Now that I’m getting stuff for the new apartment I’m getting a lot of stuff from Biltema. It’s so cheap, and the quality is usually good enough that I don’t overly worry about it. It feels more like “the basics” and no frills but stuff that will do you.

In comparison, I rarely bought stuff in a store in Singapore, because it always felt so expensive and the quality felt way more questionable on the cheap stuff (mostly the tiny shops in Sim Lim or so), not sure if that was a fair assessment most of the time. And I generally felt waaay more uncomfortable with the quality for the cheap things there. As an example, I bought a C7 cable with a euro plug (standard power cable for things like DVD players, and in my case, a charger) from Lazada from some small local shop, very flimsy, low quality, and cost me something like $12 with shipping. I bought one of those at Clas Ohlson for 69 sek (~SG$9) and it’s much higher quality.

It reminds me of talking to a distributor when I was working at DollarStore, he told me that it’s cheaper for them to sell us quality at a lower margin because then neither of us have to deal with returns and unhappy customers. Because a big batch of things that don’t work means you’ll have to scrap the whole shipment, and that’s too costly when you buy container loads of things. I bet that’s true for Biltema as well.