The Parable of the Two-Dollar Latch

A homesteader's tale, as they used to tell it

---

There was a man named Amos who bought forty acres and a barn that leaned, and he was determined to do the thing right.

He priced the gates. A good gate with a good latch ran eleven dollars. A gate with a latch of the other kind — the sort with a little spring in it that goes tink when you touch it — ran nine. Amos looked at the two dollars between them and thought about all the other things two dollars could be, and he bought the nine-dollar gate, and he felt clever about it the whole way home.

He hung it on a Tuesday. It swung sweet as anything.

On Thursday the heifers got out.

Now Amos was not a foolish man, so he walked the fence line looking for the break, and there was no break. The wire was tight as a fiddle string the whole way round. He walked it twice. The second time he was saying words his mother would not have cared for.

It was the boy who found it. The latch had a little spring in it that went tink, and a heifer with an itch and an afternoon to spend had discovered that if she rubbed her neck along the gate just so, the tink became a clack, and the gate became a door.

Amos got the heifers back by dark. It took him and the boy and the neighbor's two sons, and the neighbor's dog, who was no help at all but seemed to enjoy himself.

Here is the accounting, which Amos did that night at the table with a pencil, because he was that sort of man:

| | | |---|---| | Saved on the latch | $2.00 | | Fence post snapped in the retrieval | $4.00 | | Neighbor's boys, two, at fifty cents | $1.00 | | Bottle for the neighbor, by way of thanks | $3.00 | | A heifer bred by a bull he did not choose | considerable |

He wrote the last one in and looked at it a while, and then he put the pencil down and went to bed.

In the spring, when the calf came, it was a fine calf. It was simply not the calf he had planned on, and every time he looked at it he thought about two dollars.

The moral, as Amos gave it, and he gave it often, generally to anyone who had not asked:

A thing that keeps something in is not the place to save money. The savings are certain and small, and they are paid back later at a price you do not get to name.

He bought good latches ever after. He also, it should be said, bought a good many things he did not need, having overcorrected the way a man does — but that is a different tale, and it involves a cream separator.

---

Why this is on a gear review site

Because it is the same story every time, and it is the reason this site exists.

The cheap version of a thing is not usually worse in the way you expect. It does not snap in half on the first day, and it does not fail while you are watching. It fails on a Thursday, in a way you will spend an afternoon diagnosing, and the bill arrives in the spring.

So when a review here says the cheaper one is fine — and it often is, and we say so, because most gear is priced past the point where it gets better — that is a claim about the Thursday, not about the showroom.

And when it says spend the extra two dollars, it means Amos.

— Chris D., McEwen, Tennessee