Re: Oh well back it goes

[Mark]

But be careful it doesn't decide to turn on you

Argos has agreed to recall the Challenge SDS hammer drill

[dingbat]

Good cheap booze.

[The Medway Handyman]

Let's say I have a faulty product

Your car depreciates if you drive it or not.

[Frank Erskine]

Out of curiosity, after all this debate about Aldi, I went into one the other day. It certainly was a strange sort of store; it had a rather vacuous atmosphere. One rather amusing item was their version of (I assume) corn flakes, called "Benefit Flakes".

Actually they did have some cheese scones (to which I'm rather partial) made by a reputable local firm. I would even have bought some, but there was a queue of probably 20 or 30 shoppers at only one checkout. The conveyor belt was about 12' long, presumably to give you the early feeling that you're being "attended to".

[John Rumm]

[Andy Hall]

That's true, but generally the depreciation is more for greater mileages and wear and tear. Most algorithms for mileage calculation take depreciation into account plus other costs.

[Guy King]

The message from Frank Erskine contains these words:

Ours have dangly signs at the end of the belt with "If you're queuing beyond here, speak to a manager". Which is fine except you can't find one!

I've nothing against Aldi/Lidl, they're cheap, and provided you're selective much of their stuff is fine. Netto on the other hand is a step too far - dismal, smelly, disorganised and full of crap.

[Fitz]

Oh but I disagree! :-)

That's exactly what I said. If the OP had an actual _real_ opportunity to work and earn money during the period he spent returning the jointer then it was a false economy. No argument. In this case he didn't, So in real terms, as in actual measruble money in the bank he is financially better off. His claim was to have 'saved oodles', which I must admit I interpreted as 'saved oodles of cash' and not 'saved oodles of theoretical potential earning time', but I'm fairly sure that's what he meant.

Potential earnings are meaningless if you can't actually turn them into real earnings. Potentially, someone could be paying me a million pounds an hour right now to look after their rare and precious goldfish, but they're not, so doing something else for that hour should not be compared to the potential loss of the million pound earnings. As always an exageration to make a point, but the same principle.

So surely you would be better off financially spending any time you would have done DIY working and pocketing the net difference between your earnings and the tradesmans earnings. Time only equals money if you can turn that time into money somehow.

In financial terms then only the fuel and parking are things that actually impact your total net worth. Obviously car depreciation will have some effect but for a ~100 mile round trip it's going to be pretty negligible.

Neither frustration or delay necessarily cost you money. The enxt logical extension of the argument is that frustration causes impatience which raises your accident potential whilst driving, which is a potential cost of =A3400 to fix the car etc. I'm all for big picture but you have to stop somewhere.

I do think that your arguments are entirely valid and spot on in a theoretical sense, but in reality when purchasing decisions can make a significant difference to the money in your bank account you have to think about the application of the theory to the real world.

I mostly have tools towards the budget end of the scale, but the position on that price scale varied depending on how much I anticipated using them. I've built up a set of about 9 or 10 items in the last 4 years. Maybe I've been lucky but I've only had one failure - a Ferm SDS drill, which was returned to Screwfix under the 2 year warranty and replaced with a new model which is still going strong. That return cost me nothing in time or money because it broke when I didn't really need to use it, and was returned by post all paid for by Screwfix.

This set of tools probably cost me in the region of =A3450 (very rough totting up guess based on a creaking memory). I could have reached that on two lovely yellow Dewalt items or 4 ok mid-range items. In real money at this point in time though, I'm probably hundreds or thousands better off than if I'd bought mid or top range tools.

I'd rather have that money in an investment fund than sitting in the garage gathering dust and depreciating.

Don't get me wrong I'd have loved to buy a full set of really nice, smooth, well designed tools, but I simply couldn't justify the cost because I'm not trade and I don't use them every day. This means, for me, that things like vibration, noise and comfort are negligible because of the low level of use they get.

If I had the opportunity to build my own house and chose to do a lot of the second fix and finsihing myself I'd invest in better tools because I could justify the cost against the huge cost of the total building cost and the large amount of use they would get. Seeing as that's not going to happen any time soon, I'll stick to the cheapies for now.

--=20 Steve F

[Andy Hall]

The equations are really simple.

There are two aspects.

One is the earnings potential discussion, the second is cost of work.

Both can easily be accounted. If I waste my time returning a defective product during time that I could have been making money, there is a direct and obvious cost. That is very high.

The second case is for when there is a choice of paying somebody to do a job or doing it myself. For that scenario, the cost per hour of my time could be rated at my business revenue potential or it could be rated at the equivalent cost per hour of paying someone to do the work. This is actually a more conservative example because I can make more money per hour than I would pay someone to do work, but I'll leave that on one side and look at it on the basis of costing my time at the same rate that I would pay someone.

It was on that basis that I costed returning a duff product at £20/hour plus transport.

On the contrary. If I pay a tradesman, that is money directly out of my pocket. If I take the role of tradesman and do the work myself, I cost my time at the rate that I would pay him. If I waste 2hrs and transport (=£50) then it is £50 gone in the same way as if he had had to do the returning. Arguably I wouldn't have to pay for all of the time taken to return if he did it, but certainly it is a cost to him and customers would pay.

Untrue. It's £50 because 2hrs of time have been spent as costed against the job.

They most certainly do. BTW. When I return products to stores I always ask for and usually get compensation for having to do so.

That's a different discussion.

It's very real world. If I waste half a day returning a cheap product it becomes very expensive and makes the exercise of buying cheap completely pointless.

That is why it is important to look at the total cost of ownership over the projected time and not just the purchase price.

I don't make decisions based on amount of use, I do so on what I expect in terms of the job produced, ease of use and maintainability. If use is projected to be low, I don't buy a cheap tool but rent a good quality one when needed.

I agree. I don't buy things that are not likely to be used and simply obtain when needed.

As far as investments are concerned, I certainly don't use funds because I can manage them far more profitably myself.

I take the opposite approach of choosing high quality tools to buy or not buying at all.

[Fitz]

Err I think I'm agreeing with you in the case where your nature of employment means you can increase the number of hours you work. This is the crucial factor on which all this hinges in my opinion.

If your sole income is from a fixed salary and you can never do paid overtime then it doesn't matter what you do over the weekend. You will never receive extra money for it. In purely financial terms your time is worth nothing, because no-one is willing to give you money for your time. Surely you can't dispute this statement?

If you are self-employed, a contractor, have the opportunity to lots of paid overtime etc. then monetarily you will be better off spending Saturday doing that job to earn 1 day extra money and then using that to pay someone on a lower hourly rate than you to do the job with their own tools. If you choose not to collect extra income in this way then you have negated all the earning potential and you time becomes worth =A30 again.

Anyway I think really we just look at the world in very different ways and I don't have any great need to bring you round to my perspective, so as long as I've explained my point of view clearly I'll probably leave it at that. :-)

--=20 Steve F

[Andy Hall]

Yes I can. You are thinking of a simplistic case of salary and overtime.

There are many other models apart from self employment, owning one's own business or overtime which can affect income. I'll give you a few examples:

- One might receive commissions for sales made or bonuses for objectives achieved. In that scenario, hours worked may well affect outcome and earnings.

- One might have stock options which are realisable on IPO or acquisition of a company. For those to be interesting, the value of the company needs to be as high as possible. To do that, it needs to meet its objectives. Again, effort and hours worked may well have an influence.

Even someone on a completely fixed income should value their time on the second basis of my argument. That is that if they were paying someone to do the work there is a cost associated. If they do the work themselves there is still an effective cost because time can either be profitably used to do jobs or wasted at food warehouses selling tools.

There is a cost however you look at it. I would argue that if one isn't costing that, they ar not valuing themselves or the outcome of what they do.

That's simplistic. I have other reasons for wanting to do work myself. From a purely financial standpoint, one also has to factor in whether the outcome is going to be satisfactory. I know that I can meet my standards (almost) and have skin in the game. It's not always easy to find third parties with the same commitment.

All of that is before one thinks about the more aesthetic issues such as that I like doing the jobs. If I have to waste the time that I would like to be using for that on visiting shops to change dud products, I am not going to be as happy as if I didn't have to waste that time. Then there are the issues of enjoying use of the tools and the outcome.

I guess we do......

[Owain]

The manager will be the lad/lass behind the till.

Alternatively, a "Manager to the checkouts please" in parade-ground tones will usually provoke a response.

Owain

[dingbat]

Lidl pay up to 35K for a store manager salary. That's better than Java programmers.

[Andy Hall]

So should Java programmers wake up and smell the coffee? ;-)

[Owain]

I know. I applied to Lidl. For the money they pay, I'll clean the shop toilets.

Owain