Whether you’re talking about appliances, cars or clothing, it’s true: they don’t make ’em like they used to. Here’s an easy way around a persistent problem
When eight different people send me a link to the same website in the span of a week, I know I have to write about it.
The site is called Buy Me Once. I’m in love, and I think the site and its mission are incredibly important.
Here’s why.
I talk a lot about reducing consumption, buying less and choosing to buy better quality products when it is actually necessary to make a purchase. But as I’ve discovered over the past eight years, actually doing this can be quite challenging.
Initially, when I was trying to change the way I shopped, I vowed to stop buying clothing from fast fashion outlets. You know the ones – they’re popular and trendy and filled with stacks of $5 T-shirts and racks of $15 shoes. The whole place is fluorescent and pulsing with music and when you go in it’s hard not to buy something.
Banning fast fashion made me feel good, but it wasn’t long before I realized that I really wasn’t making much of a difference. The $40 T-shirts I was buying at the upscale shop a few blocks away were still made in sweatshops with unsustainable manufacturing practices and horrific working conditions. The fabric was a bit better and the label certainly was, but other than that, was it really all that different?
This realization was disheartening. It wasn’t long before I began to encounter the type of fact-finding fatigue that plagues most people trying to be conscious of the impacts of their decisions – things like buying a T-shirt, which used to be a simple five-minute decision, now took weeks of research. I was sick of it.
Did I really have to conduct a full-scale investigation into each company I wanted to support just to buy a new pair of shoes or lipstick? And sometimes even after investigating labour practices I’d finally pull the trigger, only to have the product fall apart a few short months later.
Rage. Just pure rage.
It’s true what they say, they don’t make ’em like they used to, whether you’re referring to appliances, cars, electronics, clothing or furniture.
So, here we are, shopping and shopping. Meanwhile, those who would like to fill their homes with well-made products rather than spend their lives looking for replacements often find themselves at a loss, frustratedly casting about in a sea of temporary crap, trying to find the one-offs. The good stuff.
The site my friends and family kept sending me is designed to help do just that.
It’s called Buy Me Once and its motto is “Love Things That Last”. It’s one of those sites you wish you’d thought of yourself. It is lists products – clothing, kitchen goods, footwear, toys and more – that are simply built to last.
This site is the holy grail for those looking to prioritize quality over quantity. You won’t find the cheapest stuff here, nor always the most stylish, but everything collected on the site is designed to be bought once. It’s designed to spur a shift from the pervasive “consume and replace” mentality of our culture to a more sustainable “keep or pass on” mode of operation.
In the Buy Me Once collection, you’ll find Patagonia brand coats, leggings and shirts that come with a lifetime guarantee – you can send them back to be fixed at any point in their life cycle. You’ll find Tweezerman tweezers which you can send back to be sharpened and realigned, teddy bears that can be returned and repaired in a bear hospital when they’re loved a little too much, and even Le Creuset dutch ovens, which have always carried a lifetime quality guarantee.
Of course, let’s get one thing out of the way: this stuff ain’t cheap. These products are a far cry from $5 T-shirts and the prices may seem steep at first glance (although not when you run a simple cost-per-use calculation). It’s worth noting that the price points may make these products inaccessible for many consumers. It would be ignorant to assume that it’s pure evil that fuels the cycle of buying cheap crap that breaks: it’s not. For many, it’s the fact that coming up with $15 to replace an item every year is far more feasible than coming up with $100 to invest in something that will last a lifetime. For many of us, big chunks of money are hard to come by – especially since no one really seems to save up for purchases anymore (but that’s a different column altogether).
Nonetheless, a site like Buy Me Once is long overdue. It shines a well-deserved spotlight on those companies which have bucked the trend of planned obsolescence. It highlights the manufacturers who stand behind their products, those who design them to last and have the guts to guarantee the same.
The site also has a fascinating side effect that is not unlike the effect the Bechdel test had on how I evaluate movies. When you start evaluating products by whether or not they’d qualify to be listed on Buy Me Once, it’s astonishing how few make the cut.
Let’s show that we support the ones which do.