Cost per season
What Buying Once Actually Costs Over Ten Years
On our four oldest records the cheapest item produced the worst number. A 190 dollar jacket costs 95 dollars a season. A 470 dollar boot costs 89.
Why Price per Season Instead of Price?
Because the number on the tag answers a question nobody actually has. What you want to know is what the thing costs you per year of use, including everything you spend keeping it alive.
Fleet managers worked this out decades ago and nobody in outdoor gear copied them. A haulage company does not compare trucks by sticker price, it compares them by cost per mile over the life of the vehicle, because the cheap truck that lives in the workshop is the expensive truck. Gear behaves identically and is almost never priced that way.
The arithmetic is deliberately simple. Purchase price plus every dollar of repair, divided by seasons actually used. Not seasons owned. A coat that hung in a closet for two winters gets no credit for them.
The Four Oldest Records
Two of these are doing well, one is doing quietly well, and one is the reason we started publishing the column at all.
| Item | Bought | Seasons used | Repairs | Total | Cost per season |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stitchdown work boots | $470 in 2017 | 9 | $330 | $800 | $89 |
| Carbon steel fixed blade | $210 in 2019 | 7 | $120 | $330 | $47 |
| Waxed cotton field coat | $260 in 2020 | 6 | $34 | $294 | $49 |
| Synthetic insulated jacket | $190 in 2023 | 2 | $0 | $190 | $95 |
The jacket is the useful row and it is worth being precise about why. It was the cheapest item on the list. It failed at the end of its second season when the seam tape lifted along both shoulders, and every shop we asked declined the job. Not because it was difficult, but because re-taping one seam on a laminate that is delaminating everywhere is a repair with a two month lifespan. So the jacket is finished, its cost per season is fixed at 95 dollars, and the next one will start the clock again.
Expert note from Marisol Quintanar, textiles and waterproofing
I turned away that category of repair for twelve years and I want to be fair to it. A laminate shell is not badly made, it is made to a lifespan. The membrane and the adhesive age together, so when the first seam goes the rest is close behind. What I object to is that nobody tells you at the counter that you are buying a five year object, because the price says otherwise.
What Does the Boot Number Hide?
A lot of waiting. Nine seasons of service also means two trips to a shop and roughly fifteen weeks in total without them.
Cost per season is honest about money and silent about inconvenience, which is the standing weakness of the measure. Our last resole took eleven weeks and landed in the middle of a season. If you own one pair of boots, that is not an abstraction, and it is a genuine argument for cheaper gear you replace on your own schedule.
It is also silent about weight. The boot that lasts nine years is heavier than the boot that lasts three. Anyone carrying it uphill gets to weigh that themselves.
Three costs sit outside the column and belong in the margin next to it:
- Downtime. Fifteen weeks across nine seasons, always at the wrong moment.
- Weight carried. Roughly 400 grams a pair over a lighter boot, on every mile of every season.
- Capital tied up early. You pay the 470 dollars in year one and collect the benefit in year six.
What Makes a Number Go Bad?
Three things, and only one of them is quality.
- No repair path. The single largest factor. An unrepairable item stops accumulating seasons at the first failure, and its cost per season freezes at whatever it reached.
- Seasonal narrowness. Gear that only suits a five week window accumulates use slowly. A specialist item at 200 dollars used eight days a year is expensive whatever it is made of.
- Buying above the work. A boot rated for terrain you never walk is money spent on a margin you never draw on. This is the failure mode of people who read logs like ours and overcorrect.
Running the Number Yourself
Four lines in a notebook, updated once a year. It takes about ten minutes per item per year and it changes what you buy within two seasons.
- Write the purchase price and the month it went into service, on the day you buy it. Retrospective entries are guesses.
- At the end of each season, write the number of days you actually used it. Days, not months of ownership.
- Add every repair invoice, including freight, to a running total.
- Divide the running total by seasons used. Write the result next to last year’s result, so the trend is visible rather than the snapshot.
The trend line is where the value is. A boot at 130 dollars a season after four years and 89 after nine is telling you something a single figure cannot. A jacket that goes from 95 to 95 to 95 is telling you it has stopped.
The Column Where the Number Gets Strange
Knives, because they stop losing value in a way nothing else in the log does.
Our fixed blade is at 47 dollars a season and falling, and it is the only item on the list where the denominator keeps growing without the numerator moving much. A sharpening costs a few dollars, a rehandle costs 85 to 140 once a decade, and neither resets anything. The blade is 7 years old and has lost measurable width, but nothing about it is closer to being unrepairable than it was in 2019.
Expert note from Ezra Hollins, blades and edges
I am the reason that row looks so good and I want to be honest about why. A knife is small, it lives indoors between jobs, and the wear item is an edge that costs almost nothing to restore. Compare that to a boot, which spends its whole life in mud at ground level. The knife is not a better made object than the boot. It has an easier life and a cheaper consumable.
That is why knives keep appearing in a log about boots and coats. A blade bought from a maker who builds custom knives one at a time is the closest thing in the category to an object with no natural end, provided the handle can come off and the grind has width left. How much width, measured rather than guessed, is set out in our count of how many sharpenings a knife has in it, and the boot equivalent is in what it costs to resole boots and when it stops being worth it.
The framework behind all four rows, including the test for whether an item can be repaired at all, sits on the pillar guide to repairs, costs and when to stop.