Guest Post from my husband, Stephen Fuhrman:
Garbage in Garbage out
In the late 80s my
grandfather passed away. My Dad moved all of Grandpa’s stuff to his shop
and tried his best to pass it out to family members. Nobody wanted
it. At that time I was all but broke so I dug through it and found a
bunch of old tools and household goods that I was allowed to take home with
me. Items like a carpenter’s square, electric drill, hand wrenches,
electric skillet, and aluminum cake pan, etc. To this day I still use
most of these items. A few have worn out completely and had to be
replaced. My point is, these are items that sooner or later I would have
purchased in order to cook, fix or whatever throughout the last 25 years.
My wonderful frugal wife that
I married just 6 years ago brags almost daily about her 25 year old kitchen
center, her 20 year old pots and pan set, and her 25 year old electric
skillet. Sure there are many new versions of these items on the market just
begging her to buy but why?
I am talking about all this
because of how disposable our society has gotten. Just today in my little
vacuum store, I had a customer come in with vacuums that were 3 years old and a
1.5 years old. They were no longer working right and making squeaking
noises. As we talked to her, she made it clear that she loves her
vacuums. If we were to total up the amount of money she spent it would be
between $800 and $900 just 1 to 3 years ago. As we prepared a quote, she
spoke up and said if it cost too much that she would just buy new ones.
“WOW” was my thought. In three years you are willing to pay another
$850 for new items to replace the old machines that have stopped performing for
you in that short amount of time. Of course, we convinced her, that
spending $100 on repairs was much better than filling the landfills and
spending another $850 on new vacuums which will inherently have the same
problem in a couple of years.
This got me thinking…
What is wrong with us Americans? Why do we complain about money and the
economy while wasting so much money on garbage products? Once we do find
that we made a bad investment, why do we insist on doing it all over
again? I’m not sure I have the answer, but I do have some thoughts.
Are we lazy? A
couple of weeks ago I replaced an old floor in my wife’s office with laminate
flooring. Even though I have lots of power tools and what I refer to as
garage toys, I do not have a table saw or a compound miter saw to easily cut the
boards perfectly. I was about to go to Home Depot and buy one for $300
until I remembered that, back in the late 80s, I built furniture without
these tools and it all turned out nice. I figured if I could do it then,
I can do it now. So I saved myself 300 bucks and used squares,
straight-edges, and a good old fashioned circular saw to make all my cuts.
The woman that was in my
store seemed like a quite mechanical and intelligent woman. She could see
that paying $100 and waiting for a day was a better deal than paying $850 and
getting instant gratification. But we had to do some convincing.
Was she mentally lazy, or just swayed by the “go out and buy a newer, better
one” mentality? Why was it that it took convincing that repairing
the old, saving money and landfills was a better deal? I could make a
pretty good living if I could save or collect $750 everyday.
To get back to my main
thought of garbage. OK let’s say these machines were garbage and needed
to be dumped. Why would anyone replace a 3 year old relatively expensive
item with a duplicate? Why would anyone think that you need to replace
appliances every three years? If you do your homework, buy quality
products that are suitable to your needs, allow it to be demonstrated so that
you use it and care for it correctly, you should never have to.
Back to my tools, I could
have gone out and bought new tools that are shinier and would have done the job
easier and maybe even better, but I didn’t. Why? Because the old
tools are not garbage, they just required me to do more brain work.
Shop online at www.vacshack.com
In the Oklahoma City area shop www.acleanerplace.com
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