Throughout life I didn’t care much with the quality of the items I purchased, I would try to take good care of my items regardless of their price.
This has worked out fairly well, I have items for several years happy with the use I made of them. During this time, I also haven’t had much money so price was always something I strongly considered. This was very nearly the main consideration when I purchased something.
Now that I’m focusing on purchasing less, I really want to invest in quality so I have items I love for as long as possible. You can take good care of something, but inevitably with use (especially daily use) that item will need to be replaced.
Thankfully, price doesn’t mean the best quality, although there is a thresh hold. There are plenty of luxury brands with clothing that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars but are absolutely not worth that much in a quality, but they do meet the thresh hold of being a quality garment. I want to switch your thinking from Price Conscious to Quality Conscious, purchase things for the long term (I would relate this to the number of uses you get out of the item).
Purchasing for quality requires making informed purchases, do your research to find good items, usually this will lead to finding good brands. Once you find good brands you don’t need to research as much when you buy something from that trustworthy company.
When you buy something cheap you realize it almost immediately and if you plan to use your items for years, this cheap items irritation will quickly lead to an annoyance. So you either stick with using the annoying item until you can replace it, or you avoid using it (because it’s so annoying) and find creative ways to still get the task done. In this instance you may find that you don’t need the item or a replacement. Perfect! But usually the creative way takes longer and the replacement is necessary.
Both these avenues are a direct result of purchasing something that wasn’t quality. You can’t return this item, because you’ve used it and if you spend the money now on a quality item (which I would recommend) the best thing you could can do is get rid of the old item (hopefully through donation, recycle, or resell). The one benefit from this is you know exactly what you want from the perfect item you now purchase.
Don’t put yourself through these ordeals anymore. Your time is worth more than that. Sometimes this is necessary to find great items for the price, but often you can tell if an item is worth what you will pay for it before you make your purchase. A game you can play is asking yourself if you’ll use this item once a week/month for the next 1, 3 or 5+ years.
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Photo is from a cool rooftop terrace of a hostel I stayed at in Zadar, Croatia.