Most of the examples I’ve found that approach the originals in quality are $200 or more. I want to know if anyone tracks one down for less than $150, because I’d likely own 2-3 of them before the year’s out if they do. 8x the supposedly inflation-adjusted price of the original would be, from what I can tell, a bargain.

Your note that a dress per year felt like a lot is exactly my point: if I had to pay $150 per blue-collar work shirt I’d feel like I was doing pretty great if I could responsibly buy a couple per year. IOW, buying similar quality goods, our alleged improvements in QOL are significantly diminished.

[edit] if you look into what decently-constructed (not even finely-made! Just, like, not shit) dresses made with fabrics that aren’t mostly or entirely plastic cost, they’re hundreds of dollars today, even for fairly simple ones, especially midi-length or longer (as there’s more fabric than in a mini)

And as a reminder blue collar work was _an improvement_ over the default which was agricultural work. Most workers in the US could not afford to buy clothing from a catalog in the 1930s.

The dress comparison was as opposed to her peer group who wore clothes made out of seed bags.

I do get that the specific type I called out might have some functional equivalent that's simply a different style & material but is just as good, but not that cheap, they don't. Under $150, probably, sure. Under $50? No.

This suggests that the cost of clothing has inflated at more like 3x the nominal inflation rate, despite the existence of $18 (or cheaper!) shirts—the inflation was eaten up by worsening quality, rather than showing up in prices, but like for like, even with a generous "functional equivalent" accounting, the change was more like $0.79 -> $50+ than $0.79 -> ~$18—your "equivalent" dollar under the latter calculation in-fact buys less.

Your own example is an interesting one because a) it’s very hard to compare clothing by objective quality b) you’re changing the goal posts. I’ve found a carhart product that nearly exactly matches your specification and msrp’s for $40. I’ve seen discounters selling it for $25. Which is getting very close to your specific target.

My pet peeve is automated checkouts and ordering kiosks. These save stores and venues on labor costs by making the customers do the work for the store. For free, and disproportionally wasting customers' time.

(In many cases this applies to self-service in general.)

Based on what I’ve heard, it may be wasting time somewhere like Germany where the staff are scanning your items at lightning speed. However, here in Poland self-checkout is where you go to save time. Human-staffed checkouts are and have always been slow like an iceberg. Now and before self-checkout was ever a thing. I was relieved when they were introduced, precisely thanks to the time saved. I hate waiting in queues.

All self-checkout machines are moody and lock up if you so much as look at it funny. It would be somewhat acceptable if there was always a dedicated employee delegated solely to assist and unlock the machines, but stores cheap out even on that.

Now, you just need to deal with individual people being slow partially because it’s not their job and partially because it’s a lot less efficient to have a little kiosk vs a conveyer belt. Not to mention if you want to buy something that a store locks up you need to wait for them to go get it. Progress?

Also keep in mind that the quality and durability of that dress, and similarly-priced clothing of the era, made it possible to not need to buy new every season. That dress could be expected to last for years, longer with simple repairs.

Also, shoes are even worse than clothing for declining price/decreasing quality.

Oddly, the low end getting worse while prices also go up has made $200+ good leather shoes more attractive, LOL. Though I expect we’re about to either see most of those companies go out of business, or hike prices $100 or so in a short period of time, given post-2021 labor price increases. They’ve got to be hurting for margin right now.

On the flip side, four years is nothing. I have shoes I bought over thirty years ago, and all I've ever done is replace the insoles. Even the laces are original.

I'd say over four years of this a few days a week on a $9 pair of sneakers is pretty decent. They'll likely hit at least six or seven before replacement.

And yeah, I have some nice dress shoes that I've had for twenty years that pretty much look like the day I bought them. They get worn like 2-3 times a year. I also have leather cowboy boots I bought over 15 years ago that had their heels replaced a couple of years ago and are otherwise still in great shape. Both were more than $9 though. I think the boots were like $110 back when I bought them at Cavender's. The comment I was replying to:

> I can’t friggin’ believe how bad $70 sneakers can be these days

Even in the 90s my sneakers usually fell apart within a few years, and I rarely even owned $70 sneakers back then even adjusted for inflation. These days I can get sneakers for about $15 that last just about as long as the sneakers I owned in the 90s. That's the equivalent of buying ~$6 shoes in 1990 by many inflation calculators.

These are my cheap sneakers, a little bit different but the same brand and general style:

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Athletic-Works-Men-s-Banded-Jogge...

One pair, $230, made in USA. Just looked it up, are now 10 years old. Perfectly fine and at this rate will last another 10, then be resoled and last another 20. These cost $440 now.

The other, which I used more often actually, made in I don't know where, are now almost 20 years old and still perfectly fine as well, tho the outsoles will need work soon.

I basically switch between the two whenever I need to wear some winter boots, except for when it's super cold, then I take out the Baffins, which are the only boots that have kept my feet warm no matter what.

In the same timeframe I've run through regular sneakers of the ~$50 kind from Costco about once per year (and I also keep 2 pairs around so I never have the same ones on two days in a row)

> Go look at what it costs to get a chambray work shirt (where we got the term “blue collar”, so, made for physical labor, not something fancy) made with similar-quality fabric and construction to a common 1940s or 1950s offering in a Sears catalog.

> How do you know they were better made back then?

I think it's pretty clear based on what I've read about purchasing behavior back then: people would own a relatively small quantity of clothes (compared to today), which they'd wear for a long time. That just wouldn't be a tenable strategy given modern quality.

Also, historically, stuff in the Sears catalog wasn't super special high-end stuff. It was common mass market stuff.

I think the point being made by the OP is that it might be a tenable strategy if you were to spend an equivalent portion of your income on said clothes - which would be ‘very expensive’ by modern standards.

one problem though. My clothing would also last noticeably longer if I was hand-washing it. How much longer I don't actually know, but some of the dresses that was passed to me from older generations have never seen the inside of a washing machine. I also can find similar fabric in some stores, so, theoretically, some clothes today would also live for decades.

We have to adjust to washing machines and our washing habits. Some people I know wash their jeans every week. Every. Week. On a high speed. Yeah no shit they would fall apart in a year, that's like 20-30 washings in a year if they had 2 pairs.

> one problem though. My clothing would also last noticeably longer if I was hand-washing it.

While modern clothing might last longer if hand washed, the question is how long. Up-thread it was noted an old $18 (adjusted for inflation) work shirt has the quality features of a $200+ shirt today. I'm under the impression that no amount of babying would allow many modern clothing items to last a long as people used to wear their clothes.

And then we have to adjust washing habits to ongoing loss of quality^W^W^W progress of clothes.

This hit me once I started to see ads for laundry detergents supposedly able to clean clothes in cold water, like 20℃ or less - what's happening is, the fabrics and colors got so bad they start to degrade quickly even in 30℃ or 45℃ programs. The market, instead of giving us more durable clothes, decided to give us more high-tech detergent.

Oh, and this is sold under the guise of being eco-friendly - cold water = less energy. Even if that's a valid gain, I think it's not what's driving the existence of those detergents. Rather, they're the "fix" to the problem of low-quality clothes, and its existence only lets the quality get even worse (and further enabling the "fast fashion" phenomenon).

The sad thing is, if one wanted to buy tools of any sort that weren't Harbor Freight, you'd go to another store and get the exact same quality but with different colored plastic handles that just cost twice as much. And instead of tool steel, they're made out of whatever pot metal happened to be around that day.

Furniture is now almost always made out of something like cardboard, compared to the real wood that it was constructed from in that era. It would amuse me as a child when I'd watch some old film and the people had all their worldly possessions piled up on top of the Model T or maybe even a cart, and I couldn't at the time understand why they were bothering to do that if they had to flee. Well, because I'd do the same if I could somehow afford dining room chairs that weren't cheap junk.

Someone in another forum was complaining about Pyrex cookware, which is hardly some luxury good itself. Apparently they've not been made of the proper borosillicate glass in a long time, and so they're no longer really oven-safe.

I think it's a bit more than that: those possessions not only weren't cheap junk, they also probably consisted of a significant fraction of that family's total wealth.

It's a good example of the question: "where is your generational wealth stored up?"

For homeowner types it's in your real property and the house sitting on top of it. A home and land are assets that also come with significant costs for maintenance and upkeep. And homeowners are in ridiculous situations of living childfree in a 4BR/6BA filling up with litter boxes, or their kids all flee the nest and don't want Mom and Dad's old place at all? Owning land, however, is a good way to ensure that a family invests in their local community and cares about the direction it takes, because they're not liable to pull up their stakes and go elsewhere.

So a century ago, and probably for hundreds of years, if a family didn't own land, I can see furniture as the soundest investment for generational wealth. Because sturdy furniture can be used by anyone for a long time, and its maintenance costs can be minimal. So you sit in your great-grandfather's chair, and occasionally needing to move, hopefully find ways to take it all along with you. Sadly in an emergency, transportation costs and logistics can outstrip their value now. All the time I see people abandoning furniture because they didn't account for how unwieldy it becomes with time. But furniture and clothing are so replaceable, interchangeable, and nearly fungible, it's now a lousy way to store up wealth.

So where's your generational wealth built? What will your great-grandchildren enjoy when the world's a different place? Your 401(k)? A McMansion? Your Prius?

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