Perhaps this is a function of aging, but I guess I expect a relationship to
exist between the expense of an item and its quality — or, closer to the matter,
its longevity.
We recently replaced my Dyson upright "Ball" vacuum cleaner. It was an "animal"
model, meaning — well, implying — it was a superior machine to the manufacturer's
normal models. I paid somewhere around $570 for it new in about 2009. (By the way,
I *think* Dyson announced sometime in 2019 or 2020 that it wouldn't produce its
upright "Ball" vacuums any longer, preferring to focus on its "stick" models instead
— perhaps as a function of demand; yet Dyson is currently selling two upright
"Ball" models.)
Sometime in the past few years, it hasn't sounded the same as it had. To be
honest, I believe the change in sound happened at the same time we let someone
borrow it. I'm not saying that to be a jerk or anything — it's an observation,
not an accusation. (Full disclosure: it's totally passive-aggressive accusation.)
Anyway, the bottom line is that my wife spoke to me about replacing it, and I
was disgusted, I guess. Disgusted because I recall clearly how expensive it was
when I bought it. How could this need to be replaced? Her calm response: "Well,
it IS ten years old."
— and that's when my world started to crack.
My mind became overloaded with questions: "Has it really been that
long?" Just considering that much produced a memory leak. I could feel
letters and words falling from my brain and down my body as I tried to compare
my memories and my expectations to reality.
I mean, yes of course I expected the unit to be a high-quality machine, but
I guess I never really translated that expectation into time. How much
time should I have expected it to operate? Is 10 years really
too little? How much more should I reasonably have expected?
I don't have answers, because I never made an estimate. I was just stunned
that I had to replace it at all. And that was maybe naive of
me at best.
It just didn't occur to me to time-box the transaction. To think, "Well,
we'll probably get 10 years of service from it" — you're not going to find
that printed on the box or in the marketing materials. You'll perhaps find a
warranty on what they present as a minimum time expectancy on various
parts or maybe the entire machine. A lower bound, not an upper bound. Perhaps
that's the value of Consumer Reports (not a sponsor).
A more pragmatic approach might have been to start with the assumption —
mindfully, I might add — that companies understand that they can't build
widgets so well as to preclude repeat business. Most of the time, obsolescence
is built-in simply as a function of the life expectancy of the materials or
as a function of use — meaning, at some point some dipshit is going to use
the machine in an unintended way. Public means public. I think consumers
inherently understand this, but perhaps don't approach home appliance
purchases with this in mind — I just think it's not a consumer behavior.
My actual approach was more simplistic than the ideal: "This vacuum was
very expensive, so I expect it to perform well indefinitely," I guess.
Laurel mentioning that ten years had passed put a gaping hole in that thought.
Ten years is not indefinitely, but, I mean... it's ten years, and that's a
lot of years, right? The time it takes for your infant to hit double-digits
is a long time, though it seems to pass in the blink of an eye.
Can I be happy with a ten-year lifespan? It's hard to resist doing the
math: I spent $57 on that vacuum cleaner each year I owned it, whether it
got used or not... $5 each month.
At $5 per month, did I get a good deal? Harder to answer. One the
one hand, you could think, "I get to use this all I want for a month for only
$5? Such a deal!" — but that's backwards of what the situation actually was.
If I used it once each week, then it was like I spent $1.25 each time I ran it.
If I used it every other week, the cost doubled. If I average the two, then it
was like I spent $1.87 each time I ran it. Does it seem like such a deal now?
Now I feel like running the vacuum so I won't feel like I've wasted money.
Which is not where I'd hoped this post would end up.
I guess it's easier to think about life expectancies when you're talking
about consumer goods that one expects to have a relatively short
life span. I was just inspecting a plastic food container I'd just removed
from the dishwasher. The cool thing about this container is that it
contracts to minimize storage space thanks to an accordion-like folding body.
As I was looking it over — and I'd just been writing most of this post —
it occurred to me that I've owned that container for probably longer than I
had the vacuum cleaner. And I had no expection the food container would be
around this long. Why? Maybe because it was about a $10 purchase.
Thinking about it now, I guess I would have expected to get maybe two to
three years of service from that food container. If I'd been asked if I could
expect over ten years of service from the thing, I probably would have replied
that that'd be nice, but I wouldn't have expected it. Had I been asked the
exact same question about the vacuum cleaner, I might have replied that I felt
it should last me ten years, based on its features and expense.