The phrase that gives this article its title is old. Really old. But it highlights something that’s every bit as important now as it ever was. Even if, as our online shopping global overlords remind us, it’s no longer the hard-and-fast rule that (we like to think) it once was. Who amongst us hasn’t bought something from a premium brand only to discover that it’s either every bit as crap as something we could’ve picked up from our local “Disposable Tat” store? Worse than those are the times where the thing is exactly the one you’d find at said store, only with a hilarious amount of markup for having the name of a brand that used to make decent things poorly stenciled on it.
With that in mind, though most of the things I end up purchasing follow the maxim of minimizing breakage and annoying warranty claims or returns, some of them have been moved to what I’ve taken to calling “The toolbox rule,” after the container I am to fill while heeding this advice.
It goes a bit like this: Though large toolboxes with every conceivable tool known to man are really impressive, the sad fact of the matter is that most of those tools are fated to sit on that box, unimportant and ignored until that one impossible task that requires that specific tool comes around. As such, whenever you need a tool, it’s not a bad idea to buy the least expensive variant of said tool. Even the most bargain-basement item of questionable manufacturing should be able to handle a single project. If it does, you can use it on the next one and the one after that. And if it breaks on one of those? Now you know its rough lifespan and can decide if your use case deems a straight replacement or you could stand to go to a higher-quality item.
Entirely aside from Murphy’s law telling me that the tool will break the moment it’s most inconvenient for it to do so, it’s an interesting way to go around purchases for which you are unsure about. But since my toolbox is mostly tech these days, I figured I’d see how it deals on that particular arena. Which is why I bought a really inexpensive GaN Type-C charger from my local big box store. Single output, cheap black plastic, nothing remarkable whatsoever.
But it charged my laptop and my phone exactly as you would expect it to, and it was small enough to be lost on my backpack, which is certainly more that can be said from the standard barrel-plug charger that has been bundled with laptops since forever. As the months went by, it did what any consumer item should do, quietly disappear into the background and get out of your way. And so it was until, about a week ago, I pulled it from my power outlet to discover that it had come back with only one of its prongs. I’d owned it long enough that I had to go back to my receipts to see how much it was. I thought of replacing it with an identical one until I had to carry the couple of chargers it had replaced again. That’s when I realized how much it had improved my everyday carry.
The upgraded, expensive one should arrive in the mail soon. Perhaps the new version of our title should be “Buy Twice, Break once.”
