14 ms·

This is a bit flame bait-y but I really feel like America is getting a super Galapagos effect compared to the rest of the world. Everything is super different a

by rtpg 7y ago

This is a bit flame bait-y but I really feel like America is getting a super Galapagos effect compared to the rest of the world. Everything is super different and weird and kinda bad, and nobody seems to notice. I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes. The doors are all terrible. The plumbing is crap. The furniture just feels bad. The cheapest studio apartment in Western Europe or Japan ends up with better infrastructure than the $2M duplex in California Then you get to grocery stores, and you have to go to the “fancy places” to even get the baseline of quality you see in the rest of the developed world. All the chocolate is bad. My dad has a really expensive american-made fridge. It sucks. The UX is awful and it basically just looks shiny. Maybe this is the result of 30 years of wage stagnation. I like to think it’s the result of people not really traveling abroad (reasonable! It’s expensive and far away). People don’t get that so many other places are just nicer and have higher quality things for cheaper. There’s some quote about how somebody was super poor when growing up but was fine about it because they didn’t realize it. I think about that all the time when looking at some stuff in the US.

starpilot 7y ago
I could cherry pick examples from around the country to show exactly the opposite. There's a great Quora answer on this phenomenon, "Why do so many Europeans look down on 'American Cheese'?": https://qr.ae/TWJAc9 https://qr.ae/TWJAc9
- mrtksn 7y ago
  I was expecting to read a great Quora article but the author compared American speciality cheese to European supermarket fast serving cheese to prove that not everything made in Europe is superior. What's next? Comparing an American ivy league university building to a newly built apartment somewhere in Brussels and prove that not everything is older in Europe? Of course every place has all kind of extremes. I look down on West European cheese too because they don't have proper white cheese that is available in the Balkans and Turkey and when abroad I have to rely on low quality feta as a substitute and get depressed. That said, I am not going to claim that Balkans and Turkey have the best chease, it's just that the kind of the cheese I like is not available in western Europe in good quality and I am better of to stick with the local cheese(which is superior to the versions found in the Balkans and Turkey). All those "country X is superior to the country Y" is inherently flawed unless you talk about specifics. Otherwise, all you do is some kind nationalistic masturbation.
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    Lack of white cheese is a real problem, I kid you not!
    - mariorossi666 7y ago
      Ever tried Italy? ;) I think quartirolo (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartirolo_Lombardo https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartirolo_Lombardo) is the closest to the white cheese you're looking for and also salty ewe's ricotta is pretty similar.
ArtDev 7y ago
Like how you have to adjust the water temperature everytime you take a shower in the US. It's a solved problem!
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  What’s that then? I live in Western New Zealand (Tasmania), and we have to adjust the temperature too.
  - Daniel_sk 7y ago
    You can set a temperature on a thermostatic shower head and you just adjust the flow of water. Most newer bathrooms have thermostatic shower heads in Europe. But even the old ones with hot + cold valves allow you to not only set the temperature but also the flow. I think most US showers have just a single faucet where you can control the temperature but not the pressure/flow. You always have to go from cold to hot (it looks like this: https://www.americanstandard-us.com/-/media/sites/asus/images/products/shower-faucets/colony-soft-bathshower-trim-kits-t675502/silo/t675502002-colony-soft-bath-shower-trim-only.png?w=1200&hash=432BDADD0634553ACAC0B3F1078BB4B7BBBB880F https://www.americanstandard-us.com/-/media/sites/asus/image...)
    - blkhawk 7y ago
      those are common in Europe too. A Thermostat is nice but it does not solve the "first water" problem. A shower will always run cold at first.
      - Daniel_sk 7y ago
        I guess it's a regional thing, the single "US" faucet is something I guess no one in Slovakia or Czech Republic has seen. I remember when we were on a first US business trip and it was hilarious to find out that I was not the only one of the group who tried to find Youtube videos how to control that thing and also to switch between the shower head and the tap. The second thing was that after having a shower I wanted to switch on the bed lamp - the switch was a small knob which I tried to push but nothing worked, then I found out I had to turn it in any direction to cycle between on and off.
arethuza 7y ago
There are plenty of shoddy new build expensive properties in the UK - I've been amazed when looking at some new properties how poor the fit and finish is but they still sell.
- boomskats 7y ago
  Yes but so many of them are built and sell as investments that are banking on an ever-inflating property market. I guess it's also what happened in most of the US to drive the quality down. I wouldn't bundle the UK in with the rest of Western Europe. We're much more interested in the American model.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  If you want to see shoddy new buildings, go to Sydney. Third Sydney apartment block abandoned https://thebrag.com/third-sydney-apartment-block-abandoned/ https://thebrag.com/third-sydney-apartment-block-abandoned/
- CalRobert 7y ago
  Yeah, ROI (so not UK but similar in many respects) and I feel like the construction here is utter crap. Hell, houses are now being sold with 10 year structural warranties (rather short, that) because of a history of houses falling down because of pyrite. Nevermind that we always feel 20-30 years behind everyone else; god help you if you want a timber frame, or for that matter have a heritage building where the builders just slop cement on top of the walls (thus starting the destruction of the lime mortar). The OP's comments remind me of how much nicer everything seems on the continent, groceries included (though increasingly everyone shops at Aldi/Lidl anyway)
  - patrickk 7y ago
    Aldi and Lidl's quality is overall better in Ireland because they use local suppliers for certain items. The dairy and meat in Germany is quite low quality for example, although the beer is way better and cheaper in Germany.
    - 7y ago
kstenerud 7y ago
I'm inclined to agree. I've lived in Japan (5 years), in San Francisco (6 years), and now live in Germany. The food quality goes Europe -> Japan -> USA, with a sharp drop between Japan and the USA. I'm currently living in Leipzig, which still has bombed-out looking empty buildings from the time of the Iron Curtain (although things have finally been picking up over the past few years). And yet even here the infrastructure is better than in San Francisco or any other part of the USA I've visited. I'm originally from Canada, and I'm sad to say that, although some things are better than the USA (like the roads and the trash), it's not by much, and it's still terrible compared to the rest of the first world.
- mrarjen 7y ago
  I'd ague that Japan's quality is a bit better than EU but also depends on what food you are used to. Mainly healthy options wise I think Japan stands out even more.
  - taurath 7y ago
    It’s so hard to get a proper vegetable conveniently in the US, while in Japan you can get it at a 7-11.
    - azernik 7y ago
      In California, proper vegetables are very attainable.
      - Angostura 7y ago
        When I've visited, I've noticed that the fruit in particular look gorgeous in the shops, but taste like damp tissue paper. Weird
        CharlesColeman 7y ago
        > When I've visited, I've noticed that the fruit in particular look gorgeous in the shops, but taste like damp tissue paper. Weird Thank the market: the food companies have prioritized durability, yield, and appearance over taste. https://www.npr.org/2011/07/09/137623954/the-troubled-history-of-the-supermarket-tomato https://www.npr.org/2011/07/09/137623954/the-troubled-histor... > On top of that, the tomatoes you see in those supermarkets have been bred for high yields and durability, not flavor. "As a farmer once said — an honest farmer — 'I don't get paid a cent for flavor,'" Estabrook says.
eej71 7y ago
I remember thumbing through the CR car ratings book in the early 1980s and the track record of American cars was terrible (by comparison) even then. The Japanese cars were consistently good. So I don't think it's 30 years of wage stagnation either.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
  My thoughts exactly. Those of us “of a certain age” will remember that this is not new at all. I can’t speculate on the reasons, but I agree about standard quality levels being higher in Japan and Western Europe; but so are costs.
  - Someone1234 7y ago
    I'd speculate that it is because people still buy them regardless. That may sound overly simplistic but I think there's an element of truth to it. Foreign vehicle companies needed to fight to gain market share in the US, often needing to be much better just to be compared as equals. Look at KIA recently doing so, now they're doing very well reliability wise and offer a substantial free warranty, but ask random people and they'll be described as unreliable foreign cars. The real mystery is why Americans still buy American made cars. The foreign competition has eclipsed them for whole generations at this point, but yet demand remains.
    - VintageCool 7y ago
      Americans generally don't buy American cars, right? We buy American-made trucks. The US imposed a 25% tax on imported light trucks and has for decades (the "chicken tax"). I think that this has resulted in a weird distortion where American auto makers focus heavily on that one more profitable market segment, and advertise most heavily on that one market segment, and have done so for generations.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
        I think the Ford F-150 is the best-selling vehicle made by US companies. There's a reason that Musk is building a Tesla truck.
qaq 7y ago
"expensive american-made fridge" how did he manage to find something like that? People might have different priorities but nothing is preventing you from installing Grohe faucets, or Villeroy & Boch sinks they are widely available.
systemtest 7y ago
I've seen videos of people tripping in their home and punching a hole in the drywall. My apartment in the Netherlands is 100% drywall but I need to run into it at full force to even make a dent. To make a hole in it I need tools.
- non-entity 7y ago
  > I've seen videos of people tripping in their home and punching a hole in the drywall Did that last year. Went to stretch and pressed my palms firmly on the wall and one side punched in. Apartment complex made me fix it too. You could also easily hear neighbors and whatever domestic dispute they were having that week. I live in a nice place now. Advertised as "luxury", but everything still seems cheaply built
  - war1025 7y ago
    I think a lot of this is that people don't know what to look for, so they buy based on appearance rather than quality.
usrusr 7y ago
I got the very same impression when I visited the US, particularly about housing and furniture. But I don't quite trust it: there must be a lot of quality metrics where the American stuff shines which I don't even recognize, for exactly the same reasons you named. But in the end I guess I still agree, chances are it's not even half as bad as it looks to my untrained European eyes, but still not good.
lgbr 7y ago
> Then you get to grocery stores, and you have to go to the “fancy places” to even get the baseline of quality you see in the rest of the developed world. All the chocolate is bad. While I agree with you on other points, I take issue with this. American grocery stores are a real treat when visiting. Produce is colorful, plentiful, and delicious thanks to American embrace of GMO's and subsidies for farmers. Raw ingredients such as flour are available in huge variety (try finding something as simple as peanut oil at your local Lidl). Even the quality of "junk" food is comparably fantastic, as you won't find a frozen pizza like DiGiorno anywhere else. This is all before you visit a Whole Foods, which takes quality and variety to a point which organic supermarkets elsewhere in the world can't compare. Europe, on the other hand, is so obsessed with the discount model, so disinterested in variety, and so opposed to GMO's, that their supermarkets are downright frustrating. Yes, the meat, cheese, and chocolate is great, but it stops there.
- jacobush 7y ago
  The corn economy in the US is highly perverted, and that is just the tip of an iceberg. Agreed somewhat about Lidl, I'd be very frustrated if Lidl was the only place I could buy stuff in Sweden.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
    There’s a Lidl opening nearby, soon (I live in New York).
- manderley 7y ago
  Lidl is a discount supermarket. It's not about choice, it's about the lowest prices possible with a limited amount of variety available in exchange. There are plenty of other chain supermarkets that have the huge variety of flour (?) you crave. And "colorful" doesn't mean tasty with produce, unfortunately.
  - svrtknst 7y ago
    Also Lidl, at least in Sweden, does some things amazingly. One of the best shops for produce, for instance, both in quality and price.
tim333 7y ago
In the US the power of large corporations seems to have run amok a bit allowing them to foist crappy bread, chocolate etc. In Europe things are more regulated and it seems easier for local producers to not be wiped out by the large corporates. I think the US need some political reform so it's less easy to buy political influence.
- mojuba 7y ago
  Yes it's regulations, but there's another factor too: population density. In Paris for example, you can find food markets where stuff is brought from small farms and is ridiculously cheap, right in the city central areas, though often hidden in the back alleys. The reason this works is that this type of commerce doesn't require marketing: local people just see it and use it. Only possible in higher density population areas. I think this is one of America's problems: living far apart from each other has a lot of disadvantages and inefficiencies. Homes are much more expensive to build and maintain (just think of the road infrastructure and all the utilities alone). In a typical suburban there can be virtually no public areas other than shopping malls, which are owned by someone. There's also research that confirms people are more productive in higher density areas from the point of view of economics. We'll have to see if America can fix itself by moving to bigger cities, which seems to be the current trend among the millennials and younger, I hear.
  - screye 7y ago
    I talked about this earlier in the thread, and I strongly believe that their urban design decisions have shaped and in-turn damaged a massive part of their lifestyle. Car dependence, massive maintenance costs, density that's too low to support any social or public programs....so many problems created by an idea that is described as the American dream.
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    Decent parks are much more common in the US than huge shopping malls.
    - 7y ago
Someone1234 7y ago
This is a slight aside but the Wikipedia article on Galápagos syndrome is kind of interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome It seems like a pretty useful metaphor that I wasn't familiar with.
Doubleslash 7y ago
German citizen here. I travel to the US quite often - I find that the quality of the Grocery stores is on average one level up. The quality of the goods sold there is another story. But mid-and southern Europe likes it cheap when it comes to these things. There is a reason why we call them "discounters". I really do hear you on the housing quality - it's ridiculous what people are willing to put up with over there. We have friends living in the southern bay area who pay 3.5k for a 2.5 bedroom apartment in an apartment complex - the whole thing calls itself "Luxury Residencies". Ain't no luxury there. Like you describe everything is built extra cheap: from the walls, to the kitchen appliances and the plumbing. There is a massive top-loader in their supply closet that sounds like it runs on it's own ICE, built in the 50s. In Europe this would be considered a very basic apartment but it's already considered 1-2 levels higher than average and not even 3 years old. I do think there is something to your Galapagos syndrome theory.
- Ill_ban_myself 7y ago
  The effect on housing you see is a unique artifact of unconstrained unregulated capitalism: Property investment firms and private, "house flippers" have been buying up old houses at market value in many US cities for over a decade. They paint them grey, put new cabinets in, a new shiny refrigerator, and put it back on the market for double the price. The first time one of these places sells (with black mold still in the basement, asbestos in the walls, and lead paint the children's room) the value of the nearby houses goes up and everyone starts looking to sell THEIR old beat up black mold and asbestos special. It starts a boom and suddenly a whole neighborhood of 300k$ houses become 1million$ grey monstrosities. This all drives up the cost of new construction as well (which is always a little more pricey than buying an older home) and so you get overpriced mansions that you describe as well, but the root cause is the removal of the entire "bottom" of the market. It is now almost impossible to find what Americans call a "fixer-upper" in some cities.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    It certainly takes something to look at a housing market where regulations enforce artificial scarcity and say that everything wrong with it is the result of capitalism...
patrickk 7y ago
One of the small, but significant things I noticed about German apartments was the lipped 'bezel'[1], where the door and the frame fit snugly into each other and there is a rubber/plastic seal between the door and the frame. This is a big deal in an apartment, because it reduces noise, reduces drafts, and eliminates the need to heat more than one room at a time. Also, the door itself seems to be very solid, you'd have to hit it with quite some force to make a dent - none of this cardboard sandwiched between 2 slides of thin MDF nonsense. I'm not from the US, I've just noticed this in Germany coming from another European country with less quality interior finishings. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/InteriorDesign/comments/8ths03/german_interior_doorsrabbeted_why/ https://www.reddit.com/r/InteriorDesign/comments/8ths03/germ...
- mariorossi666 7y ago
  That's pretty standard feature in Italy, it's called door frame and it's basically everywhere, even on cheap doors. I didn't know it wasn't common all over Europe.
  - patrickk 7y ago
    It's not standard everywhere. My theory is that furniture and home fittings like doors have not really been disrupted by the internet (perhaps because of high shipping costs and bulky sized items). Therefore, there is wide variance in cost and quality from country to country.
  - krzyk 7y ago
    Yeah, it is strange for me too. I live in Poland and such doors are the only kind that is being sold - it protects one from the winters.
- anpat 7y ago
  Thank you for linking this, I noticed this in every apartment I lived in Germany and was wondering what is it called. The door frame had rubber/plastic dampener that would literally create a vaccum like effect when closing (i.e the room door would slam if I closed the balcony door). They really made a difference in terms of inside temperature. Also the ability to tilt windows and even doors (vertically) was an amazing feature.
Luc 7y ago
I think there is something to this, but in my experience they just don't care. Their stuff is optimized for their own cultural values, which you perhaps expect to be more like your own than they are. I have had American visitors marvel at the (German built) windows in my French home, calling them something you'd see on a space station. On the other hand they think I must be having money problems for not having a tumble dryer (only poor people hang their laundry to dry) or not having airco.
- oblio 7y ago
  Could be. I find it amusing that from a climate change point of view, both their comments are basically negative: * good windows provide better insulation and reduce the need to heat/cool down a building, plus their reduce dampness since they keep moisture out * while a tumble dryer uses electricity for something which is not much of a chore (it takes like, 5 minutes, to hang the laundry and 5 more minutes to pick it up when it's done)
  - screye 7y ago
    Also, clothes last longer, so it promotes reuse.
  - navigatesol 7y ago
    >I find it amusing that from a climate change point of view, both their comments are basically negative: It's almost like countries like Germany (350k sq km area) and the US (10 million sq km) have different climates and needs. This thread is filled with Europeans saying, "I went to the US once, and their grocery store didn't have produce like my French neighborhood market!"
    - oblio 7y ago
      You're making so many assumptions in 1 short comment that it's hard to dismiss all of them without writing a novel. But still, this is HN, so let's go: - I'm not German and most of my points apply in quite a bit of the EU - the EU is about 4m sqkm, which while smaller than the US, puts them in roughly the same ballpark (they'd both qualify as "huge countries") - the EU as a whole has at least as diverse climates as the US - I'm not even sure what to respond to the "needs" part - I've been to the US more than once, to different places Let's track back a bit and find out what exactly your argument against high quality German windows is. Is it that you don't need them in hot climates? You do, to reduce the need for cooling. Is it that you don't need them in cold climates? I don't even know what to reply to this :-) Is it that you don't need them in Mediterranean climates, a la California (stable relatively warm and dry climate)? Even there, there is variation, houses do need heating and cooling and it can't hurt to have better windows. I'll grant you this, but that's probably an area which is 1/30th or less of the US territory. Or was it about normal drying vs tumble drying? The only solid argument against normal drying that I can find is that normal drying requires more space (and a bit more time, but you can easily plan around that). But US homes, on average, are way bigger than EU homes. So Americans could easily find room to dry their clothes. If I can do it in 65sqm, an American definitely can do it in 120+ sqm.
beefield 7y ago
> Everything is super different and weird and kinda bad, and nobody seems to notice. I have this a bit uneasy impression[1] that a really significant chunk of US is basically a developing country with bigger cars. [1] Based only on visiting a few developing countries as well as a few states of US. Not on any statistics or data whatsoever.
- jiggawatts 7y ago
  The United States is the World's richest third-world country. You have crazy levels of gun violence, high inequality, tribal politics, high levels of corruption that have been legalized via Super-PACs, effectively state-run media (Fox News), highest per-capita incarceration, a failing medical system, failing infrastructure, etc, etc... The best example I can think of to show how far the US has fallen behind the rest of the world is that it's one of only a handful of countries that hasn't adopted the Metric system!
  - freeflight 7y ago
    Funny story about that, the US is actually metric [0] Still doesn't stop the nutters from opposing it because it's supposedly a tool by the NWO to take over the world, with the US remaining as sole resistance [1] [0] https://youtu.be/SmSJXC6_qQ8 https://youtu.be/SmSJXC6_qQ8 [1] https://youtu.be/8jl5epgqHac https://youtu.be/8jl5epgqHac
    - thedaemon 7y ago
      Funny story? Not a funny story. We are not metric. We would be metric if you bought items in metric. We do not. Doesn't matter what the scientist use. It matters what milk and bread is sold in. We buy drinks in liters and gallons. Those are not metric.
      - robin_reala 7y ago
        Litres are metric?
roenxi 7y ago
America has a trade deficit of ~600 billion, which roughly equates to every American having $2,000 to spend buying stuff from overseas. Then on top of that there are all the services America exports. If foreigners are willing to give Americans stuff for paper there is a real pressure for Americans not to bother making stuff and printing more paper instead. That probably influences a lot of the decisions behind American made consumer goods. > The cheapest studio apartment in Western Europe or Japan ends up with better infrastructure than the $2M duplex in California. I live a long way from California, but the first stop should always be to check the local tax code, financial incentives and regulations. Most countries I've been to end up having strange tax incentives that influence how much money gets spent on primary residences; and taxes can put a real dampener on what gets done. I speak mainly from experience in Australia where there are massive tax incentives for a person to spend money on their primary home.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  I live in Australia. What are the tax incentives to spending money on my home?
  - skissane 7y ago
    roenxi is possibly talking about the main residence CGT exemption.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    When you spend money on your house the value of that house increases. When you sell your primary residence, it isn't caught by the Capital Gains Tax. So essentially if you are looking for a place to park money you have two choices: 1) Put it in your primary residence. Wealth is stored, no future tax liability, you are more comfortable 2) Buy a productive asset. Wealth stored, you will pay capital gains tax on the asset price rises due to asset inflation. The most tax-effective place to store money long term is capital improvements to your primary residence, mainly due to how inflation and CGT interact. And the capital value of the property could reasonably rise more than the cost of the work done. There are risks but there is also a lot of incentive to remodel the kitchen or upgrade something if money is available.
taurath 7y ago
That’s all I ever think of when traveling, even to relatively poorer countries. The US doesn’t even seem to try to be a top tier country in anything that brings quality of life.
ralfd 7y ago
> The UX is awful Wait, what UX does a fridge need? Mine just has a scroll wheel which goes from cool to cold.
- ptaipale 7y ago
  Of course there needs to be a clock that you then need to switch between daylight savings and normal time.
- dqv 7y ago
  American fridges have falcon wing doors with door knobs instead of handles
- mosselman 7y ago
  "Mine just has a scroll wheel which goes from cool to cold." It not having a touch screen doesn't mean there is no UX.
- afarrell 7y ago
  One important user interaction for a fridge is that when the door is open you grasp the handle and push toward to the body of the fridge, three things happen: 1) The door glides smoothly on its hinge toward the body. 2) The door connects with the body and provides haptic feedback that it is closed 3) The door remains closed. The last one is the most important because user will likely walk away and stop monitoring the state of the fridge. If it changes to an open-state, it could remain open and thereby let the food inside spoil.
- Hendrikto 7y ago
  The handle, the different compartments, the drawers, …. That’s all part of the UX.
- gattilorenz 7y ago
  Well, the fridge needs to be opened, closed, has inner compartments, you need to be able to regulate the temperature, possibly to let the user know the fridge is running/which temperature is inside... all this happens in the kitchen, possibly with dirty hands, or with wet hands, or while you're holdin ga handful of things... that's all UX-related aspects. The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman, had a nice example of how even the wheels for regulating the temperature can be very confusing (and indeed, in basic fridges you don't regulate the temperature, you set a number on the scrollwheel e.g. between 1-7. But is 7 a higher temperature or higher cooling power?).
Someone1234 7y ago
American bread is particularly problematic as someone that moved from Europe. Until I found bread I liked I'd often joke that it was suitable for storage in a bomb shelter since it has an unnatural shelf-life and tastes like it. After a tedious search, we wound up buying $2.60 "Sara Lee Artesano Style Bread" which is still less good than a 70c loaf of Hovis in the UK, and certainly less good than fresh made French bread (which in my opinion is world class). But it is very notable that it has a 7~10 shelf life, not one month like other supermarket breads, is actually soft, and not overly sweet. It is kind of unfortunately that in the US basically passable bread is called "Artesano" and earns a price premium. Many living in the US haven't had the opportunity to try elsewhere to compare. The strangest thing about this is that you'd expect the US's bread to be much cheaper (given the quality reduction) but that wasn't at all my experience (in fact fresher bread in Europe was substantially cheaper than long-shelf-life-bagged bread in the US).
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  It's the same in the UK, where most of the bread you can get is basically intended for a toaster. But, it's down to volume and consumption; in my country (NL), bread is a daily staple, often featured in two meals a day - so a family will easily go through a loaf a day. It makes more sense to optimize the production and logistics for a shelf life of days instead of weeks. We can get reasonably fresh (factory-produced) bread daily, and a lot of grocery stores have an in-house bakery as well nowadays if you want to go super fancy. (I'm sure that's a logistical optimization as well, that is, dough or its components are easier to transport than ready-made bread, especially because some (like croissants) are very fragile).
  - mcny 7y ago
    I bought some bread from Safeway earlier this year in August. I called the number on the package when the bread started to mould within four days of me buying it. Outside of New York City area, I wouldn't think of doing groceries more than once a week. The place I've lived at are all terrible in terms of how grocery stores are walkable.
    - 7y ago
igammarays 7y ago
It’s not until I was forced to live in Europe due to circumstances that I realized that there exists a much better life than the North American one. Even though I’m in the East (Ukraine), everything is better here. Everything, especially the food, the prices, and the lack of racial tensions and militarized police. The only thing I miss here is trying to fill the emptiness in life with same-day Amazon junk delivered to my door.
- oblio 7y ago
  Well, just glide about 1000 km west and you can still have Amazon :p
- screye 7y ago
  > lack of racial tensions Is this because of lack of diversity or actually accommodating masses ? Genuine question.
  - igammarays 7y ago
    Both. Maybe the latter is caused by the former.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
lazyjones 7y ago
> The cheapest studio apartment in Western Europe or Japan ends up with better infrastructure than the $2M duplex in California This is a strange comparison, housing prices depend on many different factors and you can get really crappy small apartments (including the plumbing) in expensive parts of London or Monaco for that kind of money. If the $2m home in California has mediocre doors and plumbing, it's probably just due to lack of attention/clue by previous owners, possibly also from abundance of crappy plumbers because everyone in the business makes plenty of money from rich people in the area.
brightball 7y ago
Shiny sounds right. In my experience with appliances in the US people either get the cheapest option or the option that matches the design of their home the best. You hear people wanting stainless steel appliances...but never discussing their quality.
mpweiher 7y ago
> Maybe this is the result of 30 years of wage stagnation. Don't think so. My family moved to the US in the early 80s and all the same observations applied back then.
- mxcrossb 7y ago
  This. America has always been considered crude by Europe when it fines to cuisine, craftsmen, etc.
blackhaz 7y ago
Hah! And I have completely the opposite experience - with the exception of modern American cars of course (still miss my 90s Chrysler Saratoga!) Europe is very often about the looks and the function is secondary. The most recent example - Vaillant vs Honeywell heating controllers. Vaillant looks fancy with decorative, smoothly flowing elements, knobs and fancy backlight, and the Honeywell unit is, well, spartan: big LCD letters, primitive graphics. Vaillant is crazy - it is too slow to react on temperature changes, the interface is just horrible: imagine no escape or back button - you just have to idle a minute to go back to the "main screen." It takes 30 seconds or so to connect wirelessly to the boiler, sometimes it fails or even freezes and requires a reset, and I can go on forever. I hate the fucking thing. Honeywell... Well it just works.
- onion2k 7y ago
  Every place I've lived in for the past 20 years here in the UK has had a Honeywell thermostat. They're pretty much the standard in cheap houses.
- twic 7y ago
  I wonder if this is because Vaillant is really a boiler company, so they are good at things involving gas and water, whereas Honeywell are an electronics company, so they're good at things involving electricity and information.
juskrey 7y ago
This is not true. America is highly non homogenous, and looks like you did not bother to find "something else". If you seek long enough, you can find the worse but also the best things in the world here, including houses, people, politicians, bread, vegetables, meat, businesses, service, amenities and so on. Europe, especially its non-Mediterranean part, is boring in this sense (everything is kinda OK but mostly not that fun)
iainmerrick 7y ago
I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes. The doors are all terrible. The plumbing is crap. The furniture just feels bad. The cheapest studio apartment in Western Europe or Japan ends up with better infrastructure than the $2M duplex in California I think there’s truth in this, but the factors behind it are tricky. Unlike something like bread, it’s not easy for consumers to actively choose good plumbing over bad plumbing. Installing new plumbing is something you do very rarely. Most often it’s done by a developer rather than the person who will actually live in a property. And when you’re buying or renting a property, plumbing quality is lower priority than other factors, notably price and location. So developers go for the cheapest option they can get away with, property owners don’t necessarily like it but don’t push back enough because they have bigger concerns, and the result is that most plumbing is low quality. Even if you yourself are the developer, it’s hard to ensure decent quality unless you spend a lot of money, do a lot of research, have a lot of time available, or ideally all three. I’ve learned this to my own cost - on a renovation project, we ended up with some crappy fittings and crappy installation because we didn’t manage it closely enough and the builders don’t care. I would like nice stuff, but how do I get it? Edit to clarify: I think building standards are driven much more by builders than by homeowners. I’d like to know more about the driving factors - is it purely a matter of cost? I hope not, because that suggests everything everywhere will inevitably become crap.
- rtpg 7y ago
  > I’d like to know more about the driving factors - is it purely a matter of cost? My thesis on this is that people do what they can get away with. If you think you can get away with really low quality stuff, you do that. Definitely helps to have a housing shortage, where there's probably no other choice anyways. So everything is cheap (since there's no incentive to make a nice place. You're gonna get someone in the apartment anyways!) and so nobody actually knows what "nice" is and just assume it's normal to be able to punch through your door.
HeckFeck 7y ago
You could also lay some blame on a race to the bottom; i.e what is the minimum definition of a product that we can get away with making in order to keep those profit margins as wide as possible. Less profit, though still plenty of it, can be made from high-quality goods. It's not that profit is inherently wrong, rather it's widespread business and corporate attitudes. An obsession with numbers and statistics rather than any pride in work.
freeflight 7y ago
If your countries ethos consists of being "the greatest in the world", then a part of that is the expectation that everything in the country must be equally as great as its sum.
_iyig 7y ago
As an American, I agree with your observations. Average food quality was higher when I lived in Europe, even in parts of the former Yugoslavia. Instant hot water was also more common; American homes typically use tank-style water heaters which take a minute to warm up once you open the faucet.
SQL2219 7y ago
80% of that $2M home was for the land, no money left for build quality.
JPKab 7y ago
"I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes." Where in the US? First mistake is acting as if a house built in northern California is representative of a house built in rural Maine, or suburban Texas. If you think it's remotely monolithic, it absolutely isn't. But there's definitely a pattern of lower quality building in very high-growth, high cost of living areas where the property's value isn't related much to the building, but mostly reflective of the land and it's location.
- neogodless 7y ago
  I agree with this comment. I don't know the actual cut off, but having done a lot of home shopping and some home owning, I'd suggest you look for houses built before the 1980s, and if you can afford it, in the less dense suburbs and rural areas. Say a place with an acre or more. Bet you'll find it was built with some care. Look at the standard 1/2 acre or less suburban development from the 1980s forward, though, and it's cookie cutter, cheap supplies, tight deadlines. Of course that's a generalization, but I feel like there's a broad spectrum of build quality to be found in the United States.
jki275 7y ago
Having lived in Japan for a significant portion of my life, I would really disagree with you on all of this. I lived in a very expensive, up scale apartment in Japan, and everything in it was very poor quality in comparison to the quality of my (not mcmansion) house in the US. My doors are good quality, plumbing works fine, furniture is much nicer and less expensive by an order of magnitude. I do most of my grocery shopping at Aldis, and certainly you can get fresh fish more easily at the corner grocery in Japan, but otherwise the selection is better even at Aldis than at most groceries in Japan. There's nothing like a Wegmans or a Harris Teeter in Japan at all that I ever saw -- maybe somewhere upscale in Tokyo or something.
rpmisms 7y ago
I live in the middle of nowhere and rent a wonderful studio in a beautiful old building for next to nothing. The Bay Area is the armpit of America when it comes to value per dollar spent.
arkades 7y ago
It certainly depends on what you’re comparing to. I’ve lived up and down the USD east coast, and spent time in London and Reykjavik, and traveled through Italy, Spain, and Portugal. I was always left with the impression that everything in Europe except for trains and windows (why do Europeans have such nice windows and we do not?!?) is rundown crap. I’m not saying I’m necessarily objectively correct. But I’m definitely not endorsing your subjective impression, either.
nostrademons 7y ago
So you may be right, but I'll point out that if your sample of American housing is "California" you're getting a biased sample. The housing stock in California (and particularly the Bay Area) is uniquely terrible in the U.S, for a variety of reasons: 1.) Much of the housing in Silicon Valley was built in the 1950s and 60s by a wave of migrants coming to work in the nascent defense & semiconductor industries there, sometimes with their own hands. They'd go to the hardware store, buy some lumber and build a house, something you definitely can't do today. Oftentimes they were in a rush to do so because they'd just taken a job in the area and were otherwise living in a tent. Of the ones that are professionally built, they were often quickly mass-produced to keep up with the flood of new migrants. 2.) There are a variety of disincentives to upgrading your house from the original build: you have to bring it up to the (now vastly upgraded) building codes, you need to deal with the year-long permitting process, you often need to get written permission from your neighbors if you're doing something big like adding a second story or rebuilding the house, you may lose your Prop 13 grandfathering if the value changes significantly. That's why you end up with ridiculous situations where the land under your house is worth $1.5M and the structure is worth $100K. 3.) California has forgiving weather. You can get away with stupid stuff like having doors & windows that don't completely seal, no heating (let alone air conditioning), no basements, etc. 4.) California has unforgiving natural disasters. Between earthquakes, wildfires, termites, mudslides, and floods, it's often not worth sinking a lot into your primary residence if it's just gonna get destroyed with the next earthquake anyway. I lived in Massachusetts before California and there were houses in my town still standing from the 1700s. They were a bit drafty since they still had the original windows from then, but the build quality was a lot better than what you see in California.
kube-system 7y ago
I think the Galapagos effect exists anywhere there's enough isolation, whether it be through language, geography, class, or politics. Different cultures have different values, preferences, and priorities. These differences shape all of our opinions, whether it's you visiting the US, or me visiting the EU. Don't assume that your values are as equally important to someone in the US as they are to you, though. Many of our cultural preferences are just that -- preferences -- which all come with an associated set of pros and cons. One person's "crappy hollow-core door" is another persons "ADA accessible, 2018 IRC-compliant, lead-free, contemporary-style door".

by rtpg 7y ago

starpilot 7y ago

I could cherry pick examples from around the country to show exactly the opposite. There's a great Quora answer on this phenomenon, "Why do so many Europeans look down on 'American Cheese'?": https://qr.ae/TWJAc9 https://qr.ae/TWJAc9

mrtksn 7y ago
I was expecting to read a great Quora article but the author compared American speciality cheese to European supermarket fast serving cheese to prove that not everything made in Europe is superior. What's next? Comparing an American ivy league university building to a newly built apartment somewhere in Brussels and prove that not everything is older in Europe? Of course every place has all kind of extremes. I look down on West European cheese too because they don't have proper white cheese that is available in the Balkans and Turkey and when abroad I have to rely on low quality feta as a substitute and get depressed. That said, I am not going to claim that Balkans and Turkey have the best chease, it's just that the kind of the cheese I like is not available in western Europe in good quality and I am better of to stick with the local cheese(which is superior to the versions found in the Balkans and Turkey). All those "country X is superior to the country Y" is inherently flawed unless you talk about specifics. Otherwise, all you do is some kind nationalistic masturbation.
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  Lack of white cheese is a real problem, I kid you not!
  - mariorossi666 7y ago
    Ever tried Italy? ;) I think quartirolo (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartirolo_Lombardo https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartirolo_Lombardo) is the closest to the white cheese you're looking for and also salty ewe's ricotta is pretty similar.

ArtDev 7y ago

Like how you have to adjust the water temperature everytime you take a shower in the US. It's a solved problem!

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
What’s that then? I live in Western New Zealand (Tasmania), and we have to adjust the temperature too.
- Daniel_sk 7y ago
  You can set a temperature on a thermostatic shower head and you just adjust the flow of water. Most newer bathrooms have thermostatic shower heads in Europe. But even the old ones with hot + cold valves allow you to not only set the temperature but also the flow. I think most US showers have just a single faucet where you can control the temperature but not the pressure/flow. You always have to go from cold to hot (it looks like this: https://www.americanstandard-us.com/-/media/sites/asus/images/products/shower-faucets/colony-soft-bathshower-trim-kits-t675502/silo/t675502002-colony-soft-bath-shower-trim-only.png?w=1200&hash=432BDADD0634553ACAC0B3F1078BB4B7BBBB880F https://www.americanstandard-us.com/-/media/sites/asus/image...)
  - blkhawk 7y ago
    those are common in Europe too. A Thermostat is nice but it does not solve the "first water" problem. A shower will always run cold at first.
    - Daniel_sk 7y ago
      I guess it's a regional thing, the single "US" faucet is something I guess no one in Slovakia or Czech Republic has seen. I remember when we were on a first US business trip and it was hilarious to find out that I was not the only one of the group who tried to find Youtube videos how to control that thing and also to switch between the shower head and the tap. The second thing was that after having a shower I wanted to switch on the bed lamp - the switch was a small knob which I tried to push but nothing worked, then I found out I had to turn it in any direction to cycle between on and off.

arethuza 7y ago

There are plenty of shoddy new build expensive properties in the UK - I've been amazed when looking at some new properties how poor the fit and finish is but they still sell.

boomskats 7y ago
Yes but so many of them are built and sell as investments that are banking on an ever-inflating property market. I guess it's also what happened in most of the US to drive the quality down. I wouldn't bundle the UK in with the rest of Western Europe. We're much more interested in the American model.
TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
If you want to see shoddy new buildings, go to Sydney. Third Sydney apartment block abandoned https://thebrag.com/third-sydney-apartment-block-abandoned/ https://thebrag.com/third-sydney-apartment-block-abandoned/
CalRobert 7y ago
Yeah, ROI (so not UK but similar in many respects) and I feel like the construction here is utter crap. Hell, houses are now being sold with 10 year structural warranties (rather short, that) because of a history of houses falling down because of pyrite. Nevermind that we always feel 20-30 years behind everyone else; god help you if you want a timber frame, or for that matter have a heritage building where the builders just slop cement on top of the walls (thus starting the destruction of the lime mortar). The OP's comments remind me of how much nicer everything seems on the continent, groceries included (though increasingly everyone shops at Aldi/Lidl anyway)
- patrickk 7y ago
  Aldi and Lidl's quality is overall better in Ireland because they use local suppliers for certain items. The dairy and meat in Germany is quite low quality for example, although the beer is way better and cheaper in Germany.
  - 7y ago

kstenerud 7y ago

I'm inclined to agree. I've lived in Japan (5 years), in San Francisco (6 years), and now live in Germany. The food quality goes Europe -> Japan -> USA, with a sharp drop between Japan and the USA. I'm currently living in Leipzig, which still has bombed-out looking empty buildings from the time of the Iron Curtain (although things have finally been picking up over the past few years). And yet even here the infrastructure is better than in San Francisco or any other part of the USA I've visited. I'm originally from Canada, and I'm sad to say that, although some things are better than the USA (like the roads and the trash), it's not by much, and it's still terrible compared to the rest of the first world.

mrarjen 7y ago
I'd ague that Japan's quality is a bit better than EU but also depends on what food you are used to. Mainly healthy options wise I think Japan stands out even more.
- taurath 7y ago
  It’s so hard to get a proper vegetable conveniently in the US, while in Japan you can get it at a 7-11.
  - azernik 7y ago
    In California, proper vegetables are very attainable.
    - Angostura 7y ago
      When I've visited, I've noticed that the fruit in particular look gorgeous in the shops, but taste like damp tissue paper. Weird
      - CharlesColeman 7y ago
        > When I've visited, I've noticed that the fruit in particular look gorgeous in the shops, but taste like damp tissue paper. Weird Thank the market: the food companies have prioritized durability, yield, and appearance over taste. https://www.npr.org/2011/07/09/137623954/the-troubled-history-of-the-supermarket-tomato https://www.npr.org/2011/07/09/137623954/the-troubled-histor... > On top of that, the tomatoes you see in those supermarkets have been bred for high yields and durability, not flavor. "As a farmer once said — an honest farmer — 'I don't get paid a cent for flavor,'" Estabrook says.

eej71 7y ago

I remember thumbing through the CR car ratings book in the early 1980s and the track record of American cars was terrible (by comparison) even then. The Japanese cars were consistently good. So I don't think it's 30 years of wage stagnation either.

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
My thoughts exactly. Those of us “of a certain age” will remember that this is not new at all. I can’t speculate on the reasons, but I agree about standard quality levels being higher in Japan and Western Europe; but so are costs.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  I'd speculate that it is because people still buy them regardless. That may sound overly simplistic but I think there's an element of truth to it. Foreign vehicle companies needed to fight to gain market share in the US, often needing to be much better just to be compared as equals. Look at KIA recently doing so, now they're doing very well reliability wise and offer a substantial free warranty, but ask random people and they'll be described as unreliable foreign cars. The real mystery is why Americans still buy American made cars. The foreign competition has eclipsed them for whole generations at this point, but yet demand remains.
  - VintageCool 7y ago
    Americans generally don't buy American cars, right? We buy American-made trucks. The US imposed a 25% tax on imported light trucks and has for decades (the "chicken tax"). I think that this has resulted in a weird distortion where American auto makers focus heavily on that one more profitable market segment, and advertise most heavily on that one market segment, and have done so for generations.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
      I think the Ford F-150 is the best-selling vehicle made by US companies. There's a reason that Musk is building a Tesla truck.

qaq 7y ago

"expensive american-made fridge" how did he manage to find something like that? People might have different priorities but nothing is preventing you from installing Grohe faucets, or Villeroy & Boch sinks they are widely available.

systemtest 7y ago

I've seen videos of people tripping in their home and punching a hole in the drywall. My apartment in the Netherlands is 100% drywall but I need to run into it at full force to even make a dent. To make a hole in it I need tools.

non-entity 7y ago
> I've seen videos of people tripping in their home and punching a hole in the drywall Did that last year. Went to stretch and pressed my palms firmly on the wall and one side punched in. Apartment complex made me fix it too. You could also easily hear neighbors and whatever domestic dispute they were having that week. I live in a nice place now. Advertised as "luxury", but everything still seems cheaply built
- war1025 7y ago
  I think a lot of this is that people don't know what to look for, so they buy based on appearance rather than quality.

usrusr 7y ago

I got the very same impression when I visited the US, particularly about housing and furniture. But I don't quite trust it: there must be a lot of quality metrics where the American stuff shines which I don't even recognize, for exactly the same reasons you named. But in the end I guess I still agree, chances are it's not even half as bad as it looks to my untrained European eyes, but still not good.

lgbr 7y ago

> Then you get to grocery stores, and you have to go to the “fancy places” to even get the baseline of quality you see in the rest of the developed world. All the chocolate is bad. While I agree with you on other points, I take issue with this. American grocery stores are a real treat when visiting. Produce is colorful, plentiful, and delicious thanks to American embrace of GMO's and subsidies for farmers. Raw ingredients such as flour are available in huge variety (try finding something as simple as peanut oil at your local Lidl). Even the quality of "junk" food is comparably fantastic, as you won't find a frozen pizza like DiGiorno anywhere else. This is all before you visit a Whole Foods, which takes quality and variety to a point which organic supermarkets elsewhere in the world can't compare. Europe, on the other hand, is so obsessed with the discount model, so disinterested in variety, and so opposed to GMO's, that their supermarkets are downright frustrating. Yes, the meat, cheese, and chocolate is great, but it stops there.

jacobush 7y ago
The corn economy in the US is highly perverted, and that is just the tip of an iceberg. Agreed somewhat about Lidl, I'd be very frustrated if Lidl was the only place I could buy stuff in Sweden.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
  There’s a Lidl opening nearby, soon (I live in New York).
manderley 7y ago
Lidl is a discount supermarket. It's not about choice, it's about the lowest prices possible with a limited amount of variety available in exchange. There are plenty of other chain supermarkets that have the huge variety of flour (?) you crave. And "colorful" doesn't mean tasty with produce, unfortunately.
- svrtknst 7y ago
  Also Lidl, at least in Sweden, does some things amazingly. One of the best shops for produce, for instance, both in quality and price.

tim333 7y ago

In the US the power of large corporations seems to have run amok a bit allowing them to foist crappy bread, chocolate etc. In Europe things are more regulated and it seems easier for local producers to not be wiped out by the large corporates. I think the US need some political reform so it's less easy to buy political influence.

mojuba 7y ago
Yes it's regulations, but there's another factor too: population density. In Paris for example, you can find food markets where stuff is brought from small farms and is ridiculously cheap, right in the city central areas, though often hidden in the back alleys. The reason this works is that this type of commerce doesn't require marketing: local people just see it and use it. Only possible in higher density population areas. I think this is one of America's problems: living far apart from each other has a lot of disadvantages and inefficiencies. Homes are much more expensive to build and maintain (just think of the road infrastructure and all the utilities alone). In a typical suburban there can be virtually no public areas other than shopping malls, which are owned by someone. There's also research that confirms people are more productive in higher density areas from the point of view of economics. We'll have to see if America can fix itself by moving to bigger cities, which seems to be the current trend among the millennials and younger, I hear.
- screye 7y ago
  I talked about this earlier in the thread, and I strongly believe that their urban design decisions have shaped and in-turn damaged a massive part of their lifestyle. Car dependence, massive maintenance costs, density that's too low to support any social or public programs....so many problems created by an idea that is described as the American dream.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  Decent parks are much more common in the US than huge shopping malls.
  - 7y ago

Someone1234 7y ago

This is a slight aside but the Wikipedia article on Galápagos syndrome is kind of interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome It seems like a pretty useful metaphor that I wasn't familiar with.

Doubleslash 7y ago

German citizen here. I travel to the US quite often - I find that the quality of the Grocery stores is on average one level up. The quality of the goods sold there is another story. But mid-and southern Europe likes it cheap when it comes to these things. There is a reason why we call them "discounters". I really do hear you on the housing quality - it's ridiculous what people are willing to put up with over there. We have friends living in the southern bay area who pay 3.5k for a 2.5 bedroom apartment in an apartment complex - the whole thing calls itself "Luxury Residencies". Ain't no luxury there. Like you describe everything is built extra cheap: from the walls, to the kitchen appliances and the plumbing. There is a massive top-loader in their supply closet that sounds like it runs on it's own ICE, built in the 50s. In Europe this would be considered a very basic apartment but it's already considered 1-2 levels higher than average and not even 3 years old. I do think there is something to your Galapagos syndrome theory.

Ill_ban_myself 7y ago
The effect on housing you see is a unique artifact of unconstrained unregulated capitalism: Property investment firms and private, "house flippers" have been buying up old houses at market value in many US cities for over a decade. They paint them grey, put new cabinets in, a new shiny refrigerator, and put it back on the market for double the price. The first time one of these places sells (with black mold still in the basement, asbestos in the walls, and lead paint the children's room) the value of the nearby houses goes up and everyone starts looking to sell THEIR old beat up black mold and asbestos special. It starts a boom and suddenly a whole neighborhood of 300k$ houses become 1million$ grey monstrosities. This all drives up the cost of new construction as well (which is always a little more pricey than buying an older home) and so you get overpriced mansions that you describe as well, but the root cause is the removal of the entire "bottom" of the market. It is now almost impossible to find what Americans call a "fixer-upper" in some cities.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  It certainly takes something to look at a housing market where regulations enforce artificial scarcity and say that everything wrong with it is the result of capitalism...

patrickk 7y ago

One of the small, but significant things I noticed about German apartments was the lipped 'bezel'[1], where the door and the frame fit snugly into each other and there is a rubber/plastic seal between the door and the frame. This is a big deal in an apartment, because it reduces noise, reduces drafts, and eliminates the need to heat more than one room at a time. Also, the door itself seems to be very solid, you'd have to hit it with quite some force to make a dent - none of this cardboard sandwiched between 2 slides of thin MDF nonsense. I'm not from the US, I've just noticed this in Germany coming from another European country with less quality interior finishings. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/InteriorDesign/comments/8ths03/german_interior_doorsrabbeted_why/ https://www.reddit.com/r/InteriorDesign/comments/8ths03/germ...

mariorossi666 7y ago
That's pretty standard feature in Italy, it's called door frame and it's basically everywhere, even on cheap doors. I didn't know it wasn't common all over Europe.
- patrickk 7y ago
  It's not standard everywhere. My theory is that furniture and home fittings like doors have not really been disrupted by the internet (perhaps because of high shipping costs and bulky sized items). Therefore, there is wide variance in cost and quality from country to country.
- krzyk 7y ago
  Yeah, it is strange for me too. I live in Poland and such doors are the only kind that is being sold - it protects one from the winters.
anpat 7y ago
Thank you for linking this, I noticed this in every apartment I lived in Germany and was wondering what is it called. The door frame had rubber/plastic dampener that would literally create a vaccum like effect when closing (i.e the room door would slam if I closed the balcony door). They really made a difference in terms of inside temperature. Also the ability to tilt windows and even doors (vertically) was an amazing feature.

Luc 7y ago

I think there is something to this, but in my experience they just don't care. Their stuff is optimized for their own cultural values, which you perhaps expect to be more like your own than they are. I have had American visitors marvel at the (German built) windows in my French home, calling them something you'd see on a space station. On the other hand they think I must be having money problems for not having a tumble dryer (only poor people hang their laundry to dry) or not having airco.

oblio 7y ago
Could be. I find it amusing that from a climate change point of view, both their comments are basically negative: * good windows provide better insulation and reduce the need to heat/cool down a building, plus their reduce dampness since they keep moisture out * while a tumble dryer uses electricity for something which is not much of a chore (it takes like, 5 minutes, to hang the laundry and 5 more minutes to pick it up when it's done)
- screye 7y ago
  Also, clothes last longer, so it promotes reuse.
- navigatesol 7y ago
  >I find it amusing that from a climate change point of view, both their comments are basically negative: It's almost like countries like Germany (350k sq km area) and the US (10 million sq km) have different climates and needs. This thread is filled with Europeans saying, "I went to the US once, and their grocery store didn't have produce like my French neighborhood market!"
  - oblio 7y ago
    You're making so many assumptions in 1 short comment that it's hard to dismiss all of them without writing a novel. But still, this is HN, so let's go: - I'm not German and most of my points apply in quite a bit of the EU - the EU is about 4m sqkm, which while smaller than the US, puts them in roughly the same ballpark (they'd both qualify as "huge countries") - the EU as a whole has at least as diverse climates as the US - I'm not even sure what to respond to the "needs" part - I've been to the US more than once, to different places Let's track back a bit and find out what exactly your argument against high quality German windows is. Is it that you don't need them in hot climates? You do, to reduce the need for cooling. Is it that you don't need them in cold climates? I don't even know what to reply to this :-) Is it that you don't need them in Mediterranean climates, a la California (stable relatively warm and dry climate)? Even there, there is variation, houses do need heating and cooling and it can't hurt to have better windows. I'll grant you this, but that's probably an area which is 1/30th or less of the US territory. Or was it about normal drying vs tumble drying? The only solid argument against normal drying that I can find is that normal drying requires more space (and a bit more time, but you can easily plan around that). But US homes, on average, are way bigger than EU homes. So Americans could easily find room to dry their clothes. If I can do it in 65sqm, an American definitely can do it in 120+ sqm.

beefield 7y ago

> Everything is super different and weird and kinda bad, and nobody seems to notice. I have this a bit uneasy impression[1] that a really significant chunk of US is basically a developing country with bigger cars. [1] Based only on visiting a few developing countries as well as a few states of US. Not on any statistics or data whatsoever.

jiggawatts 7y ago
The United States is the World's richest third-world country. You have crazy levels of gun violence, high inequality, tribal politics, high levels of corruption that have been legalized via Super-PACs, effectively state-run media (Fox News), highest per-capita incarceration, a failing medical system, failing infrastructure, etc, etc... The best example I can think of to show how far the US has fallen behind the rest of the world is that it's one of only a handful of countries that hasn't adopted the Metric system!
- freeflight 7y ago
  Funny story about that, the US is actually metric [0] Still doesn't stop the nutters from opposing it because it's supposedly a tool by the NWO to take over the world, with the US remaining as sole resistance [1] [0] https://youtu.be/SmSJXC6_qQ8 https://youtu.be/SmSJXC6_qQ8 [1] https://youtu.be/8jl5epgqHac https://youtu.be/8jl5epgqHac
  - thedaemon 7y ago
    Funny story? Not a funny story. We are not metric. We would be metric if you bought items in metric. We do not. Doesn't matter what the scientist use. It matters what milk and bread is sold in. We buy drinks in liters and gallons. Those are not metric.
    - robin_reala 7y ago
      Litres are metric?

roenxi 7y ago

America has a trade deficit of ~600 billion, which roughly equates to every American having $2,000 to spend buying stuff from overseas. Then on top of that there are all the services America exports. If foreigners are willing to give Americans stuff for paper there is a real pressure for Americans not to bother making stuff and printing more paper instead. That probably influences a lot of the decisions behind American made consumer goods. > The cheapest studio apartment in Western Europe or Japan ends up with better infrastructure than the $2M duplex in California. I live a long way from California, but the first stop should always be to check the local tax code, financial incentives and regulations. Most countries I've been to end up having strange tax incentives that influence how much money gets spent on primary residences; and taxes can put a real dampener on what gets done. I speak mainly from experience in Australia where there are massive tax incentives for a person to spend money on their primary home.

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
I live in Australia. What are the tax incentives to spending money on my home?
- skissane 7y ago
  roenxi is possibly talking about the main residence CGT exemption.
- roenxi 7y ago
  When you spend money on your house the value of that house increases. When you sell your primary residence, it isn't caught by the Capital Gains Tax. So essentially if you are looking for a place to park money you have two choices: 1) Put it in your primary residence. Wealth is stored, no future tax liability, you are more comfortable 2) Buy a productive asset. Wealth stored, you will pay capital gains tax on the asset price rises due to asset inflation. The most tax-effective place to store money long term is capital improvements to your primary residence, mainly due to how inflation and CGT interact. And the capital value of the property could reasonably rise more than the cost of the work done. There are risks but there is also a lot of incentive to remodel the kitchen or upgrade something if money is available.

taurath 7y ago

That’s all I ever think of when traveling, even to relatively poorer countries. The US doesn’t even seem to try to be a top tier country in anything that brings quality of life.

ralfd 7y ago

> The UX is awful Wait, what UX does a fridge need? Mine just has a scroll wheel which goes from cool to cold.

ptaipale 7y ago
Of course there needs to be a clock that you then need to switch between daylight savings and normal time.
dqv 7y ago
American fridges have falcon wing doors with door knobs instead of handles
mosselman 7y ago
"Mine just has a scroll wheel which goes from cool to cold." It not having a touch screen doesn't mean there is no UX.
afarrell 7y ago
One important user interaction for a fridge is that when the door is open you grasp the handle and push toward to the body of the fridge, three things happen: 1) The door glides smoothly on its hinge toward the body. 2) The door connects with the body and provides haptic feedback that it is closed 3) The door remains closed. The last one is the most important because user will likely walk away and stop monitoring the state of the fridge. If it changes to an open-state, it could remain open and thereby let the food inside spoil.
Hendrikto 7y ago
The handle, the different compartments, the drawers, …. That’s all part of the UX.
gattilorenz 7y ago
Well, the fridge needs to be opened, closed, has inner compartments, you need to be able to regulate the temperature, possibly to let the user know the fridge is running/which temperature is inside... all this happens in the kitchen, possibly with dirty hands, or with wet hands, or while you're holdin ga handful of things... that's all UX-related aspects. The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman, had a nice example of how even the wheels for regulating the temperature can be very confusing (and indeed, in basic fridges you don't regulate the temperature, you set a number on the scrollwheel e.g. between 1-7. But is 7 a higher temperature or higher cooling power?).

Someone1234 7y ago

American bread is particularly problematic as someone that moved from Europe. Until I found bread I liked I'd often joke that it was suitable for storage in a bomb shelter since it has an unnatural shelf-life and tastes like it. After a tedious search, we wound up buying $2.60 "Sara Lee Artesano Style Bread" which is still less good than a 70c loaf of Hovis in the UK, and certainly less good than fresh made French bread (which in my opinion is world class). But it is very notable that it has a 7~10 shelf life, not one month like other supermarket breads, is actually soft, and not overly sweet. It is kind of unfortunately that in the US basically passable bread is called "Artesano" and earns a price premium. Many living in the US haven't had the opportunity to try elsewhere to compare. The strangest thing about this is that you'd expect the US's bread to be much cheaper (given the quality reduction) but that wasn't at all my experience (in fact fresher bread in Europe was substantially cheaper than long-shelf-life-bagged bread in the US).

Cthulhu_ 7y ago
It's the same in the UK, where most of the bread you can get is basically intended for a toaster. But, it's down to volume and consumption; in my country (NL), bread is a daily staple, often featured in two meals a day - so a family will easily go through a loaf a day. It makes more sense to optimize the production and logistics for a shelf life of days instead of weeks. We can get reasonably fresh (factory-produced) bread daily, and a lot of grocery stores have an in-house bakery as well nowadays if you want to go super fancy. (I'm sure that's a logistical optimization as well, that is, dough or its components are easier to transport than ready-made bread, especially because some (like croissants) are very fragile).
- mcny 7y ago
  I bought some bread from Safeway earlier this year in August. I called the number on the package when the bread started to mould within four days of me buying it. Outside of New York City area, I wouldn't think of doing groceries more than once a week. The place I've lived at are all terrible in terms of how grocery stores are walkable.
  - 7y ago

igammarays 7y ago

It’s not until I was forced to live in Europe due to circumstances that I realized that there exists a much better life than the North American one. Even though I’m in the East (Ukraine), everything is better here. Everything, especially the food, the prices, and the lack of racial tensions and militarized police. The only thing I miss here is trying to fill the emptiness in life with same-day Amazon junk delivered to my door.

oblio 7y ago
Well, just glide about 1000 km west and you can still have Amazon :p
screye 7y ago
> lack of racial tensions Is this because of lack of diversity or actually accommodating masses ? Genuine question.
- igammarays 7y ago
  Both. Maybe the latter is caused by the former.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

lazyjones 7y ago

> The cheapest studio apartment in Western Europe or Japan ends up with better infrastructure than the $2M duplex in California This is a strange comparison, housing prices depend on many different factors and you can get really crappy small apartments (including the plumbing) in expensive parts of London or Monaco for that kind of money. If the $2m home in California has mediocre doors and plumbing, it's probably just due to lack of attention/clue by previous owners, possibly also from abundance of crappy plumbers because everyone in the business makes plenty of money from rich people in the area.

brightball 7y ago

Shiny sounds right. In my experience with appliances in the US people either get the cheapest option or the option that matches the design of their home the best. You hear people wanting stainless steel appliances...but never discussing their quality.

mpweiher 7y ago

> Maybe this is the result of 30 years of wage stagnation. Don't think so. My family moved to the US in the early 80s and all the same observations applied back then.

mxcrossb 7y ago
This. America has always been considered crude by Europe when it fines to cuisine, craftsmen, etc.

blackhaz 7y ago

Hah! And I have completely the opposite experience - with the exception of modern American cars of course (still miss my 90s Chrysler Saratoga!) Europe is very often about the looks and the function is secondary. The most recent example - Vaillant vs Honeywell heating controllers. Vaillant looks fancy with decorative, smoothly flowing elements, knobs and fancy backlight, and the Honeywell unit is, well, spartan: big LCD letters, primitive graphics. Vaillant is crazy - it is too slow to react on temperature changes, the interface is just horrible: imagine no escape or back button - you just have to idle a minute to go back to the "main screen." It takes 30 seconds or so to connect wirelessly to the boiler, sometimes it fails or even freezes and requires a reset, and I can go on forever. I hate the fucking thing. Honeywell... Well it just works.

onion2k 7y ago
Every place I've lived in for the past 20 years here in the UK has had a Honeywell thermostat. They're pretty much the standard in cheap houses.
twic 7y ago
I wonder if this is because Vaillant is really a boiler company, so they are good at things involving gas and water, whereas Honeywell are an electronics company, so they're good at things involving electricity and information.

juskrey 7y ago

This is not true. America is highly non homogenous, and looks like you did not bother to find "something else". If you seek long enough, you can find the worse but also the best things in the world here, including houses, people, politicians, bread, vegetables, meat, businesses, service, amenities and so on. Europe, especially its non-Mediterranean part, is boring in this sense (everything is kinda OK but mostly not that fun)

iainmerrick 7y ago

I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes. The doors are all terrible. The plumbing is crap. The furniture just feels bad. The cheapest studio apartment in Western Europe or Japan ends up with better infrastructure than the $2M duplex in California I think there’s truth in this, but the factors behind it are tricky. Unlike something like bread, it’s not easy for consumers to actively choose good plumbing over bad plumbing. Installing new plumbing is something you do very rarely. Most often it’s done by a developer rather than the person who will actually live in a property. And when you’re buying or renting a property, plumbing quality is lower priority than other factors, notably price and location. So developers go for the cheapest option they can get away with, property owners don’t necessarily like it but don’t push back enough because they have bigger concerns, and the result is that most plumbing is low quality. Even if you yourself are the developer, it’s hard to ensure decent quality unless you spend a lot of money, do a lot of research, have a lot of time available, or ideally all three. I’ve learned this to my own cost - on a renovation project, we ended up with some crappy fittings and crappy installation because we didn’t manage it closely enough and the builders don’t care. I would like nice stuff, but how do I get it? Edit to clarify: I think building standards are driven much more by builders than by homeowners. I’d like to know more about the driving factors - is it purely a matter of cost? I hope not, because that suggests everything everywhere will inevitably become crap.

rtpg 7y ago
> I’d like to know more about the driving factors - is it purely a matter of cost? My thesis on this is that people do what they can get away with. If you think you can get away with really low quality stuff, you do that. Definitely helps to have a housing shortage, where there's probably no other choice anyways. So everything is cheap (since there's no incentive to make a nice place. You're gonna get someone in the apartment anyways!) and so nobody actually knows what "nice" is and just assume it's normal to be able to punch through your door.

HeckFeck 7y ago

You could also lay some blame on a race to the bottom; i.e what is the minimum definition of a product that we can get away with making in order to keep those profit margins as wide as possible. Less profit, though still plenty of it, can be made from high-quality goods. It's not that profit is inherently wrong, rather it's widespread business and corporate attitudes. An obsession with numbers and statistics rather than any pride in work.

freeflight 7y ago

If your countries ethos consists of being "the greatest in the world", then a part of that is the expectation that everything in the country must be equally as great as its sum.

_iyig 7y ago

As an American, I agree with your observations. Average food quality was higher when I lived in Europe, even in parts of the former Yugoslavia. Instant hot water was also more common; American homes typically use tank-style water heaters which take a minute to warm up once you open the faucet.

SQL2219 7y ago

80% of that $2M home was for the land, no money left for build quality.

JPKab 7y ago

"I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes." Where in the US? First mistake is acting as if a house built in northern California is representative of a house built in rural Maine, or suburban Texas. If you think it's remotely monolithic, it absolutely isn't. But there's definitely a pattern of lower quality building in very high-growth, high cost of living areas where the property's value isn't related much to the building, but mostly reflective of the land and it's location.

neogodless 7y ago
I agree with this comment. I don't know the actual cut off, but having done a lot of home shopping and some home owning, I'd suggest you look for houses built before the 1980s, and if you can afford it, in the less dense suburbs and rural areas. Say a place with an acre or more. Bet you'll find it was built with some care. Look at the standard 1/2 acre or less suburban development from the 1980s forward, though, and it's cookie cutter, cheap supplies, tight deadlines. Of course that's a generalization, but I feel like there's a broad spectrum of build quality to be found in the United States.

jki275 7y ago

Having lived in Japan for a significant portion of my life, I would really disagree with you on all of this. I lived in a very expensive, up scale apartment in Japan, and everything in it was very poor quality in comparison to the quality of my (not mcmansion) house in the US. My doors are good quality, plumbing works fine, furniture is much nicer and less expensive by an order of magnitude. I do most of my grocery shopping at Aldis, and certainly you can get fresh fish more easily at the corner grocery in Japan, but otherwise the selection is better even at Aldis than at most groceries in Japan. There's nothing like a Wegmans or a Harris Teeter in Japan at all that I ever saw -- maybe somewhere upscale in Tokyo or something.

rpmisms 7y ago

I live in the middle of nowhere and rent a wonderful studio in a beautiful old building for next to nothing. The Bay Area is the armpit of America when it comes to value per dollar spent.

arkades 7y ago

It certainly depends on what you’re comparing to. I’ve lived up and down the USD east coast, and spent time in London and Reykjavik, and traveled through Italy, Spain, and Portugal. I was always left with the impression that everything in Europe except for trains and windows (why do Europeans have such nice windows and we do not?!?) is rundown crap. I’m not saying I’m necessarily objectively correct. But I’m definitely not endorsing your subjective impression, either.

nostrademons 7y ago

So you may be right, but I'll point out that if your sample of American housing is "California" you're getting a biased sample. The housing stock in California (and particularly the Bay Area) is uniquely terrible in the U.S, for a variety of reasons: 1.) Much of the housing in Silicon Valley was built in the 1950s and 60s by a wave of migrants coming to work in the nascent defense & semiconductor industries there, sometimes with their own hands. They'd go to the hardware store, buy some lumber and build a house, something you definitely can't do today. Oftentimes they were in a rush to do so because they'd just taken a job in the area and were otherwise living in a tent. Of the ones that are professionally built, they were often quickly mass-produced to keep up with the flood of new migrants. 2.) There are a variety of disincentives to upgrading your house from the original build: you have to bring it up to the (now vastly upgraded) building codes, you need to deal with the year-long permitting process, you often need to get written permission from your neighbors if you're doing something big like adding a second story or rebuilding the house, you may lose your Prop 13 grandfathering if the value changes significantly. That's why you end up with ridiculous situations where the land under your house is worth $1.5M and the structure is worth $100K. 3.) California has forgiving weather. You can get away with stupid stuff like having doors & windows that don't completely seal, no heating (let alone air conditioning), no basements, etc. 4.) California has unforgiving natural disasters. Between earthquakes, wildfires, termites, mudslides, and floods, it's often not worth sinking a lot into your primary residence if it's just gonna get destroyed with the next earthquake anyway. I lived in Massachusetts before California and there were houses in my town still standing from the 1700s. They were a bit drafty since they still had the original windows from then, but the build quality was a lot better than what you see in California.

kube-system 7y ago

I think the Galapagos effect exists anywhere there's enough isolation, whether it be through language, geography, class, or politics. Different cultures have different values, preferences, and priorities. These differences shape all of our opinions, whether it's you visiting the US, or me visiting the EU. Don't assume that your values are as equally important to someone in the US as they are to you, though. Many of our cultural preferences are just that -- preferences -- which all come with an associated set of pros and cons. One person's "crappy hollow-core door" is another persons "ADA accessible, 2018 IRC-compliant, lead-free, contemporary-style door".