pay now, or pay later

You go out and purchase a brand new, inexpensive guitar amplifier with cost-efficient PCB constructiion. It seems, at first, to be a great deal! A new guitar amp, with channel switching, and reverb, for less than $1000! Unfortunately the manufacturer cut corners and used inexpensive construction techniques that are easy to mass-produce, and keep the selling price low. But, wait till you have to fix the amp (and you surely WILL have to fix it often)–your repaitr costs will be quite high due to the more time-consuming nature of having to repair these amps. In many, if not most, of these new amps, the solder joints are on the underside of a printed circuit board, and to get to those points to enact the needed reapirs requires a time-consuming partial dissassembly of the internals of the amplifier. So, the “great deal” you thought you had ends-up possibly costing you more (due to labor costs) than if you had bought a higher quality amplifier in the first place.