Let's make quality the norm again(forbrukerradet.no) |
Let's make quality the norm again(forbrukerradet.no) |
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.
The LL game: the curious preference for low quality and its norms
https://diegogambetta.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/the_ll_...
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.
No affiliation, just a satisfied customer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And you're reversing cause and effect. Do the consumers prefer a disposable lifestyle or is that a cope?
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.
[0] https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn’t really know, I’ve only used car share for the past 10 years shrug
You still renting the old Xbox? Try renting this new Xbox instead, the verification cans come in additional flavors!
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.
Of course there's an aesthetic difference.
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.
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.
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).
So if my commute is only 20 minutes I shouldn’t own a car? :)
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.
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.
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.
200 years ago, you could buy a table from that guy or the other guy or make one. Today there are endless choices (including local craftspeople and DIY) and sometimes the right choice is a $10 table made from cardboard and glue.
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.
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.
The same forces that we can see as plain as day in U.S. healthcare are affecting... everything.
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
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.
It's not a terrible philosophy as many people don't care what their desk is made of, and the cheaper materials are actually better in some aspects (MDF doesn't warp as it dries..) but some people do and it's resulted in inflation being massively undercounted, possibly by a factor of 10.
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.
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.
You're involved in taking a quality product off the market by collaborative enshittification together with your so-called competitors: the quality product your company used to make will no longer be available to consumers, and shareholders will hold shares in whatever will be left of it, which is bound to be worth less than the quality product it once was. This has nothing to do with growth. This paradigm of constitutes a lose-lose situation, where only you (the one moving on to another role, leaving consequences as something your successor will have to deal with) will experience a temporary 'profit', until you are actually in need of the very product you used to be able to manufacture.
Deliberate destruction of valuable resources, products or services does not equal growth.
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.
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.
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.
Problem is gaming is now relatively mature and competing with other media for attention and so you either need to cut production cost or raise prices.
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.
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
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.
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.
No, I am not at all overweight. Carhartt just makes more durable pants, and I hate shopping.
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.
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.
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 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.
can't trust reviews because theyre spammed with fakes. can't trust brands because private equity buy them out and enshittify.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
The non-standard browser runtime was a massive pain for anyone working in tech, but when it came to the implementation quality of that non-standard browser runtime, IE6 wasn't all that bad for the user.
It was insecure as hell, of course, but so were all browsers at the time. Focusing on quality was a bit easier when complex security considerations weren't really necessary.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...
"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 do however agree that making the cheapest/best solutions also be good for the environment would be ideal.
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.
I wouldn’t say that’s low quality though, just something with a lot more care put into it.
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.
* 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Quality was what you judged products on and the origin of brands.
The overwhelming majority of brands today are meaningless because they have nothing to do with quality. They are either status markers or tools for exploiting our tendency to form habits.
You need go no longer than your local hardware store. Almost all the consumer grade electrical tool brands today are from perhaps 2 manufacturers. But you are likely to have a preference that you tell yourself is grounded in a rational, informed choice. Except, it mostly isn't. You probably buy the same toothpaste every time. Not because you have done an exhaustive study of toothpaste and concluded it is the best one for you. But because it is what you are used to buying.
(Yes, there are still some professional tool brands that make their own electric tools, but the kind of stores consumers shop in don't have those since they cost an arm and a leg)
Yes, quality used to matter. A lot. But most people alive today have not lived in those times. People have a hard time imagining things that are outside their own experience. So much so that they can even conclude "it can't be if I haven't experienced it".
No adverts on Netflix, bbc, Disney, YouTube, paramount, Spotify. I cancelled Amazon because they added adverts.
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.
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.
But I think your point is the vast majority, and that point probably stands, and indeed is a huge problem.
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}?"
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)
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.
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.
Yes, let's blame the working class for spending money on Chinese goods after their jobs were offshored and their spending power was decreased.
Because paying a penny won't prevent ads or tracking.
Example: YouTube Premium.
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
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.
So the seller committed a fraud. Did you get your money back?
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.
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.
No, that's not easy to reason. People are buying because of the quality and selling them anything less is malice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 do agree that third party certification is one possible avenue.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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
> 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.
Why would you assume that to be true? It's definitely not true for me.
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.
I would argue the surge in vintage clothing ecosystems is an indication there is an unmet demand.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
What's your point?
"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.
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.
The business that had those problems didn't become Apple.
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.
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.
A niche use case, but at least there was one source of information.
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.
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.
Granted they're the ones creators put in their own videos, which is kind of a technicality. Premium does block the overt ads that YouTube itself pushes. (There's no telling if it blocks submarine ads that are videos) However, it was promised to block all ads, and that's what the lawsuit is about.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
Apple/MS/Google would have to keep their products working for 10 years.
For example, NYC now requires all sold e bikes to be UL certified because of too many apartment lithium battery fires.
Boeing 737 MAX tragedy did happen because of self-certification abuse, still I would not call FAA certification worthless.
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.
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.
Personally I value the time saved far more than the 2% of my income I spend on streaming subscriptions.
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.
Or you could expand to other markets, lots of options that don't require making your products worse.
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).
See, for example, Marine Layer in San Francisco, or boutiques like Red Ants Pants.
Couldn't remember the word tailor, and seamstress felt very outdated and weird, hence the explanation.
That’s the problem, I want something in-between.
Now I feel old - get off my lawn.
I just wish we still did too.
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 thought they already did. That's certainly my impression of them.
Australia gives the store primary responsibility and it seems to work well for them.
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.)
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).
It’s also possible the situation has changed enough with modern manufacturing that it’s no longer as relevant.
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 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.
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.
LL Bean jeans are pretty decent and consistent.
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.
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.)
I don't think anyone is required to insure a table or a wardrobe for decades, even in France?
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.
That is where chatGPT is for me these days on the kinds of tasks I throw at it, and for the seriousness of HN comment threads.
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.
Instead all I seem to do is replay Donkey Kong Country 2 and Streets of Rage 2.
AI to the rescue!
Digital distribution already pretty much killed the second hand market.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And yet countless millions of people basically say nothing about how the food they eat is produced.
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/brands/henckels-internatio...
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/zwilling
The first one is on their watchlist and probably the brand you're thinking of?
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.
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.
This could be solved via regulation (unlikely to happen in the US).
Another solution would be independent testing labs / publications. To stay independent, they can't finance themselves using ads. Would people be ok to pay for information, on the internet? For $1000 lawn mower maybe, what about for a $50 kitchen appliance?
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.
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.”
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.
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.
And I'm not talking about offering extended warranty programs or such here. Just the basic warranty everyone gets when they buy the product.
So, the company kinda honored the contract.
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.
Apparently they set up an organization to help other people do this: https://100forpurpose.org/
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.
Even back then, long before the word "enshittification" was coined, it made me squirm.
It did make a bit more sense back then. In the early 20th century there was a lot of utterly massive overproduction that greatly increased the price of some good for everyone while not giving improved service. I recall a house a relative had, which has about an 18"x18"x12" cast iron grating to distribute forced air between two floors. Unbelievably overproduced for the purpose. In the 1990s quality was still decent, and overproduced in some areas. But the trend was clear, and yea verily these 30 years later, it most certainly continued.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.)
---
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.
'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.
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.
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 have a pair of cheap Chinese earbuds that way outlasted all of the expensive ones I ever bought.
The theory might've used to be true when prices were related to costs. In current year they'll sell you the $10 slop for $50, and sell you the exact same $10 slop for $300. Someone else will sell you the $200 amazing product for $300, but they won't sell the $200 amazing product for $50. Paying a lot of money is (usually) necessary, but not sufficient, for getting a quality product.
I do like the suggestion of building a charity that spins off nonprofit companies.
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".
Also...
> But boy was I disappointed that their "Zwilling Peak" branded ceramic hybrid frying pan for $100 says "Made in China"
But does it work? My twenty year old B&W speakers were built in China but they do the job and do it really well.
Not just the willingness but the ability to live without if the salesman doesn't cave in. If you need the car (or other goods) now you might not have that luxury.
> If you need the car now
If you put yourself in a bad negotiating position, that's on you.
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.)
Oddly enough, none of my bookcases in my new house are Billy ones though. Yes, I still have loads of physical books. I found a Chinese brand of all-metal bookcases that are lighter weight than Hon or Steelcase but hold a lot more weight than Ikea bookcases of similar price. They don't suffer from the famous bowed shelf problem most MDF shelves get. They're also packed flat. They even disassemble and reassemble neatly for moving or storage. It's Oseillc, which is a brand of Outstar Office Solutions, Ltd. They also make a little institutional, industrial, shop, and retail furniture under the parent company's own brand.
I have some older Billy shelves that have been very solid, even when overloaded with books (I too have a lot of physical books, a lot of them older and not available as anything except physical, quite a few even predating the ISBN system).
I do not think that is true for stuff being bought directly in a physical store. The policy is for online purchases.
I have some of their more expensive solid wood furniture and it is really quite nice. I have some of their particle board college student grade stuff and it is pretty lightly built, but an incredible value when compared to other vendors at the same price point.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/how-mckins...
History shows profit maximizing behavior in letters dating to 1900 BCE Egypt and 1800 BCE Anatolia by Assyrian merchant houses.
I appreciate the analysis you're making, again, but it is low resolution. There's a lot more nuance to what you're saying and it definitely doesn't come down to MBA graduates in the past few decades.
The consultancy-private equity complex for example is a big part of the shift in American culture after "Greed is Good" was said out loud in the 1980s. Why this cultural shift happened? "Because MBAs" is not as much of an answer as it is bar talk simplistic hand waving to end a conversation and change subject.
The Chicago school hadn't yet convinced everyone that fiduciary responsibility to shareholders was the prime concern of the C-suite and the board either. Those were economists, not MBAs. Deregulating the market also played a part.
Leveraged buyouts used to boom when another industry went bust. Companies would save some assets of a company that might otherwise be liquidated altogether, and sometimes rebuilt the company into a healthy one. Think junk bonds, the S&L crisis, the dotcom bust, and such. PE also used to take over lots of family-run businesses with succession issues so the companies could continue.
With relaxation of laws and regulations and more examples set by financiers, more of the acquisitions landscape shifted toward the corporate raider type of LBO.
Besides the circularity in saying that a cultural shift happened because something changed, Investment Banking is a thing since at least 1932 when the Glass-Steagall act was passed to enforce separation of concerns between "commercial banks" and "investment banks".
Venture capital dates from at least the 1950s:
The Venture Capital Revolution https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.15.2.145
"The first true venture capital firm was American Research and Development (ARD), established in 1946 by MIT President Karl Compton, General Georges F. Doriot"
As for Leveraged Buyouts, I highly recommend this analysis of 2000 cases done in 1993 which is far from any categorical conclusions on LBOs being a straightforward phenomenon that can be explained away in four sentences.
The Determinants of Leveraged Buyout Activity: Free Cash Flow vs. Financial Distress Costs https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1993.tb05138.x
It explicitly asks:
1. Do LBOs create wealth, or do they merely redistribute wealth?
2. Does the debt taken on in LBOs cause problems in periods of economic distress?
My point being essentially: don't hand wave historical analysis away. Get into it, read the papers, and the primary sources. History is fascinating and full of interesting questions about why things have come to be how they are in society. Whenever I feel intrigued by some historical question, and I decide to question the facile explanations that come to mind, I am endlessly fascinated by how complex and nuanced things are, and by how much analysis has been published starting out with the same questions as I asked myself.
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.
I admittedly travel less than I used to but I bought my basic carry-on for about $110 more than 20 years ago. Close enough to "buy it for life" for me. It's not much worse for the wear, I fully expect to have it for 20 more years.
At the very least my expectation was that by paying this much i'd finally be end of the company BS. For example with almost all Apple products they have been BS free in the sense that they are made to consistent quality standards, returns, and service cannot be any more straightforward, the product portfolio is super clear, you can easily buy from them at the same price they sell elsewhere (within reason) and not various reseller or third parties that might play tricks and even if you do Apple handles service and warranty. And so after a lifetime of buying PC/Android after experiencing this BS free life I conditioned myself to accept the added cost of Apple and reduce spending elsewhere.
The tactics I described earlier are indicative of a unserious company playing games. Stuff I expect from bottom of the barrel junk.
In regards to sales, I've looked at the price history of this product. (Here: https://i.imgur.com/BQOcRLk.png) The price you indicated last occurred in the middle of the pandemic which for obvious reasons seems like an outlier. To be fair I bought during the height of the return to travel period but even now post all this inflation the price is a solid 390$-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?
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.
If they added chicken to the food and it didn’t have it before, more dogs with digestion problems is what you’d get for sure.
At a certain point you're just asking the consumer "how much are you wiling to suffer before you go without? Let's find out."
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.
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.
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.
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.
The same company also makes cabinets and enclosed cases. They are available via a handful of retailers in the US. The big one is Amazon. I would have guessed they sell and ship worldwide since they're on Amazon. It appears I would have been wrong. I can't find the brand on the sites for Sweden, UK, or Germany. If I set my delivery to Sweden, I can't even find them on the US site by searching but can still see their store page. They don't seem to be on AliExpress either.
Here's their store on Amazon US.: https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/E14E7D47-A6A4-44AD-95CB-6...
It seems on AliBaba proper the parent company does ship to Sweden under its own name. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Office-Furniture-Vert...
I can't vouch for this one, but it looks interesting. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005012805578614.html?spm=a2...
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.
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.
The cumulative level of the "hedonic adjustments" they keep stuffing in, ostensibly to adjust for the natural improvement of things but in practice over the sum of them to allow them to keep stepping down the quality of the basket of goods under the cover of "oh, we're just trying to maintain it" is pretty substantial. They've hidden a lot of things in the electronics. Other things aren't doing the exponential advance thing the electronics did for so long.
If you spend $700 to $1,000 on a carry-on suitcase, will it be good? Damn well better be. Can you get one that will last a long time for around one third that price, or even less? Yes, you can.
Also, $110 20 years ago is ~$200 in today's money (even more if it was 'more than').
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".
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Expect a lower end sofa from these companies to be $3,000 on sale, and a really nice one to be $10k+. Quality furniture is typically made to order since people paying that much are going to want to choose a finish and fabrics. I don't know if that means custom made by your definition, but that is how furniture has always been sold.
There are still plenty of brands in almost any product category that maintain consistent quality. They are not household names in many cases, but they certainly exist.
Exactly!!! It used to NOT be like that!!!
I think that what IS true is that there is a lot more to choose from on the low end. There are effectively infinite low end options via china/amazon, but if you want high quality stuff you have to seek it out.
Fords, on the other hand, have an even, predictable quality. The same with my 72 Dodge. The windows still crank up and down nicely!
I don't know if I'd say they have an even, predictable quality, but on an actuarial basis, Detroit certainly makes for easier claim severity modeling than anything out of Ingolstadt, Muenchen, Stuttgart, or Wolfsburg.
That said, I don't really understand how quality maps to cars beyond what my comprehension of Japanese has allowed me to read about how Toyota's industrial engineering contrasts against Ford's. My first may have been a 1971 Opel GT that I salvaged by bringing home in parts on a bicycle-drawn trailer as a teenager, but I only ever wrenched on it. I never drove it.
