Both of these are examples of a bad signal to noise filter. People think they know what they want, but they don't. Compound this with the fact that nobody trus

Both of these are examples of a bad signal to noise filter. People think they know what they want, but they don't. Compound this with the fact that nobody trusts salespeople (with good reason; they very often aren't trustworthy). "Car salesman" is sometimes used as an epithet. The main difference is that people like to pretend they are clueful about cars--partly for status purposes, as someone else noted--and go for the advanced features. Whereas not too many people know or care about the composition of a tennis racket. What particularly bothers me is the lack of attention paid to durability. This is the primary reason why things "ain't made like they used to be". Following the original article, using shoes as an example, there are really only two large makers of durable dress shoes left in the US, and only one of them makes shoes that aren't ugly (Alden).