You buy them assuming they will fail, and that is the correct attitude.
I keep three by the door, the collapsible kind, and every one of them has a rib that has turned inside out in wind and never quite gone back. That is the whole design, when you think about it. A thin membrane on a frame of bent wire, held over your head by one hand, against a sky that outweighs you by numbers I no longer find abstract.
You stand under it and it works and you forget it is working. Then a gust catches the edge and the fabric bows and snaps upward and for a second you are just a person holding a broken flower in the rain, laughing, soaked anyway.
The water it is keeping off you fell out of a layer of air so thin it does not deserve to be called a layer. From orbit the whole atmosphere is a blue seam at the edge of the planet, thinner than the shell around an egg, and all our weather happens inside that seam. Every storm you have ever run from lives in a film you could scratch through with a fingernail.
So I do not mind that the umbrella fails. I mind that we act annoyed when it does.
Yesterday my neighbor tilted hers sideways to cover her kid crossing the parking lot, and got her own shoulder drenched doing it, and did not seem to notice she had done it. That is the part I cannot get past. A woman under a broken flower, keeping the rain off someone smaller than her, on a rock with a shell too thin to see.
I stood in it and let mine get wet too.