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Why There Are More Consumer Goods Than Ever
- Animats 11y agoThen there's Trader Joe's, with a limited selection of reasonably good items at reasonably good prices to make reasonably good profits.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- LesZedCB 11y agoIn a related fact, consumer debt normalized to household income has also increased massively[0]. [0] http://www.money-zine.com/financial-planning/debt-consolidation/consumer-debt-statistics/ http://www.money-zine.com/financial-planning/debt-consolidat...
- JacksonGariety 11y agoHow do I read this article?
- flurpitude 11y agoPay money to the Wall Street Journal.
- cjlars 11y agoGoogle the headline and access it through the search results.
- pravda 11y agoGoogle the title, then right-click WSJ result and open in incognito window. That's what I do.
- aidenn0 11y agoAlso to save you from having to google the title, you can click the "web" link below the headline if you are viewing the comments.
- gashad 11y agoClick "Web" below the article title on HackerNews. Then click the first result in the Google search.
- marcosscriven 11y agoI have this bookmarklet for such articles: javascript:window.location=https://www.google.com/search?q=window.location https://www.google.com/search?q=window.location
- wodenokoto 11y agoAre there any reasons why we shouldn't expect there to be more consumer goods than ever?
- wutbrodo 11y agoYea seriously. "Because the economy is bigger than ever"
- stephengillie 11y agoSince durable goods[0], by definition, last a multiple of the time it takes to create them, we would have more simply by making more at a set rate over a period of time. As our population grows, if the same percentage of our labor force goes into making durable goods, the quantity of durable goods created would also increase over time. In short, I agree completely. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durable_goods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durable_goods
- esharef 11y agoYes, but there are fewer merchants than over. 50% of e-commerce goes through 12 merchants. Consolidation is insane in digital commerce. So yes, we can buy many more products but through fewer and fewer merchants giving them huge power. Amaozn alone accounts for 30% of e-commerce
- jbob2000 11y agoI am ok with this, as a consumer and user of these sites. You know how annoying it would be to have different logins for every dinky little product I want to buy?
- cm2012 11y agoKeep in mind that well over 50% of amazon merchandise sales are from 3rd party sellers - basically small businesses. A bunch of other big players have significant 3rd party marketplace models - eBay, Newegg, and more.
- digi_owl 11y agoSadly this means that there is a very big caveat emptor factor involved. Ebay at least is up front about it, as it is basically an auction house for anyone. But Amazon and Newegg is in a sense lending credibility to any fly by night reseller from who knows where. When you buy from a big name store front you expect someone working at their supply end has assessed the product as worth the risk of stocking. But with the likes of Amazon, seemingly anyone can start offering products through them. Consider for example a recent story here on HN about a USB charger that had a damaged transformer. It was giving out straight 240V (European model) to the USB end.
- cm2012 11y agoGenerally reviews are meant to solve this problem - both internal amazon metrics (which vendors are punished for severely if they are bad) and external customer metrics.
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- thedevil 11y agoIs anyone else amazed at the absolutely magical era of time in which we live? I don't know which is more awesome: 1) I can find a product that fits my need more exactly than I could ever have expected ten years ago, 2) that I can get information, recommendations and reviews in order to buy these things with confidence, or 3) that something even more awesome will come out a couple years later. It gets even better because I can take part in all this: I can make an app that fills a specific need (literally, I made an app to calm a crying baby) and without advertising at all, I can ship it to tens of thousands of people around the world just by reviews and word of mouth. I get so excited just thinking about this stuff and how much greater the future will get, and at an accelerating pace!
- mattmanser 11y agoIs it? The razor I bought can't cut hair, the laptop I got has a stupidly nosiy fan, the phone I bought has a rapidly diminishing battery life, the headset I bought makes a constant hiss, my OS and TV now spy on me. Do I even own my steam games? I have to rent my music and TV to get it at a reasonable price, but songs and shows disappear without explanation or warning. It seems to me things are worse than they used to be, it's harder than ever to find quality products, even meticulously researching everything. And that's before we even get onto forced obselence. Maybe I'm becoming a grump as I grow older but electronics brands you used to be able to trust are no longer sure bets and everything seems to have a nasty gotcha spyware or horrid EULA. Edit: although I do admit there's a lot of magical things, I love my Kindle, I love how my phone synchs with my Kindle when I'm in random queue, I love being able to get + give directions from my phone in random places. I just feel overall quality of goods has gone down as they become (worringly for the environment) disposible and consumers are losing control as their stuff is no longer theirs.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoMaybe a case of increasing expectation. Owning your own movie or game was never all that cool - what with losing them, or scratching the CD, or the platform changing so they didn't run any more. Steam beats all that, at a cost of course. The chaotic state of shows and songs is another story. My outlet (e.g. Netflix) has shifting contracts and terms that are opaque to me. So I miss out by procrastinating. Still its better than broadcast TV ever was! That was somebody else deciding every night what I would watch. I'm an old grump too. But really, I should just have more patience when my phone won't connect. Its going to space after all!
- grillvogel 11y agoother fun facts: modern advertising exists because factories were churning out so many products that they needed to figure out how to sell them all. advertising was created to recruit consumers to buy all this shit.
- stephengillie 11y agoHenry Ford doubled his workers' wages so they could afford to buy it all, too. Or at least the ones they made.
- askyourmother 11y agoAt first I think "wow, what a price for those jeans!" Then I watch the documentary 'China blue', and then I think "wow, what a price for those jeans".
- shogun21 11y agoWith the paradox of choice, this many products often make us less satisfied and more unhappy. https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_c...
- wallacoloo 11y agoI have major objections to this talk. The speaker claims that choice itself is the issue. I disagree - choice is not the issue. The issue is an inability to make decisions when presented with hundreds of possibilities & to not be upset over poor outcomes that our choices create, and our ability to make these choices is a recent phenomenon that has finally caused this issue to surface. Consider his point on salad dressing (paraphrased): > If you buy one of the 100 available salad dressings & you don't like it, > it's easy to imagine what things would have been like if you had chosen a > better one & suddenly you're disappointed. Well sure, I'll be disappointed. But then I'll just try a different one next time and repeat until I find some dressings that I do like, and now I'm happy. If there wasn't choice here, I would be perpetually unsatisfied. Regarding paralysis when confronted with too many choices, I think this is just a temporary artifact as we're making the transition to having more options. The first few times I went shopping for shoes at a shoe store, I tried on tens of pairs and debated the pros and cons of various shoes for over an hour under the assumption that of all the shoes in the store, only one would be the best one for me. Now I know that this isn't the case. There are several shoes that I'll be completely satisfied with, and now there are enough of them that the store has specific sections where probably a good 20% of them will meet all the requirements I have. So I find the first one that meets all my goals, and then I buy it. The process takes < 10 minutes. This is actually less time than it previously would have taken, as the candidate shoes would previously have been spread over different sections and not one of them would match all my requirements, leading me to have to make a conscious decision on what to sacrifice. And now that my decision carries more weight, I would spend more time deliberating and hence the trip to the shoe store would take longer & I'd be disappointed at the time I lost. No, the author cherry-picks his points & confuses his own limitations as being indicative of a problem with the existence of choice rather than a personal limitation because - guess what? - he doesn't want to blame himself for his own lack of satisfaction.
- mrfusion 11y agoI feel like quality has plummeted. The last 4 toy boats I've bought have top sized or sunk. How hard is it to test a toy boat in water before you mass produce? I think we're relearning how to produce and market quality goods now that all manufacturing has moved to China. Lately I've been preferring to buy from target or Walmart over Amazon since I know they have a purchasing team that vets products before allowing them on their shelves. (Not always though). But they should do more of this since it would be a great differentiator for brick and mortar retailers.
- jkraker 11y agoI agree, and I've observed this on multiple products. The most recent was a hair trimmer that I replaced with the same brand and model. It's unfortunate how there's an ever quickening velocity of consumption. Not sure who exactly is to blame, but I think both consumers and companies play their part.
- guelo 11y agoTLDR: because of Facebook ad microtargeting.
- freddref 11y agoIf the price goes to near-negligible, and people (eventually) reach some saturation level for the amount of easily replaceable stuff they have access to, what will a feeling of infinite supply do to consumer demand? Surely you can only need or use a certain amount of stuff. And what will this do to the value of money if having more money doesn't change your life much. Is money becoming worthless?