The Cloud Blog

The leaves are starting to change colors here on the east coast, a visual punctuation that we’re a week into the fall season.  This, and the coolness in the air — a harbinger of the winter that lies ahead — prompted me to begin my search for a replacement snowthrower.  This past winter put undue stress on the Sandorfi marriage, as every time it seemed to snow back home I was traveling to some place sunny and warm leaving the snow clearing duties to my less-than-happy wife.  It wouldn’t have been so bad, but the snowthrower that we have is an “HQ special” (you remember HQ don’t you, the now defunct Home Depot competitor?).  The “HQ special” was cheap enough, but requires attention every time it’s used — snow jamming, slipping belts, sticking throttle, and so on.  “Hey, you get what you pay for” I told my wife after our last snow storm (of course, returning from a trip to sunny and warm Santa Clara).  She simply scowled and handed me the starter handle that broke off when she tried to restart the stalled machine — a couple hundred feet from the house.  She finished after running several extension cords to use the electric starter.  Needless to say, she wasn’t a happy camper.

What on earth does this have to do with storage?  Well, it seems to me that there are strong parallels between the Sandorfi snowthrower experience and the notion that you can purchase storage “much cheaper” than what the Tier 1 companies offer.  To that latter point, you can absolutely find cheap storage.  But, the adage “you get what you pay for” keeps entering. Michael Hay wrote an interesting blog here, where he looks at “cheap storage” and rightly points out that one of the costs that needs to be considered is us — people costs.  My cheap snowthrower worked only because I had to devote more than my fair share of attention to that beast.  The same argument can be made on the storage front.  Pay more up front, and get something that “just works” and doesn’t break. Or, cheap out and make up for it with more “back end” costs.

So, I found myself at Lowe’s last night looking at their 2010 snowthrower models.  After seeing the machines in person, and noting that almost everything was made out of plastic (at least the “HQ special” beast was metal!), my son Harrison turned out to be the wise one.  His simple words “dad, these look really cheap” (and by “cheap” he didn’t mean “inexpensive”) jogged my memory of the winters past with the old machine.  This time, we purchased a John Deere snowthrower — it’s entirely made of metal, has a 2-year warranty (versus 90 days), and looks like it’ll last a lifetime.  It cost more than the Lowe’s house brand, but all things considered (like my time and marital bliss), it was the least expensive option of them all.