In spite of everything, you can think of, you do not have to get what you pay

About six months ago I walked into a store in St. Johns Wood in London and came up with the most expensive gift, I've never bought it. It was a brown suede handbag from Gucci, the £ 1.380 (€ 1.755) cost, but was marked by "only" 550 pounds. I wore it in a victorious, transferring, high and round the kitchen with their prancing. My youngest child looked at the bag, then seized on the receipt I had carelessly dropped. "Oh my God!" He said. "They spent £ 550 on it?" I tried to explain that it was 60 percent from the bag and was very well done. If I use it every day for three years, it would cost less than 50p per end wear. He shook his head. "You're crazy." How right he was. In a week began to bag a goal, and after 150 carries the deer had been rubbed on one side, shiny bald spots. Last weekend I was in the store where the woman behind the counter looked at me with clear disapproval and said back, I have brought against the wrong kind of overcoat. In some ways it was right to send me packing. Missed the bag and I deserve each other. With the purchase, I think the basic mistake, I was for something useful, where to do pay for things. In fact, what I bought the idea was that I wanted to be a Princess Caroline of Monaco, beautiful girl who seems stifled research in the Gucci ads. Luxury bags, as I remembered from the study of economics, are positional goods. The more expensive they are, the more people want them. There is a second, more important, something tells me that the bag. It is not expensive means better. This lesson is important, and make sure that I'm learning, I decided to use the bag for the next three years anyway, and when I look at his bare patches to say out loud: you can not get what you pay for. The best knife I've ever had came from Ikea and cost about £ 7 I have a drawer full of knives Sabatier are expensive all useless. Basics Sainsbury chocolate biscuits cost 40p for 30 biscuits. They're pretty good - much nicer than the sickly taste of the range of difference, which cost about 40p each. Cheap clothes can be waste, or they can be good. The same is true for most costly. The same is true with cars, wine and restaurants. Some things - like clothes dryer - are actually better than cheap, because it can go wrong less, that with them. The lack of a relationship between price and quality is even more evident in the labor market. Paid more than your colleagues does not mean that you are better on your work. It simply means that you probably scream louder. There are many economic studies indicate that this address. My favorite was by two economists who have carefully researched French in 32 Cuban cigars to the conclusion that the good and the cost was very independent. But despite these findings, we do not have to believe that we get what we pay, and this belief has a distorting effect. The market price would equate supply and demand, but that does not remotely effective because the application is based on ignorance and prejudice. Curiously, the large number of reviews on the Internet for every product ever made does not really help. You can spend hours reading the reviews online restaurant meal and still get missed. You can roll consumption tests and yet end up with a fridge-freezer, which is both ugly and terribly noisy. What we need instead of rules of thumb to help us decide what to buy. Last week, when leafing through a surprisingly readable report of the Artemis Income Fund, I came across this: "When Peter Mayle, author and resident of Provence, states:" In France there is a simple and rough, if you eat when you opt for the third wine down, it is usually very good value. "We like to think we can say equities." Target cheaper third is a great idea. I have long used something similar to wine in restaurants and bald now, with one eye on my Gucci bag, do the same with everything. I just tried with face cream and I rejoice in the result. The face cream is the third most expensive La Prairie. It costs $ 3,000 (€ 2,450) for a small jar of caviar, and includes the distribution on your face. Cheapest The third is much more attractive. Sudocrem is £ 3.50 for a large pot. It could be for diaper rash, but Cheryl Cole swears by it. And if, as it happens, do I.