I stopped at a dollar store yesterday.
I needed some clipboards and some core foam boards. Each item was around $1 and I figured it was
an amazing deal. Except that…
I needed to decorate the clipboards with scrapbooking paper (which I had
purchased previously). I peeled off the
protective plastic wrap to discover that one of the clips was loose from its
board. Fortunately, I had purchased extra
clipboards for a later project so I could use some of the extra clipboards for
this weekend’s project, return the defective one later, and still have my
decorated clipboards ready for Monday.
The foam core boards were something else. They are normally about $7 at the craft
store, so having them for less than $2 was a bargain; or so I thought. As I starting cutting them with an sharp work
knife (I needed to make 6 squares out of each board), the black covering was
ungluing itself from the foam AND the foam was breaking instead of
cutting. My squares looked awful.
So what did I learn from this? Well, cheap is often a synonym of poor
quality. Not always, especially if you
find something on sale, but too often I’m disappointed in the poor quality of
items I buy. Most of my clipboards are
fine – they are wooden clipboard with a metal clip which is quite robust. And knowing I was on a time crunch, I made
sure I had a couple of extra ones. And
even if I decided to throw out the defective board, my average cost per
clipboard is very low.
But what about my frustration level at using poor quality items? What
about the angst at trying to solve a problem that should not have been there?
What about my panic when looking at my foam squares that are not so good
looking and needed in 2 hours? What is
worth it? Possibly not…
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