Buy American or Bye America
Made in the USA
A product that is “Made in the USA” both sources it’s materials and builds the final product in the United States, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
It’s a high bar, and one that fewer and fewer products meet. We are a society that increasingly wants cheap plastic junk from China. Our addiction to cheap stuff has very real costs associated with it, but it doesn’t stop us from buying the bottom dollar product in the big box store.
Today’s products are disposable by design. We’ve chosen to embrace the “throw it away and buy a new one” mentality. That approach poses a problem for me as I hate doing things twice.
I don’t mind spending more on something if it’s maintainable and well designed. I’m willing to pay for quality. I’m not willing to pay for the sticker on the front. It’s the equivalent of a segfault in my brain that people routinly spend $1,000 on a telephone that doesn’t even have a user serviceable battery. It’s designed by it’s creator to become a piece of trash regardless of how well you care for it.
By contrast companies like Saddleback Leather focus on making a product last a lifetime. It began with a volunteer English teacher who needed a durable bag to carry the school books. After searching and unable to find exactly what he wanted, he had a bag custom made telling the leather maker he wanted it “made so well that his grand kids would fight over it”. That concept became the tagline for Saddleback Leather. Their bags are designed with full grain leather and medical grade Stainless Steel 316.
Consumable vs. Investment (Buy it For Life)
We can separate any purchase into one of two categories:
1. Consumables:
There are some things in life you can never have too much of. When toilet paper is on sale, buy it! It’s a safe bet you’ll run out of room to store it before you purchase more than you need. The question with consumables is if you know it’s not going to last, is there a compelling reason to spend the extra bucks on the brand name or is “good enough” “good enough”?
Other times there are consumable things in life that are more expensive for the brand name, but really worth it. I recall the first time I purchased a Diablo saw blade. It cut through wood like a hot knife through butter. I’ve purchased them ever since. Are they more expensive than budget brand blades? Yes. Are they worth it? I think so.
2. Buy it For Life
The second model is based on buying nice things one time, taking good care of them, then knowinng that they will take care of you when you need them. I respectfully submit to you that this doesn’t necessarily mean the latest and greatest. A friend of mine refers to this syndrome as LAGS.
Newer is not always better. The latest is not always the greatest.
We were pulling light fixtures out of a basement room. As we pulled them down, their quality and craftsmanship drew my attention. At one end of the light fixture I noticed a label marking the product as that of union craftsmanship.
I pulled the new LED fixture out of the box. This would be the replacement for the old, heavy, fluorescence based fixture. By contrast the new fixtures were light and efficient, but there was very little craftsmanship. It was effectively bent pieces of sheet metal fit together with with a cheap LED strip along the face.
While there can be no argument that the newer more efficient LED fixtures provide for better light and lower power draw, Less than 5 years after I put them up, a few of the cheap Chinese LED fixtures have failed and needed to be replaced.
I realized that while I had set out to invest in a quality light fixture. I had inadvertently purchased a disposable light fixture. Worse yet, as I
At SouthEast LinuxFest 2022 a group of geeks attempted to load functional operating systems onto older devices. One device was a 486. They successfully loaded some ancient version of RedHat and it booted to a usable (by 1990’s standards) system. The other device was a PlayStation. The process of installing an operating system failed before it had really started because the PlayStation required you to sign into an account on a server that no longer existed.
The PlayStation was newer than the 486 by 20 years. It has superior computational power by almost every measurable metric, and yet in 2022 the 486, was the more capable machine.
“Good Enough” (aka Consumable)
I keep my food budget down and support Americans by eating the following specials for lunch.
The Weekly Lunch Schedule:
Monday - Burger Time Bigger Burger Combo
- Place: Burger Time
- Price: $10.89
- What’s on special: Burger, Fries and a Soda
Tuesday - Rumors $7 Express Lunch
- Place: Rumor’s Lounge
- Price: $7.00
- What’s on special?: Classic Cheeseburger and Fries
Wednesday -
Thursday - El Gordito
- Place: El Gordito
- Price: $6.50
- What’s on special?: Any burrito at half price.
Friday -
- Place: Speedway Grill & Bar
- Price: $9.49
- What’s on special?: 2 fillets of Alaskan Pollack, fries, and toast.