My parents are tightwads, and I love them for that. When I grew up, I continuously witnessed my mom and dad fixing things that went bad. Hole in the sock? Mended. False contact in my walkman (I date myself here)? Soldered back on. Bad haircut? Well, sometimes they went too far.
It took me a while to realize that even though I grew up that way, I diverged greatly from my parent’s guiding principle about things: buy good quality items and make them last. When I started my adult life, I did not fix anything. When something got bad, I would hide behind the lack of time and get a replacement.
One day, my dad paid me a visit and found my all dismembered trash bin. He asked me what I was going to do about it. I told him “don’t worry, the trash company will replace it”. But he couldn’t “not worry” about it. One hour later, he had the trash bin as good as new by reinforcing it with a metal cloth hanger woven into its hinges. That put me to shame.
From then on, I decided to try to fix things. I got to test my resolve when my dryer died last year. Instead of getting a new one, I took it all apart (to my wife’s dismay), identified the issue, got a $10 part from the net and put it right back to work. I was pretty proud.
Starting to fix things got me to think differently about purchases. I no longer focus on price only but on quality and maintainability. And even though I do spend more in the short term, I save quite a bit in the long run. Since my drier fix already added one year to my drier’s 5 years life, it saved me the equivalent of 20% of the cost of the dryer.
It is interesting to me how most we naturally emphasize quality during our car purchases (cf. Toyota annihilation of GM) but not when making smaller ones. I guess the high price of cars forces us to think our purchase. At least, it shows that we can do it.
Some will say that our economy is consumption-driven and that some short-term adverse effects could be felt if we all decided to consume less but better quality products. I agree to to a certain point but in the long run, I think a change in the consumption mindset could also have positive repercussions:
- It would allow US companies to focus on quality instead of cost cutting, therefore slowing the import of low quality goods and keeping valuable jobs in the US.
- It would create a new industry to serve the people that need their things fixed but don’t have the time to do it. This would definitely create jobs. Think of all the cobblers that went out of business in the last 20 years.
When we fix things, we reduce waste, save money, have better quality stuff and gather valuable skills. So, I believe that if we were all a bit less Walmart and a bit more Wall-E, we would make our world a better place. Don’t hesitate to disagree with me. Looking forward to hear from you.
Once upon a time, as I was taking out the trash, a whole new world opened to me right there, under the lid… About 100 maggots were happily chomping on the previous day’s bits. The revelation was immediate: trash can sustain life!