Too big for your boots...

[#1]

...or in my case too big for my socks and really, I never used to be.

My size nines seem only able to buy size seven sevens or rather, those packs of 'one size fits all' which never do and instead finish up with the heel halfway down the bottom of my foot.

So what's going on?

I'm not buying cheap from some discount store either, so is it really too much to ask to ask that socks are made to fit not slip. There again maybe on the other side of the world where these things get made (there is a 'sock city' in China apparently) their feet are much smaller.

Grr 😬

[#2]

The whole thing of "make 'em in a huge factory by the million, then rebrand to get more money from a name" gets me.

I've just bought a digital micrometer. Hasn't come yet. It's for occasional use. A (relative) cheapie.

I bought it from one of these "UK stock but not really" sellers.

There's a UK seller, selling exactly the same thing (as far as I can tell) with their name on it for half as much again.

I'm a woodworker, or rather used to be before the wood dust got to me. Must be at least fifteen years ago, I was buying unbranded brass screws. Dead cheap though from the local hardware place. The quality was (is) pretty bad,  badly formed, shallow slot, poor thread. Usable, if sorted through but not great.

So I happened to find several almost full boxes of screws at a boot sale, from when we still made stuff here. The quality difference is obvious, and you can see that the alloy used has much more copper in it than the Far Eastern ones. Less brittle but more expensive.

So I asked my up country supplier "Can you still get good quality brass screw made by one of the old companies?"

"Yes, but they're more expensive" (About four times IIRC)

SO they came. And they were in much the same box as the old ones I had.

And they were actually exactly the same screws as the ones from the cheap hardware place.

I have the same problem with socks. . .