By ARTHUR VIDRO
By Arthur Vidro
My wife came home from one of the local dollar stores with several identical nozzles for our one garden hose.
“Why so many?” I asked.
“Because they don’t last long,” she said.
She was right. The nozzles, cheaply made of plastic in a country known for shoddy merchandise, typically would last two weeks before breaking. Sometimes just a day or two.
Eventually we went to a real plumbing and hardware store and bought a more substantial nozzle — made of metal — for about $15. It’s already lasted two years. I don’t know how many cheap plastic nozzles we would have gone through during that time, but it would have been more than $15 worth.
By spending more for higher quality, you are often making a better purchase.
In the supermarket today, I saw a mother checking the expiration dates on milk before placing three 1-gallon bottles in her wagon. She wanted the ones that would last the longest. I studied the milk containers on the shelves. The expiration dates varied by a full week.
Before making a purchase, a wise consumer pauses to ask, “How long will it last?”
I grew up near a large city that foolishly passed legislation requiring it to accept the lowest bidder on all contracts. So when it comes to potholes, the company that submits the lowest bid gets the work. Never mind that a fix by Company X might last one month, while a fix on the very same pothole by Company Y might last five years — if Company Y charges even a penny more, then the city could not hire them. (Our leaders can be as stupid as the people who elect them.)
Gadgets that come with batteries tend to have the cheapest available batteries — made in the same country that makes the shoddy nozzles. When you replace those batteries, you can buy the same super-cheap batteries. But in the long run you’ll be paying more, and the device might fail when you need it most.
Spending $2 for a battery that won’t last more than a few months, versus spending $8 for a battery that should last more than eight years. Which is the smarter buy? You figure it out.
City governments should ask, before outfitting their departments with new computers, how long they will last — or, approached from a different angle, how long will it be before folks decide a yet newer version is needed?
I wouldn’t want to buy a refrigerator, washing machine, dryer, oven, television, or computer without the expectation that it would last 15 to 20 years.
A lawn mower that can’t last ten years is probably going to be a more costly purchase than a model that lasts thirty years, regardless of the sale price.
The most insane example of failing to ask is with sports stadiums, which typically cost hundreds of millions of dollars. All across the nation, pro teams in all the major sports cry out for new stadiums. Sometimes, as in Oakland where the A’s play, the stadium is indeed falling apart and needs to be replaced. But often there is nothing wrong with the old stadium; the owners merely want more moneymaking features (i.e., luxury boxes) or more technological gadgetry.
Often big-city taxpayers are so addicted to having a pro sports team, they don’t care how much a new stadium costs. Nor do they ask, “How long will it last?” Or, “If we build a new stadium, how long will the team stay?”
One place that did ask was San Diego. In November 2016, the city residents voted down a proposal that would have raised money (through taxes and fees) to build a new stadium for the football Chargers. So the team moved to Los Angeles.
The Minnesota Vikings are about the same age as me, and they’re already on their third stadium. The Braves moved to Atlanta in 1966. They’re on their third stadium there, too.
Meanwhile, Boston’s Fenway Park and Chicago’s Wrigley Field survive, getting fixed up as needed. They’re each more than 100 years old.
I don’t know who spent what for all these stadiums — but Fenway and Wrigley are the one that have lasted.
If you have consumerism questions, send them to Arthur Vidro in the care of this newspaper, which publishes his column every weekend.
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