I remember revelling for days in the good fortune that led me to the electronic spark plug tester, of being incredulous that none of the bargain hunters before me had been savvy enough to recognise the great prize, and of my pride in haggling the price down to $11.
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I think, 20 years ago, we were early in the transition from everything being expensive to everything being cheap, so that we saw anything less than half price as a bargain. Things these days are so cheap that at half price they are in large part neither worth selling nor buying.
I was glowing as I carried it to the shed and made a spot for it on a shelf, a big step towards being a proper handy man with all things mechanical.
That was 20 years ago, and last week I found it hidden under a layer of more recent bargains of the century. I'd never used it. There are much easier ways of testing a spark plug, and why bother testing a spark plug anyway when you can buy a new one for just a few dollars!
Until a few years ago I'd have offered it to visitors who knew what a spark plug looked like but last week I put it straight in the bin, pleased to be rid of something that stood as testimony to my foolishness. It was, I recognise now, worthless, and I find it hard to believe that I didn't see it as worthless 20 years ago.
I know why I didn't see it as worthless. Twenty years ago a great mass of us were in a frenzy of bargain hunting, weekend secondhand markets were in their heyday, and each Sunday morning bags and boxes of stuff were carried up my front steps.
Most of it then was my wife's, and almost all of it now is hers.
The problem was that no stuff ever went down the front steps or even out through the back door, and as I would warn often enough it was only a matter of time before there was no more room for stuff and maybe even for us.
These days she buys mainly stuff for grandchildren, which she keeps at our place because she suspects their parents don't fully appreciate it, and I'm with them.
When she's not buying stuff for grandkids she buys fabric, otherwise known as bits of cloth, and she has spent thousands of dollars more storing this fabric than the fabric is worth.
I help ease the load by grabbing an armful whenever I need rags for the shed, and she has never noticed so much as a shred missing. Right about now as you read this she'll be poring through the mountains of fabric in noisy, panic-stricken horror.
Hehe.
I think, 20 years ago, we were early in the transition from everything being expensive to everything being cheap, so that we saw anything less than half price as a bargain. Things these days are so cheap that at half price they are in large part neither worth selling nor buying.
As well, I suspect, for the first 10 of those 20 years, we clung to a belief that the disappearing expensive stuff was much better than the cheap stuff replacing it. Men, for example, would rummage through boxes at secondhand markets looking for old spanners in the belief that old was better, when the fact is that the jaws of those old spanners were never as precise as those of the modern cheapest of the cheap.
Seven or eight years ago I paid more than $550 for a cordless drill in the belief that I was buying quality.
If I was buying quality it was, in hindsight, unnecessary quality.
A few months ago I paid $29 for a cordless drill to keep in my caravan, and it does the job just as well as the $550 drill. And the cheap drill has five years' warranty, five times that of the drill that cost 20 times more.
It's a replacement warranty for the cheap drill because repairing a $29 tool is not feasible, and that's part of the new world. Most everything is throw-away.
A $29 tool that needs even the simplest repair must be thrown away. And even a $29 tool in perfect order is probably not saleable at half price at a secondhand market because for a lousy $15 more you can get a new one with five years' warranty. Worse, my $550 drill may not be saleable for $15 for the very same reason.
I wonder whether this new age of cheap has made us more or less materialistic. On one hand we amass more material possessions, and on the other we value them less. Certainly we consume more. My mother, by way of illustration, had the same fridge and television and washing machine for 30 years or more, and over the same number of years I will have bought three or four our of each.
Secondhand markets have changed too.
Professional stallholders have taken over from casual, downsizing stallholders, and that may be because casual stallholders themselves put such a low value on their stuff these days that they toss it rather than try to sell it.
The pros want more for their treasures and so we are tempted less often to buy simply because something is ridiculously cheap. And since new things are so cheap there's not much room for ridiculously cheap, so only old things can have a value. And on any sensible assessment, like my spark plug tester and ancient spanners and my wife's fabric, they're simply not worth it.
My life, and probably yours, would be better with less stuff.
jeffcorb@gmail.com
