to work pack. I’ve had to replace some heat shrink tubes on paracord zipper pulls but everything else should last at least another 10 years if not longer.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ProllyInfamous 3y ago
This is why I ended up purchasing a "hybrid" water heater [primarily uses a heat pump to heat water]. After the first couple years, the substantial energy savings ends up meaning "free hot water" after just a few years of ownership. Costs about 2x a "normal" water heater, but uses 4x less energy.
RecycledEle 3y ago
I like this reasoning. Logical.
fmajid 3y ago
Unfortunately it is easier and more profitable to signal durability than actually engineer it, which is why there are so many companies that use marketing dark arts to trick you into believing a shoddy product is BIFL (buy it for life). There is also the phenomenon of Quality Fade where a hedge fund buys a storied brand, cuts corners but keeps prices high and extracts money from the company as it is running it into the ground. This makes it very hard to assess which products are truly durable, and Quality Fade means even the Lindy Effect is not a reliable heuristic.

75 points by bilsbie 3y ago

I personally use a related version of this, and it's a lot simpler. Cost per month. The biggest factor in buying something for me is typically resale value vs what I pay for it. This is why I always buy the Amazon Marketplace Used items, or used items from local sellers, where available. This way, I mentally only consider the depreciation over the period of time I use the item as the cost. Usually, the depreciation is minimal over a short period, allowing me to buy stuff I don't need just to experiment with it (I keep a budget for this) Then I divide it by the number of months I'll have it， and then compare the value I get from it relative to eating lunch outside ($20), days of work, or something else like that. I'm effectively leasing things to myself. I'll own nothing and be happier.

robocat 3y ago
I try that but it usually doesn't work well. For cheap items - it usually costs me more time and effort to sell than the item is worth. I might do it anyway because it helps others. For expensive items the problem is risk - especially due to "the market for lemons". I rarely get market price because I prefer to be honest about the known problems. For example: a car has lots of invisible known issues when you've had it a while. Paying to fix the problems before sale is just not worth it (for multiple good reasons).

delgaudm 3y ago

A fine heuristic if you have enough money to make the choice in the first place. [1]Sam Vimes’s ‘Boots’ Theory of Socio-economic Unfairness, propounded in Men at Arms: "But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet." Men at Arms" [1] https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots-theory-of-socio-economic-unfairness/ https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...

rozap 3y ago
It's expensive to be poor.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  Money follows money, that's how it works. If someone invests 100€ and makes 1% of profit, they got an extra 1€. You can maybe buy a cup of coffee with it. But if a someone invests a million euros and gets 1% of profit, they get 1000€. That's a cup of coffee every day for almost 3 years. Exact same investment, very different outcomes.
  - stevezsa8 3y ago
    1% of a million is 10k. But your point is still valid :]
  - RetroTechie 3y ago
    More to the point: living expenses. If someone starts out with $10k, invests at 5%/y, that's $500/y added. If that person's rent + food + utility bills are $1000/month, that $500/y is 'peanuts', and other income (like regular job) is needed to make ends meet long-term. (ignoring inflation for simplicity) But if starting with $100k, 5% is $5k/y which would cover 5 months/year living expenses. And no worries about losing a job. Starting with $1m, that's $50k/y interest, or all living expenses covered, no need to have a job, AND $38k/y left over to increase capital or do fun stuff. That's apart from effect of increases in the cost of living. So very different effect even if interest % and all else equal. Moving up the ladder from $1k -> $10k -> $100k etc as savings, can take a loooonng time (if possible at all).
  - chii 3y ago
    > Exact same investment, very different outcomes. not exactly the same. The quantity is itself a difference. All investments would have a risk. The $1million investment has 1000x the risk, and thus, they obtain 1000x the reward. So, the weighted reward for both situations are the same per dollar.

angry_moose 3y ago

Cost/use really only works well for things where the results of use are broadly equivalent across price tiers. In the example given, expensive socks and cheap socks are basically the same when new (they'll keep your feet warm, padded, and wick away moisture), the only difference is how long that lasts. For things like tools its often a bad metric unless you truly only need it once. In addition to durability; the ergonomics, cut quality, fidelity, trueness, etc will often be dramatically different across price ranges.

Ekaros 3y ago
And do they actually get job done... Hammer drills compared to impact drills...
- rokkitmensch 3y ago
  Apples and oranges. I need to sink into masonry approximately never, but demand tight bolt-ups on the weekly. I own several impact drivers, and no hammer drills. Give me torque or give me death!
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    I admit impact driver is more of and passion fruit... Not a useless drill...
ericpauley 3y ago
> In the example given, expensive socks and cheap socks are basically the same when new (they'll keep your feet warm, padded, and wick away moisture), the only difference is how long that lasts. As someone who swears by high quality wool socks, I’m going to have to hard-disagree on this example.
wink 3y ago
My problem is that not all cheap socks wear out quickly and not all expensive socks stay nice. It's a bit of luck and who actually counts? But that's basically the real problem. I want to believe decades ago there was more of a relation between higher cost (but not outright a luxury brand) and quality. Now that is completely random and even if you look for reviews hardly anyone does any "5 years later" tests (except for some maybe paid amazon reviews...)

otteromkram 3y ago

That's a solid plan. I'd add in another factor: gratification. This isn't for all items, but splurging on certain things because it gives you an emotional boost shouldn't be discounted. After all, we only get a precious few trips around the sun...

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

I convert the cost into hours that I need to work. Do you want to trade weeks of your time on this planet for a doodad? Better have good value add.

personjerry 3y ago

IMO if you primarily think in terms of cost per use, you're missing a big step in "financial maturity", because for expenses that are in the reasonable range, I think switching to evaluating based on their value to you is much more effective. Is the $8 Starbucks Frap worth the cost per use compared to a $2 drip coffee? Probably not, but it makes me happy, and the value on that is VERY high, and that value additionally rises proportionally as my income grows.

kepano 3y ago
This fits into the "cost per smile" heuristic lower down in the essay: > How much joy can you get out of each dollar? Some things bring lots of joy for a small amount of money: ice cream, sunsets, nature walks. A cheap date can bring many smiles per dollar.
- nisegami 3y ago
  I think about this whenever I'm spending money on my cat. Some of the highest smiles per dollar I can think of tbh.
vorpalhex 3y ago
That only holds when you have unused money. Eg the "cost" of spending $8 doesn't remove another source of happiness, like a few days in Bora Bora. I have a buddy who is constantly buying shit. Every day is a new "thing" and he talks about how he just buys what he wants. Then I'll go on a nice trip or buy an expensive item and he'll be a bit jealous about it - but I actually spend less per year than he does on these things.
the_third_wave 3y ago
Financial maturity... now there's a euphemism. You can also turn this around by stating that you have fallen for the marketing ploys which attempt to connect subjective emotions - happiness, fulfilment, accomplishment - to consumption in general and the consumption of 'premium' products in particular whereas others look past such attempts at emotional bribery. Is that $8 Starbucks Frap worth the cost per use compared to four $2 drip coffees? Not if you've seen the Fnords [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fnord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fnord

mattlondon 3y ago

I do this a lot for games, but cost per hour. Some games now are really expensive (£60 etc) but if I get 40 hours entertainment out of it then per hour that is actually pretty good.

Ferret7446 3y ago
Games are cheaper for hour of entertainment than pretty much any other class of entertainment/hobby where you normally pay, even if you only play the game for a dozen hours or less. Movies, concerts, going to the bar, fishing, gardening, sports (including transportation/facility costs), etc.
newtom 3y ago
This is why I put a lot of games I’m not sure about on my Steam wishlist. Then when a game is “cheap enough” I buy it. If my hunch was right and the game is only “ok”, but I got a few hours of enjoyment out of it for only a few bucks, I don’t have any buyers remorse.
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  Where I was born, buying licensed games was hard/impossible, so I just used pirated content. Now, even if I can afford to buy, I still try out a pirated version and if it's good, I buy the game in steam(got Witcher & age of empires 4 this way) *(with some exceptions when pirated content gives superior experience, for example AC2/brotherhood where some content can't be accessed no matter how you pay)
- stavros 3y ago
  I pirate games, play them, and them buy them (some multiple times, sadly) if I'm still playing after an hour or so. Most games tend to not capture my interest and I only play an hour or two and leave them, and I don't want to be paying 60 currencies per time. I wish they had a free trial for an hour or two, that would be ideal.
  - em-bee 3y ago

xyzelement 3y ago

This really kicked in for me when I bought a grill. The first time I used it, that cost me "1500". The second, it was just 750 per bbq. By the time I cooked a hundred meals on it, it is a 15 bucks per meal. Etc. Longevity is obviously a big factor too

leptons 3y ago
I spent $5000 on the fastest consumer computer available in 2011. It had a 6-core CPU which was pretty amazing at the time. I still use that same computer today as my main workstation. I've put a little bit of money into it over the years, expanding it. Most recently I bought the fastest CPU that would work in that motherboard, a 12-core/24-thread Xeon for $30 on ebay. So even with adding RAM, Hard drives, new video cards, and a new CPU, it's still under about $2 per day, which has been absolutely worth it considering I've made 250x that per day when I use it for work. I'm due for an upgrade soon, but I don't have too much reason yet to do it. But when I do, I'll spend another $5k to get a monster machine and it will last me probably until I expire.
- sagarm 3y ago
  Did you overall have a better experience than buying mid range and periodically upgrading components? I'm skeptical. I've probably spent around that much (very rough estimate) on 3-4 builds over the same period, and for most of it I had a i7-6700k (4C/8T). If I hadn't just upgraded from a i7-12700F and RTX 3080 to i9-13900k and RTX 3090 within a year I'm pretty sure I'd be well under $5000. Perhaps I'll put together a spreadsheet with the total inflation adjusted spend for comparison...
  - leptons 3y ago
    The i7-12700F is about 2x the compute power at about 1/2 the power consumption of my current Xeon CPU. The cost to power older hardware is not factored in to my calculations. I'm not also not necessarily getting 2x the work done if I had a CPU that is twice as fast - most of the time the computer is just doing menial stuff. I do have some tasks that max out all cores (no matter how big the system is) and that doesn't run too often, maybe once or twice a week typically. A faster system might save me a few minutes of my time. So far I haven't really needed to upgrade. I don't game, I write software, and about the only thing I'd like to be faster is compiling an IoT/C project that does slam all my cores and slow things to a crawl. But it's rare that I need a full recompile and the old system does well enough. I do also have a 12700F system that my work supplied, and while it's brand new and has Windows 11, it's rare that I find it performing any better or making me any happier than my old computer running Windows 10.

kepano 3y ago

Source: https://stephango.com/buy-wisely https://stephango.com/buy-wisely

jbs8877 3y ago

Posts like this make me think that we rediscover with every generation. Interesting to me that this particular author has found this, but also keenly aware that millions of people (billions?) have reached the same conclusions.

piggybox 3y ago

My ex-manager once told me whenever he decides what to eat for a meal, he prioritizes calories per $.

xnx 3y ago
Does your ex-manager drink cooking oil?
- rokkitmensch 3y ago
  When I was in engineering school, my employed mentors would roast me with precisely this torch.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

motohagiography 3y ago

When I was a younger cyclist, I felt this way about stop signs. The fine for ignoring one was fixed, rare, and occurred at random, so getting my marginal cost per run sign as close to zero as I could was the rational choice. Penalties that affect your license change those incentives, but arbitrary enforcement rewards noncompliance.

rokkitmensch 3y ago
Stop signs should really be yield signs for bikes, the cost to actually stop on a bike at every stop sign is ridiculous, and furthermore ruins the enjoyment of a casual ride around the neighborhood. But don't let my kids hear me talking like this...
- sagarm 3y ago
  I would phrase this differently: cyclists and pedestrians don't need stop signs. Drivers do. We already give pedestrians right of way at four-way stops. It's pretty reasonable to extend that to cyclists.

lepus 3y ago

That's one useful metric, but it's also limited - you're still gambling on an estimated number of uses, which can often vary wildly and in ways you can't predict. This is further complicated by variables such as companies taking advantage of your assumptions about quality and lifespan of a product by selling out a product line to another company who will produce it at a lower standard for less for the same retail price and hope you won't know or notice. I once bought socks assuming they'd last a long time but the company silently cheapened out on producing them at some point and they were falling apart after just a couple dozen uses. And they were expensive! There's no guarantee that Darn Tough won't do the same, or that you'll spill sauce with turmeric on them and ruin them the first day you get them, or etc etc. At some point trying to explicitly micro-optimize all your purchases down to the socks you wear starts to get lost in the noise and you expend a lot of mental effort on things of minimal benefit, but this is a good thing to vaguely keep in the back of your mind for expensive and/or very frequent expenses that you know you'll always be using.

djhworld 3y ago

It also depends on the category of the product and what 'value' you hope to get from it. For example recently I purchased a Lego set, the biggest one I've ever purchased and it cost £565 (titanic) which is the most amount of money I've ever spent on what is essentially a display piece once built. However I enjoy the process of building Lego and this set is going to take me months to build, just devoting an hour or two a week to completing a section at a time. So the initial outlay is a lot but breaking it down to 1. the enjoyment of building the set 2. the enjoyment of displaying the set once it's complete as a sort of home decor item 3. the amount of time devoted to it (I reckon it'll take me about 35-40 hours to complete, but it'll be months before I see the end because it's just a lil hobby to do at the weekend) ...the cost almost doesn't matter.

kepano 3y ago
The HN title cuts off the other heuristics that are described: > Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use. Sometimes I consider other priorities such as cost per smile, cost per thrill, cost per externality, and cost per lesson.

martinsmit 3y ago

Ironically, sometimes calculating cost-per-use takes more brainpower than it's worth. Sometimes I get a lot of enjoyment of buying a thing that I know I will love and considering all of the alternatives. Other times, I just defer to what worked in the past.

BooneJS 3y ago

My 10 year old GORUCK GR1 backpack has been around the world and been my only carryon for most domestic flights. Plus it’s my every day commute to work pack. I’ve had to replace some heat shrink tubes on paracord zipper pulls but everything else should last at least another 10 years if not longer.

deleted 3y ago

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ProllyInfamous 3y ago

This is why I ended up purchasing a "hybrid" water heater [primarily uses a heat pump to heat water]. After the first couple years, the substantial energy savings ends up meaning "free hot water" after just a few years of ownership. Costs about 2x a "normal" water heater, but uses 4x less energy.

RecycledEle 3y ago

I like this reasoning. Logical.

fmajid 3y ago

Unfortunately it is easier and more profitable to signal durability than actually engineer it, which is why there are so many companies that use marketing dark arts to trick you into believing a shoddy product is BIFL (buy it for life). There is also the phenomenon of Quality Fade where a hedge fund buys a storied brand, cuts corners but keeps prices high and extracts money from the company as it is running it into the ground. This makes it very hard to assess which products are truly durable, and Quality Fade means even the Lindy Effect is not a reliable heuristic.