Take the padlocks I bought a couple of weeks ago to lock two storage boxes on the back of our caravan. There were locks of the right size and type in the Bunnings aisle for $30 and for $5, so naturally I bought the $5 locks. After all, a lock is a lock, and the price difference for the two I needed was $50.

At home I tested them as I attached them to the toolboxes and that was the last day they worked. Two days and 300km later the lock on one toolbox opened but refused to close again, and the lock on the other toolbox refused to open until I'd applied 20 minutes of heavy persuasion.

Then I bought the locks I should have bought the first time. A cheap man pays twice.

An early lesson in value weighed on all my purchases for decades. For the first few years of my newspaper life I was wearing out a pair of shoes every three to six months, partly because I have a wide foot that may be the result of a barefoot childhood. Then, soon after I joined this paper and on a recommendation, I lashed out and bought a pair of R.M.Williams boots.

They were then more than $200, four times more than I'd been paying for supposedly durable shoes. I wore them every working day, resoled them many times, and over the next 35 years I bought just two more pair. They were the cheapest shoes, as cheap as thongs.

Perhaps as a result of that I came to see price as a reliable indicator of quality but that has been seriously tested in recent years. No matter how much we spend on a washing machine, for example, after a couple of years it's in need of regular and expensive attention, so now we pay less and buy extra warranty to give five years' cover, replacing the machine at the first breakdown outside warranty.

The machine we've just replaced, a good brand not made in China, was repaired under warranty eight times, so we see the premium for quality as best spent buying warranty.

Take the cordless drill in my shed. I paid more than $500 for it, and it is not as good as the $80 Ozito I bought to keep in my travelling toolbox a year ago. And, incredibly, the Ozito has five times the warranty of the expensive drill, at five years.

I know the warranty is good because my first Ozito drill, the cheapest one at $40 and not as good as the expensive shed drill, packed it in after three years and was replaced without a murmur. It seemed almost unreasonable claiming warranty after three years. I paid an extra $40, by the way, to get the drill with the brushless motor.

At the extremes there are, as you'd expect, two types of consumers. One wants to pay the lowest price, regardless of quality, and the other wants to buy the highest quality, regardless of price. In real life the second type of consumer wants to buy the highest quality he or she can afford, so money is part of the equation.

I have moved from the quality-driven end of the range to become what I see as a pragmatic consumer, one who seeks a compromise between price and quality and who no longer believes that price necessarily reflects quality. We used to be the first to espouse the wisdom that you get what you pay for but now we assure ourselves privately that if we get less by paying less it may well be enough.

Pragmatic consumers have been increasing in number, I reckon, since the improving products of China's manufacturing blitz turned up in our shops at a fraction of the incumbent products' prices.

We get it wrong, as I did with the padlocks, and we get it right, as I did with the drill. And while we may well save money on individual purchases, I doubt that we save money or much money overall. Compromise is risky.

Right now I'm in the midst of a raging struggle between price and quality. We have decided we need a bigger fridge in my wife's Landcruiser, partly because the fridge in our folding caravan is small as it can be only as high as the fold. Fridges don't fold.

Another reason is camping fridges can now have dual zones, meaning the one compressor can maintain two separate sections of the fridge at different temperatures. One section can be, for example, a freezer, and one section a fridge. For many years Engel fridges have had the best reputation for quality but that company does not have dual-zone technology, which means it may be heading down on the other side of the peak. It will keep its deserved reputation for longevity, but why would I want to buy a camping fridge to last 40 years! I want dual zones now, not a single zone for 40 years.

Consumer prejudices are easier to shift than other prejudices, because shifting a consumer prejudice is to our advantage and shifting another type of prejudice is to someone else's advantage, and my decades as an Engel stalwart have just come to an end.

I became interested in big dual-zone camping fridges with a price of about $700, less than what my second-hand Engel is worth, and what appear to be the same fridges are available under a number of brand names. I noticed that the specs for the similar fridges carrying various brands are wildly different, suggesting to me that they're fictitious.And when I noticed some dodgy work I became concerned about the work I couldn't see.The next step up, and possibly now taking on Engel's mantle, is the Dometic, formerly Waeco, at more than twice the price. It's a struggle, and the lesson of the padlocks is not making it easier.

Jeff Corbett is a former Newcastle Herald journalist. He contributes regular opinion columns to the pages of the Herald each week.