You get what you pay for

Having spent the past thirty five years in the solid waste industry i have really seen the excess of our consumable society and it is sad. I have seen enough food thrown away that could feed thousands. I see memories discarded as if they meant nothing. Toys thrown away because some small part broke, therefore casting a death sentence to the life and enjoyment that toy should have brought the child.

So much of our refuse is packaging. Bottles, jars, boxes, plastic shrink wrap and many other ingenious ways to package an item so it can be sold regardless of it's quality. Glitz and visual sell not quality. Package it so there are less clerks in the store to help you. Expand the profits, sell inferior products, cheap prices, volume sales, drive the quality merchants out of business and deprive the consumer of true choices.


This past Saturday I went shopping to look for a new chair for my room. I was looking to replace a recliner that is virtually brand new but is an accident awaiting to happen. It's unbalanced and when it tipped over twice on my granddaughter I said it"s time to find something better. The sad thing about this is that this chair was bought at a top of the line furniture company, for big bucks and long time quality reputation.

So off to a local furniture retailer. What an education. He informed me that he buys American just for those quality issues and product life. As we talked I could see the quality in his product line but unfortunately there are too many "Discount Places" that sell furniture that is junk.

You know that heavy particle board stuff with the plastic look alike wood grain that is nothing more than contact paper. Furniture that once put together you can't move for fear of breaking. I know I've bought a piece or two over the years. It looks good but put anything other than air on it and it sinks like our economy. Yet we throw it away and go out and buy more of this crap. And within a year or two we do the cycle all over again.

While we are so fixated on buy the cheapest crap on the face of the earth good quality furniture makers are going out of business. There once was a time that furniture was handed down from generation to generation. My dresser belonged to my grandparents and is probably over 100 years old. It is as sound today as it was when it was made. If that was a particle board dresser it would have been replaced 25 or 40 times by now.

So while I was shopping for the chair I did a little comparison shopping. I looked for a five drawer high boy dresser made out of mahogany with dove tailed drawers made from solid wood. I found one for about $700.00. Seven Hundred dollars! You got to be insane. I can get a nice five drawer mahogany looking particle board for $275. About one third the cost. So now do the math. A dresser that costs $700 and lasts for 100 years costs about $7 a year. The particle board dresser, lasting 3 years if lucky costs $91.66 a year. If replaced every 3 years for the $275 price in 100 years it will have cost $9,350, without indexing for inflation and adding in disposal.

Now look at the disposal of that dresser. The particle board dresser probably weighs 75 pounds. Over the next 100 years it would be discarded 34 times at a weight equal to 2,500 pounds. No wonder we're filling up our landfills.

So with just this one item we can save $8,650 in 100 years. We can also save on fossil fuels because good quality furniture can still be made here in the good old USofA and we don't have to ship it halfway round the world on a freighter that burns dinosaurs at a unbelievable rate each day.

Let's get with it people. We got to start thinking smart. We'll save money, landfill space and resources if we buy quality not price.