Insanity: Improper Price Comparisons:

People love to get great deals.  I completely understand that, don't get me wrong.  However, there is one bit of issue I personally encounter frequently, which seems to elude the comprehension of some customers and other people that I encounter: improper price comparisons.  This is not to say that people are comparing the exact same product at two different stores and wasting more money in gas and time (as compared to even minimum wage) to get to the lower price; that is a separate issue and just as insane.  No, the issue in particular I'm talking about is when people are comparing the price of a used product to a new one when it significantly makes a difference, like the wear and tear on a television set and getting only $25 in savings or the like, or when comparing two products that are not the same.  Taking a 720p resolution plasma television set and comparing it to a 1080p LED LCD television set when their price is not too far apart is ignorant, but once people are told this most will get the LED set.  However, some will get the plasma, return it thinking it is just a defect because it doesn't look as good as their friend's 1080p LCD set, then return it again and again.  That's insane.  Likewise, complaining that the $5 set of headphones doesn't last long enough due to wear and tear, and then getting a $7 set that has the exact same thickness of rubber in the part that had broken before.  Quality truly costs more, and mass-production leads to lower quality for faster higher markup sales because the manufacturers know people will just buy another when the first one fails.  It's called planned obsolescence.

Electronic manufacturers know that every few years technology jumps ahead and it becomes less expensive to include the same quality as was in their previous models, and so they have to keep up with newer quality at the same price, or keep producing the same thing but at a lower price.  As this is more costly in the long run, they make sure that you'll need to buy another in a few years by making it cheaply, by not properly telling people in the manuals how to prolong the life of their products, and by frequently using salvageable parts from other sent in products rather than completely unused parts.  This means those same parts already have wear on them, and it becomes even more likely that the product will only last a little bit beyond the life of the warranty.  Quality products still suffer from this problem but usually have a longer lifespan, and people that try to compare a high quality product to a low quality product are often sadly insane in the notion that maybe, just maybe, this new one will last longer than the old even though it was the same cost.