Quality, Utility, and Expense

I recently came across a bicycling magazine that seems to be devoted to competitive racing. On the back cover is an ad promoting an apparently very good bicycle, specially designed and built to give its owner the best possible performance in a race. To my untrained eye, it looked just like an ordinary bicycle. But its price, $3300, was anything but ordinary.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to my local Wal-Mart and happened upon the bicycle section. There was a mountain bike for sale, at $75. I bought it and rode it around the neighborhood. Perfect, for my purposes.

Just do the arithmetic: for the price of that one racing bicycle, I could have bought 440 of the Wal-Mart bikes! But I am not a racer; I bicycle for the exercise and fun, more than anything else. I am not into the marginalism involved in trying squeeze out a competitive edge in order to beat out my opponents. So I can go cheap in this area.

But suppose it is a different area in my life where a margin or edge does matter. Perhaps I am a stickler for gourmet cooking; then I might dole out quite a sum on high dining. When someone else might be satisfied with simpler and less expensive food. Or I may feel the need to wear only clothing that has been specially tailored to perfectly fit me, and anything else simply will not do. In these cases, as with the bicycle, it is the “margin” of quality that drives up their costs much more than then the basic utility of the good.

The question I have to ask myself is what areas should I personally take a stand in and insist on the “highest quality”, even when this entails paying much more for it than I would for the “basic package”. And having been rooted in simple utilitarian living, this is not something easy for me to answer.

I tend to search out the cheapest ways to attain the best variety of goods and experiences for myself and my family. There are no areas in my life that I can firmly state I am committed to spend whatever it takes to attain an elite level of quality. Maybe this is good, maybe not. Or am I selling myself short?

Right now, I am interested in running. I would like to invest some money in traveling to various places that hold races. Not only would I expand my running experiences, but it would be a lot of fun sightseeing as well. Or perhaps it is in the area of learning foreign languages where I have been selling myself short. After all, the best way to learn a foreign language is to live for a while among its speakers. This requires money and time, something I have heretofore been unwilling to commit.

Well, I’m not getting any younger, so I had better decide which if any areas in which I really want to take the plunge and invest that substantially higher level of money and time necessary to have optimal outcomes. I don’t want my old age to be a time of regret for opportunities passed by. But I do know one thing right now: no way am I going to blow $3300 on a bicycle!