While it does relate to price discovery--i.e., some folks just aren't willing to pay for an additional unit of quality at 10x--my theory is that the decline in quality is another hidden form of inflation. Thing continues to cost X even though regulations have increased costs Y, ship production to China and scrimp on the inputs. (Or have market forces do that for you.)
I think 10x is quite rare. Quality ends up actually curtailing costs to some degree (eg. fewer returns, cheaper marketing - word of mouth). Buy a Weber grill, I had 2 grills before my Weber that lasted 3 seasons between them. I bought the Weber at about 2.2x the cost of the bargain grills and 17 YEARS later it's still going strong, built like a tank. Saved a lot not buying more cheapo grills.
Yes, this is quite common and is usually referred to as "it's expensive to be poor". That said, unfortunately these days it's very difficult to know which brands are still actually quality anymore and which are the ones still coasting on previous good engineering reputation while currently shipping substandard crap to make an extra buck for the bean counters in charge before the ship sinks.
True, recently Rachel Ray sold her dog food brand. I didn't know until my dog started having digestion issues with it. That's how I found out it had been sold and other dogs were also having issues. Apparently buyer cheapened the recipe. At least we have the internet to quickly get the word out that it isn't what it used to be.
The steelman is that by lowering the cost, more pets can afford better food than what they currently eat. No comment about whether that is reflected in the consumer facing price or in profits.
> The steelman is that by lowering the cost, more pets can afford better food than what they currently eat. No comment about whether that is reflected in the consumer facing price or in profits.
For your steelman to be relevant it would have to be reflected by lowering the price, otherwise they're just making the product worse for no customer benefit whatsoever and hoping customers take a long time to notice.
And if they were trying to offer a different value proposition by reducing the quality in order to lower the price, the honest way to do it would be to introduce a new product with a different name rather than changing what the product is while leaving the name the same.
As someone who works very close to this I’m well aware, it’s also very visible when you look at trends over decades in most populations. It has significant impact on a lot of people.
> difficult to know which brands are still actually quality anymore
I haven't verified its accuracy, but I had a tab open for this from HN a while back:
> The Brand Ledger tracks 397 brands, from the tools in your garage to the pans in your kitchen. Who owns them, what they used to be, whether they're still worth buying.
Yeah, not sure I would rely on that.. Sure, they have Knipex and Klein on the approved list (which, AFAIK, is true), but then they list Warby Parker (read reddit - has gone WAY downhill), Cutco (by all accounts, a total rip-off and super low-quality knives requiring you to constantly get them sharpened) and Henkels, which also makes some pretty suspect knives, AFAIK.
The first one, "Henckels", openly says that their stuff is from China.
But the second link, "Zwilling" says "Approved". But boy was I disappointed that their "Zwilling Peak" branded ceramic hybrid frying pan for $100 says "Made in China".
It doesn't seem they address the quality of the final products, just how the companies are run. Anecdotally, I know tons of nurses wear Hoka shoes and act like they are to die for, but yet Hoka is on the avoid list. It would be more interesting rather than some vague articles about the brand to actually compare reviews before / after or how they match up against Consumer Reports --- a much more valuable resource in my mind.
It strikes me that I am really turned off by the phoned in Claude Code design on this website. For a website that tracks quality I just expect a bit better. Probably unfairly.
Because my experience is that most popular brands in those industries have really gone downhill, and it'd be lovely to track which ones are even remotely edible anymore.
Even if a brand stays solid for 100 years, for all I know as I'm standing there in the store deciding whether to buy something, private equity bought them two quarters ago and hollowed them out. Harvard MBAs/private equity sees brand reputation as just another resource to be converted into money.
If I were a billionaire my dream would be to create a logo for the "We Put The Extra 10% In It" program where products could advertise that they put the extra effort in. What is really sad to me is that so often it's not even that much extra effort, which is why I say 10% and not 100% or 10x. So often it's just "used a 5 cent metal part instead of a 1.2 cent plastic part". But without a reliable signal that the effort is there MBAs/private equity turns every market everywhere into a lemon market. Way too much tech is applied in manufacturing to turn everything into a lemon market.
Yeah. On various "Buy it for life" forums it's a daily occurence that someone mentions a brand they bought 5 years ago and then someone chimes in that they were sold or restructured last year and now it's no longer "buy it for life".
Some brands kind of split up so products sold in one market is cheap knockoffs while products sold in the home market is still high quality manufactured at the old factory with 100 years old machinery and experienced workers. If you want to buy quality you've got to do deep research first.
One signal (not fool proof, but often a good signal): what length of warranty do they offer? If some brand has a warranty significantly above the average for the product type, that can be a good sign.
And I'm not talking about offering extended warranty programs or such here. Just the basic warranty everyone gets when they buy the product.
Something to be said for places like Costco that has an absurdly generous return policy (are they the only major retailer left that does this? REI used to, but they got rid of it).
I believe Costco requires their vendors to eat the return if they want to remain a vendor. Doesn't meant that Costco is immune to bad products, but it severely punishes vendors that sell garbage and protects customers.
I'm not sure that is such a strong signal. The minimum return policy by law in EU is 14 days. IKEA has a one year open box return policy. I would not argue that modern IKEA is high quality.
I'm also sure I have seen other stores with a 1 year return policy, though I can't remember which ones off the top of my head.
(That is "return undamaged working product" return policy, not warranty policy. Exceptions apply to perishables, underwear, etc. At least here in EU they are different. Warranty is, depending on product category, typically 3 months, one year or two year minimum by law.)
A buddy of mine paid a premium to get some fancy umbrella with a lifetime warranty. It had a failure at some point, they replaced it with a worse quality one. Another failure, and he got another step down in quality.
There is also other tricks I fell for. I think I saw a recommendation for Travelpro on Buy it for life(Its been a while so dont remember fully). Nice luggage but expensive. I took a risk and bought it. I received it the day I was rushing to travel and there was some "registration card" that you had to fill out by a certain time that unlocked lifetime warranty else you were stuck with a shorter limited warranty. That card got accidently thrown out by a family member while I was on a trip. It apparently had some serial number or something on it. To make matters worse, the zipper got damaged after 1-2 uses and it was just outside the shorter warranty. I had to go to a local luggage place that had a relationship with them and they were able to get it replaced. (I wanted it fixed but Travelpro only offered replacement). Im hoping it does not break again. If you are going to advertise this warranty just make it the default! I went back to those reddit posts and I started to suspect there is some astroturfing going on so I don't even know if this is a reliable luggage or if it is just junk. It was so expensive and I honestly thought I bought it for life.
Yeah, if you wanted a proper BIFL suitcase you needed to spend even more and get a Briggs and Riley suitcase.
Also, Travelpro Platinum suitcases aren’t the cheapest… but how much do you think is so expensive? Sales should put them sub $200, maybe less if you bought awhile ago.
Curious, so I checked. A Briggs and Riley Essential 22" Carry-On Expandable Spinner is $729. Sorry, but that's insane.
I admittedly travel less than I used to but I bought my basic carry-on for about $110 more than 20 years ago. Close enough to "buy it for life" for me. It's not much worse for the wear, I fully expect to have it for 20 more years.
Its been 4 years now(purchased 2022). I just looked at my records. My suitcase was a Travelpro Premium and it cost 300$. I've purchased 50$ suitcases back in 2015 that lasted for years (just checked the equivalent is now 100$). 300$ in 2022 seemed like a step up in price given I was anchored at that previous price in my mind.
At the very least my expectation was that by paying this much i'd finally be end of the company BS. For example with almost all Apple products they have been BS free in the sense that they are made to consistent quality standards, returns, and service cannot be any more straightforward, the product portfolio is super clear, you can easily buy from them at the same price they sell elsewhere (within reason) and not various reseller or third parties that might play tricks and even if you do Apple handles service and warranty. And so after a lifetime of buying PC/Android after experiencing this BS free life I conditioned myself to accept the added cost of Apple and reduce spending elsewhere.
The tactics I described earlier are indicative of a unserious company playing games. Stuff I expect from bottom of the barrel junk.
In regards to sales, I've looked at the price history of this product. (Here: https://i.imgur.com/BQOcRLk.png) The price you indicated last occurred in the middle of the pandemic which for obvious reasons seems like an outlier. To be fair I bought during the height of the return to travel period but even now post all this inflation the price is a solid 390$-400$ now.
I only travel 2-3 times a year and so at this price I expect this luggage to last quite a while(at least a decade no?) but if another mishap happens well then I might have to walk away burned and wondering, what was the point?
> and even if you do Apple handles service and warranty
Depends on the product, if I’m not mistaking. iPhones warranties are pretty much honored globally, whereas I exchanged some defective AirPods at an Apple Store recently and was explicitly asked if I’d bought them with them.
Incredible process by the way, no questions asked when I said I’d like to swap them, they simply got a new box out and made me remove the old ones from my iCloud, out the door in five minutes. I don’t see any scenario where you wouldn’t buy your Apple products directly through them besides maybe when you’re buying refurbished.
> In regards to sales, I've looked at the price history of this product. (Here: https://i.imgur.com/BQOcRLk.png) The price you indicated last occurred in the middle of the pandemic which for obvious reasons seems like an outlier. To be fair I bought during the height of the return to travel period but even now post all this inflation the price is a solid 390$-400$ now.
I wouldn’t use the Amazon/CCC history for this. Their cheapest sales tend to be on their own website, and only occur like once a year. I may be off on sub-$200 in the current environment, but it wouldnt surprise me if mid-200s is achievable at their lowest sale time.
The rest of your points, I’d agree it’s kind of a bummer they don’t really have that sort of guarantee. The Briggs and Riley stuff really is the true thing you’re looking for, but it’s awfully hard to justify a $600+ suitcase if you’re only traveling a few times a year I’d say.
I got 3x Bose QuietComfort 35 2 by buying 1. They did honor their warranty, but my impression was that they plan for people not going through the effort of actually requesting a replacement item, even though the warranty says they can.
I wish more brands would follow the Newman’s Own charity model. All profits go to charity, so there isn’t an incentive to hollow out the brand, and the products are a reliable quality at a decent price.
The general problem with this is that starting a business generally requires money, which for-profit companies get from investors. For a non-profit to do it they need to get it from donors, and then your actual complaint isn't that nobody is willing to start a company that works that way, it's that people (e.g. you and your friends) haven't donated enough money to make it happen.
But something that might be interesting is to start a non-profit whose mission is to create value for customers (i.e. produce non-garbage products), and then all profits go not to a separate charity but to increasing the number of product lines the company produces. Then spin the new product lines off into independent non-profits with the same charter so the organization doesn't become large and bureaucratic or suffer permanent collapse as a result of a single period of poorly chosen upper management.
It's the MBA mindset. I think about it in simplified way that in the past a lot of businesses weren't run mainly for profit. So a plumber focused on plumbing first and set prices to have enough profit to live. Once the MBA/PE mindset comes in, they think about maximum profit first and plumbing is just a secondary thing. I have seen that with dentists, vets and many contractors.
Worker owned cooperatives could be a reliable indicator however i'm not sure there are many examples of this being scaled upwards, like could an airline do that? Could they even have an option for a worker owned company provide an alternative for everything in the economy? You need capital to make a competitor and all the capital is rapidly being sucked up by the people enshittifying everything.
The answer probably lies in fixing government so that they can go after these players. However to fix government you need massive buy in from both the left and the right and there lies the crux. Our system forces us to cater to the lowest common denominator voter. Until that is fixed we can't go back to the status quo. Maybe its not possible anymore as our currency gets inflated down to nothing.
The alternative could be to just live in this enshittified system, leave the US to a country with a functioning government, or just accept that mass consumerism has run its course and lower your lifestyle needs to only own less items but of higher quality that have been researched(this requires time investment so you are forced to research what is good which limits how much you can cover if you consume too much).
We need more supply-chain visibility. Currently we have none, hence this problem.
Consider all the farm bio-outbreaks. We're told "Americans won't do these [farm] jobs" but they neglect to mention the subpar pay and working conditions. Thus the slaves that take these jobs have no knowledge of their rights, have limited education and literacy, have dubious residence status, and are not inclined to blow the whistle when they witness crops destined for human consumption being fertilized with industrial amounts of human shit (biosolids). Meanwhile, conservatives blame the workers themselves for contaminating the product. This cycle will never end until we have more stakeholders working the fields.
Same goes for Tyson and their chicken farms staffed by Somalis. Not saying anything about them specifically but outsourcing all labor to foreigners denies all visibility and access into our own food production. They could get away with packaging human meat and none of us would know it because none of us can afford to work there and see for ourselves. Our regulatory agencies are all compromised and can't be trusted to do it, so it's a free for all.
If you had like-minded people positioned close enough to supervise production and ensure that the product meets a certain set of high standards (call this "keeping kosher"), you would no longer have to worry about ingredients being replaced with foam, sawdust and heavy metals to satisfy those MBAs.
Both historical socialism and current-stage capitalism suffer from the exact same problem - lack of competition and limited access to information. They arrived there in vastly different ways but in both cases it's very hard both to know how to obtain higher quality goods, and to actually obtain them once you know how. Compare to 1960s USA where it was quite easy to know which car/drill/grill/TV/pants/table/etc. is guaranteed to last you years.
I lived through the 60s and know what the goods were.
TVs, for example. They had tubes then, and crummy B+W pictures. They were constantly going on the fritz, to the point that drugstores had tube testing stations. You'd bring in the tubes from the TV and test them in this device that looked like an arcade game, and buy replacements.
Cars then required a lot more maintenance then. And I mean a lot. I've owned and repaired them.
I'm sorry but I will need a second opinion. I just don't believe there was not a single brand of TV that was reliably good the way some brands of clothes, furniture, power tools, phones, spices, perfume, refrigerators, light fixtures, record players, guitars, lawn mowers, and basically all non-perishable goods on the market were.
You could get the cheap stuff, or you could get the quality stuff, and you knew which is which. Neither of these is true nowadays.
My dad had a Mercedes in the 1960s. It was not a very reliable car. He later bought a Chevy which was much more reliable.
I bought a 1963 230SL Mercedes as a young man. It was such a beauty! But it was a terrible car. As an engineer, I could see that it was a patchwork of brilliant design and stupid design. The latter caused lots of problems. Sadly, I gave up on it. Stupidly, I bought a Mercedes wagon some years later, and it, too, suffered from the patchwork of stupidity. Got rid of it.
My 1967 Mustang was much better engineered. Ford gets a lot of guff, but their cars are inexpensive and easy to repair, which I appreciated. It had a sad end being crushed on the highway by a truck. I had a 1989 Bronco II and drove it for 20 years.
A friend of mine is restoring an old Mercedes, and he (also an engineer) discovered the Mercedes patchwork of stupidity. One of the problems is the radiator is undersized, making the car prone to overheating. He's engineering a fix for that.
You are literally calling one car much better engineered than another car. So what exactly are you arguing against? I said that you could pick bad car or good car back in the 60s, and it was easy to tell which one is bad and which one is good by the brand alone (usually). Isn't that so? Unlike nowadays where the brand means absolutely nothing and nearly all reviews are fake, and also most brands are manufactured by the same 2 or 3 companies worldwide so there isn't much to choose from in the first place.
What they're describing is that TVs had consumable items in the circuitry. It isn't possible to have had a TV without tubes. Tubes were basically really fancy lightbulbs and had a finite life. No amount of quality could make consumables not necessary. TVs needed maintenance and manual back then. They sucked. It's like saying that buying a higher quality car means you don't need to buy tires.
The broader point is that we think that things lasted longer back then because of survivorship bias, but on the whole they really didn't. The incredible old fridge in grandpas garage is incredible because it was an exception. 100k miles used to be a car that was ready for the wrecker. You used to have to get tune-ups several times per year where points, timing, carburetors, spark plugs, and other things needed replacing or adjusting. That's why every gas station had a mechanic. Now, half those things have been replaced by more reliable longer lasting mechanisms that adjust themselves, and the stuff that still exists like spark plugs last for years instead of months.
The highest quality stuff from back then doesn't really stack up to many modern things, especially if you pay the same inflation adjusted price.
From your list:
clothes: higher quality, several times more expensive (inflation adjusted. Levis 501 were $90 adjusted in 1975, Amazon has them for $45)
furniture: cheap shit and expensive stuff was available, just like now
power tools: almost universally, I would trade old corded, brushed tools for new cordless brushless. Old machine tools are the exception where old is as good as new.
phones: you didn't have a choice, the phone company gave you whatever they had in stock and charged you a monthly fee for the privilege.
spices: less variety and freshness. Good luck getting spices that weren't part of your local cuisine.
perfume: no idea
refrigerators: incredibly inefficient, harmful chemicals, and today you can still buy a VERY nice fridge if you are willing to pay what a shitty fridge from 1975 would have cost ($2,200 inflation adjusted for the cheapest one from sears).
light fixtures: same as furniture, you get what you pay for then and now
record players: see furniture
guitars: see furniture
lawn mower: see furniture
The enshitiffication of known brands is a real problem today, but that doesn't mean that everything was perfect and known back then.
I wasn't saying things were better then than now. I was saying exactly what you're saying - cheap shit and expensive stuff was available, see furniture, see furniture, see furniture.
Except no, it's like that anymore. It's literally impossible - and I mean literally literally - to find any mass-produced brand (as in not needing to be custom made) of furniture that consistently, across all its products, will last more than warranty period. I haven't been an adult for that long, and I've had multiple beds break down under me and multiple sofas sag down entirely. And no, none of them were cheap. I paid extra specifically to avoid this kind of thing. It didn't work. And there's no alternative for me, literally nowhere I can buy furniture that doesn't break down unless I make it myself or pay some craftsman to.
Everyday I am reminded about these brain dead arguments in my local town by people who can't think one step ahead.
You made this generalized statement probably from some propaganda you've read or some trauma you've experienced growing up. Yet, if you look at the current state of the situation its in clear decline. The only ways forward are to accelerate the decline and live with the consequences (ie. doing nothing) or to consider moving in the other direction(ie. leftist things).
In the US I think there are two sources of this mentality: 50% of the population don't have a passport so they have never seen how people in say Europe/Canada deal with this, EU/Canada/AUS/UK have higher standards and don't tolerate this kind of crap as much
Example: Hyundai removed immobilizers in their cars...but only in the US because Canada/EU had regulations requiring an immobilizer.
End result: Someone on TikTok discovered that you could steal cars with a screwdriver and a USB cable. This resulted in insurance costs shooting up, people stuck without cars due to lengthy repair times and overall lower quality of lives.
The braindead response that comes from people with OP's mentality would be "you should have researched the car better beforehand its all your fault".
Yea ok people with limited budgets and time looked at which cars had good reviews and Kia/Hyundai were winning many of those (likely BS ) awards like "North American Car of the year".
People are already stressed for time trying to survive in this jungle and now the "free market" played games with them and anyone suffering from this might be having a worse life now because of this mess. Why are they having to spend all their miniscule free time just to not be screwed?
Wouldn't it have been better if we had European style regulations that would have established a minimum standard that all cars in this era should have?
NO! We can't have things like that because people like OP (and a lot of conservatives) have these imprinted beliefs from a lifetime of fear mongering, or trauma if they immigrated from some garbage country with poor institutions(ex. Cuban immigrants opposed to Universal healthcare or eastern european immigrants opposed to anything with the word [commun/social]ist)
I've volunteered in the past for Progressive candidates that have a #1 criteria for not taking any corporate money. It is so much of a time sacrifice to get an AOC or Bernie type candidate only to have that progress stymied by endless amount of money pouring in on the other side. Why are we even doing it when day after day people like OP crop up with this nonsense? Whats the point of constantly fighting to enlighten person after person who starts off their beliefs with these 1-dimensional arguments? Its makes me want to just watch it all burn down just as long as people with your mentality go down with the ship. I get why a lot of wealthier people are just leaving the country. The fix requires decades of effort and will just break many people that try to go down that path. If you are wealthy and you have this one and only life, is it really worth it to have to deal with people like OP? Or is it better to just leave and let them wallow in their ignorance. I guess it depends on how important the country is to you. Even that concept of loyalty to a country seems to be eroding in this era of passport wealth.
Yes I know the Democrats take tons of corporate money and outspend any outsider. So do Republicans (including Trump). Thats the fundamental problem. My efforts to push back against this seemed to have gone over your head. Reread my paragraph about progressives.
Regardless of what the fundamental issues are, its pointless to discuss with you.
You have nothing but a default dismissal of anything that does not conform to your imprinted beliefs. In your original message and followups you have not even given any possible reasoning as to why you believe just as all the other people that think exactly like you do.
I guess this is something I should be thankful to Elon for: He exposed how surface level the thinking is on the right when he opened Twitter up to the masses, how easy they are to grift off of. Once can argue its even become pop culture at this point: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xoim0K4WPMI
I'm still grappling with how to respond to people that are so solidified in their propagandized thinking. Like I mentioned in my post, its likely best to just let you experience the maximum amount of pain from your dumb decisions.
>Why do you discount their experience with universal healthcare? Have you ever experienced it?
YES! Actually I attribute my blessed fortune of being wealthy enough to quit a bad job early on in my tech career and take almost an entire year traveling the world. I lived in Europe in various countries and learned hands on how different people think and how different fundamental level things are including healthcare.
Coming back to the US you realize how people are stuck in this collective trauma of the current system. I mentioned in my post that 50% of the country does not have a passport. For some perspective, the US is only 5% of the world population. There are so many ways of thinking out there that people just have never had exposure to. I'd argue its a life half lived.
You traveled the world and had a major health problem and experienced socialist healthcare?
I have a friend who decided he'd be better off as a Canadian. It wasn't long before he came back to the US. And Canadians still come to America when they have a serious health problem.
Since you've discovered that life in other countries is so much better than America, what's stopping you from immigrating to your favorite?
BTW, I've actually lived in foreign countries. I also toured East Berlin in 1969.
I recall an online discussion years ago by survivors of Chernobyl. They remarked that a root canal was free in Russia, but you had to buy your own anesthetic. Generally, the health care workers expected bribes.
Keep in mind, though, that the US health care system is very heavily interfered with by the government and all their programs. It's not very free market, but it's still better than socialism.
I have a couple friends who grew up in the USSR. They'd laugh at your contention that socialism makes better products. They both moved to America to get away from socialism.
Socialism has never worked out very well.
As for loyalty, I am a true blue American and vote in the country's best interests.
> European style regulations
Yah, read my other post about experiences with Mercedes "quality".
>They both moved to America to get away from socialism.
Yes and they brought their trauma to the US so when the fundamental system desperately needs reform due to underlying conditions changing their trauma serves as a liability to the continued improvement of the country. Instead they buckle down and demand no changes as conditions continue to deteriorate. Fortunately a lot of the second generation did not internalize that trauma and have different plans. I only lament that its going to take a long time for these liabilities to die off and finally free the country to make fundamental changes to move forward. The people who care enough about this country not to just leave and not waste their one life trying to fix this mess are all trapped until then.
>As for loyalty, I am a true blue American and vote in the country's best interests.
I don't know what "true blue American" means. Is that another dumb slogan pushed by one of the major propaganda outlets? If you are referring to being a Democrat, then what kind of Democrat are you? Regardless it does not matter as its not the point. The right had at least one amazing honest candidate this year who eschewed corporate corruption and tried to stick his neck out to do the right things for the country only to be rewarded by his voters voting for a last minute plant just because Trump told them to vote for the outsider. That was definite proof that the right is just gone. The party as it stands has no long term future. Its just how much pain are we all going to collectively endure until it finally does.
Forget about voting, you should start by looking at all the issues in a more objective lens and try to understand underlying causes. Then understand how many of these problems occurred elsewhere and how others successfully solved the problems. Are other places perfect? No, but fundamental lessons are always better to be learned rather than mistakes repeated.
Ran into that with an Oxo coffee grinder recently. Old one died, bought the exact same one again. And that motor sounds just a little more tinny than the old one, and the whole thing seems just a little more...rattly than the old one. I am not exactly sure where they cut the corners, but corners were indeed cut. Oh, and the new one was $10 more, so the savings were most definitely not passed onto me.
i think the only solution to this is to force a company to rebrand when they purchase a brand.
otherwise we end up exactly where we are, private equity buying out a brand, obfuscating that it’s no longer the same company, slowly sucking the life out of the product and screwing the public over.
if we make them always rebrand, we would at least be more aware when purchasing.
it’s kind of funny how certain people will tell us to vote with our wallets on a product, but they intentionally obfuscate everything about the product so we can’t make informed purchases.
could you imagine if we had to “do your own research” on every single thing you purchase? just think of how many items you purchase from the grocery store alone every month. it’s unreal we allow them to get away with hiding what they’re doing.
a great example is the sibling poster who talked about the dogfood being changed and messing up their dogs stomach… just trash behavior by these companies.
To be fair, mandatory warranty has added a lot to that.
Most larger electronics (washing machines, fridges, dryers, ovens, etc.) have a mandatory 5y warranty in most european countries, and since the profit margins are so low, even the cheapest washing machine (~250eur range) has to survive the daily use of a family with three kids (or even multiple daily uses) for at least five years, since even a single replacement/repair eats away profits of dozens others sold.
"back in the time", you'd skip the cheapest stuff, now i just say "buy the cheapest one, it'll work for at least five years", and in 99.9%, it's actually true.
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
It's a great theory, though it doesn't seem as accurate nowadays. Now, even supposedly 'high-end' brands will be low-quality garbage hollowed out by private equity firms or other corporate acquisitions.
We're not in a world where you can necessarily choose between quality at a high price and disposable junk at a low price, we're in a world where you're often choosing between disposable junk at a low price and rebadged junk sold at a premium one.
It really pisses me off there are used car lots that obviously prey on the poor. I asked for their cash price and they wouldn't give me one, or it was ridiculously priced. They just want for people to pay off a debt and all the interest that goes with it.
A car dealership makes most of their money off of the financing.
> I asked for their cash price and they wouldn't give me one
When I bought a car from a dealer, the dealer told me that what I wanted was impossible. So I walked out and got in my car, and started to back out. The salesman came running out and agreed to my terms.
The trick to making a good deal is a willingness to walk away.
P.S. My accounting teacher used to work at a used car lot. He explained to me that poor people tended to screw themselves by not understanding how financing works. He'd try to explain it to them, and they'd accuse him of trying to screw them, and they'd go for the more expensive option.
I tell this story to people who say that learning math in school is irrelevant.
I also remember a Frontline episode years ago on 401k plans. One company had an identical plan for all employees. The reporters discovered that the higher paid employees had better returns on the 401k plans. Why was it that the lower paid ones did poorly with them? It was they did not understand how to manage investments.
I paid cash for the last two used cars I bought. As used cars go they weren't particularly expensive and it wasn't a big deal. Both purchases came from dealerships that also sold and serviced things like brand new Hondas or Chevrolets.
For one of those cars, the paperwork was completely finished and I drove off in that new-to-me car without me even giving them a dime. (I did promise in writing that they'd have a check in a few days, and I did make good on that promise.)
There's also used car lots that work with real financing companies. They broker the financing deal and get paid for it. That works, too. (I've financed cars at these places, too; this also went smoothly.)
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But then, too: There are buy-here, pay-here used car lots. These are traps for the poor, and they love their particular financing game.
At these places: The loans are designed to be very upside down and they therefore hold all of the cards. They'll sell a used car for years of weekly payments of $120, and if/when the payments stop then they just turn the car off remotely and have someone go pick it up.
After that, it's cleaned up and sold to the next guy for $120 a week.
It's a very profitable way to conduct business and nobody of any substantial means and sane mind would ever buy anything there at all.
But they don't check credit, and they don't report credit. So as ugly and expensive as it is, for some folks that's the only way they can get the car they need to try to survive in the society that they were born into.
There are two kinds of lots.
'normal' lots will sell a car, and the financing comes from a finance company. could be a bank, could be a credit union, could be a business that provides money to car purchasers.
the normal lot has markup on the price, and also gets a kickback from the finance company. the car buyer does not pay, the finance company has a problem.
'buy here, pay here' lots sell a car, and do the financing. They buy cars at auction, fix them if they have to, then sell them. The down payment money usually covers the auction cost of the car. Then every 2 weeks, the buyers drops by with a payment. The buyer stops paying, the car is repossessed. And then it is sold again. The dealer wins in both directions; the buyer pays a lot of money in finance charges, and if it is repossessed then you don't have to buy new inventory at the auction.
Poor people with bad credit way over pay for cars both ways. One a little worse than the other.
In the US, a lot of car dealerships make a good portion of the profits from a car sale from the loan. E.g. the lender gives the dealer a kickback on the loan and that is a good portion of the total profit. It's somewhat analogous to how US airlines make their profits from credit card deals and selling miles.
I always felt this was over stated, but I think it’s become less true over time.
First different people treat their stuff harder than others. I basically never break or wear out anything, and I usually start with the cheapest option.
Second the quality of cheap shit made in Asia has gone up a lot over the last couple decades. And it is very difficult to know how to pay more for more quality.
I don't know why people keep posting that silly quote. Outside of fantasy novels, in the real world the most expensive footwear is often the least durable, and you can get decent boots at Walmart for <$50 on clearance sales.
A current rough rule of thumb I currently use: if private equity buys out a company I'm using, I bail for the next best competitor within a couple years. If it is a US private equity firm, within a year.
There are exceptions. It isn't hard though these days to look up the firms' histories and then look up customer conversations on the Net about those historical portco's. More importantly, it isn't hard to look up the people behind the private equity firms (though I find it harder to link specific partners with specific portco's), and avoid the ones you see with a track record you want to dissociate from. Before the Net, this kind of research took days to assemble in libraries. With the Net and LLM's, it is very fast.
Remember capitalism is a tool that is supposed to cut both ways, both for the producer and for the consumer. Simultaneously.
I love my Weber and I was amused to see the instruction manual specifically saying that when it's time to take your outdoor furniture inside for the winter, leave the Weber, it's built to handle it.
The Weber kettle grill is one of my favorite examples of quality in another way—function. It is built well but it also is such a wonderfully simple design that provides quite a bit of flexibility.
I have the Smokey Mountain which is amazing at holding heat but a total PIA to clean. Have one of their gas grills as well on a built in line, and it is fairly high quality also.
Walmart used to be (and maybe still is?) known for doing this. They would get companies to produce lower-quality versions of products under the same name as the standard versions available elsewhere. They could sell them for cheaper and consumers were none the wiser - or so the theory went, anyway. Obviously people caught on.
This has become a sort of unintentional skill in the ecommerce era. Everyone is using china, either the actual "first party" brand that is really just ordering bulk from china and reselling it stateside, or the various clones of that brand. The skill then becomes feeling out which of these various products and clones are coming from the better option of the couple chinese manufacturing companies everyone is using, then buying whichever of these is going for cheapest and least shipping headaches. Usually also if a product has been out for a couple years, there's an initial version widely available then an actual 2.0 version that solves a lot of the issues in the first, more sturdy at now known failure points, etc. That 2.0 version actually usually circulates in the no name brands for a little while before the "first party" brand eventually picks it up for their own line.
I grasp what you’re expressing, I really do. I’ve probably pondered this very thing too often in my life and can think of very specific examples where purchasing a non-brand name version of a particular product really froze up the decision making process.
However I think as I’ve gotten older, certain realities have occurred to me:
1. there is a fairly significant amount of people that would still pay more for the shirt the “right” logo and who would absolutely not pay less if it had the “wrong” (I.e., vs no logo). In fact, they wouldn’t wear the wrong logo even if the shirt was free. I include myself in this under certain circumstances and would conclude that some times the recognizable name actually helps put my mind at ease about the purchase, while being fully able to acknowledge that it was entirely a psychological thing.
2. Unfortunately there’s just simply no way of knowing this information (brand name product vs essentially same product without brand name) most of the time so letting that weigh too heavily on an otherwise thoughtfully considered purchase achieves effectively nothing.
3. The thing was probably entirely discretionary for my existence, so don’t buy it (otherwise, see #2…)
I got a pair of T-shirts from These Glory Days. Wore them like 20% of time last two years and they look better then some others after 2 washes (albeit changed from them after coming back to work, and use work clothes at work, so not like they were used THAT much. So it's not always the expensive stuff that's equal to the cheap stuff. And funny thing, got them on a sale because they were pretty cheap, not really because I knew that they were quality.
Though had my wife with me when shopping and she might have "felt" the material and said that it was good for that price. Her mum is a seamstress if I remember the word correctly as somebody who sews clothes.
If you watch The Price is Right episodes from the 80s, it is clear that household items have only had mild inflation. Many items are prices a little lower than today but not outrageously so.
On the other hand, the quality of the items is often much nicer. So someone might win a $500 desk, but that desk is hand-made out of hardwood. Today you can still buy a $500 desk but it will be IKEA quality. A product of comparable quality would cost many $k
Airline tickets are a very clear-cut example of this. Tickets are cheaper than they were in the ‘90s (even with inflation) but you get a lot less for that ticket than you did 30 years ago
It's less clear cut than that, because modern materials can be better at the job they are designed for. An IKEA kitchen, for instance, might not use traditional wood or stone for its benchtops, but the materials used are actually better in terms of cleaning and handling food on them. It's just that these improvements often get bundled with cheap plastic and parts in other parts of the kitchen to keep costs down.
Similarly, cars today are far superior to old cars in terms of safety, and the gains that have been made on the engine side of things are nothing short of incredible. Every modern car is essentially a supercar by the standards of the 90s in terms of oomph per unit of displacement. The problem is that all of the systems have been coupled together, often needlessly, in order to improve telemetry and capture a bigger share of the used market. It's hostile towards the end user.
There's no question that the level of quality today is higher, especially where it matters. It's just that value extraction eventually turns hostile towards consumers in the absence of real competition and the need for endless growth.
For my household I built my own cartoonishly big 200×80×4cm oak desk. The oak was €350 at the hardware store and only needed finishing. The height adjustable legs add some extra cost, but the whole was maybe €700 tops and a day of work.
You have to look at it from an item by item basis. There are different reasons for each product.
You mentioned household items: This is a combination of two things:
1. Improved QA & reduction of parts thanks to the miracle of Moores law. Ex: a TV used to be a huge collection of boards each doing its own function (power, tuning, picture control, audio). Nows its 1-2 board(power + everything else) with typically one big chip doing everything. Less parts = less chance of failure and each part is QA better thanks to software/industrial automation.
2. These things are benefiting from the low cost of living in places like China. As those countries increase their wealth and alternatives are not found this disparity disappears and you finally pay the real cost of the item but you still benefited from Moores law.
TVs deflated insanely, other appliances less so but it averages out to 0 again thanks to Moores law.
Now look at a desk. The only way it benefits from Moores law is possibly via assembly and techniques used to reduce waste. That probably where IKEA's excellent ability to turn sawdust + glue into furniture comes from. That is real value that is returned back to you in the form of similar raw numerical prices as old wood tables from decades ago.
Machinery can automate the creation of a table made out of what is technically "wood" (sawdust was at one point wood wasn't it?) and computer software allowed designers to create appealing designs and more easily optimize them to target that same number people paid in the 70s(even though it isnt the real number inflation adjusted).
An old table used real wood that probably came from an old growth tree that no longer exists because the value came from decades (or centuries) of "work" done by nature. Exchanging money for that same amount of value that would reveal the diminished value of the currency if you were to get that same thing today. You cant exchange the exact dollar amount and you are not feeling that the modern IKEA take is an improvement/equivalent over the old growth wood.
Essentially the free market could not make a 1-to-1 replica/improved product using something like moores law so that same value costs more today. That difference in quality between the Ikea table and the old wood table is still there its just that most consumers dont see it or dont want to see it since they may not be able to afford the old style of table.
>Airline tickets are a very clear-cut example of this. Tickets are cheaper than they were in the ‘90s (even with inflation) but you get a lot less for that ticket than you did 30 years ago
This is a mixed bag in my opinion:
Airlines have benefited from Moores Law. I watched so many "aviation" youtube channels and my god, the accidents from the early days of aviation are truly nightmare inducing and heartbreaking tragedies. Today thanks to computerization(Moores law), pilots are so much better trained, airplanes are so many orders of magnitude better in terms of safety and fallbacks and fuel is reduced as a result of all of this technology as well. This helped cut costs and also allowed Airlines to provide more classes of service. If you fly first class all in, you get service closer to what you got 30 years ago because you are paying for the same value as 30 years ago.
At the same time, fuel itself comes from a non-renewable resource that included dinosaurs, sea algae, and plants that spent a lifetime doing the work to accumulate energy from the sun and then be stored in a format that can be exploited centuries later. You life's comforts comes from all that work done centuries ago and its not unlimited. Thus as fuel becomes harder to get, the numerical dollar amount goes up and is reflected in tocket costs. Its just that the other reductions didn't make it as evident.
As a side note with the Iran war and the loss of companies like Spirit, more are now being exposed to the fact that todays dollar isn't the same as yesterdays dollar. Those low cost options are just going away because finally the free ride given to use by cheap fossil fuels is going away and things like moores law have already reached the limit of where you can add value to keep the number close to the 70s dollar number.
Video games are a good example of an area where the pricing makes no sense. Inflation has risen, and they make like $20 or whatever off a brand new game in 1990s bucks.
Video game prices will go up more and more, it also kind of explains to me why prices rarely drop below $59 anymore, used to be on Steam some AAA games could be snagged up for $20 after a year, now you can barely find them on reasonable sales, they hold on to dear life on pricing.
Skyrim came out in 2011 and is at this moment, the 55th highest player count on Steam. Just playing top tier single player games over the past twenty years could keep you incredibly busy.
Which Skyrim is that?
OG Skyrim (Oldrim), Skyrim Legendary edition, Skyrim Special edition, Skyrim VR, Skyrim Anniversary edition, or the Skyrim anniversary upgrade?
Are they even the same base SKUs at this point? I don’t want to pull out my gaming desktop but IIRC it was at least three different entries in the Steam library. I wonder if the stats combine them.
At this point I’ve spent so much money on Skyrim titles I should get TESVI for free with lifetime DLCs.
It's Skyrim Special edition that's on that spot. The OG version hasn't been sold in years on Steam and is tracked separately. The VR edition is sold and tracked separately. The Anniversary edition is sold as DLC for the Special edition, and not as a separate game. I think the Legendary edition was sold as a bundle for the OG version after all the DLCs came out. Either way, it too cannot be bought on Steam any more.
Games from a couple of years ago are insanely cheap on Steam. You can buy AAA titles regularly for $2-3 each. I don't have a very new GPU, so I stick great games in my wishlist and wait till they are essentially free.
I should do that. I have almost 900 Steam games, the vast majority of which I have never touched. Over the years with sales and Humble Bundles, I've just hoarded the games because I might someday want to play it.
Instead all I seem to do is replay Donkey Kong Country 2 and Streets of Rage 2.
What’s important is total profits. Video game prices fell because distribution costs tanked and there’s vastly more people playing video games so cutting 20% on the price upfront means far more than 20% extra profit.
For videogames I don’t think it really makes sense to try and compare against 90’s prices. It’s gotten so much easier to just make “a game” (in the sense that computers are enormously more powerful, third-party engines and assets exist, generally all tooling is much better, and so on). Expectations in terms of polish and graphics quality are much higher. Distribution is much easier. Videogames are a massive cultural thing these days, so the market is huge, and so is the pool of potential enthusiastic employees.
I mean the arrows are pointing in every direction, I have no idea if prices should have gone up or down or even how to make a comparison. Like we could get into details and talk about comparing a modern AAA game cost to a 90’s AAA games cost… except, even if you adjust for graphics quality generally improving, just the scope of modern AAA games is massive in a way that there doesn’t exist a 90’s equivalent.
Video games are just another example where the pricing is mostly greed. The market is massively larger than it was in the 90s, digital distribution has massively cut the cost of goods sold, new games are sold with tiered pricing, recuring revenue is now a huge part of a games viability. Game sales aren't the primary income anymore, it's all about keeping whales buying in game items, discounts are only offered when there needs to be a new influx of players to keep whales happy.
"COGS" for games has absolutely nothing to do with the plastic box on the shelf with a DVD issue. Sony wasted almost the entire PS5 generation chasing GAAS and having almost nothing to show for it.
It's part of the growth paradigm - that everything must continue to grow.
Let's say your product is mature. Your market is pretty much saturated; everyone who wants to use this product is using either yours or a competitor's. You and your competitors are finely balanced, you could reduce your prices and get more market share, but that wouldn't increase your profits. You have optimised your manufacturing process to the point where further efficiency would cut into resilience and create more risk than it would be worth.
Your shareholders demand growth. Doing the same numbers as last year is not good enough. So what do you do?
Reduce costs. Cut quality. Shrinkflate. Enshittify. Your customers won't notice immediately. Your competitors are also doing the same.
You only need this strategy to work for a couple of years until you can move on to another role, and consequences are something your successor will deal with. Meanwhile your shareholders are happy and your bonus is secure.
This just isn't true. What has happened is that companies try to cut costs at every point to make more and more profit since that is what capitalism just does.
There are two ways to submit to capitalism when making products either mass producing the cheapest crap possible with hair thin margins, but since you make so much and they last so little you still make bank.
The other is to make ridiculously over priced luxury goods that rich assholes buy because they want lovingly hand crafted quality instead of the cheap crap, but of course you are marking it up 100-1000 times the price just because you can.
What cannot survive in capitalistic world is the good mid ground of lovingly produced products that actually last and are good quality, because those don't sell as often as they last for a life time or three and you can't gauge the price.
Sure there is a sub section of the economy that literally cannot afford but the cheapest thing, but they need to keep buying same thing year after year as it won't last and thus their children are cursed to suffer the same fate as they cannot inherit any good quality furniture or cars or even houses, everything is just cheaply made consumable with no expectation that it will last longer than a year or two
Well skimpflation, with caveat that a remarkable amount to R&D is spend into value engineering to lowest price points, like you don't get to 50 cent FOB tshirt trivially. And frankly it's revolutionary - enabling developing country wages to buy clothing on a single day wage.
That said, it's 2026... if you want quality and only want to pay marginal increment, there's tons of Chinese ODMs turn direct to consumer, i.e. Quince. They'll sell you functionally top quality (spec for spec inputs if not better) with 1x markup vs 10x brand markup/premium.
> my theory is that the decline in quality is another hidden form of inflation
That is a well-known phenomenon, usually called "shrinkflation". (After the fact that the easiest way to lower quality while keeping the price consistent is to just give you less stuff for the same price.)
Although all economists are made aware of the phenomenon, they seem to be just as prone to the illusion as anyone else. Here you can see Tyler Cowen weighing in on a Twitter debate about the price of a meal at Chipotle: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/08/us...
A burrito is sold for the same price (well, 4.6% higher) now that it was 15 years ago. Case closed! Stop complaining about Chipotle's pricing.
Is it the same burrito? Deep in the comments "Michael" reports, from current and archived Chipotle menu tools, that a steak burrito bowl in 2015 contained 875 calories and the same exact menu order in 2026 contained 830 calories... with 80 calories out of that 45 calorie difference representing additional steak in the 2015 bowl.
You are right, it's easier to bake in quality decreases (aka "cost reductions") to keep the price stable than increase the price. Users usually don't see it directly, and since the whole industry does the same there is no real alternative.
A good way to see this is in clothing: my wife likes to buy vintage clothes, part because of the style, but also because most of them are actually well made and sturdy.
Nowadays it's almost impossible to get the same quality and finishes, even with the more expensive brands. Due to the mass-production of low quality clothing, (most) consumers don't even have a clear idea of what "quality" looks like, which further reduces incentives for manufacturers.
For comparison, some niche menswear brands keep the quality stable (as their specific consumer base asks for it). Say Northampton leather shoes for instance (Crockett and Jones et al.), which are still made in the UK (not in an mafia-ran sweatshop in Italia for luxury goods...).
Their products are amazing, and...the price grows 5-10% per year steadily.
> most) consumers don't even have a clear idea of what "quality" looks like
I think it just requires too much work. Your cynicism is unfair.
Also cheapest is just the simplest option, even though you know it is crap. I sometimes just give up on investing effort and time and money trying for better, because I've been repeatedly stung by expensive failures of top quality/brand items.
If I want a cordless drill, I don't want to have to learn about batteries, brands, or any esoterica relating to the quality of it.
For many goods I used to spend time looking at reviews, and cultivating my knowledge. I'm sick and tired of having to do that.
For cordless, I do like Makita, but I use a battery adapter (because their batteries are NZD250 instead of NZD50). But I usually buy a crappy bigstore brand for most cordless tools (a rebadged Einhell). They mostly work and they do a good replacement warranty.
People want a simple measure of quality.
Price doesn't work. Threadcount doesn't work for sheets (they cheat the numbers). Some brands are still worthwhile, but even that is becoming unreliable.
Some stores seem to have quality standards (in NZ Kmart goods seem mostly useable for the pricepoint, however our local 'The Warehouse' has gone downhill).
Many goods are now so complex that stores can't make a price versus quality compromise. Choosing a mobile phone is frustrating.
Complexity is the killer for choosing quality.
Our cheapest goods are surprisingly complex: e.g. socks.
I abandoned levi's in mid-late 200x. They didn't last nearly long enough in the style I prefer (at the time, 501s were still reportedly durable maybe just the special tab ones, but I won't wear button fly). Plus the whole deal with inconsistent sizing got tiresome.
I had a pair rip about 12 years ago. Cheap jeans from the supermarket - might have been the £4 ones. That’s the only time.
In that case I was fortunate I was away from work but going to the airport, went through security with my cheeks hanging out, then went to fat face. Those worked fine (well u til I no ok get fitted their 32” waist), but so do my current “tu” supermarket jeans.
I go through a couple pairs of carhartts per year, so like $10/mo for pants basically. Seems like a pretty good deal. I'd probably go through at least twice as many pairs of jeans. It's a good product. Darn Tough socks are another good one.
In the US, marks from Nationally Recognized Testing Labs (UL, ETK, CSA, and TUV are some big hitters here) do have positive value in terms of safety.
But they're not marks of operational quality. A UL mark on a microwave oven doesn't tell me that it's a high-quality item that will cook my food better than an unmarked item, or that it is something that is easy to use or will stand up to the test of time.
It just means that it's safe to use, according to whatever tests were performed on it. The UL (or other NRTL) mark means that it's extremely unlikely to give anyone an electrical shock or burn a house down, even as the device fails.
As another example: A power supply brick for some manner of widget. The UL mark doesn't mean that it will last for years and years, or that it will power whatever in-spec widget it is thrown at.
The mark does mean that when I short the output terminals together that it won't catch on fire. That's good! But it does not mean that the power supply will ever work again.
An item can fail both absolutely and permanently, and as long as it fails safely then that failure isn't held against it. It can still carry the mark.
The CE mark is worthless, since it is a self-certificaton.
The UL mark is valuable, as are the other test lab marks. However, while an ethical storefront would require it, Amazon does not. I've bought plenty of things that are not listed, and if I want safe products I generally have to include "UL" or "ETL" in my search. Even that doesn't always work, I've seen products on there claiming a listing in the title but photo shopping the place where the UL logo ought to be off of their product images.
Boeing is a company worth billions of dollars. "UKCSR" is not, there is absolutely no consequence to them getting shut down due to unsafe products. They'll just come back tomorrow as "JUSGB."
I'd call it externalized costs of regulation and rising demands on production.
If end consumers were able to see an exact and measurable bump in prices the next day a new stronger regulation made production more expensive, voters would be more informed and the whole cost of doing things "better" would be clearer.
Quality was never the norm: cheap always beat quality with a hand tied behind his back!
Western working class has spent decades complaining about cheap imports from China... while feeding that market with their own money.
Western frequent fliers keep reminiscing about the grandiose pre-deregulation era or air travel, but cry a river when their low-cost carrier of choice actually enforces the limit on cabin baggage.
Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
For product quality and ads, 90% of the time you don't really have options. For the former, it's so hard to figure out which product is 15% more expensive because it reinforces the weak points and lasts 3x as long. For the latter, YouTube premium is great but I can't get anything like it for banner ads. Most sites have mandatory ads and almost all the rest want dollars to turn off pennies worth of ads.
Sure, streaming services usually don't have ads. But you're paying a lot of money for specific content there. I'm talking about normal web page stuff. And if you're not seeing ads there, then either you go to very few normal web pages or you're using an ad blocker. Ad blocking is useful but it's not a solution.
I want a way to distribute a reasonable amount of money across the sites I visit in exchange for no ads, but that's not an option. Google almost went into that category once, but they implemented it badly and then shut down the entire thing.
I don’t think this is remotely true for most major ad-tech services.
For U.S. users, Google and Meta average several hundred dollars of annual ad revenue each. To replace their ad revenue you would need to charge ~$30+ a month for the service.
Interesting, yes. I put my approximate youtube numbers into chatGPT and it estimates $2.40-$9 a month, so at most I'm earning them on par with their cheapest offering.
The dark part is you, as a consumer who is willing to pay to not watch ads, are worth considerably more than a few cents to advertise to. In fact, the more you are willing to pay to have no ads, the more valuable showing ads to you is…
You're experiencing market segmentation. You won't pay $8.99 a month, so you don't get an ad-free product like the people who will pay. The service would rather get less than $8.99 from you than nothing, so you get ads.
But the part they seem to miss (or I get lost in the statistics) is that I wont use the service if I get annoyed by the ads. So they turn me into a churn which I wouldnt have been.
Right, you’re just getting lost in the statistics. Overall revenue is a function of revenue per user and number of users. They could go after you by reducing the ads, but they would also be reducing the revenue per user, and they might not gain enough additional people for it to be worth it.
I don't think it is true, that no one wants to pay a penny for services they use. I know at least one counter example, because I pay for search (Kagi), LLM usage (Kagi assistant), VPN, and support various good causes and content creators.
But I think your point is the vast majority, and that point probably stands, and indeed is a huge problem.
> Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
My gas pump has ads, despite me paying for the gas. My airplane has ads, despite me paying for the ticket. My phone has ads, despite me paying for the service. My doctor's office has ads, despite me paying for healthcare. My car has ads, despite me paying for the car.
I can pay for a service to watch sports, and I get ads during the event, ads painted on the field, ads superimposed on the field, normal ads embedded in the commentary, obtuse ads shoved into things like "and he's the Lite Beer Co.® Player of Match", ads in the name of the building, ads in the name of the match itself, ads on the player's jerseys. Frankly at this point I wouldn't be surprised if attending the game required receiving a free tattoo of a sponsor's logo.
Corporations have decided "why make ${service_cost}, when we could make ${service_cost} + ${ad_revenue}?"
Where can I find an oven made with entirely US parts (or even ~85-90%+)?
I'll tell you in advance that I haven't been able to locate one in a few years of looking. Most major appliances are, at best, 60-80% american with no accurate accounting, even if they're "assembled in the USA". Cars are the only thing with accurate sourcing labels due to legislation.
Why such a personal attack? I don't think I even know you!
I'm kidding, but what you say is hitting pretty close to home. I always mean to vote with my wallet, and I usually try, but for every Mikrotik router or Framework laptop I buy, there are so many Aukey Magsafe chargers, or McDodo Lightning to USB hubs. BTW, I'm not specifically calling out Aukey or McDodo, but for me those decisions were based on moments of weakness where I needed something to solve a problem, but I wasn't convinced it was significant enough that it was worth paying for what I thought was the best solution (The Aukey being the most recent purchase, and the McDodo having a memorable name).
As an example, I was recently looking for a replacement for my fraying 2m USB-C to Lightning cable, and Apple's is US$30 and it looks like it's made of the same buttery-soft plastic as all the short-lived cables that came with past phone purchases. Anker is finally a valid option where I now live - so I guess I should be giving them my business. They're a similar price, but look more resilient. I haven't quite reached USB-C on all my devices, so whenever I'm buying some accessory, it may only work with a device or two, and there's a decent chance that I might need to shuffle things around, and need a different length or a different connector on the input end.
That was a lot to write on an unimportant topic, and I didn't even touch on the temptation I sometimes cave into to fly a low-cost spin-off of a good airline.
I also share the feeling with another sibling-poster, that digital subscriptions all seem to be either free, or double digits a month, for just one small aspect of my digital existence. Things that only cost a few dollars a month are easy decisions, like Bitwarden, or leasing a domain name, or iCloud+. For anything that crosses into double digits a month, I never get around to it if there is a free alternative which I don't feel horrible about using. A grand-fathered Google Workspace, the free-tier of Protonmail, etc. However, I do feel guilty for not also paying for Kagi, Protonmail/Fastmail, Mullvad, etc. Should I be giving some money to Firefox in some way?
I wish more of these companies that were doing the right thing would offer a cheap tier that was a no-brainer, and there was a service where I could bundle together a bunch into one subscription. Feeling pretty entitled as I write this :)
But lacking that, I end up just sticking with the free options, and then every now and again donating some small amount to a cause I think is worth supporting - Lichess, Putty, VLC, etc.
Cables are something I have no qualms about buying from AliExpress, and I'd say they are better quality than what I can buy locally.
I power my laptop with a WOTOBE 100W 3-meter braided USB-C cable, I got three years ago, for €5. I roughly reel it up and throw it in my backpack, and the next day it comes out again.
I actually bought another one this year (as a spare) as I feel I've had it too long and it should break sometime soon. From a visual inspection there's absolutely nothing wrong with it though.
Compare this to paying €10 for a 1.5m cable from the supermarket, which is just a 50c Chinese product in a box that'll last 3 months - great if you need a cable NOW though. Or €30 for something from an electronics store that is whitelabeled with the brand of a phone manufacturer - and neither is actually rated for 100W.
The thing is the stuff retail stores sell locally is just the same stuff I can buy from China. Except they need to make a profit, the local distributor needs to make a profit, and the regional distributor needs to make a profit. So you end up paying 10x more for the same thing and/or they sell lower quality (= cheaper for them) items. I see zero value in them still existing other than convenience, it's not like the workers can tell you anything that you can't just ask Google yourself.
Appeals were made time after time to "Buy American!" as each manufacturing sector was offshored, first to Japan, then to China and the rest of Asia, but they were ignored by workers in other sectors. So, yes, you'd better believe the working class do not escape blame.
One big problem is that prices are easy to compare, while quality is not.
I recently bought a tub that was advertised as stainless steel on Amazon. I was suspicious but decided to take a chance. Turns out it is galvanized, not stainless. I’m not sure the average person knows the difference. To be charitable, perhaps that’s even why the listing advertised it that way. But the difference matters significantly in terms of performance and quality, especially for certain kinds of products and use cases.
There’s no “sort by quality, best to worst” system like there is for price. No “genuine stainless only” filter. You just have to know certain things.
Shopping in person obviously helps, but you still have to know what to look for. Refrigerators are a good example of this. Most people shop for them in person, yet it’s not at all obvious whether model A or model B will last longer. You can try to use price as a proxy for quality, but the more expensive refrigerators are actually more likely to fail years earlier because of the added component complexity. They’re basically banking on the fact that you don’t know how to read a wiring diagram.
To combat that, lots of people turn to YouTube or reviews to figure out quality. And sure, you can find some good sources that will tell you that top freezers will last longer than a French door model at basically any price, and they might even explain why. But all of those platforms are muddied with perverse incentives, affiliate programs, sponsorships, etc. Again, not always obvious.
We need to make quality obvious. We need to make it comparable, sortable, filtrable, and guaranteed. Poor design needs to be a valid reason to return an item. Manufacturers should be required to label products with an estimated lifespan. Give tax breaks or other incentives to products that include a warranty for its full lifespan.
We have to figure out how to improve the efficiency of making high quality goods, so that everything doesn’t just get more expensive. There should be a public database of the best known designs and techniques for making long lasting items. Patents that relate to longevity could be given extra time to encourage research, but then after, say, 3 years there could be a requirement to license the technology so that it can go mainstream.
This doesn’t solve everything. Some products need more specific approaches. Food quality is a problem. Housing needs to be both more affordable and higher quality. But I think with enough changes to incentives, the culture could shift towards seeing the value in making things well.
A simple indicator for quality should be the return rate by brand. You need two things: a law that offers a long enough warranty, and a public registry of returns where customers can check that their return is listed.
I finally subscribed to consumer reports. It is the only independent place we can trust for that information. However they only review a subset of the things I want to buy.
The more interesting part is to read the full detailed reviews on why they choose that. Often the most expensive or second most expensive has some useful features that they decide are not worth the cost but I do.
I have long thought they place too much emphasis on low cost over other factors, but the fact that I can get a useful review to make informed decisions is important.
Pretty sure they have a "best" (top of the list) and a "best value" IIRC. So you are interested in the best, but even it is often not the most expensive. OK, i didn't do any statistics, but that seemed to be typical.
There's also rtings[1]. They test consumer products and seem to try to keep their methodology transparent and consistent.
A lot of the data they produce is paywalled, but that's alright. They don't have advertising and they buy the products that they review. Someone has to keep the lights on and put food on their tables.
He convinced me to get a Dyson vacuum. Worst expensive purchase of my life.
Nothing he said was wrong. Dyson’s performance is genuinely excellent. The problem is everything else.
It squeaks as I move it around while vacuuming due to flimsy rubber seals. It doesn’t have a retractable cord or any good place to put it. It has a clever feature where if the vacuum is fully upright, then the accessories are active, otherwise the main floor head is active - cool, except that the upright position never clicks well, I have to constantly fight it. I could go on and on…
None of these things show up on a spec sheet and I didn’t come across them in any reviews either. It looks cool and it cleans well, but every other aspect of it is junk. I’m never going to buy one again.
More like who else can I trust at all? By default I trust them the most because everybody else I can find is too obviously a sell out and so the bar is low.
Note that everybody else I can find is very different from everybody else. Someone else linked rtings - I'd never heard of them before they were not in the running. There are probably many many others that are trust worthy - but all search engines will find is obvious sell outs.
I personally see two effects that are very detrimental here:
1) "Quality brands", where you pay a premium to get high quality/durability products, are economically incentivized to "sell-out" (cash in the brand name by producing as cheaply as possible). This is because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important than anything else.
2) Increasing trend towards no-name products (or ephemeral brands). This means that producers can sell cheap trash with no drawback whatsoever; slightly more expensive quality products become unmarketable because every customer will assume you're just trying to sell them the same cheapest shit for more.
I used to think that brand products were a universal money waste for suckers, but now I think they can be a very valuable mechanism.
What would really help in my view though is to force companies to stick with their brand, to incentivize them to invest into it and to make "cashing out" on good brands a universally bad decision.
> Quality brands are economically incentivized to sell-out [...] because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important
That probably happens a lot, but there's another mechanism by which it could happen, that requires no malice: the brand gets a quality reputation, which increases demand for its products, and they are unable to produce quality products at the rate needed to satisfy that demand. Then it's easy to reason that it'd be a net benefit for everyone to loosen the quality requirements a tiny bit, in order to satisfy the demand of more customers. People used to the quality will barely notice any difference, and then twice as many people can get that experience.
That works once, but when applied again, and again, and again, and again it becomes a problem, even with zero ill intent.
That sounds implausible. For a premium brand the marginal unit should be comfortably profitable, so they will have the resources to saturate the market at exponential speed purely from their unit economics. The somewhat theatrical lines outside the store aside, Apple has never had a strategic problem meeting the demand for Apple computers.
It seems a lot more likely that you get executives who come in and believe that narratives beat reality, there are a lot of people like that in the world. They are the sort who will abandon the reality of quality because that costs money then get confused when the narrative catches up. Or you get an idiot who is data-driven and detects that there is no immediate change in sales when they compromise on quality so they conclude that quality isn't valued by consumers. No malice, just a lack of strategic thinking.
For many, the most constraining resource is time. And you can't buy that. It takes years to spin up a new factory and production line and then transfer the implicit knowledge from your initial production line that provides the quality in the first place.
lmao, not everything is quickly scalable. Take quality lace which is still a very manual process, the highest quality brands most people working on these products are well past the age of 50. There's no one learning to make it and it takes many many years to get skilled enough to do it quickly. Also including apple in premium brand? They make cheap computers.
Once they reach the limit of demand, then there's nothing more to be made in that price category, so they get more by selling out and lowering quality and price.
We're going through massive global depopulation in the entire industrialized world. There are no new customers coming and sales will naturally trend down because of human extermination. Once everybody has an electric shaver, then you know that the next generation of customers is half the size or less. Unless you can make people grow their beards and hair faster, then there isn't going to be any demand among people who can afford a quality product. You have to start targeting the very poor, and thus lower production costs.
Or you could just be happy to have a profitable company that makes money consistently. Shavers don't last for ever and new people grow up every day. You could also just launch a new product line that's cheaper without compromising the existing ones.
But nooo we need infinite growth which is impossible so let's run the company into the ground for some more growth before our shit decisions catch up to us and stock price plummets.
Then you scale back a bit and keep making consistent money, just a bit less. The only way things go completely to shit is when you enshittify your product and nobody wants it any more.
Or you could expand to other markets, lots of options that don't require making your products worse.
Markets outside the industrialized world don't have the purchasing power for quality products from the industrialized world. That's why you have to reduce quality to reduce price if you want to sell consumer goods to them. Or wind down your operations. But who would want to wind down their operations?
I see "quality brands" as a potential way to avoid knowing yourself stuff about what you buy. In itself, outsourcing one's expertise about a product might be the root cause of the detrimental effects you mention.
As an example: I was once shopping with someone that had experience in fashion. While I don't remember all the details, with one look/touch the person could tell and explain if something was poor or high quality, while to me it all looked mostly the same. Based on that experience, I now I mostly stick to checking the material, and avoid plastics which seem to show a tendency for low quality across the board.
I do agree that it requires effort to know stuff about things, but when I see people that go like "oh, I need X, will pick the first X that shows up on Amazon", I am less amazed we get crappy quality for lots of products.
We can dream that every human should be self reliant enough to personally inspect a used car, test knife steel for ductility and carbon content, inspect the stitching in a pair of pants, on and on.
But if you need vast expertise and extensive product testing just to make a trip to the grocery store, that’s not a fluid market. You are requiring a system with a heavy reliance on unpaid labors by all parties.
There’s always a place for expertise, but trusted brands support market efficiency. The simplest is “I bought one of these before and I liked it; I trust that the brand & vendor will sell me an identical copy” without needing to interrogate their supply chain to confirm it’s the same good. Another is “if I buy this and the product has a defect, they will help set it straight”.
Trust in the seller is not far away in importance from transparent pricing, and arguably if the product hides a flaw (like a knockoff) the pricing is ipso facto not transparent.
From an economic perspective I think (more) informed consumers will just accelerate competition and innovation to obtain better results. Would be curious though to see some (academic) analysis on what is the influence on consumer expertise and brand impact over efficiency.
I feel that people "trust" too easy these days. Being it brands, politicians, artists, ideas, online videos, phone calls from a Nigerian prince, etc. I am not naive to think the majority will change tomorrow but I would advocate for the need of change. To make a far fetched comparison maybe 1000 years ago people would have said "learning to read is unpaid labors that does not benefit peasants", but I think more knowledge (and critical thinking) benefits everyone.
clothing is a particularly nasty one. "brand" is sometimes inversely proportional to quality within clothing. Price and quality is just completely random.
Checking stitch length, stitch type, fabric feel, fabric composition, any known supplier information about cotton staple and origin of production, construction complexity.
It's alot of work to keep on top of.
I read an article once about how levi slightly vary the fabric and button quality between cities and countries under the same name (and quality binning); optimising cost to consumer tolerance. And Levi is a brand marketing themselves for quality and legacy pride.
The ratings are hilariously gamed. Vendors will use coupons and discounts to get you to leave a positive review, while negative reviews are often reported off the site or the submitter is hounded by the vendor.
I do know that people use these ratings when making decisions, but the correlation to quality is fuzzy, at best. I can't imagine people will continue trusting these ratings forever.
> "cashing out" on good brands a universally bad decision.
For the company yes, not for the executive bonuses.
It is quite notable how the long-lasting companies that are household names somehow managed to resist this urge. Most of them are private.
People need to compartmentalize things in order to make sense of the universe, but doing so for companies (and governments) is just counterproductive.
Whenever you think about a company to draw any good conclusions you always need to think about all the people who work there, from the factory worker to the executive.
Something I've noticed is every maybe 3-4 years there's a new "hot person athleisure" brand that appears, prices at a premium, bombards social media, drapes every single person you see running outside in your city in full sets from it, before getting turned out and replaced by basically the same exact thing with a different name.
So they've gotten quite good at the pump n dump of getting everyone in the spin class on some new $300 polyester outfit every two weeks. It is probably brutally formulaic how refined the playbook is for these sorts of companies.
Also it doesn't even matter if the rare company making a high quality product long enough to get a positive brand rep is incentivized to sell out (although I don't disagree with you that is a pressure to act in short term interests) thanks to this great thing called: private equity!
Punishment is never a good long term solution. Because punishment is related to revenge. And revenge reinforces the punishment - but on the other side.
Perhaps questioning the underlying assumptions we make about products, money and capitalism is an alternative approach:
- money is just a means, not an end. Allowing faceless investors to pump money into brands and then have them force companies to turn a profit at any price (i.e. by decreased quality at higher prices - it's a brand after all). The euphemism for this is "increasing shareholder value". The only value being increased is money.
- why does advertising build on our fears of being "different" (not belonging to our assumed peer group) or "not being happy" (if you buy this product, you'll be as happy as the person shown here in the advertising). Or missing out on something. The euphemism here is "increasing brand awareness". They that shout the loudness will remain memorable.
- why has everything and everyone become a product to be sold and repackage to fit into the latest trends. Intelligence is now also become a product in the form of AI with folks outsourcing their intelligence to a machine "oh AI can do this better than I could so I won't even bother".
Unfortunately we make too many assumptions that it has to be this way. Science and nature have yet found the unifying law of capitalism or brandism, let allow law of influencism.
So until the next bubble bursts and much time is spent saving large bloated inefficient corporations from bankruptcy because interested parties have their fingers in the pie, the game will continue.
The whole thing is becoming a giant game of monopoly with no end. At least monopoly eventually ends with the winner gloating over their success and everyone else quietly walking away.
And to add a layer to the AI example that almost circles back to the original issue: there is a financial/time incentive to rationalize “it will do it better,” because it means you don’t have to do it at all yet you theoretically profit
I agree with this. It's curious that we always talk about "things used to last forever and weren't only made by corporations chasing infinite growth", when those things are often still available, but are almost invisible because we now discover everything through social media or SEO.
You can find great-quality, long-lasting products at great prices (great price doesn't equal cheap, but great for what you get).
I use capable LLMs on high reasoning to run a prompt like this:
"I want to buy a high-quality [category] that will/has/can [requirements here]. I do not want to pay for a brand name that doesn't improve.
Start by finding manufacturing clusters in [region of the world, e.g. Europe] where [category] is made, then find the businesses making [category] in that cluster that I can buy from.
Normal online stores are okay, but also try non-obvious avenues:
-local business registers
-stores that may only be available in the local language
-factories that sell samples directly"
-cooperatives that sell products from multiple local manufacturers
(I modify this prompt, but it's the skeleton)
To verify a given product/brand/store, a great follow-up prompt has been:
"Now find me big brands offering a product of similar quality (ideally measured by objective characteristics) and show me how much it is vs. [store name here]"
This has showed me incredible finds. It's become how I buy most things that go beyond basic trinkets, and I often pay less for far higher quality.
I understand the strong desire to help the environment, but why lead with that? I think it's become apparent that the average person doesn't really care about the environment. People do care about maximum convenience and minimal cost , which usually leads to waste. We should try harder to create a system that aligns the incentive of taking care of the Earth than we try to force people to care about the environment. Remember, if your reasoning is that "if people would just XYZ", it's bad reasoning.
This is a false pretense. Quality was never the norm.
What is no longer the norm is getting first-hand experience with a product before you buy it. Everything comes in the mail and it's a surprise to the consumer after they buy it. That's nuts!
Is it easy? What if an organization avoids liability through shell companies and financial engineering?
"The company managing your warranty was acquired by Foobar Inc and their sole building burned down destroying all records. We apologize for the inconvenience."
I think they should be responsible for accurate listings, swift refunds, taking down misleading products, and banning repeat offenders. I somehow think making Amazon "responsible for what they sell" goes far beyond that in ways that are not reasonable. Only those that make products should be responsible for them.
Well they don't ban repeat offenders. Trying to directly regulate the banning of repeat offenders seems more difficult and less fruitful than giving the store fallback responsibility for the warranty.
Australia gives the store primary responsibility and it seems to work well for them.
I guess if they aren't prohibited from having a contract with the manufacturers to have them fulfill or reimburse warranty claims, then it would be acceptable to to require stores to honor it. They'll be more careful about who they allow in.
That's what bonds are for. US customs requires prepaid bonds for other things. Importers who don't have enough assets would have to post a bond to cover repairs for the product. They get it back at 10 years.
When most fortune 500 companies burned brand-goodwill to sell disposable versions of products, it is credulous to believe all problems are external. =3
I think we're asking too much of buyers here. You shouldn't need to learn about fabrics and stitching, then check who owns the brand now, just to buy a shirt that lasts.
Being “a dick” and having a high quality product are often orthogonal to each other. Reputation also requires brand recognition which often lends itself to enshittification as companies get established.
In certain personal projects, I have the opposite philosophy where I don't want quality. I got addicted to designing models and 3D-printing them a year ago. Over time, I learned to reduce the amount of safety factor and make items just strong enough for their application - which saves material and printing time. I wouldn't skimp on something like a carrying handle for the printer, where failure would mean damaging the printer. But I would reduce the amount of plastic used in things like art pieces (3DBenchy - who needs structural strength?), end caps for various objects, prototypes for dimensioning. Moreover, sometimes I'm happy to see my parts break because I was thinking of redesigning it or did so already, hence I would be itching to print the new version. Aside from that, just knowing I can reprint a part anytime (without modifications) makes me much less worried about breaking or losing a part.
True … I’m the same, but I consider that good engineering. Designing it with the use in mind, factoring in all the stresses adequately but only just. That’s more like how an airplane is made: weight/strength only where it’s truly necessary.
I wouldn’t say that’s low quality though, just something with a lot more care put into it.
The answer is competition. Quality declines when companies no longer have to meaningful compete in the marketplace. The only other solution is regulation and force quality through punishment for noncompliance. Competition works better.
My experience is competition invokes two races happening at the same time, one for lowest price and one for highest quality. You can get a cheap car or really high quality car. Same goes for clothes, restaurants, basically anything where there is lots of market choices and competition.
That doesn't make any sense. The most expensive cars are also the least reliable. Rich people have multiple cars so when the Bentley has an electrical glitch they just drive the Porsche.
Quality means different things to different people. But the fact that Bentleys and Porsche exist support that case that not everything in a competitive markets drives things to the lowest cost product.
At the end of the day, people still end up sucking it up and buying it, so the market can only be so efficient. Every hobby I've had, all sorts of different stuff only anchored in the fact you have to buy gear, the common theme is everyone is constantly pissed off at the companies making the gear. It is very much an abusive relationship.
The upper end of a lot of these product categories is often populated with overpriced junk that's popular for conspicuous consumption reasons. Clothing is the prime example, but a lot of modern fine dining is also trash (who actually enjoys eating flavoured foam?). So there's actually three races: lowest price, highest quality, and highest brand value.
Depends- i care about the quality of power tool I buy. There’s plenty of competition, but most of it I won’t touch because it’s some “Zissbou” brand off of Amazon.
The competition on the high end is great! Makita, Milwaukee, and others battling it out. Better materials, batteries, designs. But I’ll only pay for actual performance, so there’s no where for bad actors to hide.
1. Higher quality requires better trained technicians. That means fewer people will be able to participate due to any of missing experience, costs of training/education, and opportunity costs.
2. Higher quality generally requires third party certification, such as the CE or FCC identifiers on electronic equipment. Certification costs time and money resulting in a form exclusivity.
3. Higher quality means goods/services with increased durability, which requires fewer updates or repurchases. That is great, for the producer, if everything comes with a warranty but is bad if patching is an extra expense.
Now consider what that means for software, a fully unregulated industry. It means some form of credentials for developers instead of frameworks or tech stacks. It means paying money to third parties to validate every patch release. It also means applying a warranty to all commercially licensed software. These things would raise the price of software and eliminate most people currently employed.
"Now consider what that means for software, a fully unregulated industry. It means some form of credentials…"
So what! Until the 20th Century pharmaceuticals/medicines were unregulated (eg: buy laudanum (opium) anywhere without regs and instructions said it was fine to give it to kids). After deaths, disasters and addiction regulations tightened—especially so after birth defects and thalidomide. Now the industry is tightly regulated.
Right, it took over one hundred years for pharma to be regulated. So be it for software. It's time the Wild West came to an end.
There'll always be whingers along the way, especially if they stand to lose profits. The "Good Times" for the software industry ought to be over because consumers are no longer benefiting in the way they should. Want a quintessential example of 'junk' software: Windows 11.
Existing regulations should cover software in their respective industries. Outside of that what you are asking for is simply onerous and isn't something that can be regulated in a meaningful manner.
We've already had opensource projects threatened by the age-check legality nonsense (which cannot be enforced). If you regulate what features can/can't be in an OS you will end up negatively affecting opensource and/or hobbyists which will give the consumer less choice.
The only reason we have an actual alternative to Windows is because people create their own Linux distros and software around it.
I don't buy your list. For example, higher quality doesn't require third part certification. Reputation (and warranties) can work without third parties.
I do agree that third party certification is one possible avenue.
My local coffee shop makes excellent coffee. They don't need get a third party certification for me to to believe that.
Similarly for eg a local carpenter. Or my tailor.
The bar exam merely tells you that someone is legally allowed to be a lawyer or some such. They don't tell you, if she's any good. I don't know what USMLE or PE are.
> Same goes for products too. It’s not a reasonable solution for the consumers to perform an exhaustive research to get high quality guarantee.
That's for the consumer to decide, isn't it? And consumer can use third party certification, if they want to, sure. (Or if they are required to do so by regulation.)
That doesn't say anything about quality, except for "should not kill you or give you a disease". What shopper would be satisfied with the bare minimum of the minimum, no matter what they are buying?
I think you misunderstand quality versus competition. The purpose of regulation is to impose a minimum baseline of quality.
Software does not have regulation. In many areas of software we force shit quality on the users and just expect them to take it without complaint as a common practice. Then we as developers, like entitled children, completely rage the moment anyone casts light on this insanity.
> The purpose of regulation is to impose a minimum baseline of quality.
Quality has more than one dimension. Food regulation is mostly concerned with "don't poison the customer". It doesn't otherwise care about things like taste or smell or texture.
It's because something is better than nothing when it comes to software. Which people always forget.
Is eating spoiled food which gives you a disease better than not eating anything? No, it's worse, and therefore the minimum quality regulations make sense.
Is having low quality software better than not having any software? Yes, in almost all cases it is better. So a minimum quality regulation doesn't make sense.
When people put quality requirements too high on software, we get situations where for example public transport information and tickets aren't available digitally because the government is taking 15 or more years to make the "perfect" platform. The public is better served by a shitty solution the first years, an OK solution after that, and hopefully a good solution later on.
Delivering fast has a very important value when it comes to software, because you can replace it with improved versions at no physical cost. Delivering a vehicle which will kill you or food which will make you sick is very different. In those cases nothing is better than anything.
> When people put quality requirements too high on software, we get situations where
This is a common trope of the unregulated: We can’t raise quality because we can barely deliver as it is. The real message there is that the user should suffer so that you won’t.
I'm a consumer of software, not a developer. And I can tell you that as a consumer I always prefer something over nothing. If you can do it better, you have a golden opportunity, which you should take, to deliver something better to the market. Otherwise, you haven't much reason to complain that other people are doing at least something.
I think reputation and warranties are insufficient. While building a reputation may be expensive, destroying a reputation can be profitable (in the short term). Warranties can also be made less effective by making the buyer spend excessive time and effort to enforce the warranty. The company sets the terms and effectively their interpretation, so after two years of waiting, nudging, waiting, complaining, waiting, threatening, and waiting one finally gets an "equivalent value" replacement (and the warranty clock was running during that time).
The company might also go bankrupt with much of its profits having gone to owners and decision makers who are not bound to honor the warranty.
You can be free to disregard warranties that are solely policed by the company that offers them. And companies are free to give you warranties guaranteed by third parties.
> The company might also go bankrupt with much of its profits having gone to owners and decision makers who are not bound to honor the warranty.
I don't think the idea of circular economy, where goods are produced with high manufacturing quality standards, applies to software. In the sense that producing high quality physical goods may not be beneficial for the producer. But producing high quality software is rarely not beneficial for the developer, specially in the long term.
Maybe idea could be maybe applied to the offering of long-term technical support and backwards-compatibility (in terms of durability of the software) and open source (in terms of reusability of the software).
One of the greatest challenges for software as an industry is for the developers to consider the role of the user. In my 20 years of doing this rarely have I seen a developer advocate for the users over themselves. Instead the developer imposes themselves as the primary user and the actual users as a secondary class. This is where most tech stacks and design decisions come in at every step.
I can also remember when I worked at Travelocity a million years ago and they actively tried to fight this insanity with exhaustive A/B testing.
Not to mention, it would raise the cost of Software as a Service businesses as the cost of building and maintaining software goes up, as well as the technical expertise to maintain those systems. That would have a flow-on effect of reduced market as low-medium income folks are effectively priced out of the market, no long paying for "cloud services, and so on... It would be a disaster.
I think all three of these points, but especially the first two are rather speculative; I don't personally believe they hold, though I can't be sure.
Most quality defects I see are ultimately down to culture, not training and certainly not certification. Getting to excellent quality simply does not require great training nor rigorous certification, and I'm not even sure it really benefits from either all that much. But what it does require is a culture of chasing down all the avoidable risks, to fix not just the immediate bug, but also the process that allowed it to come to be, to pre-emptively look for whole classes of bugs or misfeatures seriously, and to always look deeper than for underlying causes or interactions (i.e. take the 5-why's game seriously).
It's perhaps almost a trope by this point, but it's still a great reminder and example - sqlite. About a month ago Richard Hipp, one of the primary authors, gave a great presentation "Reliability Lessons From SQLite" (https://youtu.be/V_qzqY1bb7I) - and notably, I'm not seeing even _echos_ of training and certification in their clearly world-class process. I don't think you can even seriously claim it's all that expensive, if you consider how tiny that team is, and yet how much they've achieved.
If larger organizations fail to achieve high quality - well, _why?_ It's not due to lack of training, certifications or smart people. Perhaps its intrinsic about larger for-profit corporations, but I suspect we could do better with better incentives, and a more serious attitude about dealing with mis-aligned incentives throughout our culture. Is it really a flaw for a corporation to prioritize short term cost reduction even over long term self-harm if that's what they're judged by? Is it a flaw for a profit seeking corporation to largely ignore costs their low quality imposes on others? Is it a flaw for a for-profit organization to take huge risks when the upside is unbounded but the downside is mere bankruptcy without any further liability?
I don't know how to solve these problems, and don't want to claim it's even remotely reasonable to throw out the capitalist baby with the corporate bathwater, but surely we can do better than the status quo even without a revolution. Misaligned incentives and tragedies of the commons aren't new issues, nor ones without potential mitigations. We're just choosing to ignore those inefficiencies, and have for decades. And at this point, even small changes in incentives might have truly wrenching consequences; the ingrained and by now deeply embedded carelessness in our huge software and other engineering stack is corroded at every level.
TLDR: I don't have the answer, but I'm pretty positive it's not an issue of cost, training or certification.
Those are tangible, obvious things. They are not subtle. They do not take months or years to discover or become obvious. They are (mostly) not vague or ambiguous. Does this car have lane assist? Yes or no. Will this car last me 20 years? ...maybe? That's a very hard question to answer. It's messy and complicated and has a lot of clauses to it.
So, consumers buy whatever is the cheapest available with the features they want, or the most feature-rich they can with their budget.
This demand forces manufacturers to respond. They find a way to cram more functionality in, at a cheaper price. If they don't, they will simply get eaten up by those who do, overseas or otherwise.
You can say you want quality and reliability all you want - it changes nothing. At the end of the day, the vast majority keep voting with their wallet - and they want CHEAP.
> Consumers, fundamentally, care about two things: * Price * Features
Consumers also care about accessibility. It doesn't matter to me if product X is amazing and affordable if I can't find it in any store anywhere near me or if amazon never shows it in search results because all they want to push is amazon basics and products made by FSLHVHSLR
If no company anywhere sells what I want, then I have no choice but to compromise and today there is a whole lot of compromising going on. Companies are more interested in selling what is most profitable to them, not what consumers actually want. Very often consumers are forced to buy what little is offered to them. The consumer "voting with their wallet" will always lose when companies also vote with theirs because theirs is much much bigger.
Consumers care about a lot of things besides that, it's just that (as you mention) those are the two most legible things to consumers.
Your specific example of cars is, IMO, not correct: Honda, for years, could charge a premium on their new cars due to a reputation for reliability increasing resale values.
For less expensive things, how much time should I spend researching quality USB-C to HDMI dongles? It's plausible that the chip in the $5 on amazon WOPEIME (or whatever) branded dongle is the same as the in the $25 Belkin one.
For intermediate things, time-pressure might matter. If my clothes washer were to fail today, I'm doing laundry by hand until I can get a new one in my house, so I'm probably playing quality roulette with several hundred dollars of my money at Best Buy.
I think what people associate with "quality" is vastly different from each other.
For example I believe there is a deeper quality that cannot be easily found in a more quality product. Quality can be expressed in many ways and felt throughout the life. But people don't care for that.
They mostly care for cheap and good enough. I don't want to attack that way of life its simply one with tradeoffs like a life with more quality.
More quality can mean more expensive, the need to engage with something a bit more, etc.
Leibl famously needed over 3 months to just draw the hands of one model for "Three Women in Church" it certainly has some quality to it.
In the modern world seldom you will find one that wants to pay for such work or even spending 3 months of work on painting hands.
Enshittification is definitely real, but let's not look at the past with rose-colored glasses. A lot of things you can buy today are vastly superior to things available 50 years ago.
It used to be remarkable to drive a car 100k miles without major repairs. Volvo dealerships in the 80's and 90's would give you a badge at 100k milestones to advertise how reliable their cars were compared to others.
Anything tech related is just light years ahead of what it used to be, and for far cheaper. 65"+ OLED TVs for less than a couple grand are pretty much science fiction come to life. Gaming consoles are super-computers compared to an NES.
For many appliances, if you pay an inflation-adjusted cost for what a 1980's family would pay you can get something that will last forever. Last year I bought a commercial microwave for about $300 that has a single dial, hardly any features, and likely will last longer than the first microwave my family owned and also paid ~$300 for. Adjusting for inflation my new microwave is vastly better and cheaper than my childhood one.
I play guitar - in 1954 a new Stratocaster sold for $249, which is about $3k in today's dollars. And $249 today will get you a guitar that's easily as good as most 1954 Strats. If you spend the inflation-adjusted equivalent you're in ultra-luxury territory.
Want good furniture? That's ALWAYS been expensive, but you'd typically buy a table for the equivalent of $5k in today's dollars and expect it to last a lifetime. You can spend $5k on real wood furniture today, but nobody does.
Housing materials are much better and cheaper with the possible exception of copper pipes and anything made of real wood. Certainly builders of McMansions are cutting corners at every opportunity, but if you do your own building/finishing these days a lot of materials are available that will outlast their 1980's equivalent, and the cheap options are better.
I think a lot of this is a lack of perspective - everyone wants better things but nobody actually wants to pay for it.
> I think a lot of this is a lack of perspective - everyone wants better things but nobody actually wants to pay for it.
I think that's part of it, but I also think it's largely an issue of information asymmetry. Brands used to be a proxy for quality, and price could also be a proxy for quality, but that is no longer the case. That means it takes significantly more effort to research a product category to find a good product and people don't want to expend that effort. I am one of those weird people that enjoys that research, so I'm often the one people in my friend group ask for product recommendations because they are more than happy to spend the money, just not the time.
It's a discovery problem at the end of the day. When all the existing indicators become unreliable and advertising is inundated with scams and frauds, there's no way for good products to connect to good customers, so /everyone/ suffers.
There's few things where the drop in quality is astronomical, one of them being clothing.
Clothes used to last a life time till few decades ago.
Right now you buy stuff that after the first wash already looks worn out, terrible or starts falling apart.
Major known brands are guilty of this too, often regardless of price.
So people end up with closets filled of junk that they look terrible in anyway.
I wish there was a line of brands and even better shops that focused on quality fabrics and sewing processes for clothing that lasts for ages as it used to.
> Major known brands are guilty of this too, often regardless of price.
I think this is part of the problem. Everyone wants high-quality (for the most part), but no-one wants to pay more than necessary. If known brand is no longer an indicator of quality, how do you determine that you want to spend say 2-5x the price on something? Reading reviews and such gets you part of the way, but they often focus on new products and performance or style. And it's not always easy to find a review for the thing you are looking to buy. Besides, who has time to wade through reviews for every purchase? So we end up buying the cheaper options because at least then you will only be out a little bit instead of feeling tricked spending more for the same product.
I love this - super testable experiment. I have this exact desire too.
- I can’t stand most cheaply made tshirts or things with crass branding
- there are a few clothing brands that focus on high quality (and in this case english mfg fabric mills).
- it is not cheap. our whole society is warped around “physical goods are super cheap now [because we can manufacture in cn]”. it’s a race to the bottom and we’ve hit the bottom.
- you can buy a black nylon/cotton tshirt for 10 USD
- these tshirts will set you back 130 USD. it feels amazing, was made in a country with health care, ages well, looks high quality.
it's also a matter of fashion, you can get real denim work pants that will last a tech worker probably two lifetimes. They're ugly, thick, and heavy though.
I ordered one to see how it holds up. $100 for a t-shirt isn't even that high of a price, most t-shirts I own are merch shirts that cost $45-$70 anyway and are printed on the cheapest Hanes or similar shirt. If it's actually good at $100, I'm sure many people would want to buy it, they just don't know about it. I had never even heard of this company till I saw your comment, but regularly spend more than $100 on an article of clothing if I think it will actually last.
Claude is subject to the same enshittification market forces. Think of the value Claude could unlock by having trusted commercial partners that just happen to have the best product in a market segment.
I guess "necessary" was a bit too vague of a word. I meant that for all your various requirements such as quality, style, workers conditions, etc. there is a cost included. If I gave you the same shirt, from the same brand, created by the same people, but gave you two options for price you'd choose the lower one. If I gave you one shirt at a high price and one shirt at a low price you'd need the higher priced shirt to be justifiably more expensive.
The share of household spending on clothing has gone from 10%+ to under 5% in Western countries. When you're spending that much, it's not a surprise that clothing was "BIFL" both in quality and upkeep (repair rather than replace).
The overall revealed consumer preference has been "more and cheaper", not "less and higher quality", which still exists as a niche if you are willing to go down the tailoring route, not off the peg.
The thing is mainly there are no quality options available. It's mostly all cheap shit or slightly more expensive, but still equally shit.
So how can this reveal preference if there are no options?
I would argue the surge in vintage clothing ecosystems is an indication there is an unmet demand.
There’s certainly options above temu junk. Maybe it doesn’t meet your bar but I’ve found the 100% cotton stuff from Uniqlo to be massively higher quality than the average. I’ve got tshirts from them I’d guess I’d worn and washed 80+ times.
You can still go to a tailor and commission jackets, trousers and shirts, made with the same quality of fabrics and manufacturing techniques. With shoes, you can still go and buy hand welted shoes.
It all comes at a price but I don't disagree that we have a barbell problem here (ie cheap fast fashion or bespoke, with nothing in the middle).
Not just rich people, I pay maybe 3 times more for my T-shirts than the average person. I'm certain they last me at least twice as long, probably 3 times and they're way nicer to wear.
That's not actually "revealed consumer preference" for quantity over quality. It's just that it's impossible for the average consumer to assess quality.
> I wish there was a line of brands and even better shops that focused on quality fabrics and sewing processes for clothing that lasts for ages as it used to.
They still exist, at least here in Europe.
I quit buying cheap clothing a decade ago, getting quality items is much more expensive but at the same time I've had basic t-shirts that I wear most days last me 5-8 years; trousers that are almost 10 years old and the only blemish is a bit of faded colours; underwear lasting 5+ years, etc.
The issue is very few people have the disposable income and are willing to pay 40-80€ on a good quality t-shirt with heavy premium quality cotton (280-300gsm) sewn in Portugal, Spain, or Italy, or 45€ on a 3-pack of underwear made in Scandinavia, or 20-30€ on a pair of great quality woolen socks.
I do it because I have experienced how much longer they can last, and also had the experience of overpaying on what seemed to be a good quality item and didn't last, it's really hard to find a good signal for what's quality since price alone doesn't do it, you need to buy the stuff and hope it will be good quality and if it's not you learn to not buy it again, it can get expensive if you are unlucky or didn't do proper research.
In the end it can be exhausting for a normal person just looking for good quality to find those items, it took me years to settle on the brands I buy from.
Haha, yeah, completely understandable, I have a few linen pieces (shorts, shirts, a couple of t-shirts) for the occasions I go to a hot place during summers but I live in Scandinavia where summers are, to me, the perfect level of warmth. I generally avoid the peak summer in southern Europe (both due to the heat but also overcrowding), and when I visit my family in Brazil it's also usually off-peak summer.
I really cannot handle very hot weather, it's nice for a day or two but a week of constant 30+C is definitely not my happy place.
That's the trap I described, it's really hard to tell since price is not a good signal.
To me it was trial and error, recommendations, and shopping at physical stores, and like I mentioned as well: it's time-consuming, frustrating, and I wouldn't expect a person not interested in this quest to be able to find good quality items consistently.
Yeah its great when you find quality things but you don't always know, price isn't a great indicator of quality. There is also the buyitforlife subreddit, would like something like it but more structured.
I think this reflects how companies are run in US and Europe, they don't seem to believe how different companies can be here, its not only about turbo maxing the owners profit.
Both have great videos on garment quality. But with the inevitable caveat that they are in the business themselves. I take it as an insiders perspective and watch out for content marketing (while being tainted!).
It seems to be easier to find better clothes if you are a bit of a hipster type. Those kind of stores still care for quality. My friend has such a shop and tells me that even for them it gets harder to source good vendors as it is a continuous race to the bottom.
Clothing is also a bit of a special thing. Some people will just get bored or tired of wearing the same trousers or the same old coat every year during 10 years. So it is simply not worth it to spend a mini fortune on a great quality one.
This tends to happen more when one is young. Growing older usually means that a good old dusty 15 years great quality coat is seen as it being perfectly ok. I guess that's also what provides that feeling that some people when they approach middle age they "always look the same"... It's not cheap to have a large and varied wardrobe and at the same time filled with high quality garments.
There’s some amount of gradient between use-once and fully bespoke clothing, and most people’s economic means are positioned somewhere on that gradient. Indeed it’s a U curve of sorts – cheap clothing can be surprisingly expensive (see also the Vimes Boots Theory).
Yes, it can be expensive to be poor, but the rich really do consumer more dollars-of-boot per day, because they can afford it.
> There’s some amount of gradient between use-once and fully bespoke clothing [...]
Bespoke clothing mostly fits you better. It doesn't necessarily last longer. (But you can ask for harder wearing material or longer lasting manufacturing techniques, of course.)
The "rich" mapped to our world are the middle class (which only barely exists in Ankh-Morpork, just like it only barely existed historically in the real world). We could define "middle class" as the people who can afford to buy boots that last, but can’t afford to buy boots that don’t have to last. Exactly the bottom of the U curve I mentioned.
This is why wear-once ultra-fast fashion is attractive in the first place: not only is it cheap (in a very short-sighted sense) but it allows the less-than-affluent to signal affluence (by never wearing the same outfit twice – we call this "being fashionable" but of course being fashionable has historically been about signaling wealth first and foremost).
Taking Pratchett at his word, the obvious solution would be to rent good boots to poor people. The bootlord would make good money, and the poor would get access to better boots for cheaper. The troll mafia can threaten to to break some kneecaps to make sure people are properly incentivised to keep up with the rent.
Quality already is the norm for many products. For example, I own Sennheiser headphones, an iPhone and a MacBook. (Sure maybe not the absolute top of the line, but definitely more expensive than commodity products.)
I find great utility in cheap low cost products for things that I don’t know I’ll use more than once. For example, I’m glad I bought the cheapest roller blades a few years ago because I used them twice. I also buy a lot of cheap toys for my kids, they may use them only a few times and also quantity really has a certain quality (novelty is good for kids).
I find the moralizing and lecturing around quality to be distasteful. These holier than thou types really think they know better than the buyer.
I think about this a lot because I try to never buy anything Chinese or low quality unless I have to.
Unfortunately, from my experience artisans aren't willing to do the work anymore, even if you pay them premium. For instance, a carpenter here in Poland that decided to be a carpenter would rather cut up pre-made cabinets to your specs than make them from scratch using wood, even if I pay them 10x.
Then, people aren't willing to pay premium for stuff. For some reason, they would rather buy 20 products that last year than 1 product that can last 20 or more.
It's a problem for me because I value quality and would be willing to pay premium, but I just can't ever find anything.
It's an old stereotype - between 1990 and 2010 or so, Chinese manufacturing was usually seen as of a lower quality.
This was often unfair and incorrect even then, but it's clearly mad now. Chinese products run the gamut from the lowest to the highest ends in almost every consumer field. But some people hew to old stereotypes.
I'm not sure where you live, but it is reasonable to bet that "we" still does.
The US manufactures more than it ever did - but the number of people working to manufacture stuff is way down (while population is way up), and so few people have visibility into what is being made. There is a lot of cool stuff made in the US. Whatever country you live in likely has a similar story.
Where are you going to shop? And how do you know something is the 'Chinese version'? It's not like for example Apple advertises where they assemble their products.
For a concrete example, we get very good rice varieties specifically from certain parts of China. (But here in Singapore people also really care about rice. You generally can't buy good and fresh rice in the middle of the Polish countryside for example.) And, yes, for this product the 'Chinese' variety is superior to eg generic Thai rice.
I put 'Chinese' in scare-quotes, because just like you don't just drink 'French wine' when you know what you are doing, you don't just eat 'Chinese' rice.
For a lot of tea drinking paraphernalia, the most top of the line items also come from China. Even if you are into, say, Japanese tea.
I either look at the label or do research beforehand. I buy from all kind of places.
I wasn't thinking of agricultural products, but rather anything manufactured. As an example, appliances made in Germany will have a cord long enough that you can actually plug into the wall, while the one that's made in China will have a useless 10-centimeter cord that would force me to use an extension.
Your mileage might vary, this is just my experience, but it's been pretty consistent for a few decades, with things going downhill in the past I'd say 5 years or so.
We are happy with our Miele appliances (washing machine, dryer, dish washer.) But we also have plenty of Chinese stuff that works well.
I've recently had kids, and I'm actually impressed at how much toys have improved in quality since I was a kid growing up in Germany. And, yes, most of these new toys come from China etc. By and large, they seem to be sturdier and last a lot longer, and are cheaper, too.
I'm especially impressed by the light-up shoes we bought. I guess you can blame that on general improvements in LEDs and battery technology in that specific case, maybe.
For what it's worth, I now live in Singapore, and we are very open on trade, so as a consumer you benefit from especially brutal competition.
Could also be that if you're in Singapore you get better stuff. It's possible that European companies pick crappy, cheaper products that they have a higher margin on to cover importing and transport. I have no idea.
It might be possible, I don't know. Singapore is a fairly small market, so we don't really get any bespoke stuff.
Transport shouldn't really be worse: once you put anything on a container ship, it doesn't really matter much how long the ride is. But imports could be more annoying in other ways.
We do have a lot more people speaking Chinese here (around 3/4 of the population are ethnically Chinese after all) and lots of personal contacts, so we get a lot of people running small import businesses getting in Chinese stuff.
Of course, there's still plenty of low quality stuff you can buy. But I see that as a benefit: it's good to have the choice available, if you want to take it.
Regulation doesn't have much to do with quality. For example, there's plenty of regulation to make food safe, but almost nothing about making your food high quality in the sense of taste and texture.
You get quality from competition and customers opening their wallets for quality.
Another example: Apple assembles some nice consumer hardware in China. Their quality doesn't depend on regulation.
I definitely have to do a lot of work every time I need something, but I can often find products that aren't made in China (normally Germany).
If not, I usually just don't buy it new and just go to the thrift store. I can usually find what I need, made 30 years ago that will probably last me for the rest of my life.
> Unfortunately, from my experience artisans aren't willing to do the work anymore, even if you pay them premium.
"premium" ? No they've had to lower their prices because otherwise you would never even look at them in the first place (or they don't get a livable amount of work, even if you personally do pay like you say).
And the drop in prices has to come from somewhere. Quality is by far the easiest thing to skimp on.
I would PAY Apple $500 if they'd dedicate a year of development only to fixing known issues. The number of sort-of-well-known bug grows from year to year, and it feels like they only accumulate, never go away. VoiceOver of my (touch-id-only) iPad said "Face not recognized" yesterday, because it failed to read my finger rpint. This is getting comically bad.
Tech workers in the US are probably around 90-99 percentile wage. Take something where the quality is well known and measurable, and can be purchased for extra money. How often do you fly first class, or even pay 10-20% extra to have more legroom, early boarding or a more convenient flight times versus picking the cheapest option that you can make work?
People will demonstrably shop primarily on price no matter what... The producers respond to that.
Related, Matt Levine has recently been writing about how the AI labs are paying huge amounts of money to tech/math/AI people but these people don't actually know how to spend it. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-09-10/dal... As opposed to the typical finance worker who knows very well how to spend.
People are buying EVERYTHING indiscriminately, accelerating enshittification. Just make anything, advertise with influencers, meta ads, etc and sell stuff is the mantra. If people learn to value their money, only pay for the best and let the bad products die, things will change.
In a world of shrinkflation and enshittification, I just wanted to give a shout out to Feetures socks[0] which I love. It's a family-owned business and all they make is socks. They're anatomically designed, so if you can't handle sorting L/R these aren't for you. Not only are they a high-quality sock, they have a lifetime guarantee as well.
A related concept is Jugaad - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad Often interpreted as "good enough" with no connection to Quality at all. Even when the context/environment changes to afford better quality (both manufacturing and cost) quality is never pursued unless mandated by National/ISO standards etc.
But the actors are never fully rational, there is always a clique which manipulates/influences and therefore there is never a "fair" market. Human motivations and behaviour are always the key and so you need Behavioral Game Theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_game_theory (see book of the same name by Colin Camerer)
Finally, Nassim Taleb's ideas are also very relevant here. Markets work on "Trial and Error" and "Chance", there is no "fair/efficient invisible guiding hand" but only a guiding hand by cliques which have no "skin in the game" when it comes to downsides and "asymmetric risk" benefiting corporate capitalism. But the system as a whole functions because it is somewhat "Antifragile" i.e. the chaotic interactions and successes/failures within the system somehow strengthens the whole.
The main problem is that most business are run by people who have no believe at all that you could run a successful company without tricking people into buying your product. That means they don't even try. The rare exception are companies where rhe founder is e.g. a principled engineer, or some German family business that does nothing but ball bearings in the 4th generation and their business model is basically to be the best at ball bearings. Something like that.
But so many publicly traded companies appear to basically have become stock gambling dens that accidentally produce some products on the side out of legacy reasons.
Many are of the kind that use quality only as a marketing statement and when it comes to the engineering choice they will not even shell out 10 cents more for stainless screws to hold the thing together.
The reasons why there is little quality products is because the incentives all point in the other direction for most companies. And where they don't it is usually a special niche product or the intrinsic values of one or a few individuals making the choice to put their ideals above their wallet.
If we want this to change we have to change the incentive structure.
With sufficient competition, the incentives of companies would change if consumers would be willing to rent instead of owning products. Then planned obsolescence is not to their benefit.
I do think our consumer rights in Norway help a bit on this (the article is a page to the consumer agency here). We have 5 years mandated "warranty" on almost all purchases. Which means selling a cheap blender that breaks after two years, you as a shop/producer/importer have to eat the cost to provide a new one if it happens. Which means that the chance of something breaking becomes priced in, so you can't really get away with selling something flimsy a bit cheaper to trick the consumer.
Planned obsolescence is absolutely to the benefit of corporations if those goods are being rented. Non-durable goods are inherently profitable to rent out at above the cost of outright ownership, because then the companies involved can double dip on the consumers paying the costs of producing the good as well as claiming depreciation on the good the company still technically owns. It's a similar concept to why owning durable goods and renting them out to consumers is so viable.
I imagine you're looking at it from the avenue of "if those goods last longer, they can be rented for longer", but having to manage and store more durable goods after consumers have moved on to newer and better things is a considerable cost. A good that has to be returned is often better discarded, from the company's point of view.
Most cars are rented nowadays and they are less durable than ever. It's better for the manufacturer to lease and then get you to upgrade periodically to keep you as a novelty-seeking consumer.
Long warranty is better as there is no other incentive who has to pay if the product breaks down. Cars should have a 7 years warranty by default for instance.
We have reached a point where it's possible to make a car that lasts 200,000 km reliably, but the economic incentives are to make a car that people want to upgrade every few years. The ability and incentives are hugely misaligned.
My goto example for this is Hilti powertools. They can (and have) made some of the best tools in the game, but they now make most of their money from companies going the "fleet" option, where, for a monthly fee, tools can be replaced almost immediately when they fail. The result of this is tools that work brilliantly for a short time but are non-field-repairable, and aren't really designed to last any more.
Cars and motorcycles have massively increased in quality compared to before. You can't fix them yourself as easily as before, but also you won't have to.
And this fact nukes most of the arguments made in this thread and in the article. Vehicles have become better because everybody who is going to buy a new or used vehicle will do very diligent research among their contacts to know which brands and models are reliable and which aren't. It's the free market and care of reputation in action.
well, if you religiously maintain the car, it was easy even back then. The dirty secret is keeping rust out of the car - in the winter, regularly wash it to avoid salt ingress, and generally store it in a dry (both physical and humidity) garage, to routinely change engine and transmission fluids and to only run good quality fuel.
Oh, and don't subject your car to constant short start-stop cycles (i.e. drives of less than half an hour), warm up the car prior flooring the gas pedal on a highway, and for turbocharged cars, take it easy on the last 5 minutes so the hot side of the turbo can cool down.
Ignoring any of that can kill modern cars just as fast as it could kill old cars. Even electrical cars need their love - don't always go for the HVDC charger, use trickle AC chargers instead whenever you can, and look what needs lubrication and maintain that (e.g. transmissions).
At the very least, halve all service intervals, especially for engine and transmission oil. Go for an oil designed for heavy start-stop load, usually on the 5W or even 0W side, but be cautious, it must carry the manufacturer permit as well.
Also add fuel additives designed to clean up injectors every few months on a fresh full tank of the highest quality fuel you can get.
If it's a diesel, regularly go for a highway ride at sustained high speed and load for at least an hour or two to cause the DPF to enter soot burnoff mode.
Depending on that being legal where you live, code out the stop-and-go functionality as well. Yes, it saves fuel especially in typical commuter cars, but it seriously impacts engine life as well.
And for the love of god be proactive in driving if you can. If you know your traffic lights, let go of the brake five seconds before you get green, if you can estimate when your red phase is over. That way your engine can start and have a few seconds to build oil pressure before you command load from it. The way most people go - go off the brakes when they get green and then kick the gas pedal - is extremely damaging.
A final note for commuters: if you must go with an ICE powered commuter vehicle - use a small engine. A 60 HP engine is more than enough, and it will warm up and get to optimal temperature much faster and stay in that temperature range for much longer. A 300 HP engine? That thing is built to endure much, much more load - it won't get properly warmed up even on a longer commute, much less on a short commute.
There might not be any trade-off in your example. You're assuming that a solid wood piece of furniture is superior to the flatpack alternative and you can't really say that without knowing what the consumer needs.
I have a little Ikea Lack table that holds my printer. I paid less than $10 for the table and I don't even think it's wood (cardboard maybe?). It's getting close to 20 years old and is in great shape.
Absolutely. And it’s a trade off that doesn’t necessarily go against Ikea. Frankly, I think it’s one of the top reasons people choose Ikea furniture.
One of the genius things Ikea did was have little staged rooms in their store. They do a great job of these and lots of them look like rooms I’d want to spend time in. You see how that various pieces can be combined into something very inviting.
Was there a time when an oak dresser was much cheaper in inflation adjusted dollars?
Furniture that lasts forever is an anti-feature for some. They want to change their furnishings about as often as cheap furniture lasts anyway. I mostly buy quality furniture, but sometimes I don't know what I really want and Ikea and Wayfair are great for that. Cheap enough to donate after I decide what quality piece I really want.
It would be nice if quality became a standard, but the problem is that the world has become too complex. On top of that, I think the disappearance of friction is a big part of it.
In the past, if a garment factory was located in a certain country and the quality was poor, it was often directly tied to that country's reputation. But as the world began to lose friction and entered the era of globalization, much of the work was passed down to subcontractors, and the big problem is that consumer complaints don't get passed down to the subcontractors either.
And within this structure, multiple subcontractors can't survive; as subcontractors grow, they begin to centralize into one. In such a structure, it's not that the original contractor controls the brand quality of the subcontractor. Rather, the subcontractor that has grown huge begins to control the quality ceiling of the entire market.
On top of that, for a company to sustain continuous growth, a given product must not last too long, right? Because a product that can be used for 20 or 30 years means people won't have to buy that product line again.
The way I see it we all have 30-60 modern slaves working for each one of us. More or less depending on the country and personal consumption.
So I don’t have such determination in complaining about the quality of the goods that I participated in exploited labour of.
It’s all working somehow more or less. Seems like it could stop any moment. The continuous decrease in quality is rather the least of my worries.
What worries me is the fragile state of global affairs and heavy fog of war obscuring the future.
I am AI accelerationist after all not because I believe in utopias but because of how dire the situation is. AGI/ASI might buy us couple of decades or more. The risk/reward calculation heavily favours pedal to the metal.
People in poor countries have gotten massively richer over the last few decades. Especially those that participate in global trade, ie those that you could even call 'your slaves'. After all, some poor soul in North Korea who doesn't trade with you can hardly slave away to your benefit.
More specifically, people in PR China have gotten massively richer since the late 1970s. How does that square with your slavery thesis?
I might also add that if anything, goods from China have become better value for money since then. Even as their people have moved further and further away from slave status.
No. China is a colonial structure of extreme 1-tier cities, 2-tier cities, and the lower cities beneath them. It's called hukou... That's also why ordinary Chinese young people don't want to go down to the provinces.
People in China's first-tier cities live well and are more up to date than almost anywhere, but in the lower cities, they are not free. I usually think that popular literature reflects a country's social conditions, and even in China's xianxia, there are ranks, and people act according to those ranks. To say that all of China has become wealthy would be an overstatement, given that there are many problems starting with the migrant worker issue. Of course, China is a great power, and the wealthy programmers in first-tier cities are extraordinarily talented.
> That's also why ordinary Chinese young people don't want to go down to the provinces.
Recently you're even starting to hear stories I thought ended with the Soviet Union. People who are literally terrified of getting on a train out of the city because they think they might never be allowed to come back.
The world economy has never done better in absolute terms. I'm not sure where all those hard times are that I keep hearing about year after year, virtually independent of how well the economies are actually doing.
It's a K-shaped economy, after all. From the way you talk, you seem to be upper class. Usually Singapore is centered on elite schools and technology for certain families, and just from the fact that you can go into the English-speaking and IT industries, it seems to me—based on this conversation—that you're basically upper class. You're probably connected to Lee Kuan Yew's family. Singapore itself is a standard English-speaking country, and there are many Chinese Singaporeans, but even so, considering the basic amount of education needed to learn IT skills in Asia, you're probably upper class.
Then it makes sense that you wouldn't feel it. In fact, because it's a K-shaped economy, the bosses and businesspeople I meet think the business climate is good. But separately from that, for ordinary people who are the actual consumers, it's hard to make a living.
While it does relate to price discovery--i.e., some folks just aren't willing to pay for an additional unit of quality at 10x--my theory is that the decline in quality is another hidden form of inflation. Thing continues to cost X even though regulations have increased costs Y, ship production to China and scrimp on the inputs. (Or have market forces do that for you.)
I think 10x is quite rare. Quality ends up actually curtailing costs to some degree (eg. fewer returns, cheaper marketing - word of mouth). Buy a Weber grill, I had 2 grills before my Weber that lasted 3 seasons between them. I bought the Weber at about 2.2x the cost of the bargain grills and 17 YEARS later it's still going strong, built like a tank. Saved a lot not buying more cheapo grills.
Yes, this is quite common and is usually referred to as "it's expensive to be poor". That said, unfortunately these days it's very difficult to know which brands are still actually quality anymore and which are the ones still coasting on previous good engineering reputation while currently shipping substandard crap to make an extra buck for the bean counters in charge before the ship sinks.
True, recently Rachel Ray sold her dog food brand. I didn't know until my dog started having digestion issues with it. That's how I found out it had been sold and other dogs were also having issues. Apparently buyer cheapened the recipe. At least we have the internet to quickly get the word out that it isn't what it used to be.
There’s a special place in hell for people who would buy a dog food brand only to make worse dog food…
Let me introduce you to a little thing called Private Equity.
I know it well, made me quit one job and I will never work for “it” again. Still, when they go after the dogs I get upset.
The steelman is that by lowering the cost, more pets can afford better food than what they currently eat. No comment about whether that is reflected in the consumer facing price or in profits.
> The steelman is that by lowering the cost, more pets can afford better food than what they currently eat. No comment about whether that is reflected in the consumer facing price or in profits.
For your steelman to be relevant it would have to be reflected by lowering the price, otherwise they're just making the product worse for no customer benefit whatsoever and hoping customers take a long time to notice.
And if they were trying to offer a different value proposition by reducing the quality in order to lower the price, the honest way to do it would be to introduce a new product with a different name rather than changing what the product is while leaving the name the same.
> There’s a special place in hell for people who would buy a dog food brand only to make worse dog food…
And yet countless millions of people basically say nothing about how the food they eat is produced.
As someone who works very close to this I’m well aware, it’s also very visible when you look at trends over decades in most populations. It has significant impact on a lot of people.
> difficult to know which brands are still actually quality anymore
I haven't verified its accuracy, but I had a tab open for this from HN a while back:
> The Brand Ledger tracks 397 brands, from the tools in your garage to the pans in your kitchen. Who owns them, what they used to be, whether they're still worth buying.
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/
Yeah, not sure I would rely on that.. Sure, they have Knipex and Klein on the approved list (which, AFAIK, is true), but then they list Warby Parker (read reddit - has gone WAY downhill), Cutco (by all accounts, a total rip-off and super low-quality knives requiring you to constantly get them sharpened) and Henkels, which also makes some pretty suspect knives, AFAIK.
There's two Henckels listed:
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/henckels-internatio...
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/zwilling
The first one is on their watchlist and probably the brand you're thinking of?
The first one, "Henckels", openly says that their stuff is from China.
But the second link, "Zwilling" says "Approved". But boy was I disappointed that their "Zwilling Peak" branded ceramic hybrid frying pan for $100 says "Made in China".
It doesn't seem they address the quality of the final products, just how the companies are run. Anecdotally, I know tons of nurses wear Hoka shoes and act like they are to die for, but yet Hoka is on the avoid list. It would be more interesting rather than some vague articles about the brand to actually compare reviews before / after or how they match up against Consumer Reports --- a much more valuable resource in my mind.
It strikes me that I am really turned off by the phoned in Claude Code design on this website. For a website that tracks quality I just expect a bit better. Probably unfairly.
It's fully LLM-written. You can trust it if you want, but there's stuff in there that's clearly wrong or nonsensical.
Is there a food and drink equivalent to this?
Because my experience is that most popular brands in those industries have really gone downhill, and it'd be lovely to track which ones are even remotely edible anymore.
Everything has become a lemon market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Even if a brand stays solid for 100 years, for all I know as I'm standing there in the store deciding whether to buy something, private equity bought them two quarters ago and hollowed them out. Harvard MBAs/private equity sees brand reputation as just another resource to be converted into money.
If I were a billionaire my dream would be to create a logo for the "We Put The Extra 10% In It" program where products could advertise that they put the extra effort in. What is really sad to me is that so often it's not even that much extra effort, which is why I say 10% and not 100% or 10x. So often it's just "used a 5 cent metal part instead of a 1.2 cent plastic part". But without a reliable signal that the effort is there MBAs/private equity turns every market everywhere into a lemon market. Way too much tech is applied in manufacturing to turn everything into a lemon market.
Yeah. On various "Buy it for life" forums it's a daily occurence that someone mentions a brand they bought 5 years ago and then someone chimes in that they were sold or restructured last year and now it's no longer "buy it for life".
Some brands kind of split up so products sold in one market is cheap knockoffs while products sold in the home market is still high quality manufactured at the old factory with 100 years old machinery and experienced workers. If you want to buy quality you've got to do deep research first.
One signal (not fool proof, but often a good signal): what length of warranty do they offer? If some brand has a warranty significantly above the average for the product type, that can be a good sign.
And I'm not talking about offering extended warranty programs or such here. Just the basic warranty everyone gets when they buy the product.
Something to be said for places like Costco that has an absurdly generous return policy (are they the only major retailer left that does this? REI used to, but they got rid of it).
I believe Costco requires their vendors to eat the return if they want to remain a vendor. Doesn't meant that Costco is immune to bad products, but it severely punishes vendors that sell garbage and protects customers.
I'm not sure that is such a strong signal. The minimum return policy by law in EU is 14 days. IKEA has a one year open box return policy. I would not argue that modern IKEA is high quality.
I'm also sure I have seen other stores with a 1 year return policy, though I can't remember which ones off the top of my head.
(That is "return undamaged working product" return policy, not warranty policy. Exceptions apply to perishables, underwear, etc. At least here in EU they are different. Warranty is, depending on product category, typically 3 months, one year or two year minimum by law.)
> The minimum return policy by law in EU is 14 days.
I do not think that is true for stuff being bought directly in a physical store. The policy is for online purchases.
A buddy of mine paid a premium to get some fancy umbrella with a lifetime warranty. It had a failure at some point, they replaced it with a worse quality one. Another failure, and he got another step down in quality.
So, the company kinda honored the contract.
There is also other tricks I fell for. I think I saw a recommendation for Travelpro on Buy it for life(Its been a while so dont remember fully). Nice luggage but expensive. I took a risk and bought it. I received it the day I was rushing to travel and there was some "registration card" that you had to fill out by a certain time that unlocked lifetime warranty else you were stuck with a shorter limited warranty. That card got accidently thrown out by a family member while I was on a trip. It apparently had some serial number or something on it. To make matters worse, the zipper got damaged after 1-2 uses and it was just outside the shorter warranty. I had to go to a local luggage place that had a relationship with them and they were able to get it replaced. (I wanted it fixed but Travelpro only offered replacement). Im hoping it does not break again. If you are going to advertise this warranty just make it the default! I went back to those reddit posts and I started to suspect there is some astroturfing going on so I don't even know if this is a reliable luggage or if it is just junk. It was so expensive and I honestly thought I bought it for life.
Yeah, if you wanted a proper BIFL suitcase you needed to spend even more and get a Briggs and Riley suitcase.
Also, Travelpro Platinum suitcases aren’t the cheapest… but how much do you think is so expensive? Sales should put them sub $200, maybe less if you bought awhile ago.
Curious, so I checked. A Briggs and Riley Essential 22" Carry-On Expandable Spinner is $729. Sorry, but that's insane.
I admittedly travel less than I used to but I bought my basic carry-on for about $110 more than 20 years ago. Close enough to "buy it for life" for me. It's not much worse for the wear, I fully expect to have it for 20 more years.
Its been 4 years now(purchased 2022). I just looked at my records. My suitcase was a Travelpro Premium and it cost 300$. I've purchased 50$ suitcases back in 2015 that lasted for years (just checked the equivalent is now 100$). 300$ in 2022 seemed like a step up in price given I was anchored at that previous price in my mind.
At the very least my expectation was that by paying this much i'd finally be end of the company BS. For example with almost all Apple products they have been BS free in the sense that they are made to consistent quality standards, returns, and service cannot be any more straightforward, the product portfolio is super clear, you can easily buy from them at the same price they sell elsewhere (within reason) and not various reseller or third parties that might play tricks and even if you do Apple handles service and warranty. And so after a lifetime of buying PC/Android after experiencing this BS free life I conditioned myself to accept the added cost of Apple and reduce spending elsewhere.
The tactics I described earlier are indicative of a unserious company playing games. Stuff I expect from bottom of the barrel junk.
In regards to sales, I've looked at the price history of this product. (Here: https://i.imgur.com/BQOcRLk.png) The price you indicated last occurred in the middle of the pandemic which for obvious reasons seems like an outlier. To be fair I bought during the height of the return to travel period but even now post all this inflation the price is a solid 390$-400$ now.
I only travel 2-3 times a year and so at this price I expect this luggage to last quite a while(at least a decade no?) but if another mishap happens well then I might have to walk away burned and wondering, what was the point?
> and even if you do Apple handles service and warranty
Depends on the product, if I’m not mistaking. iPhones warranties are pretty much honored globally, whereas I exchanged some defective AirPods at an Apple Store recently and was explicitly asked if I’d bought them with them.
Incredible process by the way, no questions asked when I said I’d like to swap them, they simply got a new box out and made me remove the old ones from my iCloud, out the door in five minutes. I don’t see any scenario where you wouldn’t buy your Apple products directly through them besides maybe when you’re buying refurbished.
> In regards to sales, I've looked at the price history of this product. (Here: https://i.imgur.com/BQOcRLk.png) The price you indicated last occurred in the middle of the pandemic which for obvious reasons seems like an outlier. To be fair I bought during the height of the return to travel period but even now post all this inflation the price is a solid 390$-400$ now.
I wouldn’t use the Amazon/CCC history for this. Their cheapest sales tend to be on their own website, and only occur like once a year. I may be off on sub-$200 in the current environment, but it wouldnt surprise me if mid-200s is achievable at their lowest sale time.
The rest of your points, I’d agree it’s kind of a bummer they don’t really have that sort of guarantee. The Briggs and Riley stuff really is the true thing you’re looking for, but it’s awfully hard to justify a $600+ suitcase if you’re only traveling a few times a year I’d say.
I got 3x Bose QuietComfort 35 2 by buying 1. They did honor their warranty, but my impression was that they plan for people not going through the effort of actually requesting a replacement item, even though the warranty says they can.
I wish more brands would follow the Newman’s Own charity model. All profits go to charity, so there isn’t an incentive to hollow out the brand, and the products are a reliable quality at a decent price.
Apparently they set up an organization to help other people do this: https://100forpurpose.org/
The general problem with this is that starting a business generally requires money, which for-profit companies get from investors. For a non-profit to do it they need to get it from donors, and then your actual complaint isn't that nobody is willing to start a company that works that way, it's that people (e.g. you and your friends) haven't donated enough money to make it happen.
But something that might be interesting is to start a non-profit whose mission is to create value for customers (i.e. produce non-garbage products), and then all profits go not to a separate charity but to increasing the number of product lines the company produces. Then spin the new product lines off into independent non-profits with the same charter so the organization doesn't become large and bureaucratic or suffer permanent collapse as a result of a single period of poorly chosen upper management.
People blame MBAs a lot, but most CEOs are Engineers or Economists by training.
It's the MBA mindset. I think about it in simplified way that in the past a lot of businesses weren't run mainly for profit. So a plumber focused on plumbing first and set prices to have enough profit to live. Once the MBA/PE mindset comes in, they think about maximum profit first and plumbing is just a secondary thing. I have seen that with dentists, vets and many contractors.
Worker owned cooperatives could be a reliable indicator however i'm not sure there are many examples of this being scaled upwards, like could an airline do that? Could they even have an option for a worker owned company provide an alternative for everything in the economy? You need capital to make a competitor and all the capital is rapidly being sucked up by the people enshittifying everything.
The answer probably lies in fixing government so that they can go after these players. However to fix government you need massive buy in from both the left and the right and there lies the crux. Our system forces us to cater to the lowest common denominator voter. Until that is fixed we can't go back to the status quo. Maybe its not possible anymore as our currency gets inflated down to nothing.
The alternative could be to just live in this enshittified system, leave the US to a country with a functioning government, or just accept that mass consumerism has run its course and lower your lifestyle needs to only own less items but of higher quality that have been researched(this requires time investment so you are forced to research what is good which limits how much you can cover if you consume too much).
Yeah, hardly anybody in it for the long-haul. I hear we might be living longer relatively soon, maybe that will change the mindset.
We need more supply-chain visibility. Currently we have none, hence this problem.
Consider all the farm bio-outbreaks. We're told "Americans won't do these [farm] jobs" but they neglect to mention the subpar pay and working conditions. Thus the slaves that take these jobs have no knowledge of their rights, have limited education and literacy, have dubious residence status, and are not inclined to blow the whistle when they witness crops destined for human consumption being fertilized with industrial amounts of human shit (biosolids). Meanwhile, conservatives blame the workers themselves for contaminating the product. This cycle will never end until we have more stakeholders working the fields.
Same goes for Tyson and their chicken farms staffed by Somalis. Not saying anything about them specifically but outsourcing all labor to foreigners denies all visibility and access into our own food production. They could get away with packaging human meat and none of us would know it because none of us can afford to work there and see for ourselves. Our regulatory agencies are all compromised and can't be trusted to do it, so it's a free for all.
If you had like-minded people positioned close enough to supervise production and ensure that the product meets a certain set of high standards (call this "keeping kosher"), you would no longer have to worry about ingredients being replaced with foam, sawdust and heavy metals to satisfy those MBAs.
And yet it's socialism that has a reputation for shoddy products. How many people want to buy a Lada?
Both historical socialism and current-stage capitalism suffer from the exact same problem - lack of competition and limited access to information. They arrived there in vastly different ways but in both cases it's very hard both to know how to obtain higher quality goods, and to actually obtain them once you know how. Compare to 1960s USA where it was quite easy to know which car/drill/grill/TV/pants/table/etc. is guaranteed to last you years.
I lived through the 60s and know what the goods were.
TVs, for example. They had tubes then, and crummy B+W pictures. They were constantly going on the fritz, to the point that drugstores had tube testing stations. You'd bring in the tubes from the TV and test them in this device that looked like an arcade game, and buy replacements.
Cars then required a lot more maintenance then. And I mean a lot. I've owned and repaired them.
I can go on, but the point is made.
I'm sorry but I will need a second opinion. I just don't believe there was not a single brand of TV that was reliably good the way some brands of clothes, furniture, power tools, phones, spices, perfume, refrigerators, light fixtures, record players, guitars, lawn mowers, and basically all non-perishable goods on the market were.
You could get the cheap stuff, or you could get the quality stuff, and you knew which is which. Neither of these is true nowadays.
My dad had a Mercedes in the 1960s. It was not a very reliable car. He later bought a Chevy which was much more reliable.
I bought a 1963 230SL Mercedes as a young man. It was such a beauty! But it was a terrible car. As an engineer, I could see that it was a patchwork of brilliant design and stupid design. The latter caused lots of problems. Sadly, I gave up on it. Stupidly, I bought a Mercedes wagon some years later, and it, too, suffered from the patchwork of stupidity. Got rid of it.
My 1967 Mustang was much better engineered. Ford gets a lot of guff, but their cars are inexpensive and easy to repair, which I appreciated. It had a sad end being crushed on the highway by a truck. I had a 1989 Bronco II and drove it for 20 years.
A friend of mine is restoring an old Mercedes, and he (also an engineer) discovered the Mercedes patchwork of stupidity. One of the problems is the radiator is undersized, making the car prone to overheating. He's engineering a fix for that.
You are literally calling one car much better engineered than another car. So what exactly are you arguing against? I said that you could pick bad car or good car back in the 60s, and it was easy to tell which one is bad and which one is good by the brand alone (usually). Isn't that so? Unlike nowadays where the brand means absolutely nothing and nearly all reviews are fake, and also most brands are manufactured by the same 2 or 3 companies worldwide so there isn't much to choose from in the first place.
My point was the brand was not a determinant of quality. People assumed Mercedes was the quality brand, but it was inferior to Ford.
What they're describing is that TVs had consumable items in the circuitry. It isn't possible to have had a TV without tubes. Tubes were basically really fancy lightbulbs and had a finite life. No amount of quality could make consumables not necessary. TVs needed maintenance and manual back then. They sucked. It's like saying that buying a higher quality car means you don't need to buy tires.
The broader point is that we think that things lasted longer back then because of survivorship bias, but on the whole they really didn't. The incredible old fridge in grandpas garage is incredible because it was an exception. 100k miles used to be a car that was ready for the wrecker. You used to have to get tune-ups several times per year where points, timing, carburetors, spark plugs, and other things needed replacing or adjusting. That's why every gas station had a mechanic. Now, half those things have been replaced by more reliable longer lasting mechanisms that adjust themselves, and the stuff that still exists like spark plugs last for years instead of months.
The highest quality stuff from back then doesn't really stack up to many modern things, especially if you pay the same inflation adjusted price.
From your list:
clothes: higher quality, several times more expensive (inflation adjusted. Levis 501 were $90 adjusted in 1975, Amazon has them for $45)
furniture: cheap shit and expensive stuff was available, just like now
power tools: almost universally, I would trade old corded, brushed tools for new cordless brushless. Old machine tools are the exception where old is as good as new.
phones: you didn't have a choice, the phone company gave you whatever they had in stock and charged you a monthly fee for the privilege.
spices: less variety and freshness. Good luck getting spices that weren't part of your local cuisine.
perfume: no idea
refrigerators: incredibly inefficient, harmful chemicals, and today you can still buy a VERY nice fridge if you are willing to pay what a shitty fridge from 1975 would have cost ($2,200 inflation adjusted for the cheapest one from sears).
light fixtures: same as furniture, you get what you pay for then and now
record players: see furniture
guitars: see furniture
lawn mower: see furniture
The enshitiffication of known brands is a real problem today, but that doesn't mean that everything was perfect and known back then.
I wasn't saying things were better then than now. I was saying exactly what you're saying - cheap shit and expensive stuff was available, see furniture, see furniture, see furniture.
Except no, it's like that anymore. It's literally impossible - and I mean literally literally - to find any mass-produced brand (as in not needing to be custom made) of furniture that consistently, across all its products, will last more than warranty period. I haven't been an adult for that long, and I've had multiple beds break down under me and multiple sofas sag down entirely. And no, none of them were cheap. I paid extra specifically to avoid this kind of thing. It didn't work. And there's no alternative for me, literally nowhere I can buy furniture that doesn't break down unless I make it myself or pay some craftsman to.
Everyday I am reminded about these brain dead arguments in my local town by people who can't think one step ahead.
You made this generalized statement probably from some propaganda you've read or some trauma you've experienced growing up. Yet, if you look at the current state of the situation its in clear decline. The only ways forward are to accelerate the decline and live with the consequences (ie. doing nothing) or to consider moving in the other direction(ie. leftist things).
In the US I think there are two sources of this mentality: 50% of the population don't have a passport so they have never seen how people in say Europe/Canada deal with this, EU/Canada/AUS/UK have higher standards and don't tolerate this kind of crap as much
Example: Hyundai removed immobilizers in their cars...but only in the US because Canada/EU had regulations requiring an immobilizer.
End result: Someone on TikTok discovered that you could steal cars with a screwdriver and a USB cable. This resulted in insurance costs shooting up, people stuck without cars due to lengthy repair times and overall lower quality of lives.
The braindead response that comes from people with OP's mentality would be "you should have researched the car better beforehand its all your fault".
Yea ok people with limited budgets and time looked at which cars had good reviews and Kia/Hyundai were winning many of those (likely BS ) awards like "North American Car of the year".
People are already stressed for time trying to survive in this jungle and now the "free market" played games with them and anyone suffering from this might be having a worse life now because of this mess. Why are they having to spend all their miniscule free time just to not be screwed?
Wouldn't it have been better if we had European style regulations that would have established a minimum standard that all cars in this era should have?
NO! We can't have things like that because people like OP (and a lot of conservatives) have these imprinted beliefs from a lifetime of fear mongering, or trauma if they immigrated from some garbage country with poor institutions(ex. Cuban immigrants opposed to Universal healthcare or eastern european immigrants opposed to anything with the word [commun/social]ist)
I've volunteered in the past for Progressive candidates that have a #1 criteria for not taking any corporate money. It is so much of a time sacrifice to get an AOC or Bernie type candidate only to have that progress stymied by endless amount of money pouring in on the other side. Why are we even doing it when day after day people like OP crop up with this nonsense? Whats the point of constantly fighting to enlighten person after person who starts off their beliefs with these 1-dimensional arguments? Its makes me want to just watch it all burn down just as long as people with your mentality go down with the ship. I get why a lot of wealthier people are just leaving the country. The fix requires decades of effort and will just break many people that try to go down that path. If you are wealthy and you have this one and only life, is it really worth it to have to deal with people like OP? Or is it better to just leave and let them wallow in their ignorance. I guess it depends on how important the country is to you. Even that concept of loyalty to a country seems to be eroding in this era of passport wealth.
> only to have that progress stymied by endless amount of money pouring in on the other side
Hillary outspent Trump 2 to 1.
Kamala outspent Trump 2 to 1.
> Cuban immigrants opposed to Universal healthcare or eastern european immigrants opposed to anything with the word [commun/social]ist
Why do you discount their experience with universal healthcare? Have you ever experienced it?
Yes I know the Democrats take tons of corporate money and outspend any outsider. So do Republicans (including Trump). Thats the fundamental problem. My efforts to push back against this seemed to have gone over your head. Reread my paragraph about progressives.
Regardless of what the fundamental issues are, its pointless to discuss with you.
You have nothing but a default dismissal of anything that does not conform to your imprinted beliefs. In your original message and followups you have not even given any possible reasoning as to why you believe just as all the other people that think exactly like you do.
I guess this is something I should be thankful to Elon for: He exposed how surface level the thinking is on the right when he opened Twitter up to the masses, how easy they are to grift off of. Once can argue its even become pop culture at this point: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xoim0K4WPMI
I'm still grappling with how to respond to people that are so solidified in their propagandized thinking. Like I mentioned in my post, its likely best to just let you experience the maximum amount of pain from your dumb decisions.
>Why do you discount their experience with universal healthcare? Have you ever experienced it?
YES! Actually I attribute my blessed fortune of being wealthy enough to quit a bad job early on in my tech career and take almost an entire year traveling the world. I lived in Europe in various countries and learned hands on how different people think and how different fundamental level things are including healthcare.
Coming back to the US you realize how people are stuck in this collective trauma of the current system. I mentioned in my post that 50% of the country does not have a passport. For some perspective, the US is only 5% of the world population. There are so many ways of thinking out there that people just have never had exposure to. I'd argue its a life half lived.
You traveled the world and had a major health problem and experienced socialist healthcare?
I have a friend who decided he'd be better off as a Canadian. It wasn't long before he came back to the US. And Canadians still come to America when they have a serious health problem.
Since you've discovered that life in other countries is so much better than America, what's stopping you from immigrating to your favorite?
BTW, I've actually lived in foreign countries. I also toured East Berlin in 1969.
I recall an online discussion years ago by survivors of Chernobyl. They remarked that a root canal was free in Russia, but you had to buy your own anesthetic. Generally, the health care workers expected bribes.
Keep in mind, though, that the US health care system is very heavily interfered with by the government and all their programs. It's not very free market, but it's still better than socialism.
I have a couple friends who grew up in the USSR. They'd laugh at your contention that socialism makes better products. They both moved to America to get away from socialism.
Socialism has never worked out very well.
As for loyalty, I am a true blue American and vote in the country's best interests.
> European style regulations
Yah, read my other post about experiences with Mercedes "quality".
>They both moved to America to get away from socialism.
Yes and they brought their trauma to the US so when the fundamental system desperately needs reform due to underlying conditions changing their trauma serves as a liability to the continued improvement of the country. Instead they buckle down and demand no changes as conditions continue to deteriorate. Fortunately a lot of the second generation did not internalize that trauma and have different plans. I only lament that its going to take a long time for these liabilities to die off and finally free the country to make fundamental changes to move forward. The people who care enough about this country not to just leave and not waste their one life trying to fix this mess are all trapped until then.
>As for loyalty, I am a true blue American and vote in the country's best interests.
I don't know what "true blue American" means. Is that another dumb slogan pushed by one of the major propaganda outlets? If you are referring to being a Democrat, then what kind of Democrat are you? Regardless it does not matter as its not the point. The right had at least one amazing honest candidate this year who eschewed corporate corruption and tried to stick his neck out to do the right things for the country only to be rewarded by his voters voting for a last minute plant just because Trump told them to vote for the outsider. That was definite proof that the right is just gone. The party as it stands has no long term future. Its just how much pain are we all going to collectively endure until it finally does.
Forget about voting, you should start by looking at all the issues in a more objective lens and try to understand underlying causes. Then understand how many of these problems occurred elsewhere and how others successfully solved the problems. Are other places perfect? No, but fundamental lessons are always better to be learned rather than mistakes repeated.
Socialism solved the problems? LOL.
America has a lot of problems. Socialism isn't going to solve any of them. Remember, I have toured East Berlin in its heyday of communism.
Trying to browbeat and insult me is never going to work.
No thanks.
Ran into that with an Oxo coffee grinder recently. Old one died, bought the exact same one again. And that motor sounds just a little more tinny than the old one, and the whole thing seems just a little more...rattly than the old one. I am not exactly sure where they cut the corners, but corners were indeed cut. Oh, and the new one was $10 more, so the savings were most definitely not passed onto me.
i think the only solution to this is to force a company to rebrand when they purchase a brand.
otherwise we end up exactly where we are, private equity buying out a brand, obfuscating that it’s no longer the same company, slowly sucking the life out of the product and screwing the public over.
if we make them always rebrand, we would at least be more aware when purchasing.
it’s kind of funny how certain people will tell us to vote with our wallets on a product, but they intentionally obfuscate everything about the product so we can’t make informed purchases.
could you imagine if we had to “do your own research” on every single thing you purchase? just think of how many items you purchase from the grocery store alone every month. it’s unreal we allow them to get away with hiding what they’re doing.
a great example is the sibling poster who talked about the dogfood being changed and messing up their dogs stomach… just trash behavior by these companies.
I'd be for forcing companies to list the top-level "owning" entity on all product labels
To be fair, mandatory warranty has added a lot to that.
Most larger electronics (washing machines, fridges, dryers, ovens, etc.) have a mandatory 5y warranty in most european countries, and since the profit margins are so low, even the cheapest washing machine (~250eur range) has to survive the daily use of a family with three kids (or even multiple daily uses) for at least five years, since even a single replacement/repair eats away profits of dozens others sold.
"back in the time", you'd skip the cheapest stuff, now i just say "buy the cheapest one, it'll work for at least five years", and in 99.9%, it's actually true.
> it’s expensive to be poor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
It's a great theory, though it doesn't seem as accurate nowadays. Now, even supposedly 'high-end' brands will be low-quality garbage hollowed out by private equity firms or other corporate acquisitions.
We're not in a world where you can necessarily choose between quality at a high price and disposable junk at a low price, we're in a world where you're often choosing between disposable junk at a low price and rebadged junk sold at a premium one.
It really pisses me off there are used car lots that obviously prey on the poor. I asked for their cash price and they wouldn't give me one, or it was ridiculously priced. They just want for people to pay off a debt and all the interest that goes with it.
A car dealership makes most of their money off of the financing.
> I asked for their cash price and they wouldn't give me one
When I bought a car from a dealer, the dealer told me that what I wanted was impossible. So I walked out and got in my car, and started to back out. The salesman came running out and agreed to my terms.
The trick to making a good deal is a willingness to walk away.
P.S. My accounting teacher used to work at a used car lot. He explained to me that poor people tended to screw themselves by not understanding how financing works. He'd try to explain it to them, and they'd accuse him of trying to screw them, and they'd go for the more expensive option.
I tell this story to people who say that learning math in school is irrelevant.
I also remember a Frontline episode years ago on 401k plans. One company had an identical plan for all employees. The reporters discovered that the higher paid employees had better returns on the 401k plans. Why was it that the lower paid ones did poorly with them? It was they did not understand how to manage investments.
Up in my neck of the woods, it depends.
I paid cash for the last two used cars I bought. As used cars go they weren't particularly expensive and it wasn't a big deal. Both purchases came from dealerships that also sold and serviced things like brand new Hondas or Chevrolets.
For one of those cars, the paperwork was completely finished and I drove off in that new-to-me car without me even giving them a dime. (I did promise in writing that they'd have a check in a few days, and I did make good on that promise.)
There's also used car lots that work with real financing companies. They broker the financing deal and get paid for it. That works, too. (I've financed cars at these places, too; this also went smoothly.)
---
But then, too: There are buy-here, pay-here used car lots. These are traps for the poor, and they love their particular financing game.
At these places: The loans are designed to be very upside down and they therefore hold all of the cards. They'll sell a used car for years of weekly payments of $120, and if/when the payments stop then they just turn the car off remotely and have someone go pick it up.
After that, it's cleaned up and sold to the next guy for $120 a week.
It's a very profitable way to conduct business and nobody of any substantial means and sane mind would ever buy anything there at all.
But they don't check credit, and they don't report credit. So as ugly and expensive as it is, for some folks that's the only way they can get the car they need to try to survive in the society that they were born into.
Even worse: they want people to fail to pay it off, so they get half the debt amount and then get the car back to do it again.
There are two kinds of lots. 'normal' lots will sell a car, and the financing comes from a finance company. could be a bank, could be a credit union, could be a business that provides money to car purchasers. the normal lot has markup on the price, and also gets a kickback from the finance company. the car buyer does not pay, the finance company has a problem.
'buy here, pay here' lots sell a car, and do the financing. They buy cars at auction, fix them if they have to, then sell them. The down payment money usually covers the auction cost of the car. Then every 2 weeks, the buyers drops by with a payment. The buyer stops paying, the car is repossessed. And then it is sold again. The dealer wins in both directions; the buyer pays a lot of money in finance charges, and if it is repossessed then you don't have to buy new inventory at the auction.
Poor people with bad credit way over pay for cars both ways. One a little worse than the other.
In the US, a lot of car dealerships make a good portion of the profits from a car sale from the loan. E.g. the lender gives the dealer a kickback on the loan and that is a good portion of the total profit. It's somewhat analogous to how US airlines make their profits from credit card deals and selling miles.
I always felt this was over stated, but I think it’s become less true over time.
First different people treat their stuff harder than others. I basically never break or wear out anything, and I usually start with the cheapest option.
Second the quality of cheap shit made in Asia has gone up a lot over the last couple decades. And it is very difficult to know how to pay more for more quality.
ive experimented with paying more for a few things and sometimes it's the cheap stuff which lasts forever.
i have a pair of cheap Chinese earbuds that way outlasted all of the expensive ones I ever bought.
I'll admit sometimes I like there is a cheap-o version as I'm not sure how much I'll end up using it.
I don't know why people keep posting that silly quote. Outside of fantasy novels, in the real world the most expensive footwear is often the least durable, and you can get decent boots at Walmart for <$50 on clearance sales.
The boots are metaphorical, obviously
If you want one I continue to really trust almost blindly: Genelec (Finnish pro audio). Not even that expensive for what it is.
A current rough rule of thumb I currently use: if private equity buys out a company I'm using, I bail for the next best competitor within a couple years. If it is a US private equity firm, within a year.
There are exceptions. It isn't hard though these days to look up the firms' histories and then look up customer conversations on the Net about those historical portco's. More importantly, it isn't hard to look up the people behind the private equity firms (though I find it harder to link specific partners with specific portco's), and avoid the ones you see with a track record you want to dissociate from. Before the Net, this kind of research took days to assemble in libraries. With the Net and LLM's, it is very fast.
Remember capitalism is a tool that is supposed to cut both ways, both for the producer and for the consumer. Simultaneously.
I love my Weber and I was amused to see the instruction manual specifically saying that when it's time to take your outdoor furniture inside for the winter, leave the Weber, it's built to handle it.
The Weber kettle grill is one of my favorite examples of quality in another way—function. It is built well but it also is such a wonderfully simple design that provides quite a bit of flexibility.
I have the Smokey Mountain which is amazing at holding heat but a total PIA to clean. Have one of their gas grills as well on a built in line, and it is fairly high quality also.
Nothing tops the kettle though.
See also: Sam Vimes Boot Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
Walmart used to be (and maybe still is?) known for doing this. They would get companies to produce lower-quality versions of products under the same name as the standard versions available elsewhere. They could sell them for cheaper and consumers were none the wiser - or so the theory went, anyway. Obviously people caught on.
People have caught on and nothing can be done because all ten "brands" are produced on the same machine in Ohio
Problem is, you pay 10x for shirt that is made in the same factory as the cheap shiry, just has a different logo.
This has become a sort of unintentional skill in the ecommerce era. Everyone is using china, either the actual "first party" brand that is really just ordering bulk from china and reselling it stateside, or the various clones of that brand. The skill then becomes feeling out which of these various products and clones are coming from the better option of the couple chinese manufacturing companies everyone is using, then buying whichever of these is going for cheapest and least shipping headaches. Usually also if a product has been out for a couple years, there's an initial version widely available then an actual 2.0 version that solves a lot of the issues in the first, more sturdy at now known failure points, etc. That 2.0 version actually usually circulates in the no name brands for a little while before the "first party" brand eventually picks it up for their own line.
I grasp what you’re expressing, I really do. I’ve probably pondered this very thing too often in my life and can think of very specific examples where purchasing a non-brand name version of a particular product really froze up the decision making process.
However I think as I’ve gotten older, certain realities have occurred to me:
1. there is a fairly significant amount of people that would still pay more for the shirt the “right” logo and who would absolutely not pay less if it had the “wrong” (I.e., vs no logo). In fact, they wouldn’t wear the wrong logo even if the shirt was free. I include myself in this under certain circumstances and would conclude that some times the recognizable name actually helps put my mind at ease about the purchase, while being fully able to acknowledge that it was entirely a psychological thing.
2. Unfortunately there’s just simply no way of knowing this information (brand name product vs essentially same product without brand name) most of the time so letting that weigh too heavily on an otherwise thoughtfully considered purchase achieves effectively nothing.
3. The thing was probably entirely discretionary for my existence, so don’t buy it (otherwise, see #2…)
Not always.
I got a pair of T-shirts from These Glory Days. Wore them like 20% of time last two years and they look better then some others after 2 washes (albeit changed from them after coming back to work, and use work clothes at work, so not like they were used THAT much. So it's not always the expensive stuff that's equal to the cheap stuff. And funny thing, got them on a sale because they were pretty cheap, not really because I knew that they were quality.
Though had my wife with me when shopping and she might have "felt" the material and said that it was good for that price. Her mum is a seamstress if I remember the word correctly as somebody who sews clothes.
Good to clarify the definition of seamstress with DiscWorld/Pratchett quotes floating around.
10x is not a likely number for quality, but for status symbol cost.
If you watch The Price is Right episodes from the 80s, it is clear that household items have only had mild inflation. Many items are prices a little lower than today but not outrageously so.
On the other hand, the quality of the items is often much nicer. So someone might win a $500 desk, but that desk is hand-made out of hardwood. Today you can still buy a $500 desk but it will be IKEA quality. A product of comparable quality would cost many $k
Airline tickets are a very clear-cut example of this. Tickets are cheaper than they were in the ‘90s (even with inflation) but you get a lot less for that ticket than you did 30 years ago
It's less clear cut than that, because modern materials can be better at the job they are designed for. An IKEA kitchen, for instance, might not use traditional wood or stone for its benchtops, but the materials used are actually better in terms of cleaning and handling food on them. It's just that these improvements often get bundled with cheap plastic and parts in other parts of the kitchen to keep costs down.
Similarly, cars today are far superior to old cars in terms of safety, and the gains that have been made on the engine side of things are nothing short of incredible. Every modern car is essentially a supercar by the standards of the 90s in terms of oomph per unit of displacement. The problem is that all of the systems have been coupled together, often needlessly, in order to improve telemetry and capture a bigger share of the used market. It's hostile towards the end user.
There's no question that the level of quality today is higher, especially where it matters. It's just that value extraction eventually turns hostile towards consumers in the absence of real competition and the need for endless growth.
For my household I built my own cartoonishly big 200×80×4cm oak desk. The oak was €350 at the hardware store and only needed finishing. The height adjustable legs add some extra cost, but the whole was maybe €700 tops and a day of work.
You have to look at it from an item by item basis. There are different reasons for each product.
You mentioned household items: This is a combination of two things:
1. Improved QA & reduction of parts thanks to the miracle of Moores law. Ex: a TV used to be a huge collection of boards each doing its own function (power, tuning, picture control, audio). Nows its 1-2 board(power + everything else) with typically one big chip doing everything. Less parts = less chance of failure and each part is QA better thanks to software/industrial automation.
2. These things are benefiting from the low cost of living in places like China. As those countries increase their wealth and alternatives are not found this disparity disappears and you finally pay the real cost of the item but you still benefited from Moores law.
TVs deflated insanely, other appliances less so but it averages out to 0 again thanks to Moores law.
Now look at a desk. The only way it benefits from Moores law is possibly via assembly and techniques used to reduce waste. That probably where IKEA's excellent ability to turn sawdust + glue into furniture comes from. That is real value that is returned back to you in the form of similar raw numerical prices as old wood tables from decades ago.
Machinery can automate the creation of a table made out of what is technically "wood" (sawdust was at one point wood wasn't it?) and computer software allowed designers to create appealing designs and more easily optimize them to target that same number people paid in the 70s(even though it isnt the real number inflation adjusted).
An old table used real wood that probably came from an old growth tree that no longer exists because the value came from decades (or centuries) of "work" done by nature. Exchanging money for that same amount of value that would reveal the diminished value of the currency if you were to get that same thing today. You cant exchange the exact dollar amount and you are not feeling that the modern IKEA take is an improvement/equivalent over the old growth wood.
Essentially the free market could not make a 1-to-1 replica/improved product using something like moores law so that same value costs more today. That difference in quality between the Ikea table and the old wood table is still there its just that most consumers dont see it or dont want to see it since they may not be able to afford the old style of table.
>Airline tickets are a very clear-cut example of this. Tickets are cheaper than they were in the ‘90s (even with inflation) but you get a lot less for that ticket than you did 30 years ago
This is a mixed bag in my opinion:
Airlines have benefited from Moores Law. I watched so many "aviation" youtube channels and my god, the accidents from the early days of aviation are truly nightmare inducing and heartbreaking tragedies. Today thanks to computerization(Moores law), pilots are so much better trained, airplanes are so many orders of magnitude better in terms of safety and fallbacks and fuel is reduced as a result of all of this technology as well. This helped cut costs and also allowed Airlines to provide more classes of service. If you fly first class all in, you get service closer to what you got 30 years ago because you are paying for the same value as 30 years ago.
At the same time, fuel itself comes from a non-renewable resource that included dinosaurs, sea algae, and plants that spent a lifetime doing the work to accumulate energy from the sun and then be stored in a format that can be exploited centuries later. You life's comforts comes from all that work done centuries ago and its not unlimited. Thus as fuel becomes harder to get, the numerical dollar amount goes up and is reflected in tocket costs. Its just that the other reductions didn't make it as evident.
As a side note with the Iran war and the loss of companies like Spirit, more are now being exposed to the fact that todays dollar isn't the same as yesterdays dollar. Those low cost options are just going away because finally the free ride given to use by cheap fossil fuels is going away and things like moores law have already reached the limit of where you can add value to keep the number close to the 70s dollar number.
Video games are a good example of an area where the pricing makes no sense. Inflation has risen, and they make like $20 or whatever off a brand new game in 1990s bucks.
Video game prices will go up more and more, it also kind of explains to me why prices rarely drop below $59 anymore, used to be on Steam some AAA games could be snagged up for $20 after a year, now you can barely find them on reasonable sales, they hold on to dear life on pricing.
Sidebar: Don't video games have ever growing competition with existing games?
I decided not to buy games until I beat the ones I already have. I am now stuck on NES games and will probably be stuck for the rest of my life.
Skyrim came out in 2011 and is at this moment, the 55th highest player count on Steam. Just playing top tier single player games over the past twenty years could keep you incredibly busy.
Important context: IKEA just released a mod where you can play as a shelf.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZODN0QUgjI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639647
Which Skyrim is that? OG Skyrim (Oldrim), Skyrim Legendary edition, Skyrim Special edition, Skyrim VR, Skyrim Anniversary edition, or the Skyrim anniversary upgrade?
Are they even the same base SKUs at this point? I don’t want to pull out my gaming desktop but IIRC it was at least three different entries in the Steam library. I wonder if the stats combine them.
At this point I’ve spent so much money on Skyrim titles I should get TESVI for free with lifetime DLCs.
It's Skyrim Special edition that's on that spot. The OG version hasn't been sold in years on Steam and is tracked separately. The VR edition is sold and tracked separately. The Anniversary edition is sold as DLC for the Special edition, and not as a separate game. I think the Legendary edition was sold as a bundle for the OG version after all the DLCs came out. Either way, it too cannot be bought on Steam any more.
Games from a couple of years ago are insanely cheap on Steam. You can buy AAA titles regularly for $2-3 each. I don't have a very new GPU, so I stick great games in my wishlist and wait till they are essentially free.
I should do that. I have almost 900 Steam games, the vast majority of which I have never touched. Over the years with sales and Humble Bundles, I've just hoarded the games because I might someday want to play it.
Instead all I seem to do is replay Donkey Kong Country 2 and Streets of Rage 2.
Just have AI agents play them for you and have Opus write a summary.
AI to the rescue!
Steam is in big trouble the day I can tell Claude to make me a game, and it can for few $ of tokens than the title would be on Steam.
What’s important is total profits. Video game prices fell because distribution costs tanked and there’s vastly more people playing video games so cutting 20% on the price upfront means far more than 20% extra profit.
That's what paid day one DLC, micro-transactions, and loot boxes are for. Ways of raising the price without raising the headline price.
For videogames I don’t think it really makes sense to try and compare against 90’s prices. It’s gotten so much easier to just make “a game” (in the sense that computers are enormously more powerful, third-party engines and assets exist, generally all tooling is much better, and so on). Expectations in terms of polish and graphics quality are much higher. Distribution is much easier. Videogames are a massive cultural thing these days, so the market is huge, and so is the pool of potential enthusiastic employees.
I mean the arrows are pointing in every direction, I have no idea if prices should have gone up or down or even how to make a comparison. Like we could get into details and talk about comparing a modern AAA game cost to a 90’s AAA games cost… except, even if you adjust for graphics quality generally improving, just the scope of modern AAA games is massive in a way that there doesn’t exist a 90’s equivalent.
That seems like it'll change over the next few years. Lots of people seem to be making video games with AI. Greater supply, same demand, lower prices.
On the other hand, Silksong.
Video games are just another example where the pricing is mostly greed. The market is massively larger than it was in the 90s, digital distribution has massively cut the cost of goods sold, new games are sold with tiered pricing, recuring revenue is now a huge part of a games viability. Game sales aren't the primary income anymore, it's all about keeping whales buying in game items, discounts are only offered when there needs to be a new influx of players to keep whales happy.
That's why the industry is thriving, right?
"COGS" for games has absolutely nothing to do with the plastic box on the shelf with a DVD issue. Sony wasted almost the entire PS5 generation chasing GAAS and having almost nothing to show for it.
The industry as a whole is growing, it's way more than just Sony, and way more than just consoles.
It's part of the growth paradigm - that everything must continue to grow.
Let's say your product is mature. Your market is pretty much saturated; everyone who wants to use this product is using either yours or a competitor's. You and your competitors are finely balanced, you could reduce your prices and get more market share, but that wouldn't increase your profits. You have optimised your manufacturing process to the point where further efficiency would cut into resilience and create more risk than it would be worth.
Your shareholders demand growth. Doing the same numbers as last year is not good enough. So what do you do?
Reduce costs. Cut quality. Shrinkflate. Enshittify. Your customers won't notice immediately. Your competitors are also doing the same.
You only need this strategy to work for a couple of years until you can move on to another role, and consequences are something your successor will deal with. Meanwhile your shareholders are happy and your bonus is secure.
Speed Queen appliances are about 2–2.5x longer-lasting for roughly a 50–75% increase in purchase price.
This just isn't true. What has happened is that companies try to cut costs at every point to make more and more profit since that is what capitalism just does.
There are two ways to submit to capitalism when making products either mass producing the cheapest crap possible with hair thin margins, but since you make so much and they last so little you still make bank.
The other is to make ridiculously over priced luxury goods that rich assholes buy because they want lovingly hand crafted quality instead of the cheap crap, but of course you are marking it up 100-1000 times the price just because you can.
What cannot survive in capitalistic world is the good mid ground of lovingly produced products that actually last and are good quality, because those don't sell as often as they last for a life time or three and you can't gauge the price.
Sure there is a sub section of the economy that literally cannot afford but the cheapest thing, but they need to keep buying same thing year after year as it won't last and thus their children are cursed to suffer the same fate as they cannot inherit any good quality furniture or cars or even houses, everything is just cheaply made consumable with no expectation that it will last longer than a year or two
Well skimpflation, with caveat that a remarkable amount to R&D is spend into value engineering to lowest price points, like you don't get to 50 cent FOB tshirt trivially. And frankly it's revolutionary - enabling developing country wages to buy clothing on a single day wage.
That said, it's 2026... if you want quality and only want to pay marginal increment, there's tons of Chinese ODMs turn direct to consumer, i.e. Quince. They'll sell you functionally top quality (spec for spec inputs if not better) with 1x markup vs 10x brand markup/premium.
The world needs more tariffs until there’s non-chinese ODMs selling top quality
The world needs better economic policy and regulation so non Chinese ODMs can compete on price/quality.
Absolutely. It's the most visible in services shrinkflation.
> my theory is that the decline in quality is another hidden form of inflation
That is a well-known phenomenon, usually called "shrinkflation". (After the fact that the easiest way to lower quality while keeping the price consistent is to just give you less stuff for the same price.)
Although all economists are made aware of the phenomenon, they seem to be just as prone to the illusion as anyone else. Here you can see Tyler Cowen weighing in on a Twitter debate about the price of a meal at Chipotle: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/08/us...
A burrito is sold for the same price (well, 4.6% higher) now that it was 15 years ago. Case closed! Stop complaining about Chipotle's pricing.
Is it the same burrito? Deep in the comments "Michael" reports, from current and archived Chipotle menu tools, that a steak burrito bowl in 2015 contained 875 calories and the same exact menu order in 2026 contained 830 calories... with 80 calories out of that 45 calorie difference representing additional steak in the 2015 bowl.
You are right, it's easier to bake in quality decreases (aka "cost reductions") to keep the price stable than increase the price. Users usually don't see it directly, and since the whole industry does the same there is no real alternative.
A good way to see this is in clothing: my wife likes to buy vintage clothes, part because of the style, but also because most of them are actually well made and sturdy.
Nowadays it's almost impossible to get the same quality and finishes, even with the more expensive brands. Due to the mass-production of low quality clothing, (most) consumers don't even have a clear idea of what "quality" looks like, which further reduces incentives for manufacturers.
For comparison, some niche menswear brands keep the quality stable (as their specific consumer base asks for it). Say Northampton leather shoes for instance (Crockett and Jones et al.), which are still made in the UK (not in an mafia-ran sweatshop in Italia for luxury goods...).
Their products are amazing, and...the price grows 5-10% per year steadily.
> most) consumers don't even have a clear idea of what "quality" looks like
I think it just requires too much work. Your cynicism is unfair.
Also cheapest is just the simplest option, even though you know it is crap. I sometimes just give up on investing effort and time and money trying for better, because I've been repeatedly stung by expensive failures of top quality/brand items.
If I want a cordless drill, I don't want to have to learn about batteries, brands, or any esoterica relating to the quality of it.
For many goods I used to spend time looking at reviews, and cultivating my knowledge. I'm sick and tired of having to do that.
For cordless, I do like Makita, but I use a battery adapter (because their batteries are NZD250 instead of NZD50). But I usually buy a crappy bigstore brand for most cordless tools (a rebadged Einhell). They mostly work and they do a good replacement warranty.
People want a simple measure of quality.
Price doesn't work. Threadcount doesn't work for sheets (they cheat the numbers). Some brands are still worthwhile, but even that is becoming unreliable.
Some stores seem to have quality standards (in NZ Kmart goods seem mostly useable for the pricepoint, however our local 'The Warehouse' has gone downhill).
Many goods are now so complex that stores can't make a price versus quality compromise. Choosing a mobile phone is frustrating.
Complexity is the killer for choosing quality.
Our cheapest goods are surprisingly complex: e.g. socks.
I had to switch from levis jeans to carhartt pants because my levis would rip after 5-6 months, almost like clockwork.
No, I am not at all overweight. Carhartt just makes more durable pants, and I hate shopping.
I abandoned levi's in mid-late 200x. They didn't last nearly long enough in the style I prefer (at the time, 501s were still reportedly durable maybe just the special tab ones, but I won't wear button fly). Plus the whole deal with inconsistent sizing got tiresome.
LL Bean jeans are pretty decent and consistent.
Why would being overweight make your jeans rip? Only if you were buying the wrong size...
Sorry, stranger on the internet, I was simply qualifying a failure case.
Or rather, the non-failure case!
The 5-6 months is in line with other slop brands I’ve tried, e.g. H&M. Sad to see Levis join them in the gutter.
I had a pair rip about 12 years ago. Cheap jeans from the supermarket - might have been the £4 ones. That’s the only time.
In that case I was fortunate I was away from work but going to the airport, went through security with my cheeks hanging out, then went to fat face. Those worked fine (well u til I no ok get fitted their 32” waist), but so do my current “tu” supermarket jeans.
I go through a couple pairs of carhartts per year, so like $10/mo for pants basically. Seems like a pretty good deal. I'd probably go through at least twice as many pairs of jeans. It's a good product. Darn Tough socks are another good one.
To me, this is why we have regulation.
The CE mark in Europe and the UL mark in the US is supposed to provide a floor on quality.
That floor can be increased if we as a society decides that this is required.
You might be unwilling to pay for this increased quality, but you don't have a choice.
In the US, marks from Nationally Recognized Testing Labs (UL, ETK, CSA, and TUV are some big hitters here) do have positive value in terms of safety.
But they're not marks of operational quality. A UL mark on a microwave oven doesn't tell me that it's a high-quality item that will cook my food better than an unmarked item, or that it is something that is easy to use or will stand up to the test of time.
It just means that it's safe to use, according to whatever tests were performed on it. The UL (or other NRTL) mark means that it's extremely unlikely to give anyone an electrical shock or burn a house down, even as the device fails.
As another example: A power supply brick for some manner of widget. The UL mark doesn't mean that it will last for years and years, or that it will power whatever in-spec widget it is thrown at.
The mark does mean that when I short the output terminals together that it won't catch on fire. That's good! But it does not mean that the power supply will ever work again.
An item can fail both absolutely and permanently, and as long as it fails safely then that failure isn't held against it. It can still carry the mark.
The CE mark is worthless, since it is a self-certificaton.
The UL mark is valuable, as are the other test lab marks. However, while an ethical storefront would require it, Amazon does not. I've bought plenty of things that are not listed, and if I want safe products I generally have to include "UL" or "ETL" in my search. Even that doesn't always work, I've seen products on there claiming a listing in the title but photo shopping the place where the UL logo ought to be off of their product images.
This is also solvable through regulation though.
For example, NYC now requires all sold e bikes to be UL certified because of too many apartment lithium battery fires.
> The CE mark is worthless, since it is a self-certificaton.
Boeing 737 MAX tragedy did happen because of self-certification abuse, still I would not call FAA certification worthless.
Boeing is a company worth billions of dollars. "UKCSR" is not, there is absolutely no consequence to them getting shut down due to unsafe products. They'll just come back tomorrow as "JUSGB."
Where on earth are you getting that "CE mark" == quality?
They said "supposed to provide a floor on quality".
because quality signals are much more misleading these days.
can't trust reviews because theyre spammed with fakes. can't trust brands because private equity buy them out and enshittify.
I'd call it externalized costs of regulation and rising demands on production.
If end consumers were able to see an exact and measurable bump in prices the next day a new stronger regulation made production more expensive, voters would be more informed and the whole cost of doing things "better" would be clearer.
Quality was never the norm: cheap always beat quality with a hand tied behind his back!
Western working class has spent decades complaining about cheap imports from China... while feeding that market with their own money.
Western frequent fliers keep reminiscing about the grandiose pre-deregulation era or air travel, but cry a river when their low-cost carrier of choice actually enforces the limit on cabin baggage.
Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
For product quality and ads, 90% of the time you don't really have options. For the former, it's so hard to figure out which product is 15% more expensive because it reinforces the weak points and lasts 3x as long. For the latter, YouTube premium is great but I can't get anything like it for banner ads. Most sites have mandatory ads and almost all the rest want dollars to turn off pennies worth of ads.
The only time I ever see ads are at the cinema. I see people talking about them but I have been out of the loop for well over a decade.
No adverts on Netflix, bbc, Disney, YouTube, paramount, Spotify. I cancelled Amazon because they added adverts.
Sure, streaming services usually don't have ads. But you're paying a lot of money for specific content there. I'm talking about normal web page stuff. And if you're not seeing ads there, then either you go to very few normal web pages or you're using an ad blocker. Ad blocking is useful but it's not a solution.
I want a way to distribute a reasonable amount of money across the sites I visit in exchange for no ads, but that's not an option. Google almost went into that category once, but they implemented it badly and then shut down the entire thing.
Well depends on your idea of “a lot of money”, but guven advertisers make a profit from me I suspect I’m actually saving money.
Personally I value the time saved far more than the 2% of my income I spend on streaming subscriptions.
There's also a lot of absurd product placement in many of the supposedly ad-free streams.
> Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
I wish they would price the service commensurate to what they earn with ads.
My ad watching gives them a few cents, and yet they want $8.99 for a month or some gems.
“My ad watching gives them a few cents”
I don’t think this is remotely true for most major ad-tech services.
For U.S. users, Google and Meta average several hundred dollars of annual ad revenue each. To replace their ad revenue you would need to charge ~$30+ a month for the service.
Interesting, yes. I put my approximate youtube numbers into chatGPT and it estimates $2.40-$9 a month, so at most I'm earning them on par with their cheapest offering.
I recommend using a calculator rather than a chatbot. (Speaking of quality.)
The dark part is you, as a consumer who is willing to pay to not watch ads, are worth considerably more than a few cents to advertise to. In fact, the more you are willing to pay to have no ads, the more valuable showing ads to you is…
Individual memberships are priced 1000x higher than individual ad revenue because only 1 in 1000 users will pay for membership.
You're experiencing market segmentation. You won't pay $8.99 a month, so you don't get an ad-free product like the people who will pay. The service would rather get less than $8.99 from you than nothing, so you get ads.
But the part they seem to miss (or I get lost in the statistics) is that I wont use the service if I get annoyed by the ads. So they turn me into a churn which I wouldnt have been.
Right, you’re just getting lost in the statistics. Overall revenue is a function of revenue per user and number of users. They could go after you by reducing the ads, but they would also be reducing the revenue per user, and they might not gain enough additional people for it to be worth it.
I don't think it is true, that no one wants to pay a penny for services they use. I know at least one counter example, because I pay for search (Kagi), LLM usage (Kagi assistant), VPN, and support various good causes and content creators.
But I think your point is the vast majority, and that point probably stands, and indeed is a huge problem.
> Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
My gas pump has ads, despite me paying for the gas. My airplane has ads, despite me paying for the ticket. My phone has ads, despite me paying for the service. My doctor's office has ads, despite me paying for healthcare. My car has ads, despite me paying for the car.
I can pay for a service to watch sports, and I get ads during the event, ads painted on the field, ads superimposed on the field, normal ads embedded in the commentary, obtuse ads shoved into things like "and he's the Lite Beer Co.® Player of Match", ads in the name of the building, ads in the name of the match itself, ads on the player's jerseys. Frankly at this point I wouldn't be surprised if attending the game required receiving a free tattoo of a sponsor's logo.
Corporations have decided "why make ${service_cost}, when we could make ${service_cost} + ${ad_revenue}?"
> Frankly at this point I wouldn't be surprised if attending the game required receiving a free tattoo of a sponsor's logo.
You don't have your BIM mark?
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/49069-the-apple (I apologize in advance to anyone who watches this as a result of my comment)
Even if you don't buy from China directly, you can't prevent local brands outsourcing their production, because all of them do It.
This is entirely untrue. Almost anywhere you live in the U.S. you can find local brands with local production.
Where can I find an oven made with entirely US parts (or even ~85-90%+)?
I'll tell you in advance that I haven't been able to locate one in a few years of looking. Most major appliances are, at best, 60-80% american with no accurate accounting, even if they're "assembled in the USA". Cars are the only thing with accurate sourcing labels due to legislation.
And the local production is an assembly of something really made in china.
It isn't like this behavior is inherent to westerners. Everyone would prefer to save money and have better service.
Why such a personal attack? I don't think I even know you!
I'm kidding, but what you say is hitting pretty close to home. I always mean to vote with my wallet, and I usually try, but for every Mikrotik router or Framework laptop I buy, there are so many Aukey Magsafe chargers, or McDodo Lightning to USB hubs. BTW, I'm not specifically calling out Aukey or McDodo, but for me those decisions were based on moments of weakness where I needed something to solve a problem, but I wasn't convinced it was significant enough that it was worth paying for what I thought was the best solution (The Aukey being the most recent purchase, and the McDodo having a memorable name).
As an example, I was recently looking for a replacement for my fraying 2m USB-C to Lightning cable, and Apple's is US$30 and it looks like it's made of the same buttery-soft plastic as all the short-lived cables that came with past phone purchases. Anker is finally a valid option where I now live - so I guess I should be giving them my business. They're a similar price, but look more resilient. I haven't quite reached USB-C on all my devices, so whenever I'm buying some accessory, it may only work with a device or two, and there's a decent chance that I might need to shuffle things around, and need a different length or a different connector on the input end.
That was a lot to write on an unimportant topic, and I didn't even touch on the temptation I sometimes cave into to fly a low-cost spin-off of a good airline.
I also share the feeling with another sibling-poster, that digital subscriptions all seem to be either free, or double digits a month, for just one small aspect of my digital existence. Things that only cost a few dollars a month are easy decisions, like Bitwarden, or leasing a domain name, or iCloud+. For anything that crosses into double digits a month, I never get around to it if there is a free alternative which I don't feel horrible about using. A grand-fathered Google Workspace, the free-tier of Protonmail, etc. However, I do feel guilty for not also paying for Kagi, Protonmail/Fastmail, Mullvad, etc. Should I be giving some money to Firefox in some way?
I wish more of these companies that were doing the right thing would offer a cheap tier that was a no-brainer, and there was a service where I could bundle together a bunch into one subscription. Feeling pretty entitled as I write this :)
But lacking that, I end up just sticking with the free options, and then every now and again donating some small amount to a cause I think is worth supporting - Lichess, Putty, VLC, etc.
Cables are something I have no qualms about buying from AliExpress, and I'd say they are better quality than what I can buy locally.
I power my laptop with a WOTOBE 100W 3-meter braided USB-C cable, I got three years ago, for €5. I roughly reel it up and throw it in my backpack, and the next day it comes out again.
I actually bought another one this year (as a spare) as I feel I've had it too long and it should break sometime soon. From a visual inspection there's absolutely nothing wrong with it though.
Compare this to paying €10 for a 1.5m cable from the supermarket, which is just a 50c Chinese product in a box that'll last 3 months - great if you need a cable NOW though. Or €30 for something from an electronics store that is whitelabeled with the brand of a phone manufacturer - and neither is actually rated for 100W.
The thing is the stuff retail stores sell locally is just the same stuff I can buy from China. Except they need to make a profit, the local distributor needs to make a profit, and the regional distributor needs to make a profit. So you end up paying 10x more for the same thing and/or they sell lower quality (= cheaper for them) items. I see zero value in them still existing other than convenience, it's not like the workers can tell you anything that you can't just ask Google yourself.
Even this site on mobile has issues with unnecessary horizontal scroll.
Really?!
Yes, let's blame the working class for spending money on Chinese goods after their jobs were offshored and their spending power was decreased.
Appeals were made time after time to "Buy American!" as each manufacturing sector was offshored, first to Japan, then to China and the rest of Asia, but they were ignored by workers in other sectors. So, yes, you'd better believe the working class do not escape blame.
> Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
Because paying a penny won't prevent ads or tracking.
Paying for an ad-free service will prevent ads.
Example: YouTube Premium.
If ads is embedded in video(like product placement, sponsor etc). You still see the ads.
Amazon prime added the ads back no?
One big problem is that prices are easy to compare, while quality is not.
I recently bought a tub that was advertised as stainless steel on Amazon. I was suspicious but decided to take a chance. Turns out it is galvanized, not stainless. I’m not sure the average person knows the difference. To be charitable, perhaps that’s even why the listing advertised it that way. But the difference matters significantly in terms of performance and quality, especially for certain kinds of products and use cases.
There’s no “sort by quality, best to worst” system like there is for price. No “genuine stainless only” filter. You just have to know certain things.
Shopping in person obviously helps, but you still have to know what to look for. Refrigerators are a good example of this. Most people shop for them in person, yet it’s not at all obvious whether model A or model B will last longer. You can try to use price as a proxy for quality, but the more expensive refrigerators are actually more likely to fail years earlier because of the added component complexity. They’re basically banking on the fact that you don’t know how to read a wiring diagram.
To combat that, lots of people turn to YouTube or reviews to figure out quality. And sure, you can find some good sources that will tell you that top freezers will last longer than a French door model at basically any price, and they might even explain why. But all of those platforms are muddied with perverse incentives, affiliate programs, sponsorships, etc. Again, not always obvious.
We need to make quality obvious. We need to make it comparable, sortable, filtrable, and guaranteed. Poor design needs to be a valid reason to return an item. Manufacturers should be required to label products with an estimated lifespan. Give tax breaks or other incentives to products that include a warranty for its full lifespan.
We have to figure out how to improve the efficiency of making high quality goods, so that everything doesn’t just get more expensive. There should be a public database of the best known designs and techniques for making long lasting items. Patents that relate to longevity could be given extra time to encourage research, but then after, say, 3 years there could be a requirement to license the technology so that it can go mainstream.
This doesn’t solve everything. Some products need more specific approaches. Food quality is a problem. Housing needs to be both more affordable and higher quality. But I think with enough changes to incentives, the culture could shift towards seeing the value in making things well.
A simple indicator for quality should be the return rate by brand. You need two things: a law that offers a long enough warranty, and a public registry of returns where customers can check that their return is listed.
I finally subscribed to consumer reports. It is the only independent place we can trust for that information. However they only review a subset of the things I want to buy.
I think it's interesting that very often the best rated one is typically not the most expensive (nor the cheapest for that matter).
The more interesting part is to read the full detailed reviews on why they choose that. Often the most expensive or second most expensive has some useful features that they decide are not worth the cost but I do.
I have long thought they place too much emphasis on low cost over other factors, but the fact that I can get a useful review to make informed decisions is important.
Pretty sure they have a "best" (top of the list) and a "best value" IIRC. So you are interested in the best, but even it is often not the most expensive. OK, i didn't do any statistics, but that seemed to be typical.
There's also rtings[1]. They test consumer products and seem to try to keep their methodology transparent and consistent.
A lot of the data they produce is paywalled, but that's alright. They don't have advertising and they buy the products that they review. Someone has to keep the lights on and put food on their tables.
[1]: https://rtings.com
I recently determined that it's basically the only place that reliably test PS5 VRR monitor capability!
A niche use case, but at least there was one source of information.
Project Farm on YouTube has never disappointed me. The guy buys everything himself and finds creative & reproducible ways to test things.
He convinced me to get a Dyson vacuum. Worst expensive purchase of my life.
Nothing he said was wrong. Dyson’s performance is genuinely excellent. The problem is everything else.
It squeaks as I move it around while vacuuming due to flimsy rubber seals. It doesn’t have a retractable cord or any good place to put it. It has a clever feature where if the vacuum is fully upright, then the accessories are active, otherwise the main floor head is active - cool, except that the upright position never clicks well, I have to constantly fight it. I could go on and on…
None of these things show up on a spec sheet and I didn’t come across them in any reviews either. It looks cool and it cleans well, but every other aspect of it is junk. I’m never going to buy one again.
Why do you trust Consumer Reports?
Independent, non-profit, probably just two of the factors. They don't allow ads or ranking either. I don't think they've steered me wrong.
More like who else can I trust at all? By default I trust them the most because everybody else I can find is too obviously a sell out and so the bar is low.
Note that everybody else I can find is very different from everybody else. Someone else linked rtings - I'd never heard of them before they were not in the running. There are probably many many others that are trust worthy - but all search engines will find is obvious sell outs.
> One big problem
This is THE biggest problem for me. I'm happy to pay for quality when I need quality. But there's almost sorcery involved in finding quality.
I personally see two effects that are very detrimental here:
1) "Quality brands", where you pay a premium to get high quality/durability products, are economically incentivized to "sell-out" (cash in the brand name by producing as cheaply as possible). This is because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important than anything else.
2) Increasing trend towards no-name products (or ephemeral brands). This means that producers can sell cheap trash with no drawback whatsoever; slightly more expensive quality products become unmarketable because every customer will assume you're just trying to sell them the same cheapest shit for more.
I used to think that brand products were a universal money waste for suckers, but now I think they can be a very valuable mechanism.
What would really help in my view though is to force companies to stick with their brand, to incentivize them to invest into it and to make "cashing out" on good brands a universally bad decision.
> Quality brands are economically incentivized to sell-out [...] because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important
That probably happens a lot, but there's another mechanism by which it could happen, that requires no malice: the brand gets a quality reputation, which increases demand for its products, and they are unable to produce quality products at the rate needed to satisfy that demand. Then it's easy to reason that it'd be a net benefit for everyone to loosen the quality requirements a tiny bit, in order to satisfy the demand of more customers. People used to the quality will barely notice any difference, and then twice as many people can get that experience.
That works once, but when applied again, and again, and again, and again it becomes a problem, even with zero ill intent.
That sounds implausible. For a premium brand the marginal unit should be comfortably profitable, so they will have the resources to saturate the market at exponential speed purely from their unit economics. The somewhat theatrical lines outside the store aside, Apple has never had a strategic problem meeting the demand for Apple computers.
It seems a lot more likely that you get executives who come in and believe that narratives beat reality, there are a lot of people like that in the world. They are the sort who will abandon the reality of quality because that costs money then get confused when the narrative catches up. Or you get an idiot who is data-driven and detects that there is no immediate change in sales when they compromise on quality so they conclude that quality isn't valued by consumers. No malice, just a lack of strategic thinking.
For many, the most constraining resource is time. And you can't buy that. It takes years to spin up a new factory and production line and then transfer the implicit knowledge from your initial production line that provides the quality in the first place.
> Apple has never had a strategic problem meeting the demand for Apple computers.
The business that had those problems didn't become Apple.
lmao, not everything is quickly scalable. Take quality lace which is still a very manual process, the highest quality brands most people working on these products are well past the age of 50. There's no one learning to make it and it takes many many years to get skilled enough to do it quickly. Also including apple in premium brand? They make cheap computers.
Once they reach the limit of demand, then there's nothing more to be made in that price category, so they get more by selling out and lowering quality and price.
We're going through massive global depopulation in the entire industrialized world. There are no new customers coming and sales will naturally trend down because of human extermination. Once everybody has an electric shaver, then you know that the next generation of customers is half the size or less. Unless you can make people grow their beards and hair faster, then there isn't going to be any demand among people who can afford a quality product. You have to start targeting the very poor, and thus lower production costs.
Or you could just be happy to have a profitable company that makes money consistently. Shavers don't last for ever and new people grow up every day. You could also just launch a new product line that's cheaper without compromising the existing ones.
But nooo we need infinite growth which is impossible so let's run the company into the ground for some more growth before our shit decisions catch up to us and stock price plummets.
If your customer base is declining, your company isn't making money consistently. Revenues and profits will decline accordingly.
Or the company is grown in an organic way that leads to lower but stable demand.
Then you scale back a bit and keep making consistent money, just a bit less. The only way things go completely to shit is when you enshittify your product and nobody wants it any more.
Or you could expand to other markets, lots of options that don't require making your products worse.
Markets outside the industrialized world don't have the purchasing power for quality products from the industrialized world. That's why you have to reduce quality to reduce price if you want to sell consumer goods to them. Or wind down your operations. But who would want to wind down their operations?
iF yOu ArEnT gRoWiNg YoUrE dYiNg
I see "quality brands" as a potential way to avoid knowing yourself stuff about what you buy. In itself, outsourcing one's expertise about a product might be the root cause of the detrimental effects you mention.
As an example: I was once shopping with someone that had experience in fashion. While I don't remember all the details, with one look/touch the person could tell and explain if something was poor or high quality, while to me it all looked mostly the same. Based on that experience, I now I mostly stick to checking the material, and avoid plastics which seem to show a tendency for low quality across the board.
I do agree that it requires effort to know stuff about things, but when I see people that go like "oh, I need X, will pick the first X that shows up on Amazon", I am less amazed we get crappy quality for lots of products.
We can dream that every human should be self reliant enough to personally inspect a used car, test knife steel for ductility and carbon content, inspect the stitching in a pair of pants, on and on.
But if you need vast expertise and extensive product testing just to make a trip to the grocery store, that’s not a fluid market. You are requiring a system with a heavy reliance on unpaid labors by all parties.
There’s always a place for expertise, but trusted brands support market efficiency. The simplest is “I bought one of these before and I liked it; I trust that the brand & vendor will sell me an identical copy” without needing to interrogate their supply chain to confirm it’s the same good. Another is “if I buy this and the product has a defect, they will help set it straight”.
Trust in the seller is not far away in importance from transparent pricing, and arguably if the product hides a flaw (like a knockoff) the pricing is ipso facto not transparent.
From an economic perspective I think (more) informed consumers will just accelerate competition and innovation to obtain better results. Would be curious though to see some (academic) analysis on what is the influence on consumer expertise and brand impact over efficiency.
I feel that people "trust" too easy these days. Being it brands, politicians, artists, ideas, online videos, phone calls from a Nigerian prince, etc. I am not naive to think the majority will change tomorrow but I would advocate for the need of change. To make a far fetched comparison maybe 1000 years ago people would have said "learning to read is unpaid labors that does not benefit peasants", but I think more knowledge (and critical thinking) benefits everyone.
clothing is a particularly nasty one. "brand" is sometimes inversely proportional to quality within clothing. Price and quality is just completely random.
Checking stitch length, stitch type, fabric feel, fabric composition, any known supplier information about cotton staple and origin of production, construction complexity.
It's alot of work to keep on top of.
I read an article once about how levi slightly vary the fabric and button quality between cities and countries under the same name (and quality binning); optimising cost to consumer tolerance. And Levi is a brand marketing themselves for quality and legacy pride.
I've heard the ratings on Amazon can make or break you, so I think most people are at least trying to get quality by taking the ratings into account.
The ratings are hilariously gamed. Vendors will use coupons and discounts to get you to leave a positive review, while negative reviews are often reported off the site or the submitter is hounded by the vendor.
I do know that people use these ratings when making decisions, but the correlation to quality is fuzzy, at best. I can't imagine people will continue trusting these ratings forever.
> "cashing out" on good brands a universally bad decision.
For the company yes, not for the executive bonuses.
It is quite notable how the long-lasting companies that are household names somehow managed to resist this urge. Most of them are private.
People need to compartmentalize things in order to make sense of the universe, but doing so for companies (and governments) is just counterproductive.
Whenever you think about a company to draw any good conclusions you always need to think about all the people who work there, from the factory worker to the executive.
Something I've noticed is every maybe 3-4 years there's a new "hot person athleisure" brand that appears, prices at a premium, bombards social media, drapes every single person you see running outside in your city in full sets from it, before getting turned out and replaced by basically the same exact thing with a different name.
So they've gotten quite good at the pump n dump of getting everyone in the spin class on some new $300 polyester outfit every two weeks. It is probably brutally formulaic how refined the playbook is for these sorts of companies.
Also it doesn't even matter if the rare company making a high quality product long enough to get a positive brand rep is incentivized to sell out (although I don't disagree with you that is a pressure to act in short term interests) thanks to this great thing called: private equity!
> is to force companies to stick with their brand
Punishment is never a good long term solution. Because punishment is related to revenge. And revenge reinforces the punishment - but on the other side.
Perhaps questioning the underlying assumptions we make about products, money and capitalism is an alternative approach:
- money is just a means, not an end. Allowing faceless investors to pump money into brands and then have them force companies to turn a profit at any price (i.e. by decreased quality at higher prices - it's a brand after all). The euphemism for this is "increasing shareholder value". The only value being increased is money.
- why does advertising build on our fears of being "different" (not belonging to our assumed peer group) or "not being happy" (if you buy this product, you'll be as happy as the person shown here in the advertising). Or missing out on something. The euphemism here is "increasing brand awareness". They that shout the loudness will remain memorable.
- why has everything and everyone become a product to be sold and repackage to fit into the latest trends. Intelligence is now also become a product in the form of AI with folks outsourcing their intelligence to a machine "oh AI can do this better than I could so I won't even bother".
Unfortunately we make too many assumptions that it has to be this way. Science and nature have yet found the unifying law of capitalism or brandism, let allow law of influencism.
So until the next bubble bursts and much time is spent saving large bloated inefficient corporations from bankruptcy because interested parties have their fingers in the pie, the game will continue.
The whole thing is becoming a giant game of monopoly with no end. At least monopoly eventually ends with the winner gloating over their success and everyone else quietly walking away.
And to add a layer to the AI example that almost circles back to the original issue: there is a financial/time incentive to rationalize “it will do it better,” because it means you don’t have to do it at all yet you theoretically profit
I agree with this. It's curious that we always talk about "things used to last forever and weren't only made by corporations chasing infinite growth", when those things are often still available, but are almost invisible because we now discover everything through social media or SEO.
You can find great-quality, long-lasting products at great prices (great price doesn't equal cheap, but great for what you get).
I use capable LLMs on high reasoning to run a prompt like this:
"I want to buy a high-quality [category] that will/has/can [requirements here]. I do not want to pay for a brand name that doesn't improve.
Start by finding manufacturing clusters in [region of the world, e.g. Europe] where [category] is made, then find the businesses making [category] in that cluster that I can buy from.
Normal online stores are okay, but also try non-obvious avenues:
-local business registers -stores that may only be available in the local language -factories that sell samples directly" -cooperatives that sell products from multiple local manufacturers
(I modify this prompt, but it's the skeleton)
To verify a given product/brand/store, a great follow-up prompt has been:
"Now find me big brands offering a product of similar quality (ideally measured by objective characteristics) and show me how much it is vs. [store name here]"
This has showed me incredible finds. It's become how I buy most things that go beyond basic trinkets, and I often pay less for far higher quality.
Could your post some example result, so we can judge by ourselves
I understand the strong desire to help the environment, but why lead with that? I think it's become apparent that the average person doesn't really care about the environment. People do care about maximum convenience and minimal cost , which usually leads to waste. We should try harder to create a system that aligns the incentive of taking care of the Earth than we try to force people to care about the environment. Remember, if your reasoning is that "if people would just XYZ", it's bad reasoning.
Maybe for Americans but certain countries the people there do on average care.
This is a false pretense. Quality was never the norm.
What is no longer the norm is getting first-hand experience with a product before you buy it. Everything comes in the mail and it's a surprise to the consumer after they buy it. That's nuts!
Seriously. Did this person never have to fix relatives' IE6?
Easy solution if you like tariffs: all imported items over $100 must have a 10 year full warranty.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...
Is it easy? What if an organization avoids liability through shell companies and financial engineering?
"The company managing your warranty was acquired by Foobar Inc and their sole building burned down destroying all records. We apologize for the inconvenience."
Well there is the option to make Amazon responsible for what they sell...
I think they should be responsible for accurate listings, swift refunds, taking down misleading products, and banning repeat offenders. I somehow think making Amazon "responsible for what they sell" goes far beyond that in ways that are not reasonable. Only those that make products should be responsible for them.
Well they don't ban repeat offenders. Trying to directly regulate the banning of repeat offenders seems more difficult and less fruitful than giving the store fallback responsibility for the warranty.
Australia gives the store primary responsibility and it seems to work well for them.
I guess if they aren't prohibited from having a contract with the manufacturers to have them fulfill or reimburse warranty claims, then it would be acceptable to to require stores to honor it. They'll be more careful about who they allow in.
Oh sure, I'd encourage the manufacturer paying whenever possible. This is just a fallback for no-name trash.
Demand collateral
That's what bonds are for. US customs requires prepaid bonds for other things. Importers who don't have enough assets would have to post a bond to cover repairs for the product. They get it back at 10 years.
A way to get the right to repair for the rest of the world.
Apple/MS/Google would have to keep their products working for 10 years.
When most fortune 500 companies burned brand-goodwill to sell disposable versions of products, it is credulous to believe all problems are external. =3
Comment is unrelated to the link, except that both have the word "Warranty".
I think we're asking too much of buyers here. You shouldn't need to learn about fabrics and stitching, then check who owns the brand now, just to buy a shirt that lasts.
So, given reality, how would you suggest this gets done?
The way we used to do it? Based on human reputation, so you know, if you're a dick you prob won't get a lot of customers.
Being “a dick” and having a high quality product are often orthogonal to each other. Reputation also requires brand recognition which often lends itself to enshittification as companies get established.
…are you willing to pay for it though? If yes, is there enough of you? If yes, is there a way to tell low quality from high?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
In certain personal projects, I have the opposite philosophy where I don't want quality. I got addicted to designing models and 3D-printing them a year ago. Over time, I learned to reduce the amount of safety factor and make items just strong enough for their application - which saves material and printing time. I wouldn't skimp on something like a carrying handle for the printer, where failure would mean damaging the printer. But I would reduce the amount of plastic used in things like art pieces (3DBenchy - who needs structural strength?), end caps for various objects, prototypes for dimensioning. Moreover, sometimes I'm happy to see my parts break because I was thinking of redesigning it or did so already, hence I would be itching to print the new version. Aside from that, just knowing I can reprint a part anytime (without modifications) makes me much less worried about breaking or losing a part.
True … I’m the same, but I consider that good engineering. Designing it with the use in mind, factoring in all the stresses adequately but only just. That’s more like how an airplane is made: weight/strength only where it’s truly necessary.
I wouldn’t say that’s low quality though, just something with a lot more care put into it.
The answer is competition. Quality declines when companies no longer have to meaningful compete in the marketplace. The only other solution is regulation and force quality through punishment for noncompliance. Competition works better.
Competition partially causes this though. When you have 100 brands selling the same thing it became a race to the lowest price.
My experience is competition invokes two races happening at the same time, one for lowest price and one for highest quality. You can get a cheap car or really high quality car. Same goes for clothes, restaurants, basically anything where there is lots of market choices and competition.
That doesn't make any sense. The most expensive cars are also the least reliable. Rich people have multiple cars so when the Bentley has an electrical glitch they just drive the Porsche.
Quality means different things to different people. But the fact that Bentleys and Porsche exist support that case that not everything in a competitive markets drives things to the lowest cost product.
Exactly. The whole notion of "quality" is so subjective that it never was and never can be a norm.
At the end of the day, people still end up sucking it up and buying it, so the market can only be so efficient. Every hobby I've had, all sorts of different stuff only anchored in the fact you have to buy gear, the common theme is everyone is constantly pissed off at the companies making the gear. It is very much an abusive relationship.
An Audi typically requires more maintenance and repair than a Toyota though. You’re not paying for quality (as in durability/longevity)
The upper end of a lot of these product categories is often populated with overpriced junk that's popular for conspicuous consumption reasons. Clothing is the prime example, but a lot of modern fine dining is also trash (who actually enjoys eating flavoured foam?). So there's actually three races: lowest price, highest quality, and highest brand value.
Depends- i care about the quality of power tool I buy. There’s plenty of competition, but most of it I won’t touch because it’s some “Zissbou” brand off of Amazon.
The competition on the high end is great! Makita, Milwaukee, and others battling it out. Better materials, batteries, designs. But I’ll only pay for actual performance, so there’s no where for bad actors to hide.
There are economic impacts to raising quality:
1. Higher quality requires better trained technicians. That means fewer people will be able to participate due to any of missing experience, costs of training/education, and opportunity costs.
2. Higher quality generally requires third party certification, such as the CE or FCC identifiers on electronic equipment. Certification costs time and money resulting in a form exclusivity.
3. Higher quality means goods/services with increased durability, which requires fewer updates or repurchases. That is great, for the producer, if everything comes with a warranty but is bad if patching is an extra expense.
Now consider what that means for software, a fully unregulated industry. It means some form of credentials for developers instead of frameworks or tech stacks. It means paying money to third parties to validate every patch release. It also means applying a warranty to all commercially licensed software. These things would raise the price of software and eliminate most people currently employed.
"Now consider what that means for software, a fully unregulated industry. It means some form of credentials…"
So what! Until the 20th Century pharmaceuticals/medicines were unregulated (eg: buy laudanum (opium) anywhere without regs and instructions said it was fine to give it to kids). After deaths, disasters and addiction regulations tightened—especially so after birth defects and thalidomide. Now the industry is tightly regulated.
Right, it took over one hundred years for pharma to be regulated. So be it for software. It's time the Wild West came to an end.
There'll always be whingers along the way, especially if they stand to lose profits. The "Good Times" for the software industry ought to be over because consumers are no longer benefiting in the way they should. Want a quintessential example of 'junk' software: Windows 11.
Existing regulations should cover software in their respective industries. Outside of that what you are asking for is simply onerous and isn't something that can be regulated in a meaningful manner.
We've already had opensource projects threatened by the age-check legality nonsense (which cannot be enforced). If you regulate what features can/can't be in an OS you will end up negatively affecting opensource and/or hobbyists which will give the consumer less choice.
The only reason we have an actual alternative to Windows is because people create their own Linux distros and software around it.
That's fine; as I've often repeated, we don't necessarily need tight(er) regulations but sophisticated and intelligent ones.
I don't buy your list. For example, higher quality doesn't require third part certification. Reputation (and warranties) can work without third parties.
I do agree that third party certification is one possible avenue.
How so?
Any sort of profession that warrants high quality service requires certifications (bar exam, USMLE, PE, etc)
Same goes for products too. It’s not a reasonable solution for the consumers to perform an exhaustive research to get high quality guarantee.
I don’t find non official third party all that compelling. See Amazon marketplace as an example.
My local coffee shop makes excellent coffee. They don't need get a third party certification for me to to believe that.
Similarly for eg a local carpenter. Or my tailor.
The bar exam merely tells you that someone is legally allowed to be a lawyer or some such. They don't tell you, if she's any good. I don't know what USMLE or PE are.
> Same goes for products too. It’s not a reasonable solution for the consumers to perform an exhaustive research to get high quality guarantee.
That's for the consumer to decide, isn't it? And consumer can use third party certification, if they want to, sure. (Or if they are required to do so by regulation.)
Actually they do. Local coffee shops fall under the regulation of local food inspectors just like restaurants.
That doesn't say anything about quality, except for "should not kill you or give you a disease". What shopper would be satisfied with the bare minimum of the minimum, no matter what they are buying?
I think you misunderstand quality versus competition. The purpose of regulation is to impose a minimum baseline of quality.
Software does not have regulation. In many areas of software we force shit quality on the users and just expect them to take it without complaint as a common practice. Then we as developers, like entitled children, completely rage the moment anyone casts light on this insanity.
> The purpose of regulation is to impose a minimum baseline of quality.
Quality has more than one dimension. Food regulation is mostly concerned with "don't poison the customer". It doesn't otherwise care about things like taste or smell or texture.
It's because something is better than nothing when it comes to software. Which people always forget.
Is eating spoiled food which gives you a disease better than not eating anything? No, it's worse, and therefore the minimum quality regulations make sense.
Is having low quality software better than not having any software? Yes, in almost all cases it is better. So a minimum quality regulation doesn't make sense.
When people put quality requirements too high on software, we get situations where for example public transport information and tickets aren't available digitally because the government is taking 15 or more years to make the "perfect" platform. The public is better served by a shitty solution the first years, an OK solution after that, and hopefully a good solution later on.
Delivering fast has a very important value when it comes to software, because you can replace it with improved versions at no physical cost. Delivering a vehicle which will kill you or food which will make you sick is very different. In those cases nothing is better than anything.
> When people put quality requirements too high on software, we get situations where
This is a common trope of the unregulated: We can’t raise quality because we can barely deliver as it is. The real message there is that the user should suffer so that you won’t.
I'm a consumer of software, not a developer. And I can tell you that as a consumer I always prefer something over nothing. If you can do it better, you have a golden opportunity, which you should take, to deliver something better to the market. Otherwise, you haven't much reason to complain that other people are doing at least something.
I don't know how it is in your country but carpenters are required to be trained and to insure their works for a decade in France, for instance.
Sorry, I was talking about the guys who make cabinets and tables, not the guys who build a wooden house. I suspect carpenter was the wrong term.
I don't think anyone is required to insure a table or a wardrobe for decades, even in France?
I think reputation and warranties are insufficient. While building a reputation may be expensive, destroying a reputation can be profitable (in the short term). Warranties can also be made less effective by making the buyer spend excessive time and effort to enforce the warranty. The company sets the terms and effectively their interpretation, so after two years of waiting, nudging, waiting, complaining, waiting, threatening, and waiting one finally gets an "equivalent value" replacement (and the warranty clock was running during that time).
The company might also go bankrupt with much of its profits having gone to owners and decision makers who are not bound to honor the warranty.
You can be free to disregard warranties that are solely policed by the company that offers them. And companies are free to give you warranties guaranteed by third parties.
> The company might also go bankrupt with much of its profits having gone to owners and decision makers who are not bound to honor the warranty.
That's where reputation comes in.
I don't think the idea of circular economy, where goods are produced with high manufacturing quality standards, applies to software. In the sense that producing high quality physical goods may not be beneficial for the producer. But producing high quality software is rarely not beneficial for the developer, specially in the long term.
Maybe idea could be maybe applied to the offering of long-term technical support and backwards-compatibility (in terms of durability of the software) and open source (in terms of reusability of the software).
One of the greatest challenges for software as an industry is for the developers to consider the role of the user. In my 20 years of doing this rarely have I seen a developer advocate for the users over themselves. Instead the developer imposes themselves as the primary user and the actual users as a secondary class. This is where most tech stacks and design decisions come in at every step.
I can also remember when I worked at Travelocity a million years ago and they actively tried to fight this insanity with exhaustive A/B testing.
Not to mention, it would raise the cost of Software as a Service businesses as the cost of building and maintaining software goes up, as well as the technical expertise to maintain those systems. That would have a flow-on effect of reduced market as low-medium income folks are effectively priced out of the market, no long paying for "cloud services, and so on... It would be a disaster.
As far as I can see the linked report does not mention software at all. It is all about physical products.
I think all three of these points, but especially the first two are rather speculative; I don't personally believe they hold, though I can't be sure.
Most quality defects I see are ultimately down to culture, not training and certainly not certification. Getting to excellent quality simply does not require great training nor rigorous certification, and I'm not even sure it really benefits from either all that much. But what it does require is a culture of chasing down all the avoidable risks, to fix not just the immediate bug, but also the process that allowed it to come to be, to pre-emptively look for whole classes of bugs or misfeatures seriously, and to always look deeper than for underlying causes or interactions (i.e. take the 5-why's game seriously).
It's perhaps almost a trope by this point, but it's still a great reminder and example - sqlite. About a month ago Richard Hipp, one of the primary authors, gave a great presentation "Reliability Lessons From SQLite" (https://youtu.be/V_qzqY1bb7I) - and notably, I'm not seeing even _echos_ of training and certification in their clearly world-class process. I don't think you can even seriously claim it's all that expensive, if you consider how tiny that team is, and yet how much they've achieved.
If larger organizations fail to achieve high quality - well, _why?_ It's not due to lack of training, certifications or smart people. Perhaps its intrinsic about larger for-profit corporations, but I suspect we could do better with better incentives, and a more serious attitude about dealing with mis-aligned incentives throughout our culture. Is it really a flaw for a corporation to prioritize short term cost reduction even over long term self-harm if that's what they're judged by? Is it a flaw for a profit seeking corporation to largely ignore costs their low quality imposes on others? Is it a flaw for a for-profit organization to take huge risks when the upside is unbounded but the downside is mere bankruptcy without any further liability?
I don't know how to solve these problems, and don't want to claim it's even remotely reasonable to throw out the capitalist baby with the corporate bathwater, but surely we can do better than the status quo even without a revolution. Misaligned incentives and tragedies of the commons aren't new issues, nor ones without potential mitigations. We're just choosing to ignore those inefficiencies, and have for decades. And at this point, even small changes in incentives might have truly wrenching consequences; the ingrained and by now deeply embedded carelessness in our huge software and other engineering stack is corroded at every level.
TLDR: I don't have the answer, but I'm pretty positive it's not an issue of cost, training or certification.
Consumers, fundamentally, care about two things:
* Price
* Features
Those are tangible, obvious things. They are not subtle. They do not take months or years to discover or become obvious. They are (mostly) not vague or ambiguous. Does this car have lane assist? Yes or no. Will this car last me 20 years? ...maybe? That's a very hard question to answer. It's messy and complicated and has a lot of clauses to it.
So, consumers buy whatever is the cheapest available with the features they want, or the most feature-rich they can with their budget.
This demand forces manufacturers to respond. They find a way to cram more functionality in, at a cheaper price. If they don't, they will simply get eaten up by those who do, overseas or otherwise.
You can say you want quality and reliability all you want - it changes nothing. At the end of the day, the vast majority keep voting with their wallet - and they want CHEAP.
> Consumers, fundamentally, care about two things: * Price * Features
Consumers also care about accessibility. It doesn't matter to me if product X is amazing and affordable if I can't find it in any store anywhere near me or if amazon never shows it in search results because all they want to push is amazon basics and products made by FSLHVHSLR
If no company anywhere sells what I want, then I have no choice but to compromise and today there is a whole lot of compromising going on. Companies are more interested in selling what is most profitable to them, not what consumers actually want. Very often consumers are forced to buy what little is offered to them. The consumer "voting with their wallet" will always lose when companies also vote with theirs because theirs is much much bigger.
Consumers care about a lot of things besides that, it's just that (as you mention) those are the two most legible things to consumers.
Your specific example of cars is, IMO, not correct: Honda, for years, could charge a premium on their new cars due to a reputation for reliability increasing resale values.
For less expensive things, how much time should I spend researching quality USB-C to HDMI dongles? It's plausible that the chip in the $5 on amazon WOPEIME (or whatever) branded dongle is the same as the in the $25 Belkin one.
For intermediate things, time-pressure might matter. If my clothes washer were to fail today, I'm doing laundry by hand until I can get a new one in my house, so I'm probably playing quality roulette with several hundred dollars of my money at Best Buy.
I think what people associate with "quality" is vastly different from each other.
For example I believe there is a deeper quality that cannot be easily found in a more quality product. Quality can be expressed in many ways and felt throughout the life. But people don't care for that.
They mostly care for cheap and good enough. I don't want to attack that way of life its simply one with tradeoffs like a life with more quality.
More quality can mean more expensive, the need to engage with something a bit more, etc.
Leibl famously needed over 3 months to just draw the hands of one model for "Three Women in Church" it certainly has some quality to it.
In the modern world seldom you will find one that wants to pay for such work or even spending 3 months of work on painting hands.
Enshittification is definitely real, but let's not look at the past with rose-colored glasses. A lot of things you can buy today are vastly superior to things available 50 years ago.
It used to be remarkable to drive a car 100k miles without major repairs. Volvo dealerships in the 80's and 90's would give you a badge at 100k milestones to advertise how reliable their cars were compared to others.
Anything tech related is just light years ahead of what it used to be, and for far cheaper. 65"+ OLED TVs for less than a couple grand are pretty much science fiction come to life. Gaming consoles are super-computers compared to an NES.
For many appliances, if you pay an inflation-adjusted cost for what a 1980's family would pay you can get something that will last forever. Last year I bought a commercial microwave for about $300 that has a single dial, hardly any features, and likely will last longer than the first microwave my family owned and also paid ~$300 for. Adjusting for inflation my new microwave is vastly better and cheaper than my childhood one.
I play guitar - in 1954 a new Stratocaster sold for $249, which is about $3k in today's dollars. And $249 today will get you a guitar that's easily as good as most 1954 Strats. If you spend the inflation-adjusted equivalent you're in ultra-luxury territory.
Want good furniture? That's ALWAYS been expensive, but you'd typically buy a table for the equivalent of $5k in today's dollars and expect it to last a lifetime. You can spend $5k on real wood furniture today, but nobody does.
Housing materials are much better and cheaper with the possible exception of copper pipes and anything made of real wood. Certainly builders of McMansions are cutting corners at every opportunity, but if you do your own building/finishing these days a lot of materials are available that will outlast their 1980's equivalent, and the cheap options are better.
I think a lot of this is a lack of perspective - everyone wants better things but nobody actually wants to pay for it.
> I think a lot of this is a lack of perspective - everyone wants better things but nobody actually wants to pay for it.
I think that's part of it, but I also think it's largely an issue of information asymmetry. Brands used to be a proxy for quality, and price could also be a proxy for quality, but that is no longer the case. That means it takes significantly more effort to research a product category to find a good product and people don't want to expend that effort. I am one of those weird people that enjoys that research, so I'm often the one people in my friend group ask for product recommendations because they are more than happy to spend the money, just not the time.
It's a discovery problem at the end of the day. When all the existing indicators become unreliable and advertising is inundated with scams and frauds, there's no way for good products to connect to good customers, so /everyone/ suffers.
There’s a horizontal body overflow bug on this page on mobile. The irony
There's few things where the drop in quality is astronomical, one of them being clothing.
Clothes used to last a life time till few decades ago.
Right now you buy stuff that after the first wash already looks worn out, terrible or starts falling apart.
Major known brands are guilty of this too, often regardless of price.
So people end up with closets filled of junk that they look terrible in anyway.
I wish there was a line of brands and even better shops that focused on quality fabrics and sewing processes for clothing that lasts for ages as it used to.
> Major known brands are guilty of this too, often regardless of price.
I think this is part of the problem. Everyone wants high-quality (for the most part), but no-one wants to pay more than necessary. If known brand is no longer an indicator of quality, how do you determine that you want to spend say 2-5x the price on something? Reading reviews and such gets you part of the way, but they often focus on new products and performance or style. And it's not always easy to find a review for the thing you are looking to buy. Besides, who has time to wade through reviews for every purchase? So we end up buying the cheaper options because at least then you will only be out a little bit instead of feeling tricked spending more for the same product.
I love this - super testable experiment. I have this exact desire too. - I can’t stand most cheaply made tshirts or things with crass branding
- there are a few clothing brands that focus on high quality (and in this case english mfg fabric mills).
- it is not cheap. our whole society is warped around “physical goods are super cheap now [because we can manufacture in cn]”. it’s a race to the bottom and we’ve hit the bottom.
- you can buy a black nylon/cotton tshirt for 10 USD
- these tshirts will set you back 130 USD. it feels amazing, was made in a country with health care, ages well, looks high quality.
do you want to pay the price this requires? I do but I think most can’t or won’t https://www.sunspel.com/collections/the-classic-t-shirt
it's also a matter of fashion, you can get real denim work pants that will last a tech worker probably two lifetimes. They're ugly, thick, and heavy though.
> do you want to pay the price this requires?
I ordered one to see how it holds up. $100 for a t-shirt isn't even that high of a price, most t-shirts I own are merch shirts that cost $45-$70 anyway and are printed on the cheapest Hanes or similar shirt. If it's actually good at $100, I'm sure many people would want to buy it, they just don't know about it. I had never even heard of this company till I saw your comment, but regularly spend more than $100 on an article of clothing if I think it will actually last.
You can look for reviewer that care about the same things you care about?
> Besides, who has time to wade through reviews for every purchase?
Claude does! And most purchases I make are repeat purchases, so I don't have to read the reviews again.
Claude is subject to the same enshittification market forces. Think of the value Claude could unlock by having trusted commercial partners that just happen to have the best product in a market segment.
Claude was just an example. You can use an open source model or even run it locally.
> but no-one wants to pay more than necessary
Why would you assume that to be true? It's definitely not true for me.
I guess "necessary" was a bit too vague of a word. I meant that for all your various requirements such as quality, style, workers conditions, etc. there is a cost included. If I gave you the same shirt, from the same brand, created by the same people, but gave you two options for price you'd choose the lower one. If I gave you one shirt at a high price and one shirt at a low price you'd need the higher priced shirt to be justifiably more expensive.
The share of household spending on clothing has gone from 10%+ to under 5% in Western countries. When you're spending that much, it's not a surprise that clothing was "BIFL" both in quality and upkeep (repair rather than replace).
The overall revealed consumer preference has been "more and cheaper", not "less and higher quality", which still exists as a niche if you are willing to go down the tailoring route, not off the peg.
The thing is mainly there are no quality options available. It's mostly all cheap shit or slightly more expensive, but still equally shit. So how can this reveal preference if there are no options?
I would argue the surge in vintage clothing ecosystems is an indication there is an unmet demand.
There’s certainly options above temu junk. Maybe it doesn’t meet your bar but I’ve found the 100% cotton stuff from Uniqlo to be massively higher quality than the average. I’ve got tshirts from them I’d guess I’d worn and washed 80+ times.
You can still go to a tailor and commission jackets, trousers and shirts, made with the same quality of fabrics and manufacturing techniques. With shoes, you can still go and buy hand welted shoes.
It all comes at a price but I don't disagree that we have a barbell problem here (ie cheap fast fashion or bespoke, with nothing in the middle).
There absolutely are still rich-people brands that sell absurd quality at absurd price.
See, for example, Marine Layer in San Francisco, or boutiques like Red Ants Pants.
Not just rich people, I pay maybe 3 times more for my T-shirts than the average person. I'm certain they last me at least twice as long, probably 3 times and they're way nicer to wear.
That's not actually "revealed consumer preference" for quantity over quality. It's just that it's impossible for the average consumer to assess quality.
> I wish there was a line of brands and even better shops that focused on quality fabrics and sewing processes for clothing that lasts for ages as it used to.
They still exist, at least here in Europe.
I quit buying cheap clothing a decade ago, getting quality items is much more expensive but at the same time I've had basic t-shirts that I wear most days last me 5-8 years; trousers that are almost 10 years old and the only blemish is a bit of faded colours; underwear lasting 5+ years, etc.
The issue is very few people have the disposable income and are willing to pay 40-80€ on a good quality t-shirt with heavy premium quality cotton (280-300gsm) sewn in Portugal, Spain, or Italy, or 45€ on a 3-pack of underwear made in Scandinavia, or 20-30€ on a pair of great quality woolen socks.
I do it because I have experienced how much longer they can last, and also had the experience of overpaying on what seemed to be a good quality item and didn't last, it's really hard to find a good signal for what's quality since price alone doesn't do it, you need to buy the stuff and hope it will be good quality and if it's not you learn to not buy it again, it can get expensive if you are unlucky or didn't do proper research.
In the end it can be exhausting for a normal person just looking for good quality to find those items, it took me years to settle on the brands I buy from.
> with heavy premium quality cotton
Just to nitpick, I doubt i could wear a heavy premium quality cotton tshirt in the current summers. I can barely stand a flimsy thin cotton tshirt...
I'm willing to pay extra for quality linen for those summers, except everyone lies and their linen can be up to 100% cotton :)
Haha, yeah, completely understandable, I have a few linen pieces (shorts, shirts, a couple of t-shirts) for the occasions I go to a hot place during summers but I live in Scandinavia where summers are, to me, the perfect level of warmth. I generally avoid the peak summer in southern Europe (both due to the heat but also overcrowding), and when I visit my family in Brazil it's also usually off-peak summer.
I really cannot handle very hot weather, it's nice for a day or two but a week of constant 30+C is definitely not my happy place.
I tried that. Turns out that the expensive clothing I found wasn't high quality. I don't know how tell quality from the online description.
That's the trap I described, it's really hard to tell since price is not a good signal.
To me it was trial and error, recommendations, and shopping at physical stores, and like I mentioned as well: it's time-consuming, frustrating, and I wouldn't expect a person not interested in this quest to be able to find good quality items consistently.
Yeah its great when you find quality things but you don't always know, price isn't a great indicator of quality. There is also the buyitforlife subreddit, would like something like it but more structured.
I think this reflects how companies are run in US and Europe, they don't seem to believe how different companies can be here, its not only about turbo maxing the owners profit.
I thought I "knew" this but this T-Shirt video let me down the rabbit hole: https://youtu.be/CMoZjcpgivM
Which means I now feel obligated to recommend:
https://youtube.com/@theironsnail
https://youtube.com/@shiftfashiongroup
Both have great videos on garment quality. But with the inevitable caveat that they are in the business themselves. I take it as an insiders perspective and watch out for content marketing (while being tainted!).
It seems to be easier to find better clothes if you are a bit of a hipster type. Those kind of stores still care for quality. My friend has such a shop and tells me that even for them it gets harder to source good vendors as it is a continuous race to the bottom.
Clothing is also a bit of a special thing. Some people will just get bored or tired of wearing the same trousers or the same old coat every year during 10 years. So it is simply not worth it to spend a mini fortune on a great quality one.
This tends to happen more when one is young. Growing older usually means that a good old dusty 15 years great quality coat is seen as it being perfectly ok. I guess that's also what provides that feeling that some people when they approach middle age they "always look the same"... It's not cheap to have a large and varied wardrobe and at the same time filled with high quality garments.
What i wouldn't give for the same socks to be available for 10 years though.
You can go to a tailor and get custom stuff, if you want to. In fact, thanks to the internet it has never been easier.
There’s some amount of gradient between use-once and fully bespoke clothing, and most people’s economic means are positioned somewhere on that gradient. Indeed it’s a U curve of sorts – cheap clothing can be surprisingly expensive (see also the Vimes Boots Theory).
I never bought Vimes Boots Theory.
Yes, it can be expensive to be poor, but the rich really do consumer more dollars-of-boot per day, because they can afford it.
> There’s some amount of gradient between use-once and fully bespoke clothing [...]
Bespoke clothing mostly fits you better. It doesn't necessarily last longer. (But you can ask for harder wearing material or longer lasting manufacturing techniques, of course.)
The "rich" mapped to our world are the middle class (which only barely exists in Ankh-Morpork, just like it only barely existed historically in the real world). We could define "middle class" as the people who can afford to buy boots that last, but can’t afford to buy boots that don’t have to last. Exactly the bottom of the U curve I mentioned.
This is why wear-once ultra-fast fashion is attractive in the first place: not only is it cheap (in a very short-sighted sense) but it allows the less-than-affluent to signal affluence (by never wearing the same outfit twice – we call this "being fashionable" but of course being fashionable has historically been about signaling wealth first and foremost).
Taking Pratchett at his word, the obvious solution would be to rent good boots to poor people. The bootlord would make good money, and the poor would get access to better boots for cheaper. The troll mafia can threaten to to break some kneecaps to make sure people are properly incentivised to keep up with the rent.
You remind me of what my grandpa always said "we're not rich enough to buy crap, we can only afford quality".
I think the “the rich” in this story is just someone who can afford not garbage boots, and not what we would consider rich today.
It’s also possible the situation has changed enough with modern manufacturing that it’s no longer as relevant.
Quality already is the norm for many products. For example, I own Sennheiser headphones, an iPhone and a MacBook. (Sure maybe not the absolute top of the line, but definitely more expensive than commodity products.)
I find great utility in cheap low cost products for things that I don’t know I’ll use more than once. For example, I’m glad I bought the cheapest roller blades a few years ago because I used them twice. I also buy a lot of cheap toys for my kids, they may use them only a few times and also quantity really has a certain quality (novelty is good for kids).
I find the moralizing and lecturing around quality to be distasteful. These holier than thou types really think they know better than the buyer.
Unfortunately, there is no quality available at this time.
I think about this a lot because I try to never buy anything Chinese or low quality unless I have to.
Unfortunately, from my experience artisans aren't willing to do the work anymore, even if you pay them premium. For instance, a carpenter here in Poland that decided to be a carpenter would rather cut up pre-made cabinets to your specs than make them from scratch using wood, even if I pay them 10x.
Then, people aren't willing to pay premium for stuff. For some reason, they would rather buy 20 products that last year than 1 product that can last 20 or more.
It's a problem for me because I value quality and would be willing to pay premium, but I just can't ever find anything.
There's lots of high quality Chinese stuff, too. Why do you say it as if quality and Chinese don't go together?
It's an old stereotype - between 1990 and 2010 or so, Chinese manufacturing was usually seen as of a lower quality.
This was often unfair and incorrect even then, but it's clearly mad now. Chinese products run the gamut from the lowest to the highest ends in almost every consumer field. But some people hew to old stereotypes.
50 years ago when I was a kid... Japan and Taiwan were known for making cheap junk. They shook the reputation.
Now I feel old - get off my lawn.
I'm honestly happy for Japan, Taiwan, and China. It's great that they make cool stuff.
I just wish we still did too.
I'm not sure where you live, but it is reasonable to bet that "we" still does.
The US manufactures more than it ever did - but the number of people working to manufacture stuff is way down (while population is way up), and so few people have visibility into what is being made. There is a lot of cool stuff made in the US. Whatever country you live in likely has a similar story.
I remember when "Made in Taiwan" was a punchline. Now you buy a fancy motherboard it says "designed in Taipei, Manufactured in China"
When I go to any store, the Chinese version is ALWAYS lower quality. I've yet to see the opposite.
Where are you going to shop? And how do you know something is the 'Chinese version'? It's not like for example Apple advertises where they assemble their products.
For a concrete example, we get very good rice varieties specifically from certain parts of China. (But here in Singapore people also really care about rice. You generally can't buy good and fresh rice in the middle of the Polish countryside for example.) And, yes, for this product the 'Chinese' variety is superior to eg generic Thai rice.
I put 'Chinese' in scare-quotes, because just like you don't just drink 'French wine' when you know what you are doing, you don't just eat 'Chinese' rice.
For a lot of tea drinking paraphernalia, the most top of the line items also come from China. Even if you are into, say, Japanese tea.
I either look at the label or do research beforehand. I buy from all kind of places.
I wasn't thinking of agricultural products, but rather anything manufactured. As an example, appliances made in Germany will have a cord long enough that you can actually plug into the wall, while the one that's made in China will have a useless 10-centimeter cord that would force me to use an extension.
Your mileage might vary, this is just my experience, but it's been pretty consistent for a few decades, with things going downhill in the past I'd say 5 years or so.
We are happy with our Miele appliances (washing machine, dryer, dish washer.) But we also have plenty of Chinese stuff that works well.
I've recently had kids, and I'm actually impressed at how much toys have improved in quality since I was a kid growing up in Germany. And, yes, most of these new toys come from China etc. By and large, they seem to be sturdier and last a lot longer, and are cheaper, too.
I'm especially impressed by the light-up shoes we bought. I guess you can blame that on general improvements in LEDs and battery technology in that specific case, maybe.
For what it's worth, I now live in Singapore, and we are very open on trade, so as a consumer you benefit from especially brutal competition.
Could also be that if you're in Singapore you get better stuff. It's possible that European companies pick crappy, cheaper products that they have a higher margin on to cover importing and transport. I have no idea.
It might be possible, I don't know. Singapore is a fairly small market, so we don't really get any bespoke stuff.
Transport shouldn't really be worse: once you put anything on a container ship, it doesn't really matter much how long the ride is. But imports could be more annoying in other ways.
We do have a lot more people speaking Chinese here (around 3/4 of the population are ethnically Chinese after all) and lots of personal contacts, so we get a lot of people running small import businesses getting in Chinese stuff.
Of course, there's still plenty of low quality stuff you can buy. But I see that as a benefit: it's good to have the choice available, if you want to take it.
Historically, they're lax on regulation. Hence the association with bad quality.
Regulation doesn't have much to do with quality. For example, there's plenty of regulation to make food safe, but almost nothing about making your food high quality in the sense of taste and texture.
You get quality from competition and customers opening their wallets for quality.
Another example: Apple assembles some nice consumer hardware in China. Their quality doesn't depend on regulation.
The regulations often change the economics of production to favour improved quality/attempting to sell upmarket.
Have you ever tried Starbucks coffee? I'm sure they are complying with all relevant regulations.
And also have the proverb, “If you can cheat, then cheat”. I guess it's just part of their culture.
Spoiler alert, almost everything is made in China, including the premium stuff.
I definitely have to do a lot of work every time I need something, but I can often find products that aren't made in China (normally Germany).
If not, I usually just don't buy it new and just go to the thrift store. I can usually find what I need, made 30 years ago that will probably last me for the rest of my life.
Curious where your entirely 100% not-made-in-china computer and/or smartphone come from. Taiwan perhaps?
Not sure, it's a Google Pixel. But a smartphone would probably fall into the "unless I have to" category.
What's your point?
Wow defensive much? I was just curious to see if you’d found a non-Chinese phone and/or computer anywhere. Chill out man.
I don't think we read the same reply you did.
No idea what you're talking about, I just replied to your message normally
Its not the 90s anymore. China can make stuff, and they make most of your stuff.
> Unfortunately, from my experience artisans aren't willing to do the work anymore, even if you pay them premium.
"premium" ? No they've had to lower their prices because otherwise you would never even look at them in the first place (or they don't get a livable amount of work, even if you personally do pay like you say).
And the drop in prices has to come from somewhere. Quality is by far the easiest thing to skimp on.
Easy: Items must work without internet connection so they cannot be updated online.
I would PAY Apple $500 if they'd dedicate a year of development only to fixing known issues. The number of sort-of-well-known bug grows from year to year, and it feels like they only accumulate, never go away. VoiceOver of my (touch-id-only) iPad said "Face not recognized" yesterday, because it failed to read my finger rpint. This is getting comically bad.
Tech workers in the US are probably around 90-99 percentile wage. Take something where the quality is well known and measurable, and can be purchased for extra money. How often do you fly first class, or even pay 10-20% extra to have more legroom, early boarding or a more convenient flight times versus picking the cheapest option that you can make work?
People will demonstrably shop primarily on price no matter what... The producers respond to that.
This is a really good point.
Related, Matt Levine has recently been writing about how the AI labs are paying huge amounts of money to tech/math/AI people but these people don't actually know how to spend it. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-09-10/dal... As opposed to the typical finance worker who knows very well how to spend.
People are buying EVERYTHING indiscriminately, accelerating enshittification. Just make anything, advertise with influencers, meta ads, etc and sell stuff is the mantra. If people learn to value their money, only pay for the best and let the bad products die, things will change.
In a world of shrinkflation and enshittification, I just wanted to give a shout out to Feetures socks[0] which I love. It's a family-owned business and all they make is socks. They're anatomically designed, so if you can't handle sorting L/R these aren't for you. Not only are they a high-quality sock, they have a lifetime guarantee as well.
No affiliation, just a satisfied customer.
[0] https://feetures.com/
There's an interesting paper about expectations of quality:
The LL game: the curious preference for low quality and its norms
https://diegogambetta.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/the_ll_...
This looks quite interesting; thanks for sharing.
A related concept is Jugaad - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad Often interpreted as "good enough" with no connection to Quality at all. Even when the context/environment changes to afford better quality (both manufacturing and cost) quality is never pursued unless mandated by National/ISO standards etc.
One way to maybe understand this is through Robert Axelrod's books; The Evolution of Cooperation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation and The Complexity of Cooperation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Cooperation
But the actors are never fully rational, there is always a clique which manipulates/influences and therefore there is never a "fair" market. Human motivations and behaviour are always the key and so you need Behavioral Game Theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_game_theory (see book of the same name by Colin Camerer)
Finally, Nassim Taleb's ideas are also very relevant here. Markets work on "Trial and Error" and "Chance", there is no "fair/efficient invisible guiding hand" but only a guiding hand by cliques which have no "skin in the game" when it comes to downsides and "asymmetric risk" benefiting corporate capitalism. But the system as a whole functions because it is somewhat "Antifragile" i.e. the chaotic interactions and successes/failures within the system somehow strengthens the whole.
The main problem is that most business are run by people who have no believe at all that you could run a successful company without tricking people into buying your product. That means they don't even try. The rare exception are companies where rhe founder is e.g. a principled engineer, or some German family business that does nothing but ball bearings in the 4th generation and their business model is basically to be the best at ball bearings. Something like that.
But so many publicly traded companies appear to basically have become stock gambling dens that accidentally produce some products on the side out of legacy reasons.
Many are of the kind that use quality only as a marketing statement and when it comes to the engineering choice they will not even shell out 10 cents more for stainless screws to hold the thing together.
The reasons why there is little quality products is because the incentives all point in the other direction for most companies. And where they don't it is usually a special niche product or the intrinsic values of one or a few individuals making the choice to put their ideals above their wallet.
If we want this to change we have to change the incentive structure.
With sufficient competition, the incentives of companies would change if consumers would be willing to rent instead of owning products. Then planned obsolescence is not to their benefit.
I do think our consumer rights in Norway help a bit on this (the article is a page to the consumer agency here). We have 5 years mandated "warranty" on almost all purchases. Which means selling a cheap blender that breaks after two years, you as a shop/producer/importer have to eat the cost to provide a new one if it happens. Which means that the chance of something breaking becomes priced in, so you can't really get away with selling something flimsy a bit cheaper to trick the consumer.
5 years is great, but I'm sure in Norway they advertise "no flip" / "no turn" / "single-sided" mattresses as a feature too ;)
Planned obsolescence is absolutely to the benefit of corporations if those goods are being rented. Non-durable goods are inherently profitable to rent out at above the cost of outright ownership, because then the companies involved can double dip on the consumers paying the costs of producing the good as well as claiming depreciation on the good the company still technically owns. It's a similar concept to why owning durable goods and renting them out to consumers is so viable.
I imagine you're looking at it from the avenue of "if those goods last longer, they can be rented for longer", but having to manage and store more durable goods after consumers have moved on to newer and better things is a considerable cost. A good that has to be returned is often better discarded, from the company's point of view.
Most cars are rented nowadays and they are less durable than ever. It's better for the manufacturer to lease and then get you to upgrade periodically to keep you as a novelty-seeking consumer.
Long warranty is better as there is no other incentive who has to pay if the product breaks down. Cars should have a 7 years warranty by default for instance.
Aren’t newer cars more reliable than older ones? Back in the day it was a feat to get a 200000 km car and these days it’s like not that big a deal.
I wouldn’t really know, I’ve only used car share for the past 10 years shrug
We have reached a point where it's possible to make a car that lasts 200,000 km reliably, but the economic incentives are to make a car that people want to upgrade every few years. The ability and incentives are hugely misaligned.
My goto example for this is Hilti powertools. They can (and have) made some of the best tools in the game, but they now make most of their money from companies going the "fleet" option, where, for a monthly fee, tools can be replaced almost immediately when they fail. The result of this is tools that work brilliantly for a short time but are non-field-repairable, and aren't really designed to last any more.
Economic incentives beat engineering ability.
Cars and motorcycles have massively increased in quality compared to before. You can't fix them yourself as easily as before, but also you won't have to.
And this fact nukes most of the arguments made in this thread and in the article. Vehicles have become better because everybody who is going to buy a new or used vehicle will do very diligent research among their contacts to know which brands and models are reliable and which aren't. It's the free market and care of reputation in action.
well, if you religiously maintain the car, it was easy even back then. The dirty secret is keeping rust out of the car - in the winter, regularly wash it to avoid salt ingress, and generally store it in a dry (both physical and humidity) garage, to routinely change engine and transmission fluids and to only run good quality fuel.
Oh, and don't subject your car to constant short start-stop cycles (i.e. drives of less than half an hour), warm up the car prior flooring the gas pedal on a highway, and for turbocharged cars, take it easy on the last 5 minutes so the hot side of the turbo can cool down.
Ignoring any of that can kill modern cars just as fast as it could kill old cars. Even electrical cars need their love - don't always go for the HVDC charger, use trickle AC chargers instead whenever you can, and look what needs lubrication and maintain that (e.g. transmissions).
> Oh, and don't subject your car to constant short start-stop cycles (i.e. drives of less than half an hour)
So if my commute is only 20 minutes I shouldn’t own a car? :)
At the very least, halve all service intervals, especially for engine and transmission oil. Go for an oil designed for heavy start-stop load, usually on the 5W or even 0W side, but be cautious, it must carry the manufacturer permit as well.
Also add fuel additives designed to clean up injectors every few months on a fresh full tank of the highest quality fuel you can get.
If it's a diesel, regularly go for a highway ride at sustained high speed and load for at least an hour or two to cause the DPF to enter soot burnoff mode.
Depending on that being legal where you live, code out the stop-and-go functionality as well. Yes, it saves fuel especially in typical commuter cars, but it seriously impacts engine life as well.
And for the love of god be proactive in driving if you can. If you know your traffic lights, let go of the brake five seconds before you get green, if you can estimate when your red phase is over. That way your engine can start and have a few seconds to build oil pressure before you command load from it. The way most people go - go off the brakes when they get green and then kick the gas pedal - is extremely damaging.
A final note for commuters: if you must go with an ICE powered commuter vehicle - use a small engine. A 60 HP engine is more than enough, and it will warm up and get to optimal temperature much faster and stay in that temperature range for much longer. A 300 HP engine? That thing is built to endure much, much more load - it won't get properly warmed up even on a longer commute, much less on a short commute.
Why would planned obsolescence not be to their benefit in a world where things are rented?
You still renting the old Xbox? Try renting this new Xbox instead, the verification cans come in additional flavors!
That would apply more to things like a washing machine or microwave - things that don't become obsolete quickly.
...some kind of subscription as a service model? looks up dramatically
Ikea compressed wood dresser = $125. Proper oak dresser = $5000 . What consumer is capable and willing to make that trade off.
Much of that cost is because we nuked the American timber industry ?
Appealing to the fabricators (or even consumers) who are 4-8 degrees downstream of this policy will get you nowhere.
There might not be any trade-off in your example. You're assuming that a solid wood piece of furniture is superior to the flatpack alternative and you can't really say that without knowing what the consumer needs.
I have a little Ikea Lack table that holds my printer. I paid less than $10 for the table and I don't even think it's wood (cardboard maybe?). It's getting close to 20 years old and is in great shape.
"there's no aesthetic difference between this beautiful portrait and the contemporary pile of trash in the corner"
Not sure who you are quoting...
Of course there's an aesthetic difference.
That’s one of the tradeoffs. And an undervalued one.
Absolutely. And it’s a trade off that doesn’t necessarily go against Ikea. Frankly, I think it’s one of the top reasons people choose Ikea furniture.
One of the genius things Ikea did was have little staged rooms in their store. They do a great job of these and lots of them look like rooms I’d want to spend time in. You see how that various pieces can be combined into something very inviting.
Was there a time when an oak dresser was much cheaper in inflation adjusted dollars?
Furniture that lasts forever is an anti-feature for some. They want to change their furnishings about as often as cheap furniture lasts anyway. I mostly buy quality furniture, but sometimes I don't know what I really want and Ikea and Wayfair are great for that. Cheap enough to donate after I decide what quality piece I really want.
yes.
And you're reversing cause and effect. Do the consumers prefer a disposable lifestyle or is that a cope?
Was quality ever the norm? IIRC Enshittification predates AI/LLMS by a few years.
It would be nice if quality became a standard, but the problem is that the world has become too complex. On top of that, I think the disappearance of friction is a big part of it.
In the past, if a garment factory was located in a certain country and the quality was poor, it was often directly tied to that country's reputation. But as the world began to lose friction and entered the era of globalization, much of the work was passed down to subcontractors, and the big problem is that consumer complaints don't get passed down to the subcontractors either.
And within this structure, multiple subcontractors can't survive; as subcontractors grow, they begin to centralize into one. In such a structure, it's not that the original contractor controls the brand quality of the subcontractor. Rather, the subcontractor that has grown huge begins to control the quality ceiling of the entire market.
On top of that, for a company to sustain continuous growth, a given product must not last too long, right? Because a product that can be used for 20 or 30 years means people won't have to buy that product line again.
Meditations on Moloch[0] explains why this is impossible at scale--too many defectors, asymmetric information, and no way to police defection.
[0] https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
The way I see it we all have 30-60 modern slaves working for each one of us. More or less depending on the country and personal consumption.
So I don’t have such determination in complaining about the quality of the goods that I participated in exploited labour of.
It’s all working somehow more or less. Seems like it could stop any moment. The continuous decrease in quality is rather the least of my worries.
What worries me is the fragile state of global affairs and heavy fog of war obscuring the future.
I am AI accelerationist after all not because I believe in utopias but because of how dire the situation is. AGI/ASI might buy us couple of decades or more. The risk/reward calculation heavily favours pedal to the metal.
So no, T-shirt quality is not my primary concern.
People in poor countries have gotten massively richer over the last few decades. Especially those that participate in global trade, ie those that you could even call 'your slaves'. After all, some poor soul in North Korea who doesn't trade with you can hardly slave away to your benefit.
More specifically, people in PR China have gotten massively richer since the late 1970s. How does that square with your slavery thesis?
I might also add that if anything, goods from China have become better value for money since then. Even as their people have moved further and further away from slave status.
No. China is a colonial structure of extreme 1-tier cities, 2-tier cities, and the lower cities beneath them. It's called hukou... That's also why ordinary Chinese young people don't want to go down to the provinces.
People in China's first-tier cities live well and are more up to date than almost anywhere, but in the lower cities, they are not free. I usually think that popular literature reflects a country's social conditions, and even in China's xianxia, there are ranks, and people act according to those ranks. To say that all of China has become wealthy would be an overstatement, given that there are many problems starting with the migrant worker issue. Of course, China is a great power, and the wealthy programmers in first-tier cities are extraordinarily talented.
> That's also why ordinary Chinese young people don't want to go down to the provinces.
Recently you're even starting to hear stories I thought ended with the Soviet Union. People who are literally terrified of getting on a train out of the city because they think they might never be allowed to come back.
We're all navigating through hard times.
The world economy has never done better in absolute terms. I'm not sure where all those hard times are that I keep hearing about year after year, virtually independent of how well the economies are actually doing.
It's a K-shaped economy, after all. From the way you talk, you seem to be upper class. Usually Singapore is centered on elite schools and technology for certain families, and just from the fact that you can go into the English-speaking and IT industries, it seems to me—based on this conversation—that you're basically upper class. You're probably connected to Lee Kuan Yew's family. Singapore itself is a standard English-speaking country, and there are many Chinese Singaporeans, but even so, considering the basic amount of education needed to learn IT skills in Asia, you're probably upper class.
Then it makes sense that you wouldn't feel it. In fact, because it's a K-shaped economy, the bosses and businesspeople I meet think the business climate is good. But separately from that, for ordinary people who are the actual consumers, it's hard to make a living.
Such is the nature of being part of a global supply chain, whilst living in one of the richest countries in the world.
Then why this supply chain hangs by a thread and progressively produces shittier and shittier results?
Because everyone at every step of the chain is primarily incentivised by money.
That is the opposite of resilience.
Thank god for the little norwegians living in their utopian bubble
Careful, this is going to hurt a lot of feelings.