Our loyal readers might remember our first piece on r/BuyItForLife. However, people have made plenty of cool posts on the subreddit since then so we felt like a follow-up was necessary too.

Plus, this time we reached out to the people running the sub and one of the moderators was kind enough to have a little chat with us. "The most popular items I see based on what's posted are: Stanley Thermos, Darn Tough Socks, Kitchen Aid mixers, Red Wing boots, and pots and pans, particularly cast iron," they told Bored Panda.

We also asked the moderator what they think allows some of these items to persevere for as long as they do. "I'm not an expert by any means but I think there are a few factors," they said.

"Most products are built to be as cheap as possible .... and poorly assembled (maybe partly due to planned obsolescence but mostly just due to the fact that people in general like spending less). The products that you see lasting longer are often made of higher quality material and care when built. But they're also priced accordingly."

But choosing longer-lasting products can be tricky. The price doesn't always tell the full story. A few years ago, The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) published an interesting study, carried out by the University of Southern Brittany, the Sircome agency, and the University of Southern Bohemia.

Its main goal was to see whether displaying a product's lifespan would influence a consumer's decision to purchase. In other words, would we choose the same products if we had this information?

The experiment involved 2,917 participants from 5 European countries (Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Spain and the Netherlands).

"We designed a fake shopping website, which consumers could use just as if it were Amazon or ASOS," the researchers wrote. The participants, however, did not know the site was fake. "Once they had checked out their shopping basket, participants were directed to a questionnaire which gauged various socio-economic and psycho-social indicators."

The results showed that if shoppers had information on product lifespan, they would choose to buy longer-lasting items: on average, a product's sales increased by 56% if its lifetime was longer than that of its competitors.

Of the products tested, purchases of suitcases (+128%) and printers (+70%) were influenced the most by this change.

"Suitcases are the quintessential roaming product, giving them two characteristics which makes the consumer rank lifetime as a priority: the trials of transport make resilience a key factor, and any item used solely for travel will be brought out only occasionally. If it is used rarely, the consumer has every reason to hope it will last a long time," the researchers explained.

"As for printers, they have one of the shortest lifetimes of all household electronic goods, and people buy them because they need them, not for pleasure – two more good reasons why we would want them to last."

Sales of smartphones were among the least affected by displaying their lifetime (+41%).

80% of participants felt that the manufacturers were very to extremely responsible with regard to providing information about a product's lifetime.

"All these findings argue for legislation on product lifetime," the research team said. "There is no doubt that the reliability of the products purchased is important to consumers. The study showed that regulatory information would steer customers when purchasing products."

Such policy changes might reflect in r/BuyItForLife's number of posts. I'm half-joking, of course, but the members of the subreddit can definitely give you valuable insight when choosing your next purchase.

"I think our community is great!" the representative of the mod team said. "Maybe I'm a little biased, I only moderate a few subs but frequent many more as a regular user and from my anecdotal experience, the BIFL community is among the nicest and most welcoming people I have interacted with on the internet."