MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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I was just looking at the other thread https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/really-expensive-stuff-that-is-definitely-worth-the-money/
IMO most things that are more expensive are worth the money. In fact I am struggling to think of anything that isnt worth the premium over a standard product.?
Brand new cars
Edit: With most things there is a peak 'value' and above that the it's not worth it - where the peak is differs for each person.
Cheap coffee is rubbish, mid price coffee is good, stupidly expensive coffee pooped out of some wild animal is probably not worth it.
Trident nuclear weapons.
FunkyDunc
Free MemberIn fact I am struggling to think of anything that isnt worth the premium over a standard product.?
How about paid membership?
UK tax , i pay in 20-40% of my wage, my employers adds NI on top, i then spend it to pay 20% VAT on the majority of stuff i buy. plus all the indirect tax, airport/flight duty, vehicle tax, alcohol duty..
yay i get my grey bins emptied every other week
new cars for me, new electric cars, i'll stick to my £20 vehicle tax pa that i can recharge in under 5 mins at the petrol station
Branded medicines - ibuprofen, paracetamol, diarrhoea relief etc. It's literally the same
Cleaning products - detergent is detergent, bleach is bleach etc.
Posh skin cream, the cheapest does the same
Champagne - horrible stuff ruining a decent wine with CO2 making it really acidic
L'Oréal (except No More Tears shampoo which was really good when the kids were small)
Fancy restaurants, 100 quid a head for a 5 course tasting menu or similar.
Anything with a Apple or Garmin badge. 30-40% markup for very little extra.
Champagne
Good answer although not for the reason given. Almost every region in France has its own sparkling wine. There are some great options for much less money
My last two car purchases have been new EVs bought cash. 🙂
Spotify, Netflix, Amazon prime, e-bikes... . But I'm sure there are plenty of people who think all of those are good value for money
Ridiculously expensive watches if you view them as a way of telling the time rather than an item of personal jewellery / adornment / a status symbol, which is what they actually are.
Posh cars with ridiculously opulent interiors.
S****y hotels. All you really need is a clean, comfortable bed and a shower not some sort of day-long snippet of a fantasy lifestyle. Once, on some godawful media trip, I sniffed too loudly and a uniformed lackey immediately appeared with a tissue. Ridiculous.
Any car beyond a basic small one.
Wellies that cost over £100 cos they have a functionless buckle on the side
Trendy t-shirts like the yoot buy just so they can be like their fave influencer eg. https://www.dsquared2.com/gb/-cool-fit-t-shirt/S74GD1222S23009900.html#cgid=men
Las Vegas - just got back from a sales conference over there. Horrific.
Shoulder chips
Trident nuclear weapons.
Most military hardware bought by the UK government is never used. Well, not for actual 'defence', anyway. And the rare times it does get used, is invariably to murder innocent people. Makes somebody rich somewhere though. <br /><br /><br />
Fancy restaurants, 100 quid a head for a 5 course tasting menu or similar.
Go it to disagree there. I went to such a place last year, and it was one of the single most amazing eating experiences I've ever had. Every little morsel was art in food form. When you consider the work that goes into producing every dish, not to mention the quality of ingredients, then it actually ends up as worth it. <br /><br /> https://www.nestfood.co.uk/about
I saw a bicycle in a shop recently that was apparently over £12,000. And it didn't even have a motor.
Hypercars and the like, are the obvious I guess, although that's clearly the point for some of them, but especially the brands that are owned by Audi and VW and are clearly trading on what they used to be rather than the thing they are now...Saw one of those Bentley Bentaygas this morning which is so obviously an Audi Q7 in a posh frock you have to wonder at the point of it. (other than the obvious 'more money than sense' bit)
Premium Economy seats on airlines...
Fancy restaurants, 100 quid a head for a 5 course tasting menu or similar.
Gonna disagree there. While its expensive it does not feel like a waste or being ripped off given how good the food and service is. Its not an everyday thing for sure but as a very rare treat its certainly worth it to me
You can easily do in £100 a head in a fairly normal restaurant with drinks.
the met office and weather warnings apparently. 😉
Many many branded products, where you are paying more for the logo on the product than for the product itself.
As an example, I got some aftershave for Father's Day.
It came with a free water bottle - branded Burberry.
While chatting with someone at work about it, I jokingly said that if you actually bought a Burberry branded water bottle it would probably cost £50.
Had a quick look on the website - they had a basic Burberry branded screwtop aluminium water bottle for £80. You could purchase the exact same water bottle with no branding on it from Amazon for ~£6.
EDIT - you could argue that aftershave itself falls into this category. £60 for some smelly water.
I agree with Apple, it's just overpriced
New cars are ridiculous, I've never had one and never want one
Rolex
Zoe.
Seen the adverts, so investigated, as was quite interested.
300 quid for the testing kit, then 60 quid a month if you pay monthly. insane money for what will be a fairly generic meal plan, with some alterations for some blood test anomalies.
Most military hardware bought by the UK government is never used.
The whole point of Trident is that it will never be used. If it used then it has failed.
We need to be ramping up our spending on military hardware at the moment. If Trump gets elected, he could easily pull the US out of NATO and then all of the European NATO members will have to build their own strength.
The UK government's Rwanda policy.
300 quid for the testing kit, then 60 quid a month if you pay monthly. insane money for what will be a fairly generic meal plan, with some alterations for some blood test anomalies.
Genuinely life changing for diabetics though. (I self funded it for 4 odd years prior to it being available on the NHS)
How about paid membership?
I agree not worth the money IMO as I gave up on the mag years ago
tomhoward
Shoulder chips
Nonsense. Mine was free!
My first thought was watches that only tell the time/date and cost over £100.
Quite a lot of PPE bought in 2020-21.
Most military hardware bought by the UK government is never used. Well, not for actual ‘defence’, anyway.
That's not how defence works. Hardware doesn't need to be used in anger to provide defence. In fact the hope* is that it never is. And it is of course 'used' regularly to provide initial and refresher training, proof (quality control) and stock rotation.
*not always justified, obvs.
NYC
XTR and XX1 should be first on the list though. I mean XTR especially; is terrible value for money.
You can easily do in £100 a head in a fairly normal restaurant with drinks<br /><br />
You must be rich! 😉
£100 a head just on food, I'm pretty sure, won’t get you a tasting menu in a Michelin starred restaurant now.
You can easily do in £100 a head in a fairly normal restaurant with drinks<br />You must be rich! 😉
https://seagers.wales/grillhouse-menu/
Just down the road, and it's a popular but unexceptional place to eat in quite a scruffy suburb.
If I ate a scampi starter (£8), a tomahawk steak (£30) with a side of garlic bread (£5) and garlic mushrooms (£7), I'd be up to £50 already. Add a pint when I got there, a bottle of decent-ish wine, and a dessert, and it wouldn't be too far short of £100. I could probably squeeze a coffee into the budget as well, and a taxi because I've drunk far too much and am stuffed - why did I have the garlic mushrooms? 😀
dogs. smelly noisy buggers that the bad behavior of which most owners turn a blind eye to.
Stuff (mainly) women put in their faces/lips- fillers, Botox etc. To me even the ones that must have spent a fortune still look really odd and false, why do people do it?
This might a controversial one around these parts:
VW transporters.
Theyre no more reliable then anything else, and when they do break the parts are megabucks compared to their tinny PSA colleagues.
- they are worth more because they last longer
- they last longer because people are more prepared to throw money at them to keep them going
- people throw money at them because they hold their value
- they hold their value because they are worth more?
Nice to drive, if what you really want is a big car though.
Oh, and anything with "Balenciaga" written on it
Wot tyres for sticking to your running shoes?
i always scratch my head when they say apple, yes definately more expensive than rivals, but usage and years they last, we are talking pennies per usage
And you still don't get a spell checker it seems!
"Usage": will be extactly the same as with a PC/Android shirly?
"Years they last": I don't think there's any difference. I'm working at my desk using a Dell Optiplex I bought for peanuts and works perfectly doing everything I need to do. under my desk is a 24" iMac that one day decided wasn't going to show anything on the screen any longer and is now scrap. It's wasn't that old.
"Plus they hold value unlike many cheap phones": That's partly 'marketing' and lets not forget a a cheaper phone doesn't cost as much in the first place!
Gonna disagree there. While its expensive it does not feel like a waste or being ripped off given how good the food and service is. Its not an everyday thing for sure but as a very rare treat its certainly worth it to me
You can easily do in £100 a head in a fairly normal restaurant with drinks.
And that fine, value is subjective. £100 was just a figure I used - if I'd said £200 people would have commented that it doesn't have to cost that much.
Don’t agree with the wellies one, my Aigle wellies have done three winters now with lots of use, and the buckle is good to snug them up on my calf and stop socks riding down. I’d previously tried various cheaper wellies and they were either heavy, uncomfortable, didn’t last more than one season, or all of the above. I do think over £200 is getting silly though, the RRP has gone up almost £100 since I bought my last pair!
I really don’t get the watch thing either, it’s just showing off. A £20 Casio will keep time as well as anything.
-Beach Holidays, get an electric heater and close your eyes with a shoreline soundtrack on spotify and its literally the same experience but with less screaming children
-Grass Seed, cheap stuff does the same as the expensive stuff, grows and turns into grass
-Carbon handlebars
-Bike Saddles
-Heinz Ketchup
-Drills, Ryobi are owned by the same company that owns Milwaukee
-Shotguns, if it fits you right and you've enough practice in you're definitely going to hit more clays with your £250 semi-auto Hatsan than Rupert with his 10k pair of Purdeys and red trousers who only dusts them off for the game bird season
-CP Company and Stone Island, infact North Face too, all cheaply made and poor quality. Let me throw Barbour International in there too but big up the stuff still coming out the South Shield Barbour factory that stull is still good, I like Barbour but avoid anything "Barbour International"
-Dentists
Posh skin cream, the cheapest does the same
I worked briefly for the company that actually manufactured the cream itself under contract (base plus most of the active ingredients), got shipped out all over europe in bulk containers. (IIRC they made something like 40% of the volume sold in Europe). Went out to canning plants to be put into retail jars by adding about tuppence worth of extra colouring and some fragrance.
They were buying it at 10-15p a litre.
Cost the place i was working about half that to make it, including running and maintaining the plant.
You could buy 1 and 5 litre bottles in the works shop at something like a quid a litre.
tjagain
Full Member
Any car beyond a basic small one.
As much as it pains me to agree with tj, I agree with tj. But only for most people. If you are just popping down the shops for groceries, a cheap hatchback is all you need. If you live in outback Australia, Africa, rural Texas, Alaska, etc., a heavy duty 4WD makes sense.
If all you're doing is web browsing and email, a high-end MacBook is just a waste of money. If you're making your living as a video editor or doing CAD work, a Mac Pro or pro-level workstation is worth the money.
Bike Saddles
I wonder about the ridiculously expensive 3D printed ones. On the face of it insanely overpriced, but ask me after 100 miles when my butt is just starting to grumble and I might give you a different answer. If they work as advertised that is. Which I honestly don't know.
Coffee from chain coffee shops (Starbuck, Costa etc).
(I've excluded independents because they can sometimes be worth it if you get a load of advice and coffee they've had a hand in sourcing/roasting/they just know what they're doing)
£100 a head just on food, I’m pretty sure, won’t get you a tasting menu in a Michelin starred restaurant now.
the three by me it will at lunchtime
+1 for not agreeing that fancy restaurants are a waste of money. They can be, but equally, they can be amazing experiences.
Also +1 for brand new cars being a waste of money, but someone has to buy them for 2nd hand cars to exist.
Finally +1 for super expensive (generally swiss) watches. I'd be afraid to go outside with that much "worth" on my wrist.
As much as it pains me to agree with tj, I agree with tj.
Bookmarked 🙂
Apart from keeping you dry in the rain?
Spooky! - word for word! 😱 👻
Anything with a Apple... badge. 30-40% markup for very little extra.<br /><br />
Again, got to strongly disagree there. I'm sure many Apple users will agree that their products are excellent value for money. My iPhone is more robust and reliable than any of the S-line Samsungs I've had. And it all syncs together seamlessly with my iMac, Apple Watch, iPad, various HomeKit accessories etc. The Android 'phones required myriad apps to do the same, and often wouldn't actually work. Life is too short to spend shouting and swearing at Microsoft and Android products. And when you consider just how well Apple products are made, to find something comparable form other brands, you tend to have to spend nearly as much at least. And still get an inferior product. Plus you can always sell an Apple device even years after you've bought it, thus recouping some of your initial outlay at least. . You'd probably have to pay someone to take your old Windows PC away. <br /><br />Bottom line is that something is generally always worth something to someone. Otherwise brands like Balenciaga wouldn't exist. Many of you happily spend thousands on pushbikes. Perspective is a rare commodity, it seems.
Audi A1 & A3.
These have just 'won' three places in the bottom 3 for both the new & also for used cars in the latest Consumers' Association / Which magazine unreliability test. Alongside Alfa Romeo, Audi also have the lowest overall score for reliability for brands across the UK market. Ouch; how the once mighty have fallen. It seems that even the very expensive e-Trons ae having widespread battery problems, with around a quarter of all EV Audis, including these, needing a full battery replacement whilst held by the original owner.
Apart from keeping you dry in the rain?
Both have roofs !
Life is too short to spend shouting and swearing at Microsoft and Android products. And when you consider just how well Apple products are made, to find something comparable form other brands, you tend to have to spend nearly as much at least. And still get an inferior product.
Depends on what you are using it for. If you use Excel for work, sticking with Windows makes sense-the Mac version of Office is different to the Windows version. My work requires some specialist apps that are only available for Windows and export data to Excel. I use an expensive scanner that dates back to Windows 7, but Windows 10 has the backwards compatibility to run it all. Apple just don't have that legacy support for hardware and software. That legacy support is worth a huge amount of money when you need it for your job.
@thols2 that's my only gripe with our Macs at home - MS Office.
Office doesn't come with Publisher either on the Mac - my Mrs runs the school magazine club so has to borrow my work laptop when not in school to use publisher.......
Other than that I'll take my Mac over a Windows PC any day!
https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/how-to-change-the-default-music-player-on-an-iphone/
Life is too short to spend shouting and swearing at Microsoft and Android products.
Think this is a you problem. I've had no issues with any of my "non-apple" products, everything just works. Unless i try to introduce apple stuff, then even the non-apple stuff gets grumpy.
The only thing i've had major, non-functioning, issues with is the two iphones i had from work.
Bathroom tiles and posh paint for walls both seem pointless to me.
On the Apple vs everyone else: I'm firmly on the side of paying a bit more for something I use all of the time that is beautifully well built (hardware and software), plays nicely with the other devices I/my family uses, and doesn't need to exploit any of my data/habits to subsidise the cost of building the hardware and software.
Google exploit all your data for advertising and close down decent services that don't make them money.
Windows laptops just aren't as nice as Macbooks. Even the high end ones.
If you game, or need to use legacy/niche software then fair enough.
Damn, got sucked into a stupid nerd argument. Buy what you want, it's all pretty good nowadays.
I worked briefly for the company that actually manufactured the cream itself under contract (base plus most of the active ingredients), got shipped out all over europe in bulk containers. (IIRC they made something like 40% of the volume sold in Europe). Went out to canning plants to be put into retail jars by adding about tuppence worth of extra colouring and some fragrance.<br />They were buying it at 10-15p a litre.<br />Cost the place i was working about half that to make it, including running and maintaining the plant.
You could buy 1 and 5 litre bottles in the works shop at something like a quid a litre.
I worked in R&D for these companies for a while. It was not inconsiderable, there is a lot of science and testing behind some of the higher end ones. Others will disagree, and i do question whether the science is genuinely worth it. So stuff may visibly reduce the appearance of wrinkles - but ageing is normal and beautiful... and while some would say that their appearance has a strong impact on their MH and wellbeing, that's a societal issue to fix, not one to throw science at particularly.
Then there's the marketing budget to pay for as well.....
I'm not sure that really expensive holidays are worth it.
A few years ago I went skiing with Scott Dunn. Everything was perfect. We had a ski guide/concierge, a chalet host and a personal chef between four of us. But I've had holidays that have been just as good where everything hasn't been perfect, and I think that the best experiences come when you have a bit of an adventure and maybe a little bit of a struggle. Part of the fun comes from sorting things out myself
I can also see why, if you're used to such service, you may end up having a complete melt down when things don't go entirely the way that you want it to.
Controversial: MTB clothing. £100+ for stuff that will get dirty and ripped within a few months
You know there are these things called washing machines, right? Granted you might rip them, but even riding around Calderdale with its multiple stone walls, I never manged to do any more than put a few holes in a jacket in 5 years. Personally I reckon that decent brands that think a bit more about ft and materials go a long way to make clothes that last a bit longer. (insert Vimes boots thing here)
I'm going to try that Beach Holiday simulation tip!
Like I said, controversial. I've bought a few jackets and trashed them after a crash. Plus, let's be honest, a polyester t shirt can be had for £10.
Don’t agree with the wellies one, my Aigle wellies have done three winters now with lots of use,
I concur. My Aigle Parcours are 15 years old and get a battering almost every day. They look as good as new. I recently repaired a thorn hole in the sole and I reckon they're now good for another 15. Mrs Bloke favours some Kath Kidson fashion type wellies which aren't cheap. They never seen to last more than 18 months.
Nurofen / Panadol etc. Exactly the same chemical formula as unbranded paracetamol and ibuprofen. It’s not like the factory has a vat of wonky carbon atoms to put in the cheaper version.
I think that the best experiences come when you have a bit of an adventure and maybe a little bit of a struggle
I agree. One of my most memorable and amazing holidays cost me about £20 for 3 days climbing in Fontainebleau.
Grabbed a spare place in a car, slept in a free "campsite", ate baguette, pasta and chocolate and managed the French side on one tank of fuel on the guys company fuel card. Nearly had to push it onto the chunnel though after doing 50 mph for an hour with the fuel light on.
So good and so memorable.
Memories are priceless.