Too Good for its Own Good.

I lost a crucial piece of pine dowel recently, while putting together some revolting flat pack furniture. I found a twig in the garden to replace it. It seemed to do the trick – the bamboo shoe cabinet is still standing, a few weeks later, in our entryway. Will it last months? Perhaps even a year or two? Will I loathe myself as much when it inevitably breaks as I did at the time I purchased it?

What do you reckon the people who design flatpack furniture are thinking when they provide you with a handful of soft plastic plugs and flimsy tacks to hold flaky sheets of low-grade MDF together? Are they thinking "this will stand the test of time"? Or perhaps "I wonder how many divorces this will provoke?"

I don't think they're thinking "gee, this is designed so well, it just might put us out of business". That might seem a preposterous hypothetical, in today's throwaway environment, but it is a very real possibility. Every now and then, people really do sit down to make a product as good as it can possibly be – and end up signing their own death warrant. It's happened before!

Go to Scotland, take a few whisky tours, and you'll come face-to-face with a few of these glorious ghosts of enterprise.

Not the whisky itself, obviously. Scotch whisky is the perfect drink, and highly consumable, and will forever be in demand. The distilleries are doing just fine. But many of the malt mills that grind the barley to make the whisky are so damn good, so damn sturdy, and so damn reliable, that the companies that made them are long gone. Porteus and Boby were the two firms most famous for this Pyrrhic fate. They designed such robust whisky mills that by the 1960s virtually every distillery in operation had one – but then ... uh-oh ... no-one ever needed to buy a replacement. Worse, no-one needed anything more from them. The machines were straightforward to run and fairly low-maintenance, and there was rarely even a need for repairs or replacement parts because they were made of such top-notch materials to begin with. So the phones didn't ring, and there was nothing to do, and the mill-making companies had to shut their doors.

Many of these mills still operate in distilleries today, some over a century old – they are solid steel workhorses, rolling and grinding grain into grist, day after day producing the perfect blend of husk, grit and flour for mashing so that we may sip the perfect dram. But today's whisky makers have been left in a pickle: only a handful of people know how to fix the milling machines on the very rare occasions something does go wrong, and if you need another mill, well – where do you go to buy one? Some distilleries have even commissioned brand new mills made from the blueprints of those original machines, requiring only a few minor tweaks to the design to meet modern workplace standards.

Now, I don't own a Porteus whisky mill – but if I did, I suspect it would be my most prized possession. What a special thing – what a treasure!

Experiencing the quiet pleasure of a ‘built to last’ item is a rare treat these days, but it’s one anyone can enjoy with a bit of effort. Hunting down these items becomes a hobby of sorts. It’s one I’ve recently taken up, and I cannot help but evangelise by brandishing my set of laundry pegs at anyone who visits.

They are made of 316 Marine Grade Stainless steel. They cost $25 – about eight times the price of a standard pack of plastic ones.

Absurd? No. They are brilliant. I will never need to buy pegs again. These pegs do not crumble and decay after one summer in the sun. Their hinges do not snap or go rusty. They have been on my clothesline for seven years now, and still look absolutely fresh-out-of-the-packet-brand-new-shiny-and-strong. They are not, actually, expensive pegs – spread over the decades of laundry hanging I have ahead of me, they will work out to be the cheapest pegs I could have possibly found. And they are emotionally rewarding: every time I use these pegs, I feel deliciously smug about how smart I was to buy them.

Now, I don't want – or need – a solid steel shoe cabinet that will last hundreds of years. But for many of my purchases I know there is a happy medium between twig-joined-junk and immortal-mill – and that it just requires a willingness to pay a little bit more at the outset, and to put a little bit of effort into looking after things. It's summoning that willingness and effort that sometimes fails me, but I find inspiration and encouragement in the "Buy It For Life" (BIFL) community on Reddit. This group was created to "showcase high quality, durable and practical products that can be bought once and used for life". Members proudly share advice and examples. There's a guy with a 30-year-old woollen sweater that looks brand new. There are whole discussion threads about which kitchen knives to buy – and how to sharpen and maintain them. There are people who've successfully done their own repairs on 17-year-old coffee machines to avoid buying a new one.

There's something about it all that feels ... empowering. Like you're part of a movement sticking it to The Man who just wants to keep you as a perpetual customer. It's no secret that 'planned obsolescence' is widely deployed these days as a business strategy. iPhones that can no longer support the software updates required to run them? A tiny fridge part that fails but is more costly or bothersome to replace than just buying a brand new appliance? Yeah. They do that on purpose. (The 'Phoebus cartel' was one of the earliest, and most notorious, examples of this practice. An international cartel of light bulb manufacturers who got together in the 1920s and deliberately shortened the lifespan of their bulbs, to ensure customers would need to keep buying more of them. Real 'evil genius' territory.)

And so, I now find myself hovering over the "Buy Now" button for a brand of household bins that cost hundreds of dollars each. It does seem crazy at first – but then I think about how many bins I've begrudgingly binned in the last ten years – because the cheap 'steel look' plastic coating is flaking all over the place, or the step-lever hinge has busted - and I think of my perfect pegs, and how nice it would be to have bins to brag about too. The company claims their bins last at least 20 years, which tallies pretty favourably against my long-term bin budget. And they've found a genius way to stay in business: proprietary liners, designed to perfectly fit the rim. Customers can buy the bin – and keep coming back for the bags.