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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

You shouldn't. If you successfully manage wear leveling all you've done is make sure you have to replace your whole stock at the same time, as well as depriving yourself of regular reminders of what new-ish clothes should look and feel like, leading you to keep wearing worn-out clothes.

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> If you successfully manage wear leveling all you've done is make sure you have to replace your whole stock at the same time

I've been doing this for decades, but have never encountered this problem. I think because of a combination of the fact that I didn't buy my entire wardrobe all at once to begin with and that different clothes wear at different rates.

If your clothes are wearing at different rates then by definition you aren't wear-leveling.

I guess it depends on what you mean by wear-leveling. I interpreted it as wearing all of your clothes about equally as much.

With socks, wear levelling is actually really useful. I tend to buy a whole rotation of identical black socks, and then I don't need to pair them up individually. Also, buying 15 pairs of socks in one go isn't going to break the bank.

Wear leveling socks is a critical challenge for me. Unlike larger clothes, socks don’t stack easily, so defy conventional methods of stock rotation.

How do you approach this? Would it make sense to buy one of those shelf springs that grocery stores use to keep boxes towards the from of the shelf?

You need "Socks as a Service" (we could call it "SaaS") - every day someone drops off a new pair of socks and picks up your previous pair.

If you pay for a premium plan then no multi-tenanting and only you get to wear any particular pair of socks.

That sounds intriguing as I like not deciding. On the other hand, I'm sure SaaS has some premium over buying outright. Since I already have the capital outlay of a washer and drier and weekly time blocked for laundry of which socks is a very small percentage, I'm not certain if it would make sense.

On the other hand, if there is a "complete casual work from home uniform" service, that might be worth it as long as some VCs are subsidizing it like its 2019.

Heck, anything is worth it if VCs are subsidising it like it's 2019.

But what's the use in that "useful"? When I pick up a sock and it has holes, I throw it out. When the drawer gets empty enough it can fit another package, I buy one. What utility would come from worrying about when I used a particular sock?

It can be hard to find the same model sock when you need to restock. Wear leveling and replacing them all at once eliminates difficulty with matching. Also, if you don't wear level, you may have one new sock and one worn sock, and that can be weird.

Another benefit of FILO is to fulfill the social convention of wearing different colors. I purposefully acquire different colors of items in order to avoid drawing attention to my apparel. Fortunately my spouse tells me when clothes are worn-out so that isn't a concern.

Seems like people should diet and binge to purge clothing of the wrong size at various intervals.

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