Entries Tagged 'Purchasing Advice' ↓

Very recently, I was informed of a new service called Quamut.  Launched by Barnes and Noble, Quamut is a service that offers many guides to life - their slogan is “The go to how to”.  I was immediately interested, and even had the opportunity to receive a couple of guides to read from Barnes and Noble.  Quamut refers to one of their guides as a Quamut, but in our report, I’ll be calling it a guide to dissolve most of the confusion.  …yeah, it sounds a bit weird, but I think you’ll eventually get what I was trying to say.  If not, just ignore the statement and continue.

You might think that I exaggerate when I say that a Quamut serves as the guides of life - I do not.  Quamut has guides on pretty much everything, from songwriting to fly fishing.  I received guides on Home Plumbing, Basic Cooking, as well as Buying a Hybrid Car.  While I’m not an expert on either of these subjects, and thus, can not evaluate them from that perspective, I can tell you that I did learn a lot from all of these guides to-go.  These guides to-go cost USD$2.95, but Quamut offers guides for free over the Internet.  Furthermore, a different .pdf of a guide to-go is available for a free download daily, which serves as extra incentive to check out their site regularly.  In that sense, I think they did a top-notch job in making the site very attractive.

Very Easy on the Eyes

As I scanned my Quamut guide, I noticed that the important information popped out at me - which is because Quamut took care to highlight the most important vocabulary with bolded text or in a red colour.  Furthermore, the diagrams included were  very useful in helping me build an idea of what kind of information they were trying to convey.  Although I found the text to be a bit small for my taste, I guess that’s justifiable to save on the amount of material used - plus, I know that I would much rather carry around a zippy, thin folder of information as opposed to a lugging around a huge binder.

Strictly for Newbies Only

While I did find the guides to be good reading, I also took them to an expert - Jonathan, of APH Networks, for appraisal.  To be specific, he was interested in the guide on Buying a Hybrid Car.  He did report that while the guide was generally pretty accurate, the information seemed to be tilted towards persuading the reader to purchase a hybrid car, and on occasion didn’t show both sides of the story.  For example: many negative aspects of hybrids are not mentioned - such as the effects the nickel batteries have on the environment, or how the hybrid standards have been revised since the article was written, and in fact, the article overall looks more like a promotional article for hybrid vehicles.

From the perspective of a newbie, however, I found the Quamut guide to be very informative and comprehensive.  Because the errors were relatively minor, most of the information actually made perfect sense to me, although it did take me a while to absorb the whole thing - it’s actually quite a good amount of reading, in case you were wondering.

I guess the conclusion that we arrived at was that while Quamut guides are great for newbies, they should only be read by newbies and not by any experts - however, it’s not likely that experts will flock to read Quamut guides - if they’re so knowledgeable about a subject already, why would they read a guide for newbies (unless they wanted to teach, or were very modest)?

Final Conclusion

Quamut guides: if you want to learn something, they’re probably the best place to turn to.  Quamut’s guides are generally very accurate, although experts on certain subjects will be able to find a few errors scattered here and there.  The guides are available free, so I can’t see a reason not to - and if you end up loving them as much as I did, you’d probably be compelled to purchase .pdf’s of them for $2.95 or even the quality-printed guides that can be found at Barnes and Noble.

Thanks to Madison Dunn for informing me about Quamut, and taking the time and care to mail those Quamut guides!

I once impulsively bought a grey Adidas sweater, complete with a stitched brown Adidas logo, for $59.99 from a local mall. After walking out of the store, I immediately regretted it - how could I have been so stupid? When my trip to the mall ended, I had also ended up with a winter jacket that I got for a bit more than half the price of my sweater - back then, I felt as though the two had balanced each other out. A couple of weeks later, I ended up discovering a deal at a store where I picked the exact same Adidas sweater in black and with a camouflage logo for $29.99. Oh yeah, we’ll talk more about the jacket later.

Today, I still wear my more expensive grey Adidas sweater proudly, but the cheaper black Adidas sweater I keep tucked in my closet. I had found that the black Adidas sweater’s hood was oddly small - it didn’t fit my head properly when the grey Adidas sweater did. Also, the cuffs of the black Adidas sweater had worn out and lost its elasticity, whereas my grey Adidas sweater’s cuffs remain pretty elastic.

What’s my point?

1. The more expensive sweater lasted longer.

My grey Adidas sweater lasted me longer, which pays off much better than the $29.99 I paid for my other black Adidas sweater. I didn’t know it at the time, but I ended up paying for better quality - the store carrying the cheaper black Adidas sweater probably got it cheaper because there were a few manufacturer defects.

This goes double for consumer electronics - even though two extremely similar products, possibly from the same brand, range in price, don’t immediately turn away from the more expensive one. Being a stereotypical male, it’s harder for me to compare two types of fabrics and whatever when it comes to clothes - but in consumer electronics, the specifications are much more comparable. Does the more expensive version have more impressive specifications, or more durable material (i.e. try comparing a plastic computer case to a metal one).

In fact, that pretty much summed everything up - because it was of higher quality material (also, the logo on the more expensive sweater was stitched as opposed to the less expensive sweater’s logo being printed) and because it remained very durable, it lasted longer. The product’s life time always results in..

2. Two baddies don’t make a goodie.

True, I could’ve bought two black Adidas sweaters for the price of my grey Adidas sweater. We enjoy making remarks like that to make us feel like we got more value for our buck - but is this true? I would’ve gotten two lower-grade sweaters that I wouldn’t have been happy with, as opposed to one higher-grade sweater that I would wear for a longer period of time.

I know a couple of people that got a cell phone a little bit later than when I got my Sony Ericsson w600i, which wasn’t a cheap phone by standards set a couple of years ago. I then saw them “upgrade” just a single year later to another phone - that my w600i probably could still outperform. What’s the point of buying two phones that suck, when you could’ve gotten one phone that rocked - that one phone would last you over a longer period of time, and you won’t have to recycle as much plastic.

Only in Certain Situations does Paying More Lead to Product Satisfaction

I’m not saying you should always pay more for a product, but you should always consider it. What are the long-term benefits, as opposed to saving a nickel or a dime (or a bit more than that) here and there? However, as you might’ve guessed, it’s not just paying more that can lead to product satisfaction. I’ll be explaining other factors that can impact product satisfaction in the next while - stay tuned!

Top Image by: rodrigo senna

Second Image by: riverwatcher09