How to decide on a major purchase

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Oh what a terrible world we live in!

I have blogged before on this issue: how can we make decisions on the quality of a product before we buy?

The economists say that the value of a product is how much the public is willing to pay for it.  More accurately, the value of a product to a particular person is precisely how much money he or she is willing to part with to procure it.  This simple view, initially perpetrated on us by some economic fathead in the late eighteenth century no doubt, is beginning to lose any residual validity it might have had.

Firstly, the money anyone is willing to pay for anything depends entirely on his or her credit situation.  We pay for silly things that are really not worth very much simply because we're not thinking very hard, and we pay with a credit-card.  Impulse purchases dilute the strength of the "value-willingness to pay" paradigm because it would suggest that very similar people with different credit situations will respond differently to the same product---indeed, the same person would respond differently--- other things being equal.  So the value of a product becomes entirely a matter of psychology and financial liquidity.  Economics is based on this value paradigm, and their insistence that the value of a class of things averages out over the market into something that is objective is hard to accept in a post-October-2009 world (or whenever the hell the economy of the USA went south, and stayed south, and don't give me any crap about how great it is today).

Secondly, Manufacturers have stumbled onto the trick of making every product a new product.  Even an automobile model that was assessed as being a great value in July could be altered in December, to use inferior parts, assemble it in a less reliable location with poorly paid workers, so that the half-year model is significantly different from the model you thought you had inspected carefully, and about whose worth you were satisfied in the Summer.  Shoes, cameras, computers, printers, paper, everything is an untried and untested product.  Bait-and-switch is built-in into the system.  Services.  TV sets.  Music Records; DVDs.  Two identically labeled items might be quite different when you open up the packages.

In short, we really have no objective basis on which to base our assessment of value.

The manufacturer might be reputable.  But over the years there have been numerous instances of reputable manufacturers who have compromised quality at some point, leaving a vast number of consumers owning a worthless product for which they had high hopes.  Toyota.  Drug companies.  Credit card companies.  Mortgages.  Phones.

Consumer's Union tests products, and their members read the reports to decide which products to buy.  But manufacturers discontinue the products the minute they get a bad rating, and market the identical product under either a different product label, or a different model number.  "Model x15 was discontinued; there were some design errors.  Model y53 is completely different!  Try it!  It has fabric softner, and makes you smell nice, too!  And it comes in this handy toxic bottle!"

The same kind of thing, of course, happens with service companies.  Vice President X comes up with a fabulous plan for earning the company millions of dollars at the expense of the customers.  (The upper management pretends to be completely ignorant of what X is doing.)  As soon as customers stumble onto the deception, X is fired with much noise (though, of course, his contract gives him a fabulous golden parachute), and a new face, Y, is hired to replace him.  The kindly face of the company president assures the public that the company is now completely worthy of trust, and will uphold its high standards once more.

But my original topic was: how to decide on a major purchase.  Do I have a method I can recommend?

Well, nothing really novel.  You have to research the product twice as hard as you would have some years ago.  You must learn where the product is actually manufactured; for instance, a Toyota might actually be manufactured by Ford, or an Oster product actually manufactured by Black & Decker.  You must read all the consumer information (including Consumer Reports, or similarly reliable publication, as well as reviews on Amazon, and on the Internet generally, bearing in mind that Internet reviews are often planted by the manufacturers themselves, and cannot always be trusted).  You must ask around your friends and colleagues, but be careful to measure their recommendations against what you know of their reliability and good judgment as well as how different their use patterns might be from yours.  For instance, a backyard chef might label product A as poor, while an occasional barbecuer might consider product A quite reasonable.  Your mileage, clearly, will vary.

Don't be shy about asking a question on FaceBook, or on your personal network.  (On the down side, Facebook will inundate you with advertisements for the product in question.)  Finally, ask the salesman candidly, when his or her supervisor isn't watching, and study their expression carefully.