I'm getting increasingly sick of never being able to buy the same product a few years after I last bought one.

In this house I have one more room needing a wall clock than I did in the previous flat. I'd therefore like a new clock which matches my existing two, but as far as I can tell nobody is still selling the things at all; even googling for the brand name written on the front turns up a completely different product and nothing else.

I don't like the nearly universal style of tall thin-stemmed top-heavy wine glasses. I tend to compulsively pick them up and twirl them, which increases the already non-trivial risk of breaking the stem or toppling the glass over. I prefer short squat glasses without an obvious weak point. I found a make of these years ago, bought some, and loved them, but a few months ago I broke one too many and had to buy more. The shop I bought them in had nothing remotely resembling them any more, so I had to find an entirely new style matching my criteria, and then buy lots of those so that I wouldn't run out for a while.

I've got a nice big cutlery drawer here, instead of having to store my cutlery in a small mug. So I now have space for a few more knives and forks, which will stop them being the limiting factor in my washing up – but of course, there's no chance of me getting the same kind as I already have.

What annoys me most about this (and I'm sure if I sat and thought for another hour I could double the number of examples above) is not just that I end up with annoyingly mismatched stuff as a result of not having known five or ten years ago what shape of house I'd be living in today. It's that when I now buy new things, I tend to buy lots more of them than I need, because I know that when I want another one I'll never see the same kind again. So now my glass cupboard contains more wine glasses than anyone who lives alone could conceivably need. I have an unworn pair of boots in a cupboard upstairs, because when I bought my current pair I knew I'd want another one eventually and didn't want to take a chance on still being able to buy them by that time. And even that only postpones the inevitable: sooner or later I'll wear out both pairs of boots and be at the mercy of the shifting markets again. So at this rate I'll end up filling my entire house with spare copies of stuff for use in twenty years' time, trading off storage space now against irritation in the future.

I wonder whether it's just me who feels like this. Sometimes I think this is one of my (many) impatiences with the world of physical objects which I derive from spending most of my time in the realm of software, in which once you've found something you like it's generally trivial to duplicate it as many times as you need and not too much harder to preserve it across decades for further duplication as necessary. Or perhaps it's because I have unusually specific ideas of what sorts of things I like. Or slightly too much of a tendency to get used to something and then not want to change it. (I could, after all, completely replace all my existing wall clocks and cutlery, instead of getting annoyed that I can't extend my current sets. But I don't want to if I can avoid it: I like my existing ones.)

But it mostly just seems silly that nobody is ever willing to make the same product again. I know why; I realise that companies will sell more stuff if customers think it's new and improved, that manufacturers deliberately encourage fashions to change all the time so they can sell stuff all over again, that product designers can't justify keeping their jobs if they tell their boss it's already perfect and doesn't need changing, and all that. But surely, surely, there must be some people like me out there, who'd like to be able to buy the same thing again ten years later; and surely there can't be so few of us that someone can't make a little money selling long-term consistent products to us?