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The problem is that 'buying quality' is very hard to prove. For important purchases, like a car, there may exist guides that give you good record of past perfo
by pierrebai 11y ago
The problem is that 'buying quality' is very hard to prove.
For important purchases, like a car, there may exist guides that give you good record of past performances, but for most thing, its mostly hearsay. "Oh, I've been buying from X for years and they never break."
The race to the bottom has the property that paying less is an easily provable fact. You can measure it. Quality is too hard to measure.
There is also the possibility, for some classes of goods, to purchase the cheap ones and fix the bad bits. Like purchasing a cheap laptop and replacing the HD with a SSD.
- Silhouette 11y agoAll true, but I'm still going to buy my expensive kitchen equipment or my new computer or my new car from a brand with a track record of consistently good reviews and reliable customer service. In the age of the Internet and modern consumer advocacy groups, it's not hard to know who those are. Of course, any business can have an anomalous bad product from time to time. But even if you're the unlucky one, I reckon you're probably still better off with a business that values its customers and its brand anyway. At least you're likely to get some genuine efforts made to put things right, maybe even a free upgrade to a better product from the range if there really was a design flaw in a new model or some similar hard-to-fix issue.
- lotsofcows 11y agowhich.co.uk has guides for virtually everything. A UK publication but there must be similar elsewhere. And brands are usually fairly easy to match across countries.