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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

>”Problem is that educated people usually spend less”

Where did you get this notion? In my experience, experts almost always have the best & most expensive gear in their area of expertise.

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Take something like work boots as an example: You might buy a $300 pair of Red Wing work boots that’ll last effectively forever. Someone who can’t afford that might buy a $100 pair of work boots from Walmart, which will need replacing more often.

So, in the category of Work Boots, you are indeed spending less.

The Vimes Theory of Socio-economic unfairness.

https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots....

I came here to say this.

Maybe shoes are not the best example, because even the most expensive shoes will only last a few years.

They are talking about boots. A good pair of boots while last you a long time and once they wear down they can be resoled and repaired. A pair of Red Wings can last you indefinitely if you maintain them.

Stuff you wear 8h a day while sweating in it due to hard labor, every day? Unless you can magically change whole interior of the boots, that ain't a good proposition at all.

I do hiking and other mountain sports a lot, wear top notch european stuff from ultra light to heavy full leather huge&heavy boots (sorry no good US products in this area sold anywhere in Europe that I am aware of), but happy to change them once every few years, the best I got on Meindl ones was 10 years. Its not just exterior that goes to crap over time, its everything and keeping them forever is unhygienic.

Also don't understand your logic - people overall spend more on lower quality equipment long term. The phrase 'I am not rich enough to buy cheap stuff' is solid one and confirmed endless times across every aspect of existence.

Only their welted work boots are resoleable, any other will last as long as the tread holds out. Beyond that you work conditions, how much you sweat, temperature, humidity, and whether or not you rotate with other boots will drastically effect the lifespan.

It's also worth noting that a lot of their lines are now made in cut-rate outsourced shops and the quality sucks.

"Best" and "most expensive" are not necessarily correlated. Plenty of companies will sell you $100 worth of stuff for $500, especially in this era of fly by night brand names sold on no-liability marketplaces.

There are plenty of people (I know a few) who will buy very expensive items that they don't understand in the hope it will solve all their problems or in lieu of skill. Experts often have a more nuanced take: match the requirements with what the product offers and no further.

True, but I wouldn't underestimate the amount of money they don't waste in useless crap, or low quality products they have to buy multiple times.

I find that experts and enthusiasts are usually willing to spend more than the average person, but they often avoid products with high margins and are hard to convince with marketing. An e-bike expert won't buy a janky fire-hazard Alibaba white-label battery, but is also unlikely to buy a luxury brand with proprietary components.

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