What is the formal name for the "buy cheap, buy twice" effect?

Question

I am looking for the proper term for the effect in which a lower price solution leads to higher hidden costs. For example,

• Batteries that are slightly cheaper than the leading brand, but have a significantly lower capacity.
• Old laptops which cost less than new ones, but which then take significantly more time to do anything.
• Incandescent lightbulbs that are cheaper to initially purchase than LED lightbulbs, but have a significantly shorter lifespan and a significantly higher running cost.
• Paint which costs less to purchase than the leading brand, but requires more coats, so requires to more time and ultimately higher paint spend.
• Old petrol cars which are cheaper to initially purchase than electric cars, but running them (fuel, maintenance, tax...) costs significantly more.

Sample sentence

Trying to save money by purchasing cheap shoes is a _ because they will wear out faster, forcing you to buy more.

Answer 1

The term is "false economy"¹;

An apparent financial saving that in fact leads to greater expenditure.

The most popular false economies in Britain as of 2013² included,

1. Just paying the minimum amount off your credit card each month
2. Buying counterfeit goods
3. Lying on your insurance application to get a cheaper premium
4. Going abroad without travel insurance
5. Not having your car serviced
6. Buying cheap shoes
7. Buying cheap paint
8. Buying cheap loo roll
9. Saving money by not having your boiler serviced
10. Comparing only price, not quality
11. Not having breakdown cover for your car
12. Gym memberships
13. Buying a cheap car
14. Buying a cheap bra
15. Mobile phone contracts
16. Buying cheap moisturiser
17. Shopping at £1 shops
18. Doing-it-yourself rather than employing a tradesman
19. Trying to avoid baggage charges on budget flights 
20. Multi-buy or 3 for 2 offers

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¹Lexico Dictionaries | English. (n.d.). FALSE ECONOMY | Meaning & Definition for UK English | Lexico.com. [online] Available at: https://www.lexico.com/definition/false_economy [Accessed 28 Jan. 2022].

²Your Money. (2013). Revealed: the top 20 false economies. [online] Available at: https://www.yourmoney.com/credit-cards-loans/revealed-the-top-20-false-economies/ [Accessed 28 Jan. 2022].

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Answer 2

While not yet a formal name, I read an interesting article this week where, in the UK, campaigner Jack Monroe has introduced the "Vimes Boots Index". This was inspired by her criticism of the official government method used to calculate the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for tracking inflation.

She believed the CPI didn't accurately reflect the fact that inflation often hits poorer people harder than those that are well off.

As per an article in The Guardian:

The Vimes Boots Index is named in honour of Terry Pratchett’s creation Sam Vimes, who in the Discworld novel Men at Arms lays out the “Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness”.

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money,” wrote Pratchett. “Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

The Pratchett estate has authorised the use of the name, tweeting its own Pratchett quote in support of Monroe’s campaign.

Answer 3

Another phrase for this is, Penny wise, pound foolish. (After the currency of the United Kingdom, but also used in countries whose currency is called the dollar.) I’m told some places also say, “Penny wise, dollar foolish.”

A related Americanism is nickel-and-dime. (This means paying or charging small amounts of money, so it can mean numerous small fees that add up, or buying the cheapest goods possible.) Over the past century of inflation, stores selling the cheapest knick-knacks went from being called “nickel stores” to “nickel-and-dime” or “five-and-dime” stores, to “dime store,” “two-bit” (twenty-five cents) as a synonym for cheap and shoddy, to “ninety-nine-cent store” and “dollar store,” and now perhaps “dollar-and-up” or “five below.”. Of those, “dime-store novel” is a genre, “five and dime” is remembered nostalgically if at all, but the others have hung on as synonyms for cheap and shoddy merchandise.

Another is, “Step over a dollar to pick up a dime.”

An example of “Penny wise, pound foolish” in use was when the executives of The Simpsons ordered him to write one clip show per season, to pad the show out with cheap episodes, writer Jon Vitti refused writing credit and wrote the episode he was ordered to under the pseudonym, “Penny Wise.” (The Writers’ Guild of America allows screenwriters to do this when their employer has forced them to write something they object to, under protest.) When the executives ordered another, “The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular,” Vitti and his co-writer David Silverman were credited under the pseudonyms “Penny Wise” and “Pound Foolish.” (Silverman was from New York City.)

Answer 4

There's "shortsighted", to mean someone who doesn't look at long-term effects. There's also "short-term planning" or "short time horizon". More specific to spending is "Penny wise, pound foolish".

careful about small amounts of money but not about large amounts —used especially to describe something that is done to save a small amount of money now but that will cost a large amount of money in the future The plans to cut funding are penny-wise and pound-foolish.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/penny-wise%20and%2Fbut%20pound-foolish

Answer 5

"You get what you pay for" is only roughly the idea, and is only said by itself -- not as part of a sentence -- but makes up for it by being universally known. It means cheap stuff is often not very good, but not in any specific way. It might break faster, or not work as well, or not be as useful... . It implies you may have wasted your money.

It might be used: "these shoes I got on sale are falling apart -- I guess you get what you pay for" or "those rebuilt computers are pretty cheap", "yeah, but you get what you pay for -- the specs are terrible".

Answer 6

That could be seen as a simple fallacy or an urban legend.

This assertion is built on 3 disputable premisses:

1. products are always marketed at their real value,
2. quality is expensive ergo non-expensive can't be quality,
3. "quality" implies durability.

If quality => high price is verified most of the time (although cheap labor can also produce quality work), nothing says that high price => quality. That would be if products were always marketed at their real value, but a common marketing strategy consists specifically in raising prices to build a perception of quality, which essentially is hacking the "buy cheap, buy twice" fallacy. Or raising prices artificially can even be used to create an exclusivity among consumers, which is the starting point of luxury goods.

In automotive and sport technical equipment (clothes, shoes, bike parts, hiking attire, etc.), ultralight products are usually the most expensive while also being less durable, which is a trade-off for weight savings. Quality is defined by ISO 9000 as the ability of the product to meet user's needs within user's budget, nothing is said about durability being a requirement. For example, any moving part put into motion by a motor consumes an energy proportional to its mass, so lightweight parts can reduce operating costs (mostly energy bills, but also bearings wear and shaft fatigue, meaning maintenance and replacement costs) while being less durable and more expensive at the same time.

So, the third premisses is plain wrong, the first and second can't be guaranteed, overall this assertion just sounds like a fallacy passing as dad's wisdom.

Answer 7

All five possible answers can fit under one slogan: "A miser pays twice"

Answer 8

This idiom is not to rush decisions without a degree of surety. When making Boolean Yes/No decisions, the top-down question is essentially - Can the desired outcome be predicted adequately in order to proceed?

Similarly, the carpentry idiom 'Measure twice, cut once' has a similar meaning. Input data must be checked before execution, and a single erroneous measurement cannot be demonstrated as True or False without a check.

Measuring once is rapid, but leaves the outcome to the mercy of other variance (so-called 'luck') Measuring twice reduces the fallibility considerably. Buying 'cheap' means something is missing, defective or there are better options available

Answer 9

Cost-effective

effective or productive in relation to its cost.

Also see: cost-effectiveness analysis