I think mass production really screws with it. Vimes was writing from the perspective of a pre-industrial society. Everything is handmade, and something cheap h

I think mass production really screws with it. Vimes was writing from the perspective of a pre-industrial society. Everything is handmade, and something cheap has to have less effort put into it. With mass production in factories, so much of the effort is front-loaded in R&D and production equipment which gets shared among all the output. Those cheap Walmart boots have far more effort put into them than your custom ones. The only reason they’re worse is because a lot of that effort was put into making them cheap rather than making them good. But it’s a conscious tradeoff and nothing forces it to be anything like proportional. Quality largely depends on those front-loaded costs which require a lot of customers to justify. The best products will necessarily be ones that are fairly popular, although not necessarily the most populr. This is most visible in electronics. You can pay for quality up to a point, but there’s a low ceiling. Pick the best cell phone you can buy for under, say, $2,000. How much would it cost to buy something even better? You might be able to do it for less than a billion dollars, but I kind of doubt it. The idea still applies, but a lot of it comes down to buying in bulk. A person who can afford to buy a year’s supply of toilet paper will save money. And yes, the ceiling on that is still not particularly high.