Recently I have been looking for some heavier dumbbells which means it’s time to go shopping. While looking at some of the prices, it seemed a bit ridiculous to pay like $1.75 per pound. I almost feel like I should just find a heavy rock and lift it for exercise. Since it’s not exactly my area of expertise I started to ask around if anyone else knew of specialized stores that would see the items for cheaper.
One funny response I got was that I should expect to pay a lot as the cheaper ones aren’t very good quality. I mentioned that it shouldn’t really matter much as it is simply a heavy object and the lighter ones I found on a fluke sale before works fine. However, the person insisted that I have to spend a lot of money for anything in life to get good quality items.
I always find that a little annoying as my mindset is that a large part of what you pay for in a product is the marketing. Example, phones or computers that use the exact same hardware but sell for a lot simply because of the brand. Therefore, you can’t necessarily judge quality based on its price. It’s kind of like we are all pre-trained to believe that expensive is better. As a result, you have to slowly re-educate yourself on how that simply isn’t true.
The best way to shock yourself I think is to look at wholesale prices for accessories like cables. When you see just how much they are marked up usually in retail stores it will definitely get you to re-think the whole notion of price and quality. There are a lot of cases where expensive items are better of course. But I have usually found that you need to verify that is the case.