Based on the excerpt from this Discworld book, what other items do you use regularly that would fit in this theory? (Boots and shoes are fair game!)
Text transcript for people who want it:
[The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
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.
This was Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.]
Bonus: suggest ways you can repair/restore your item/other people’s items.
Thats what the concept ‘conscious spending’ tries to address and set up protocols to get out of the negative feedback cycle of having to constantly buy cheap shit only to have to replace it and double your cost.
https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/conscious-spending-basics/
The link above has much more details on this if y’all are interested.
Yeah, no… that’s a pass from me.
A key component of Vimes’ theory is that he buys cheap boots because he can’t afford the expensive ones. Conscientious spending assumes the person has a choice; it isn’t an option for Vimes, or for many people.
There are many things that it makes sense to simply buy the cheap version of: things that’ll be used infrequently, or which usefullness is unknown. Gadgets which a friend loves and recommends, but which end up being simply unused.
I haven’t read the book you recommend; maybe it says all this. I do think, though, that for all the evils of cheap consumer goods, they’ve put much in the hands of people who would not otherwise be able to afford it.