Best or Cheapest
I just made an investment in a USA made quality product. It is a Dazor (brand) task lighting fixture which is a heavy base desktop fluorescent lamp swing arm type. I am not writing about the desk light per say, but a reflection on why I made this purchase.
My cost for this fixture is a little over $250.00. At first I thought, “Wow! That’s a lot of money. That’s not cheap”… but then this lighting fixture is not made cheap. So I thought about that for awhile, just as I am doing now while writing this.
I believe middle class US citizens, have been conditioned by intensive consumer marketing efforts to accept a price driven, low quality, low cost, therefore a highly disposable economy as an acceptable lifestyle. The term is consumerism, defined as the belief that the buying and selling of large quantities of consumer goods is beneficial to an economy or a sign of economic strength.
What am I doing! Consumerism is nothing more than capitalist propaganda.
I carefully chose the words above for their meaning. Look them up if you are not sure what I said.
The throw away product marketing efforts are polluting our planet and our lifestyles. Buy cheap, use it up, throw it away, then buy some more. Today’s consumers are hardly ever induced to making a lifetime investment, in their cars, homes or even choice of soul mates. (But cars, starter houses, and spouses are recyclable.) That’s another subject, not guilty or even going there.
I could have chosen a cheaper lighting product. I have in the past. After all, we are conditioned to seek the lowest price. But there are two kinds of price. Most of us still think the best price is the overall lowest price and that is seldom true. We must consider apples for apples.
I see two baskets of apples. One basket is ten dollars and the other is five dollars, same number of apples in each. One of the baskets contains rotten apples. What price should I pay?
I did seek the best price. The Dazor website was offering the product for direct sale. I looked up one of their LISTED authorized dealers and discovered they offered the exact same fixture for $130.0 LESS. In fact I think my light was drop shipped directly from the manufacture.
Looking at my lamp fixture purchase, two hundred fifty dollars is not a lot of money today. It costs fifty dollars for a tank of gasoline. One hundred dollars a tank full when I had my Dodge Hemi RAM.
I remember first noticing a Dazor (type) desk light (that looks like my new one) in my father’s office when I was a kid. I can’t swear to the brand, little did I care back then. The lamp fixture was still in daily use 40 years later when I left the family business. I am sure it could still be in operation somewhere today. Dazor didn’t have to design their product any better; they just retrofitted it with modern lamps. The quality of my new lamp fixture will last me the rest of my life and well into someone else’s.
Our culture really needs to get back to sustainable living. That does not mean we do without, but we make the best decisions on how we consume. Buy once for a lifetime of use. Look for things that are repairable rather than throw away. Put repair shops back in business. Restoration is honorable work, but the item has to be made well to begin with. That means good things probably cost more than the cheapest available.