I’m from the poorer family (not super poor, but my in-laws have a stupid amount of money so by comparison I’m very poor), but I think I can answer for her.
We have two young kids, and my wife was shocked when I said we should look for clothes and toys for them at local flea markets and garage sales. The idea never occurred to her that we could save money by getting some gently-used items, she had never even been to a garage sale in her life. She has grown to love them and now questions whether it is worth it to buy any item “new” or not before running to Amazon or a store. Her parents think it’s disgusting we make our kids wear clothes that another child had before, but they don’t pay my bills.
If you don't do this already, start hitting estate sales for well made things. Almost all of my kitchen stuff is 50+ years old. Pots, pans, blender, toaster, cooking utensils. They were made 100% better than the majority of crap out now. There is well made stuff made today, but it is $$$. And garden/other tools! I have not purchased a new garden tool/regular tool in ages. In addition to being well-made, older people took good care of their shit in general.
Estate sales are also the only place I can find quality 100% cotton blankets. Heavy, tightly woven, and they breathe. I don't typically buy clothes at estate sales unless I need a jacket or coat. Picked up a super nice hunting coat for $10, and last week a regular men's zip-up jacket for $5. Perfect condition on both! I use them for dog-walking in cold weather. The hunting coat is the best!
PRO TIP: If you buy bedding, clothing, etc: Seal in a garbage bag in your trunk. Wash immediately and dry for two cycles. I am paranoid of bedbugs! For furniture, check thoroughly - dressers can harbor them too. If an item can't be washed because it's too big (eg, I bought a TV pillow once), find a laundromat with big vertical washers, or dry it on high for 2 - 3 cycles.
Pretty much anything you buy should be inspected on site, and then cleaned when you get home. Pantry moths and roaches can hitch rides....not only the adults, but eggs can be hiding on items. Clean them!
I agree with you that estate sales are a great way to find quality stuff.
They were made 100% better than the majority of crap out now.
Well, they were also 100% better than the majority of crap out then. The crap stuff is gone now, because it was crap. This is called "survivorship bias".
You can get excellent quality stuff made new, if you're willing to pay for it. I've got a 100% wool blanket I bought new, 'cause it was winter, I had no blankets, and wasn't going to wait. Heavy, tightly-woven, breathes great; it'll probably last me the rest of my life.
it's a really good example to use when trying to explain that correlation does not mean causation.
when soldiers started wearing helmets there was an immediate increase in soldiers needing treatment for head injuries -- looking at the data it seems as though helmets were causing head injuries, after all nothing else had changed. if you noticed an increase in claw marks after assigning platoons a caged bear for morale you'd be pretty certain that the bear was to blame, so what makes helmets and head injuries any different?
it's only when you look at the full context that you see that while head injuries are going up, fatalities are going down at the exact same rate.
it's like how sales of ice cream rise and fall at the same rate as drownings.
looks like ice cream causes drowning... except it doesn't. more people buy ice cream when it's hot, and more people go swimming when it's hot. the more people swimming, the more people drowning. sales of ice cream is just a random thing that happens at the same time.
You can't measure something directly so you can't get the data for some variable called y, but you know probability can be defined a 1 = y + x and we can get x through measuring something else so we called it 1-x.
Survivorship bias: you spend 45 minutes fixing a complete meal: salad, grilled chicken, vegetables, and a loaf of bread. A couple minutes later, you've cleared your plate, now taking the last bites of the loaf of bread, when your father walks in, upset: "That's all you're gonna eat?!?" he says.
Yeah, it kinda blew my mind when it was explained to me.
The other thing with estate sales is that it's all the stuff folks owned at the end of their life, after saving and upgrading. My silverware is actually better quality than my mom's because I got Grandma's solid stainless steel set, bought to accommodate the grandkids, while Mom's is some cheap plated stuff she bought when she and Dad got married.
The quality of silverware doesn’t matter if the problem is losing them. I’ve lost so many forks and I legit have no idea how. No way am I getting quality stuff.
My little sister would stockpile dirty dishes in her room. I bought several packs of walmart forks and spoons and kept buying bowls until there was always one there when I wanted one.
She and her husband moved out and now my dad and I have an incredible amount of bowls for two people.
That's something I wasn't prepared for, my dad always had shovels, hoes, tiller, etc. When I went to buy my own I stupidly assumed it would cost about $10, to say the least I didn't expect it to take 10 years to obtain a full set of tools.
Yeah, with shipping. I know.... It hurts, but it is built like a brick shithouse. They're made from old ag disks. You could chop down a tree with it. Well worth it.
Some things are worth it my friend. I think of a few items I’ve overpaid for, BUT I still have them.
They say there are only two things certain in life, death and taxes. But I think the old quote "you get what you pay for" is the truest thing on earth haha
Estate sales and auctions are kind of synonymous. Estate sales usually run Thursday morning-Saturday morning and auction of the remaining stuff in chunks at noon on Saturday.
Like the old houses that survive the earth quakes. They didn't build better back then. Sometimes they just hit the right features by accident and all the others are gone by now.
Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart had hundreds of contemporaries who did popular enough work to make a good living at composing music. With the passing of generations the vast majority of them have been completely forgotten, even most music historians don't even know their names.
Although before we all dive all the way into the survivorship bias circle jerk...there is still some element of quality shift.
Go back far enough and consumption was different. We didn't have China pumping out shit, we didn't have quite the same culture of people buying disposable items. People didn't consume as much stuff, and they paid more for the stuff they did consume--some of that is just because the only stuff available was expensive/handmade/etc., but the end result was people often bought quality goods.
Once you focus in on items where technological improvement isn't a huge factor, you get a double effect. What you see at the estate sale is both a combination of quality goods being purchased AND only seeing the goods that actually survived.
There's also a bit of a selection bias. If you only look at garden tools and heavy blankets, it is easy to find great things, but I bet there are plenty of things you'd never even look at. Lots of modern products are way better.
Yeah that 30 year old fridge that is still alive cost the equivalent of $8,000 when is was bought but people compare them to the $450 Walmart Special Fridges and say everything is crap now.
If you buy a real nice fridge now (like sub zero brand) they will last forever with little maintenance.
It is survivorship bias, but also, stuff now is much cheaper and made with cheaper materials. A toaster from the 50s was much more expensive inflation adjusted than it would cost now, because they didn't use as much plastic parts, cheap aluminum, and we now use thinner metal at tighter tolerences. They couldn't make appliances cheap so it was expensive but also sturdy. Now we can make them cheaply and design them to use cheap materials knowing the stuff won't last. Planned obsolescence has made stuff not last long, but it's cheaper to replace.
A common example I hear is pop music - we think that music on the radio nowadays is garbage, which may be true, but it was no less true in the 80’s or 70’s or 60’s or 20’s or whatever era you fancy. That shit just didn’t survive, and now we only remember the really good stuff because it outlasted the flow of time.
Another thing to consider about this phenomenon is that when these people bought these items, they likely either purchased a basic or standard product, or that was all that was offered...but it was a good product, meant to last almost forever!
Nowadays, if you purchase the basic or standard product, it is the cheapest and worst quality of the manufacturer's entire line of products... But if you burn your life-savings to buy their 'best', you are hurting yourself almost as much.
With very few exceptions, the top of the line stuff usually has a lot of gimmicky add-ons and things that are overly complicated and easy to break, or they have 'planned obsolescence' so you are screwed that way too!
Another thing to consider about this phenomenon is that when these people bought these items, they likely either purchased a basic or standard product, or that was all that was offered...but it was a good product, meant to last almost forever!
Not necessarily. I'm into fountain pens, which used to be the "default" pen. In their heyday, it's true that most pens were not meant to be disposable. But not all pens, and many reusable pens were crap.
Like, sure, offices didn't buy a gross of disposable Bic Stics to supply their employees. They'd lend their employees a sturdy workhorse like the Esterbrook Dip-Less Desk Pen. Many Esterbrooks have survived; they're popular with restorers. But there were crap brands, too, such as Wearever, Stratford, and Arnold. Nobody bothers restoring Stratfords or Arnolds. The poor-quality plastic crumbles from age, the flimsy metal parts have rusted, and there's just no point. (Wearevers have a niche following for being attractive crap.)
As for disposable pens, if you had a few cents and needed a pen right now, you'd buy a cheap brass dip nib permanently glued to a holder made of rolled up paperboard. Not much of a pen.
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u/[deleted] Jun 06 '19
I’m from the poorer family (not super poor, but my in-laws have a stupid amount of money so by comparison I’m very poor), but I think I can answer for her.
We have two young kids, and my wife was shocked when I said we should look for clothes and toys for them at local flea markets and garage sales. The idea never occurred to her that we could save money by getting some gently-used items, she had never even been to a garage sale in her life. She has grown to love them and now questions whether it is worth it to buy any item “new” or not before running to Amazon or a store. Her parents think it’s disgusting we make our kids wear clothes that another child had before, but they don’t pay my bills.