I have been put on a permanent contract at work. One of the terms of this contract is I get a £150 budget for boots. Expensive boots, free to me! How exciting. I am currently deciding which ones I should purchase, which ones would be best and most durable.
The boots I currently wear were bought for me by a previous work place. They are Chelsea boots that cost about £23 new from an eBay ‘Buy it Now’ listing. I have had them for almost exactly a year. I have semi-regularly shampooed and conditioned the leather upper, which is in quite good condition. The lining however has aged poorly, and has worn away entirely at the heel. They are also splattered with green and yellow metallic paint. They smell bad.
These two boots, the current and future pair, are perhaps an example of 'Vimes Boots Theory'. This originates from a book written by British author Terry Pratchett, 15th in his Discworld series, called ‘Men At Arms’. It supposes that people with less money spend more money on consumer goods over time than rich people. This is because they cannot afford consumer goods that are durable, and so they regularly need to replace their cheap items.
The titular character is Colonel Vimes, commander of the City Watch. He is describing his fiance, who is an aristocratic lady of leisure with an old house full of expensive things. She lives cheaply due to the quality of these antique possessions, and instead spends all of her money on her dragon care business.
There is something to this theory, I think. But I don't know, if tested, whether the maths involved would hold it true for most items. Nice stuff is very expensive. Cheap stuff is very very cheap. The increase in price of expensive stuff as compared to cheap stuff is often by a factor of tens or hundreds, which is not an increase mirrored in its durability (in most cases).
There are different variables at play, such as quantity of use, the quality of maintenance, and the line at which someone determines a thing as no longer fit for use. My current boots for instance, while much more worn than more expensive boots might’ve been after the same workload, are still usable. Also, the promise of durability from expensive items is not always fulfilled. They may in fact be fragile, or have been overpriced through clever marketing that disguises at best average construction.
When I worked in the garden centre at a B&Q, I had a colleague called Sol. He was advising me on what kind of headphones to illicitly use while on shift, suggesting £5 Bluetooth earphones, with the warning that they would break every 3 months. When I followed this advice, it turned out that the earphones I’d bought didn’t really work at all. They were so frustrating I soon replaced them with £18 ones from a reputable brand. There is a price at which objects cease to provide their intended use value at all, and become a complete waste of money.
The main reason why both of these two different earphones were that cheap is how low the wages that would’ve been paid to the people that produced their components and assembled them. While Western craft production often doesn’t take advantage of the economies of scale that mass produced goods do, the biggest difference in the final price is more likely the amount of compensation the workers involved received.
Sebastian Cox, maker of expensive wooden furniture, when asked about his prices, stated that in order to purchase from sustainable craft makers, people will have to become accustomed to spending more on possessions, and owning them for life. This is made possible by the longevity a craftsperson can imbue into an object, and enables him to pay his employees a fair wage. Again, I think there is something to this theory. But £3,000 tables are out of the question for most people. To have that amount of cash on hand, and then direct it towards an object with the same use value as an IKEA dining table, ignoring everything else that imminently needs paying for, is not how budgeting works for most people. The Cox’s studio ethos rooted in the work of William Morris, Victorian proponent of craft production and detractor of mass production, who famously primarily produced expensive wallpaper that only the rich of his time could afford.
Ideally, everyone would consume less things, because that requires less extractive resource gathering and energy use, and less potentially dangerous or tedious work being done to create those things. But, if Vimes boots theory doesn’t hold, and it isn’t cheaper to buy something expensive and buy it once, then the argument made by craftspeople and degrowthers cannot come from a structure of rationalised consumer economics - instead as an argument of morality, aesthetics, or sentimentality. Unpacking the class implications to this is vital for those interested in the development of a sustainable material culture.