-The WNYC Leonard Lopate show has two recent podcasts all about our subject of interest. One's from the pro-cheap Lauren Weber, whose book I now have to read. The other, which I have yet to listen to, is an interview with Ellen Ruppel Shell, who (as I know from a previous podcast - jogging will do this) argues that bargain-hunting is sociopathic behavior, or some milder version thereof, and that because we are cheapskates unwilling to pay for quality the way our grandparents did, today, They Don't Make Things Like They Used To, and the market's divided between disposable crap and frou-frou designer goods. I was not sympathetic, but will save this podcast for the next run and see if I can be convinced to feel bad about paying $5.90 for Uniqlo tank tops.
-Storage spaces - worth it or evil? I get why in many cases they make no sense, but, as with credit cards, if used right, they can save tons. If you need storage for two months (of which one is free, thanks to a promotional offer) between apartments and are not paying rent in that time, you will be glad when you don't need to up and buy all new clothes, books, and furniture. If, however, you refuse to part with stacks of old newspapers and decide to rent them out their own studio apartment, perhaps self-storage is not your friend.
-Finally, shoe repair: the essence of frugality or a scam that preys on the thrifty? I just dropped off three boots (note: not three pairs of boots) in need of various rather desperate adjustments, and the total cost could, yes, buy another, if inferior, pair. But I did it anyway. Why?
So, read, listen and discuss!
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
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14 comments:
I think there is sufficient diversity in the market for stuff like clothing, furniture, etc. (low barriers to entry and all that) that my buying cheap particleboard bookshelves at Target does not nullify the existence of bookshelves made of real wood, sometimes even made by the owners themselves.
I do agree with Shell's point as applied to something like the airline industry, though; whenever people grouch about being herded like cattle, I point out that they're all buying tickets online based on the absolute lowest price being offered. The airline industry therefore distinguishes between People Who Pay Lots For A Decent Level Of Comfort (or in the case of business class, have someone else pay for it), and everyone else, and there's a huge price differential between the two.
Whenever an airline suggests charging people who need wider seats more money (e.g. by requiring them to pay for two seats, which in coach often is still cheaper than business class), fat advocates get upset and insist that at most, airlines ought to provide some 20" wide seats on every flight and charge just a *little* bit more for them, like JetBlue does for the exit row seats that have extra legroom. But that sort of halfway point of comfort between economy and first/ business class doesn't seem to exist.
Re: storage, I'm puzzled by all of the storage prices in the article being over $200 for units out on a highway outside some middling sized town in CA. I store in Manhattan (as is necessary for two people living in less than 600 sq ft), and my storage costs less per month than that. I only wish I could rent the same square footage in my building for as little as I pay each month for climate controlled storage on the West Side Highway.
Shoe repairs = essence of frugality, definitely! A couple of years back I paid quite a lot of money for a pair of shoes which I'd been coveting for a long time. To my horror, the heels came off within three months. My mother took them along to the shoemaker she swears by, and they nailed on shiny new heels. Said shoes are still being worn, where I would have just chucked them out otherwise!
:D
M.
PG,
I don't think Shell was saying nothing's real wood, so much as that now there are only the Finer Things and the Crappiest Things, with no moderately-priced, well-made but nothing-fancy mid-range left in between. I don't agree this is true with clothing - the H&M, GAP, etc. clothes I have that have lasted forever argue against that - but I do find that's the case with NYC restaurants. There's excellent cheap and expensive food, but a place where a main course is $15-ish is often one that's posh enough for people to go to on dates, but one that skimps on food quality.
As for storage, I guess it depends how big the box is? Ours was nearly $200 in Brooklyn, but again, with a month free. I would say that it's good to bring a tape measure - our "10x10" was not that at all, but was closer than many of the alleged 10x10s we were shown first. It was like a mini apartment search of its own, as though the guy showing us the spaces was a broker showing us awful apartments and then one OK one.
Marigold,
Hope you're right! Much like cheapness expert Weber, I broke from my usual cheapness for a pair of over-$300 leather boots a couple years ago, and since one of those was one that needed a repair for me to keep wearing them, it seemed like it had to be done. The repair was, of course, nothing close to $300.
Um...anyone arguing against bargain hunting based on some mythical golden age of our grandparents has clearly never met my grandparents. If anything, I'd say on the whole we are far less thrifty than our grandparents. Our grandparents lived through the depression. They reuse tea bags and kleenex (actually, I do too, once it dries out, all the bacteria have died and it's practically as good as new) and ration toilet paper squares. They make "tomato" soup out of saltines and ketchup, and take home the extra bread from restaurants wrapped in a napkin.
Also, there is a certain point about quality--there is probably more crap available now, but part of the point is that certain things are objectively getting cheaper, so a $5 t-shirt now is probably of a similar quality to a $15 t-shirt from the 80s, but because it's so much cheaper, one is likely to view it as not as good, and probably treat it less well, hence causing its earlier demise.
Also, shoe repair is great! That's the whole point of buying more expensive stuff and maintaining it, because a $100 pair of boots you wear for 20 years and re-heel is in the long run less expensive and wasteful than buying one pair of $20 boots every year when the cheap ones wear out. Or, to be more frugal, you can buy expensive shoes cheap from a thrift store, and even though repairs might be more than the shoe, it is still worth it. I bought a pair of Italian leather boots for $8, and had them re-heeled for $18, which felt counterintuitive, but the finished product was much nicer than anything within the $30 range of new boots.
Shell seems to share my fear about Craigslist furniture apocalypse, but her ideal world also frightens me. If the only dressers on the market were solid oak and cost $1000, I would not be able to afford a dresser until I was 40, and I also would never be able to move once I bought one. Too much mobility can be bad, of course. But so can having to live with one's parents until the age of 40, and then move in a covered wagon with a dowry in tow.
Her book also reiterates the common anti-Walmart argument that discount retail drives down production wages by substituting cheap unskilled labor for expensive skilled artisans, which limits the capacity of producers (and Walmart employees) to buy anything except discount merchandise, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of reliance on cheap crap. Is this argument actually true? PG?
Re: storage solutions: If your parents live in the suburbs, they probably have an attic or garage that is, while not climate-controlled, still cheaper to rent than a metal box off the side of the highway. Not that this solves Phoebe's problems, but I imagine it applies to many other New Yorkers.
Re: shoe repair: This is exactly like my dilemma of dry-cleaning. On several occasions, I've found cashmere or wool sweaters at deep discounts and thought myself so clever and thrifty. After a couple wears, it dawns on me that you can't throw cashmere or wool in the laundry, and that the lifetime maintenance cost of the sweater when you consider the $8 it costs to dry-clean it a few times a winter is actually outrageous, especially given that the item is devaluing despite my dry-cleaning investments. Then I discovered $1 dry-cleaning. So maybe there is a similar solution for shoe repair?
Britta,
"a $5 t-shirt now is probably of a similar quality to a $15 t-shirt from the 80s, but because it's so much cheaper, one is likely to view it as not as good, and probably treat it less well, hence causing its earlier demise."
Precisely! This is what I keep going on about re: the alleged fine quality of goods in Europe. In Belgium, at least, it appears that clothes and especially shoes cost tons more than in the US, and do not appear to be of better quality, yet because of the shoe:salary ratio, people keep much better care of such items.
Not sure I get reusing kleenex though - what's wrong with handkerchiefs? Same idea re: germs and reuse, but somehow less embarrassing in public.
MSI,
Shell, from the previous podcast, seems to dream of a world of mid-priced goods, sort of a generalized version of the Michael Pollan nostalgia for when a greater proportion of Americans' incomes went to food. He wants us spending more on food, but not haute-cuisine more, just fresh-produce more.
I sort of get the argument when it comes to food - food affects health, and cutting corners (unless, like Weber and like certain graduate students who shall go unnamed, this means lentils and pasta) has a downside health-wise, and certainly taste-wise. Whereas what great good comes of owning $30 t-shirts? Not to rehash the whole quality debate, but a) lots costs more without lasting longer (such as: expensive t-shirts which are inevitably made of superfine material that falls apart in the wash), and b) many items that could in theory last 'forever' you would not want to do so, such as jeans, which tend not to fit for years and which, even for the not terribly fashion-conscious, visibly go out of style every five years if not quicker.
Storage is a definite point in favor of suburbs, or of convincing one's parents to do so. Since moving to non-squalor, I actually might have more storage space within my apartment than my parents do, so if anything they should store stuff with me.
Cheap shoe repair... who knows. I can't imagine it exists, although shoe repair where you have to have an argument to get your shoes back, this does and I know just where in Brooklyn...
Her book also reiterates the common anti-Walmart argument that discount retail drives down production wages by substituting cheap unskilled labor for expensive skilled artisans, which limits the capacity of producers (and Walmart employees) to buy anything except discount merchandise, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of reliance on cheap crap. Is this argument actually true? PG?
Since Wal-Mart's producers are mostly in China, it's pretty much only the employees one has to worry about. And even my hometown isn't made up solely of Wal-Mart employees, although it is damn near impossible not to be a Wal-Mart patron. So I think that peculiarly constrained idea of the economy is a bit silly, although there is something to be said for the disappearance of decent-paying blue collar jobs on a larger scale.
I think Phoebe's focus on T-shirts and jeans is a little narrow as well, however. After a dozen trips to the dry cleaner, I can see the difference between a suit I buy at Ann Taylor vs. one I buy from the Loft, and then in turn both of those are clearly inferior to the suits my husband buys. His aren't always better simply for being more expensive than mine (he was very disappointed in Brooks Brothers and Hugo Boss; so far his favorite source of office wear is his dad's old bespoke shirt tailor in... China), but there's definitely some inverse relationship between price and likelihood of threads beginning to stick out and buttons to come off.
Also, I still wear the jeans I bought in 2004; if they are desperately out of fashion, well, I am in a staid and conservative profession and cannot be expected to know any better. And jeans, at least the kind I bought at Old Navy five years ago, seem to be more forgiving than suit pants of increasing avoirdupois.
Oh, and having parents with square footage is wonderful. All of my CD cases, most of my Indian clothes, nearly all of my books from undergrad and my romance novel collection still live in my room at my parents' house. If they also lived in a converted studio, I suppose I'd either have to get rid of stuff (horrors!) or be like the people in the article who have *multiple* storage units.
PG,
The "focus" on jeans and t-shirts was just chosen at random, perhaps because these are items I just washed and were fresh in my memory. It's true that, for obvious reasons, I don't know a thing about wear and tear of suits (the two I own, from a previous life, sit pristine in the back of the closet), but I would say that of the dressier clothing I wear (i.e. skirts, dresses, blazer-type jackets), how well they've held up has been 95% is it made out of delicate material/did I leave them in a heap on a chair and the remaining bit on how well they were stitched together in the first place. Items might be more durable according to price, but fancy often means easily destroyed. But again, this wouldn't apply to suits, I'd imagine.
Shell is using survivor bias, I think: there was a lot of cheap crap manufactured and sold in our parents' time - it's gone now. Didn't survive, went to trash. All the old stuff we see, and that survives to today, is the quality stuff.
Tangential: the word 'shoddy' means a type of cloth. As far as I know, it's no longer made - I've never seen it. Here is a harvested definition:
Shoddy \Shod"dy\, n. [Perhaps fr. Shed, v. t.; as meaning originally, waste stuff shedor thrown off.]
1. A fibrous material obtained by ``deviling,'' or tearing into fibers, refuse woolen goods, old stockings, rags, druggets, etc. See Mungo.
2. A fabric of inferior quality made of, or containing a large amount of, shoddy.
Note: The great quantity of shoddy goods furnished as army supplies in the late Civil War in the United States gave wide currency to the word, and it came to be applied to persons who pretend to a higher position in society than that to which their breeding or worth entitles them.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
dave.s.
My impression is that shoe repair places can vary a fair amount in the quality of work they do, so if you find a good one keep it in mind. (I got good service at good prices from the one right behind the US Court of International Trade building on Duane st. many times.) But, one reason why I and my wife used the shoe repair place several times is that we had shoes that we liked but that were not made any more in just those styles. The repair was quite a bit cheaper than new shoes, and well done, but also allowed us to keep using the shoes we liked rather than switch to somewhat different styles that we liked less.
On furniture, Ikea makes quite a bit of real wood stuff that looks good and is reasonably sturdy. It's not oak and won't last 100 years, but it's not as expensive as that, either. The idea that you must buy very expensive or very cheap is mistaken.
Discussion here ended a while ago, but I thought I'd mention that wool and cashmere sweaters can actually be washed in the sink for nearly nothing, rather than needing many costly trips to the dry-cleaners, using ordinary shampoo (as they are, essentially, hair). Knitting websites have more information which you may well not have come across.
Oh, that's brilliant. I will look up.
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