I have one shaped like a bat’leth
How about food?
That reminds me I have more 30 GURPS books and have never actually played the game itself. Though to be fair the books are still entertaining to read on their own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GURPS_books
I also have numerous books from other role-playing games where I have never actually played the game.
A swimming pool.
Thankfully, I have finally decided to have the darned thing filled in after living a couple of decades with it–this will be a major event in the springtime. The pool was probably 20 years old already when we go it, so it’s not a terrible loss.
We filled ours in a year ago.
Only regret is not having done it a decade ago.
When I was a bachelor, it was fun for parties, but once i got married, neither my wife nor I used it, so it was just a huge waste of time, effort and money. Now it’s a beautiful, useful patio.
I play games regularly - it’s specific games that shelfwarm, some of which never got enough play to justify what was spent on them.
I have other games (and expansions to games) which have literally never been played but I never intended to play them - sometimes the whole point was to simply own them.
I have indeed bought a used Treadmill from someone who never used it that I ended up never using only to then sell to someone else who never used it. Maybe it was cursed?
I have also spent hundreds of dollars or more on videos games I have never played.
Fine china dishes and sterling silverware. I’m talking about the sort of stuff that in generations past was passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. 364 days a year it sits in a display hutch but gets reverently broken out for use on either Thanksgiving or Christmas.
OP says moderately or very expensive, so that would exclude most food.
The vast, vast majority of guns. Even shooting enthusiasts tend to have a few they shoot a lot, some they shoot infrequently, and at least a few they shoot seldom or never. I have half a dozen or so in that last category.
Golf Clubs
I’ve seen so many dusty bags in the back of closets.
I justify it to myself by the selling cycles of current board games. In a lot of cases, you have to buy a game when it’s first published or you’ll never get a chance. There was like a three day window, for example, when you could buy a copy of Root.
Me too, but very few of the unplayed games in my collection individually cost more than $50, which I decided was a decent lower bound for a “moderately or very expensive” item. Rather than 10-20 $60 unplayed games, I have 300 $5-$10 unplayed games.
…Which isn’t to say it hasn’t been a large waste of money en total.
That’s not my experience (and Root appears to be currently pre-orderable on Amazon, assuming that’s the same Root). In my case the unplayed games tend to be ones that got played a couple times and for one reason or another got bumped to the reject pile. At the moment I only have one dude I play with and his tastes don’t match a lot of my collection, so I’m collecting a lot of dust.
The sad cases are games that cost $50+ and were essentially supplanted by a similar but better game, so there’s really no reason for them to ever be played again.
I think a large percentage of computer books over the years were basically untouched. I am amazed they still sell paper ones.
Who uses a “Teach Yourself Java in 5 Days” book?
[In my subsection of computer life as a Computer Science prof I’d get free “evaluation” copies of textbooks a lot. Very few were even looked at. If someone wanted to borrow one of those the condition was that the borrowing was permanent. OTOH, I didn’t buy those.]
Re: Bread machines. Mrs. FtG uses ours. I think it’s the 3rd one we’ve gone thru. But now is the time of year they somehow show up at the thrift stores. Don’t buy new, get a ~unused one for <$15. (She only uses it for the knead/rise phase. Then she transfers it to a real bread pan for the baking. Makes a “real” loaf. Also for buns, pizza, etc.)
Pasta machines are just too much of a pain. Get used some, but eventually stowed away. If Mrs. FtG thinks they’re a waste of her time, that’s not good.
A friend of mine is like this. He has a large gun safe that is full, the ammo contraption and all the fixings, containers full of ammo. I think he goes to the range maybe once every quarter. Maybe.
He also has a collection of bicycles. He is an enthusiast for sure, but how many bikes can a person ride? - you only have one ass. He has around a dozen bikes, many of them are same purpose (e.g. road bikes, gravel bikes, etc.), and when I suggest he make room in his garage by selling a few of them he is not using any longer, he gasps at me and says “n+1!” A couple of the bikes are older Italian models that he spend $1,000s on, and cannot bear to “loose money” on them. There are also 2 motorcycles in his garage hooked-up to trickle-chargers. I have never seen or heard of him riding those in the time I have known him well (about 10 years). I guess he just likes having his “things”.
I heard once from a swimming pool pro that half of all swimming pools get filled in less than 10 years after being put in. Two houses ago, one of my neighbors sold his to his next-door neighbor. They filled in the old hole with the dirt from the new one. That’s a pretty nifty deal.
High school class rings and annuals.
High school rings appear to be used primarily for beer money (after being pawned) at some point during the freshman year of college.
This a good one. Like 15 years ago I bought three of them and each was close to $100 and ended up using them as a platform for my mouse pad to keep my wrist straight. I only got rid of them a few months ago when I moved.