back when I was a wee lad I remember I was in the store and I broke a 5$ umbrella, the dude who was working there just rolled his eyes and told me to put it back.
To add, if you absolutely must have a stainless knife, get something like a Mora. They're cheap but well made. I normally have a carbon steel ESEE on my belt and a stainless Mora in the backpack. The Mora ends up used a lot for breaking up game and food prep.
If we're talking general flashlights for at-home use, the LED revolution of the last 15 years has brought costs down while durability, longevity, and battery life has shot way up. You can get perfectly acceptable lights for $5-$10. I own a bunch of ~$3 1xAA lights that are Just Fine for most general uses, that I just give out to friends and family. Even if you want something with a bit of throw, C8-style lights are less than ten bucks. The market is almost oversaturated with perfectly fine lights.
Moras are fantastic and cheap as chips - whether the stainless or carbon steel variety, they're great beater knives. I've got a ton of them, but the one I use and abuse the most is a stainless Craftline (their budget line with thinner blades) I keep in my saltwater fishing kit - it's the world's finest bait knife.
Do not ever buy the cheapest canned fish/meat. Especially from Eastern Europe.
cheapest sauerkraut - that shit nasty and essentially a cheap laxative
One thing I've always looked for in headlamps is a red-light function, mostly because my primary use case is for camping and nothing quite sucks like blowing out your night vision with 1000+ lumens of white light at 3AM when you're just looking for your latrine.
There are 18650 testers you can get on Bezos mart and Musk-bay for 25-35$ that are really good at telling you what the actual capacity of your 18650s are
This goes 100000% if you're doing anything solar-related and getting high-capacity LiFePos. There'a a whole lot of considerations that aren't immediately obvious if you're not a turbo autist, from temperature cutoffs to cell quality to BMS capability to burst discharge rate. At best case a failing bad battery kills itself or your equipment, at worst it turns into a massive and ridiculously hard to control fire.
Never buy cheap or pre ground coffee. If you're going to have a caffeine habbit at least enjoy it. It's disrespectful to offer someone a cup of folgers, I taste that shit and ask for water.
I can attest this is true. I worked as a loader for a hardware store a while back and if a boomer refused to get out of his car I'd give him the worst boards out of spite. Don't be a lazy and entitled boomer, pick out your own boards or you'll end up returning half your order.
