On the cost of clothes

Sometime back I started thinking about this idea below of evaluating how one spends money on clothes. I mentioned it in one of the earlier posts on the blog, but then I continued to think about it and found it more and more interesting, so here's the idea now fleshed out more. The intention to keep detailing it out until I can get something to publish in a peer-reviewed journal :-) ( the Journal of Consumer Economics ?)

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You could evaluate your clothes by dividing the cost of an item by the number of times you wore it. You'd look for a low number to come out of the ratio as that would indicate that it didn't cost you much and you used it a lot, therefore good value. We could call this number the cost per use (CPU). It seems an interesting way to evaluate the worth or the value you get out of it.

I've continued to think about this and find it very interesting. Firstly, you can think about how much money you're wearing everyday. This is the total cost per use of all the things you're wearing (lets restrict it to just clothes, including undergarments and footwear but not jewellery and accessories). I was surprised by the number that I estimated, in my case: greater than 50/-. I wouldn't have thought I was spending that much on clothes every day ! Take a 1500/- Rs pair of jeans which I bought recently ; I'd have to wear it a 100 times for the cost per use to come down to 15/- . I think I'll probably not use it so many times, perhaps 75 times is more like it. So cost per use is Rs 20/-. For other trousers I expect I'll use them even less than 75 times so if they cost the same, the CPU is even higher. A similar calculation for shirts, which could cost 500/- to 700/- for the kind of shirts I wear to work but which I would wear less number of times than trousers before discarding or giving away, perhaps 30-50 times (so CPU average around 15/-). Then calculate the cost for undergarments , shoes/socks, belt . And an unexpected extra, the cost of washing and ironing. Ironing now costs 4/- a garment for me, so that's close to 10/- for ironing itself ! So as I said, adding it all up, a total of Rs 50/- per day.

Its an interesting calculation to do.

The one thing that cost surpringly less for me was footwear. The current pair I use is from Bata, a fairly nice piece that is very reasonably priced at around 450/-. And since I use it everyday pretty much, I've probably used it more than 100 times already, so the cost per wear is down to 4.50 /- already . Very low compared to shirts and pants ! And its in pretty good shape still and could easily go for another 6 months, so the cost per wear is coming down even further. It seems I could cut down the amount I pay on clothes and splurge a little more on footwear, to reach a more optimal point.

For fancy clothes that you wear for special occasions, the cost / use would be much higher than for daily wear clothes. This is because these would be pretty expensive clothes, that we would wear it very few times, so double the effect. For eg. all the suits I've bought, I've used only a couple of times, and then they've gotten too tight for me :-( .

You can start doing this for the other things you buy and use. For example my cellphone cost is horrendous ; each time I've bought a high end phone (both Nokias), I've enjoyed using them a lot but they've lasted relatively short. The first one for eg. cost about 13000 and lasted for about 18 months, so that's close to 750/- per month ! No more expensive phones for me!