Do you know what you’re getting?
A number of years ago we bought a new bath tub for our master bathroom. The tub looked something like this:
Man it looked great in the store. SO GREAT. It was luscious. Just look at it. So we bought it.
We couldn’t use the tub until the full bathroom rennovation was done. But once it was, I remember being so excited to try it out that first night. So I filled it up with piping hot water, tossed in some silly bath salts, and got ready to luxuriate.
The first thing I remember was that I couldn’t get comfortable. The sides were sloped in a way that forced me to slide down, vs sit up. I wanted to sit up, but I couldn’t. Or, I should say, if I put my arms outside the tub to hold on I could, but then only half of my body would be in the water. So I’d have this weird mix of hot and cold. It wasn’t right.
Then I noticed that the water was cooling off quite a bit faster than I’d expected. Ah ha, the tub was wide and shallow which meant a lot of surface area for heat to dissipate. Not good. The only remedy was to fill the thing with scalding hot water so it would stay hotter longer, but I was aiming for a soak, not a burn.
Then I realized what happened. We were duped. We bought something that was in-store good, not at-home good.
This happens a lot. The more sensational the claims, the more features on the box, the more something promises to do, the more likely you are to buy something in-store good. It looks great on the floor, it looks amazing in the showroom, the demo’s impressive, but once you remove it from the perfect setting, the perfect lighting, the “I need it” moment, it fails to deliver when you actally get it home.
Now, wait… Couldn’t I have gotten in the tub at the showroom to get a sense of the slope? Wouldn’t I have noticed I’d have slid down the side? In theory yes, but in practice no. You can’t exactly try a tub at a showroom, unless you take baths with clothes on. A clothed body (esp one with grippy shoes on or a belt that creates friction) hugs a curve much differently than a wet, naked, slippery one does. And the heat dissipation part really had to be experienced to even be considered. It just wasn’t something I thought about.
So, now when I buy things I think about them differently. Whenever I’m driven to make an over-enthusiastic purchase, I stop. Why am I so excited about this? Is it the presentation or the product? How’s this going to transition from showroom to living room? What am I going to be doing with this thing? Is it the same as how I’m experiencing it at the store?
So it’s not that an in-store product is bad. In fact it’s very good! It’s just good in the wrong way and wrong place (for you). Making something in-store good is easy. But we don’t live in controlled environments dripping with psychological, consumerism traps. Aim for at-home good.
