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This is all part of a larger phenomenon I like to call the "Amazon syndrome". The quality standard for products seems to be incredibly low nowadays. I see peop

This is all part of a larger phenomenon I like to call the "Amazon syndrome". The quality standard for products seems to be incredibly low nowadays. I see people happily buying whatever cheap Chinese junk Amazon dropshippers sell, for a "low" price that's usually 4-5x the price of the exact same item on AliExpress. Reviews are overwhelmingly positive because most people don't care about actual specs or functionality and give 5 stars as long as it's cheap and it works, even when the product is marked up by the dropshipper and leaves a lot to be desired. Reputable brands that used to make quality products now need to compete on price in a sea of "good enough" garbage, and many of them choose to do so by outsourcing manufacturing to the same Chinese factories that make the no-name stuff. Midrange products disappeared entirely and now the choice is between disposable landfill and ridiculously expensive high-end items. As someonce in a Reddit thread (?) once said: "The product that retails for $500 costs $5 more to manufacture than the low-end equivalent that sells for $20. If you try to find a middle ground and spend $100, you end up with the $20 product in a nice box."

southerntofu 5y ago
> Reputable brands that used to make quality products now need to compete on price I don't think it's just that. Many people (like myself) stopped buying "reputable" brands because they have betrayed their reputation. Nowadays when buying electromechanic devices even when putting 10x the price i have no clue if it's going to last more than 2 years (minimum warranty in EU) and that's a fucking awful problem. In my view, we need 20+ years warranty (minimum, i personally would argue for 50+) on all products mandated by law, then we can start to see some improvement. This is a public policy problem and as much as i hate the EU institutions they are the only entity i know doing anything about this very serious problem creating tons of waste/pollution.
- b112 5y ago
  Quebec, a province in Canada, passed a law a few years back. Essentially, the language states that the product must last "a reasonable period of time" for its usage case. This is the new province wide, legislated warranty. Buy a washer, are a single man, use it once a week? It breaks in 15 years? Covered. Are a family of 8, wash 2x daily, it breaks after manufacture's stated warranty? Probably, not covered. This helps, because it stops parts that are designed to fail due to time, instead of usage, from destroying the product. There are a few government agencies which will help you with this too, instead of going to court, by merely a form to fill out.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > Are a family of 8, wash 2x daily, it breaks after manufacture's stated warranty? Probably, not covered. That sounds fair, until it's not. It's perfectly normal that a washer as a whole fails after 15 years: the thing is the belt is the only part that should fail and it should be easy to replace. Like with IT parts, manufacturers go to great lengths to ensure parts are incompatible with one another and hard to replace. Most electro-mechanic devices i've seen fail in the past two/three decades were due to electronics: heater thermostat (not the IoT kind, the dumb kind), washing machine program selector (also dumb kind), etc. Likewise in auto industry it was reported that most vehicles being recalled in the past years in USA were due to electronics failing, not mechanics. I personally find that outrageous and bet everyone would be better off if consumer products had standard bodies mandating use of specific interchangeable parts (like we have for electric/USB sockets or lightbulbs), and if it was illegal to sell hard-to-repair products (no glue breaking the device when you tear it apart). Mandating a >20y warranty and duty of available spare parts is in my view the path of least effort for regulators: it will significantly raise the overall price of pushing out new incompatible models. Manufacturers would only release a device once every decade once they have achieved some significant efficiency/usability gains, instead of releasing parts-incompatible new designs for bad products every month just to profit. If you add in some standards regulations dictating interoperable formats for specific parts, that would start to look like an eco-friendly user-benefiting regulation. Of course amateur industry like Pine64 needs to be exempt from such regulations to allow for innovation, but customer devices are a currently a nightmare destroying our planets and ruining our lives and wallets. I applaud Quebec for taking those steps, but they simply won't cut it. PS: How is IoT even legal? In 99% of cases, it introduces unnecessary complexity and fragility, and in most cases has glaring security concerns.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      "It was illegal to sell hard-to-repair products (no glue breaking the device when you tear it apart)." To please the 'mah free market' types, we shouldn't make it illegal - we should ship broken good back to the manufacturer and have them disasemble the device into pristine materials for perfect recylcing. Breach of recycling laws shiould be a criminal offence - if I litter on the streets, I can literally go to jail, so why is a company above the law in this regard? (and so many others) It will be so expensive to do, the effect will be the same
- Sharlin 5y ago
  Right. More than ever you’re just paying for the brand, the quality is just as bad (or inconsistent) as the equivalent H&M selection.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  For most consumer appliances, it’s vastly more wasteful and energy intensive to run them for 20 years than to replace them at ten. That’s true for cars, refrigerators, washing machines, and obviously IT. That’s because energy efficiency does tend to improve. The lack of appliances that last this long is itself a result of better production: if you have some large number of components, each one must have a 50 year expected lifetime if you want a chance for the machine to work for even a decade. It’s improvements in precision and knowledge of materials that tightened down the variability for individual components, making it possible to construct something that is likely to survive the decade, then see everything failing at around the same time. Cutting down on over-provisioning in this manner obviously saves resources and costs, as well.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > For most consumer appliances, it’s vastly more wasteful and energy intensive to run them for 20 years than to replace them at ten. That might be true in terms of CO2 and energy efficiency, although the only sources i've found on the topic gave very opposite results. But no study that i know of accounts for pollution (waste water and polluted surroundings of extraction sites, refinement sites, assembly sites, and "recycling" sites) so i'm tempted to argue that anything we don't manufacture is better for the environment than better efficiency. > The lack of appliances that last this long is itself a result of better production: if you have some large number of components, each one must have a 50 year expected lifetime if you want a chance for the machine to work for even a decade. I strongly disagree with this interpretation. First, because industry routinely employs bad parts and bad design on purpose (planned obsolescence, eg. televisions placing heat-sensitive capacitors near heat sources). But also because an individual part failing is in my view OK as long as this part is standard and easy to source. There are some environmental/logistic concerns if you want to repair old devices given the gazillion incompatible spare parts they each use. But if they all used standard parts, we could and should have repair shops run as a free public service to avoid throwing stuff away. This in itself would do more for the environment than any "green new deal" would ever do.
    - KarlKemp 5y ago
- FredPret 5y ago
  I’ve lost faith in the concept of brands. They’ve almost all been MBA’ed. Hopefully the wheel will turn soon and product people will rule the roost once again. We need some MBA types as well, but there needs to be balance in the force.
  - Mordisquitos 5y ago
    > I’ve lost faith in the concept of brands. They’ve almost all been MBA’ed. This is the first time that I've seen the term "MBA" being verbed (at least with that meaning) and yet I understand exactly what you mean and I fully agree with you. Congratulations if you coined this usage, it's a great way of expressing something for which I was missing a word.
    - mechanical_bear 5y ago
      I’ve heard it used in conversation previously, fwiw.
    - ericmay 5y ago
      It’s one of the popular tropes that’s repeated here and people use it as a lazy way of assigning blame for a phenomenon they do not understand whatsoever. Something bad happened? Couldn’t have possibly had a good reason for it, must be those MBA types. When Apple (as an example) turns around and produces groundbreaking chips and fantastic computers at an affordable price nobody gives Mr. MBA (Fuqua) Tim Cook credit for business decisions and leadership that enable this. I’d recommend avoiding this lazy intellectual path because it’s not only incorrect in this context, it perverts your thinking in other contexts as well.
      - FredPret 5y ago
        I would not be so quick to regard this as lazy thinking. It's merely shorthand for this idea: product people produce value, "MBA's" turn value into money. Obviously we need both sides. Tim Cook is an Industrial Engineer with an MBA - a perfect combination. Apple is actually a great example of a company that produces a lot of value and also captures it in the form of dollars. From this point of view, to be "MBA'ed" is to focus on profit while forgetting about producing value. This then waters down brands that were established on the bedrock of value produced by product people.
- gingerlime 5y ago
  There's already a law that covers it. IANAL but my here's my understanding of things: When you buy something in the UK/Europe, anything really, it needs to meet 3 criteria[0]: 1. Fit for purpose: i.e. if it says "running shoes", then shoes should be suitable for running. If you use them to hammer nails, then it's on you. 2. As described: match the description, model number, etc 3. Satisfactory quality: this is the key ... and it depends on the product, but generally it relies on common sense. i.e. if you bought a washing machine for 2000EUR, you can expect it to last, let's say, 20 years of regular family use... If you bought a 2nd hand washing machine for 50EUR, probably can't expect it to last more than a year... The problem is not with the law, but generally speaking, companies don't give a toss. Nobody's going to fine them... And worse, consumers are easily misled by warranty periods and just don't expect the protection. Even if they paid 2000EUR for a washing machine and it failed after 2 years, they are more likely to just get a new one. Even if legally they can require the retailer (not even the manufacturer) to replace or repair it because the product wasn't of sufficient quality. The burden of proof is usually on the consumer though, which kinda makes it harder though. [0] https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/getting-help-and-advice/consumer-rights/consumer-rights-what-you-need-to-know https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/getting-help-and-advice/co...
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Yup. Why spend 2x more for a washer when it will crap out at the same rate?
- chrischen 5y ago
  They also need to start mandating transferrable warranties. There’s no sensible reason to block transfers except to suppress the used market.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    I'm not a lawyer, but is non-transferrable warranties even a thing? I've never had a single product where they asked me for identity to use the warranty. At worst, they asked for a proof of purchase, which some second-hand sellers are happy to provide when they still have it. Also worth noting: hardware manufacturers have found a better option to suppress the second hand market. Hardware locking (iCloud/Knox lock) is terribly efficient at this, essentially turning perfectly good devices into bricks. It's even "better" because they can advertise it as a security feature for gullible users who don't realize Apple/Samsung still has the master key and there's an entire corrupt grey market of company workers getting money under the table to defeat the lock in almost every phone store across the planet...
    - chrischen 5y ago
      Yes, many product segments have non-transferrable warranties. NVIDIA warranties are non-transferrable, as are Herman Miller warranties. That being said, you can have the original purchaser make the claim for you or you can pose as the original purchaser/doctor the receipts, but it creates a big hurdle for secondary markets. I don't understand what you mean by iCloud/Knox lock. As far as iCloud lock is concerned, it is only for stolen devices in which the owner did not deactivate their own icloud account. Where are your sources for gray market of company workers defeating the lock? I'd imagine if an Apple activation lock is bypassed it would have to do with resetting the password on the iCloud account.
- ghaff 5y ago
  One of the big issues in clothing and related is mostly market dynamics. The market used to be full of relatively niche brands (and stores) that sold genuinely differentiated, often higher quality, and typically somewhat more expensive clothing etc. Over time, a lot of those companies got bought out by conglomerates and started selling the same Asian-made stuff as everyone else (for the most part; there can still be differences. Premium brands often manufacture in Asia as well). It’s harder to charge a big premium for random clothing and soft goods. To pick a random example Lands’ End is a case in point.
jotm 5y ago
What products are you talking about? From my experience over the past 15 years, most electronics that were high quality and high price remained the same, however the cheaper alternatives have gone up in quality by a lot. Imo, the midrange is still there. However the number of manufacturers have gone way up and it's really hard to find something that's quality. You can't just look at the brand name, which seems to have become a worthless concept, companies will sell their name (and long term reputation) for pennies. You need to look at the hardware itself and know some basics about what makes it good and what not. The vast majority of people can't do that. Over time I found myself thinking "I gotta get a new one" more often than "I need to fix it" because there's an abundance of stuff.
- eropple 5y ago
  One of the tricky things is that the best of those low and midrange suppliers, particularly in the electronics space, are selling things that look visually similar to the cheap stuff. They're just better. For example, if you go to buy a microphone arm, you're going to see three segments. There's the bottom tier of exposed hinges and tension springs, then there's the two-bar articulating models, and then at the top there's the unibody hinged ones from Blue, Rode, etc. which are surely nice but also a lot more expensive for not much more. Companies like Samson and Neewer sell into the bottom two categories. But even if you buy the bottom-tier mic arms, if you buy one from Neewer and buy one from another brand you'll immediately see that they look the same but the Neewer one works a lot better: better tension to hold the mic in place, ever-so-slightly better (and more pleasant to use) tightening knobs, that sort of thing. They can't be spending more than an extra fifty cents on the product but it works so much better that I preferentially buy from those brands even though it's still "cheap". And then you get into those midrange models, which for my money compete very favorably with the expensive stuff while being half the cost.
  - to11mtm 5y ago
    Neewer also sells camera type stuff and I'd agree with your overall assessment. It looks like the really cheap stuff but tends to be 'not bad' as far as fit/finish (as you point out, it's the knobs! Amazing what a (possibly metaphorical) extra decimal point of precision can get you.
endisneigh 5y ago
What's an example of something on Amazon that's 4-5x cheaper shipped on Aliexpress?
- b112 5y ago
  Pretty much everything sold on amazon, which isn't name brand. (Chinese products with made up brand names don't count.)
  - drcongo 5y ago
    I was trying to buy a Flexi brand dog lead on Amazon yesterday, and despite my search including the brand name, and me filtering the results by brand "Flexi", more than half the results were sponsored listings for Chinese knockoffs that people are drop-shipping from Ali. I gave up and went to a shop.
    - alan-hn 5y ago
      How do you know they were dropshipped from alirxpress
    - lozenge 5y ago
      If it can deliver in 2 days, it's not "drop shipping".
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Show me a single example. Not to mention aliexpress shipping usually takes about 6-8 weeks. There are no items where it’s 5 times as much for the same item with the same speed to your door. I buy things in aliexpress all the time. You’re paying in unavailability. Much of the time orders are actually batched
    - chii 5y ago
      Not quite 5x, but if you try to buy a HDMI cable off aliexpress, it takes about 2 months to get here. It's about half the price of similar length cable on amazon.
Fatnino 5y ago
They aren't quite dropshippers. Aliexpress has something like 9 weeks wait for shipping. I happily pay 4-5x the price for a $1 part because I'll actually have it in hand this week rather than 2 months from now.
- generj 5y ago
  They will ship much faster if you pay for e.g. DHL but this is cost prohibitive for most people unless ordering in bulk. But yes, it’s totally rational to pay a premium to get parts in 2 days versus 5 weeks.
deleted 5y ago
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traceroute66 5y ago
> This is all part of a larger phenomenon I like to call the "Amazon syndrome". Say what you like about Amazon, but their no-quibble returns policy is second to none, even in places like Europe that have high-levels of consumer protection enshrined in law. From my own personal experience: Amazon: Bought an IT component on Amazon (sold by third-party, not "sold by Amazon"). Item that arrived was not as described (lower spec than promised). Filed a return on Amazon, Amazon paid for the return shipment and refunded me as soon as the courier scanned the collection barcode. Third-party: Bought a new PC from a reputable reseller (with whom I'd dealt with before occasionally over the years). PC arrived, hardware was OK but the BIOS was completely FUBAR (corrupted beyond salvage). Requested a return and a refund. Despite consumer law being strong in my country, the seller made it so painful and was dragging out the process so much (no doubt so they could push me past the consumer law deadline) that I gave up. I now have an expensive doorstop that is completely unusable. I still buy from third-parties, but generally only low-risk stuff or higher-risk if I've got recent prior really good experience (or if there's no choice, e.g. things that have to be bought from "authorised resellers"). Otherwise for random stuff, if Amazon stock it and its not outrageously above the going price, I'll just buy it on Amazon for the peace of mind.
- emteycz 5y ago
  Buy from large EU eshops like Alza (if it operates wherever you are, or the local alternative) - much better experience even than Amazon, in all things considered.
- CptFribble 5y ago
  Amazon judges how quickly/whether to issue a return based on an algorithm weighted by your lifetime total value. If you shop a lot on Amazon, occasionally returning an item will be 0 hassle for you. If you don't shop on Amazon that often and get unlucky, they will hassle you about the return (you can google this for confirmation). Prime customers are also generally treated much better, obviously because they have a much higher LTV. That third-party seller probably gave you so much grief about the return because their sales volume is much lower, so individual returns cost them a much more significant % of their revenue. Also, easy returns doesn't mean the items are being reused/the process is good for the environment. Industry surveys show around 25% of returns wind up in a landfill, and this number varies greatly based on what the item is - clothes are thrown away much more often. Basically, Amazon and other high-volume low-quality retailers simply sell so many products at so high a markup that they can absorb the cost of throwing away some XX% of the products that get returned as a cost of doing business.
User23 5y ago
> This is all part of a larger phenomenon I like to call the "Amazon syndrome". You can validly blame Amazon for a lot of things, but the embrace of Chinese Chabuduo culture isn’t one of them. That is an international trade issue, which is to say a political responsibility of the federal government in the USA and evidently the EU in Europe.
jcampbell1 5y ago
The last thing I bought that fits this description was a new pair of ski goggles. The cheap $20 Chinese ones work great as far as I can tell. The local stores start at around $150. Am I missing something? I had a lot of fun with the $130 of easy money.
- Shaanie 5y ago
  There's some things that the $150 goggles might have that the cheap ones don't (anti-fogging, UV protection, durability etc). Or they're just marked up, who knows.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Presumably the brand name goggles are made by the same brands that sell $150 sunglasses. Are there differences? Probably. But they’ll probably also still fog at least based on my past experience. Maybe they’re better these days.
- aembleton 5y ago
  How do you know the Chinese ones provide you with UV protection? Eyewear is one of the things I won't buy online because I don't trust the online stores to check that their stock meets regulations.
yc-kraln 5y ago
What you are describing is what has happend to almost all markets which are primarily price sensitive over time; you end up with a bifurcation of quality such that there isn't a "middle" anomoyre. Another example is groceries (specifically, meat). You used to have almost an even distribution of meat quality, from the cheapest garbage, to fairly affordable and quality, up to the extremely high quality pampered stuff. You used to have independent butcher shops all over the place who could survive in the middle. Then, people got price concious and super markets sprang up, putting huge price pressure. Ultimately, in many areas you now only have one option, which is the cheapest possible meat produced in the worst possible conditions (slaughtered in the US, shipped to China for processing, shipped back. Really.), and maybe if you're lucky, you have access to extremely expensive gourmet meats costing 20X+ as much, with nearly nothing in-between.
- yc-kraln 5y ago
  Adding an example to this after reading down the front page more: Smart TVs are the same; you either get garbage which shows you ads, or you have to pay 10x more for a normal panel.
zihotki 5y ago
To be fair, at least in EU, there are many cases from my experience when buying the same item from Amazon was actually cheaper than on Aliexpress. Plus 1-2 days shipping. It's always worth to check the item in several places.

southerntofu 5y ago

> Reputable brands that used to make quality products now need to compete on price I don't think it's just that. Many people (like myself) stopped buying "reputable" brands because they have betrayed their reputation. Nowadays when buying electromechanic devices even when putting 10x the price i have no clue if it's going to last more than 2 years (minimum warranty in EU) and that's a fucking awful problem. In my view, we need 20+ years warranty (minimum, i personally would argue for 50+) on all products mandated by law, then we can start to see some improvement. This is a public policy problem and as much as i hate the EU institutions they are the only entity i know doing anything about this very serious problem creating tons of waste/pollution.

b112 5y ago
Quebec, a province in Canada, passed a law a few years back. Essentially, the language states that the product must last "a reasonable period of time" for its usage case. This is the new province wide, legislated warranty. Buy a washer, are a single man, use it once a week? It breaks in 15 years? Covered. Are a family of 8, wash 2x daily, it breaks after manufacture's stated warranty? Probably, not covered. This helps, because it stops parts that are designed to fail due to time, instead of usage, from destroying the product. There are a few government agencies which will help you with this too, instead of going to court, by merely a form to fill out.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > Are a family of 8, wash 2x daily, it breaks after manufacture's stated warranty? Probably, not covered. That sounds fair, until it's not. It's perfectly normal that a washer as a whole fails after 15 years: the thing is the belt is the only part that should fail and it should be easy to replace. Like with IT parts, manufacturers go to great lengths to ensure parts are incompatible with one another and hard to replace. Most electro-mechanic devices i've seen fail in the past two/three decades were due to electronics: heater thermostat (not the IoT kind, the dumb kind), washing machine program selector (also dumb kind), etc. Likewise in auto industry it was reported that most vehicles being recalled in the past years in USA were due to electronics failing, not mechanics. I personally find that outrageous and bet everyone would be better off if consumer products had standard bodies mandating use of specific interchangeable parts (like we have for electric/USB sockets or lightbulbs), and if it was illegal to sell hard-to-repair products (no glue breaking the device when you tear it apart). Mandating a >20y warranty and duty of available spare parts is in my view the path of least effort for regulators: it will significantly raise the overall price of pushing out new incompatible models. Manufacturers would only release a device once every decade once they have achieved some significant efficiency/usability gains, instead of releasing parts-incompatible new designs for bad products every month just to profit. If you add in some standards regulations dictating interoperable formats for specific parts, that would start to look like an eco-friendly user-benefiting regulation. Of course amateur industry like Pine64 needs to be exempt from such regulations to allow for innovation, but customer devices are a currently a nightmare destroying our planets and ruining our lives and wallets. I applaud Quebec for taking those steps, but they simply won't cut it. PS: How is IoT even legal? In 99% of cases, it introduces unnecessary complexity and fragility, and in most cases has glaring security concerns.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "It was illegal to sell hard-to-repair products (no glue breaking the device when you tear it apart)." To please the 'mah free market' types, we shouldn't make it illegal - we should ship broken good back to the manufacturer and have them disasemble the device into pristine materials for perfect recylcing. Breach of recycling laws shiould be a criminal offence - if I litter on the streets, I can literally go to jail, so why is a company above the law in this regard? (and so many others) It will be so expensive to do, the effect will be the same
Sharlin 5y ago
Right. More than ever you’re just paying for the brand, the quality is just as bad (or inconsistent) as the equivalent H&M selection.
KarlKemp 5y ago
For most consumer appliances, it’s vastly more wasteful and energy intensive to run them for 20 years than to replace them at ten. That’s true for cars, refrigerators, washing machines, and obviously IT. That’s because energy efficiency does tend to improve. The lack of appliances that last this long is itself a result of better production: if you have some large number of components, each one must have a 50 year expected lifetime if you want a chance for the machine to work for even a decade. It’s improvements in precision and knowledge of materials that tightened down the variability for individual components, making it possible to construct something that is likely to survive the decade, then see everything failing at around the same time. Cutting down on over-provisioning in this manner obviously saves resources and costs, as well.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > For most consumer appliances, it’s vastly more wasteful and energy intensive to run them for 20 years than to replace them at ten. That might be true in terms of CO2 and energy efficiency, although the only sources i've found on the topic gave very opposite results. But no study that i know of accounts for pollution (waste water and polluted surroundings of extraction sites, refinement sites, assembly sites, and "recycling" sites) so i'm tempted to argue that anything we don't manufacture is better for the environment than better efficiency. > The lack of appliances that last this long is itself a result of better production: if you have some large number of components, each one must have a 50 year expected lifetime if you want a chance for the machine to work for even a decade. I strongly disagree with this interpretation. First, because industry routinely employs bad parts and bad design on purpose (planned obsolescence, eg. televisions placing heat-sensitive capacitors near heat sources). But also because an individual part failing is in my view OK as long as this part is standard and easy to source. There are some environmental/logistic concerns if you want to repair old devices given the gazillion incompatible spare parts they each use. But if they all used standard parts, we could and should have repair shops run as a free public service to avoid throwing stuff away. This in itself would do more for the environment than any "green new deal" would ever do.
  - KarlKemp 5y ago
FredPret 5y ago
I’ve lost faith in the concept of brands. They’ve almost all been MBA’ed. Hopefully the wheel will turn soon and product people will rule the roost once again. We need some MBA types as well, but there needs to be balance in the force.
- Mordisquitos 5y ago
  > I’ve lost faith in the concept of brands. They’ve almost all been MBA’ed. This is the first time that I've seen the term "MBA" being verbed (at least with that meaning) and yet I understand exactly what you mean and I fully agree with you. Congratulations if you coined this usage, it's a great way of expressing something for which I was missing a word.
  - mechanical_bear 5y ago
    I’ve heard it used in conversation previously, fwiw.
  - ericmay 5y ago
    It’s one of the popular tropes that’s repeated here and people use it as a lazy way of assigning blame for a phenomenon they do not understand whatsoever. Something bad happened? Couldn’t have possibly had a good reason for it, must be those MBA types. When Apple (as an example) turns around and produces groundbreaking chips and fantastic computers at an affordable price nobody gives Mr. MBA (Fuqua) Tim Cook credit for business decisions and leadership that enable this. I’d recommend avoiding this lazy intellectual path because it’s not only incorrect in this context, it perverts your thinking in other contexts as well.
    - FredPret 5y ago
      I would not be so quick to regard this as lazy thinking. It's merely shorthand for this idea: product people produce value, "MBA's" turn value into money. Obviously we need both sides. Tim Cook is an Industrial Engineer with an MBA - a perfect combination. Apple is actually a great example of a company that produces a lot of value and also captures it in the form of dollars. From this point of view, to be "MBA'ed" is to focus on profit while forgetting about producing value. This then waters down brands that were established on the bedrock of value produced by product people.
gingerlime 5y ago
There's already a law that covers it. IANAL but my here's my understanding of things: When you buy something in the UK/Europe, anything really, it needs to meet 3 criteria[0]: 1. Fit for purpose: i.e. if it says "running shoes", then shoes should be suitable for running. If you use them to hammer nails, then it's on you. 2. As described: match the description, model number, etc 3. Satisfactory quality: this is the key ... and it depends on the product, but generally it relies on common sense. i.e. if you bought a washing machine for 2000EUR, you can expect it to last, let's say, 20 years of regular family use... If you bought a 2nd hand washing machine for 50EUR, probably can't expect it to last more than a year... The problem is not with the law, but generally speaking, companies don't give a toss. Nobody's going to fine them... And worse, consumers are easily misled by warranty periods and just don't expect the protection. Even if they paid 2000EUR for a washing machine and it failed after 2 years, they are more likely to just get a new one. Even if legally they can require the retailer (not even the manufacturer) to replace or repair it because the product wasn't of sufficient quality. The burden of proof is usually on the consumer though, which kinda makes it harder though. [0] https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/getting-help-and-advice/consumer-rights/consumer-rights-what-you-need-to-know https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/getting-help-and-advice/co...
UncleMeat 5y ago
Yup. Why spend 2x more for a washer when it will crap out at the same rate?
chrischen 5y ago
They also need to start mandating transferrable warranties. There’s no sensible reason to block transfers except to suppress the used market.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  I'm not a lawyer, but is non-transferrable warranties even a thing? I've never had a single product where they asked me for identity to use the warranty. At worst, they asked for a proof of purchase, which some second-hand sellers are happy to provide when they still have it. Also worth noting: hardware manufacturers have found a better option to suppress the second hand market. Hardware locking (iCloud/Knox lock) is terribly efficient at this, essentially turning perfectly good devices into bricks. It's even "better" because they can advertise it as a security feature for gullible users who don't realize Apple/Samsung still has the master key and there's an entire corrupt grey market of company workers getting money under the table to defeat the lock in almost every phone store across the planet...
  - chrischen 5y ago
    Yes, many product segments have non-transferrable warranties. NVIDIA warranties are non-transferrable, as are Herman Miller warranties. That being said, you can have the original purchaser make the claim for you or you can pose as the original purchaser/doctor the receipts, but it creates a big hurdle for secondary markets. I don't understand what you mean by iCloud/Knox lock. As far as iCloud lock is concerned, it is only for stolen devices in which the owner did not deactivate their own icloud account. Where are your sources for gray market of company workers defeating the lock? I'd imagine if an Apple activation lock is bypassed it would have to do with resetting the password on the iCloud account.
ghaff 5y ago
One of the big issues in clothing and related is mostly market dynamics. The market used to be full of relatively niche brands (and stores) that sold genuinely differentiated, often higher quality, and typically somewhat more expensive clothing etc. Over time, a lot of those companies got bought out by conglomerates and started selling the same Asian-made stuff as everyone else (for the most part; there can still be differences. Premium brands often manufacture in Asia as well). It’s harder to charge a big premium for random clothing and soft goods. To pick a random example Lands’ End is a case in point.

jotm 5y ago

What products are you talking about? From my experience over the past 15 years, most electronics that were high quality and high price remained the same, however the cheaper alternatives have gone up in quality by a lot. Imo, the midrange is still there. However the number of manufacturers have gone way up and it's really hard to find something that's quality. You can't just look at the brand name, which seems to have become a worthless concept, companies will sell their name (and long term reputation) for pennies. You need to look at the hardware itself and know some basics about what makes it good and what not. The vast majority of people can't do that. Over time I found myself thinking "I gotta get a new one" more often than "I need to fix it" because there's an abundance of stuff.

eropple 5y ago
One of the tricky things is that the best of those low and midrange suppliers, particularly in the electronics space, are selling things that look visually similar to the cheap stuff. They're just better. For example, if you go to buy a microphone arm, you're going to see three segments. There's the bottom tier of exposed hinges and tension springs, then there's the two-bar articulating models, and then at the top there's the unibody hinged ones from Blue, Rode, etc. which are surely nice but also a lot more expensive for not much more. Companies like Samson and Neewer sell into the bottom two categories. But even if you buy the bottom-tier mic arms, if you buy one from Neewer and buy one from another brand you'll immediately see that they look the same but the Neewer one works a lot better: better tension to hold the mic in place, ever-so-slightly better (and more pleasant to use) tightening knobs, that sort of thing. They can't be spending more than an extra fifty cents on the product but it works so much better that I preferentially buy from those brands even though it's still "cheap". And then you get into those midrange models, which for my money compete very favorably with the expensive stuff while being half the cost.
- to11mtm 5y ago
  Neewer also sells camera type stuff and I'd agree with your overall assessment. It looks like the really cheap stuff but tends to be 'not bad' as far as fit/finish (as you point out, it's the knobs! Amazing what a (possibly metaphorical) extra decimal point of precision can get you.

endisneigh 5y ago

What's an example of something on Amazon that's 4-5x cheaper shipped on Aliexpress?

b112 5y ago
Pretty much everything sold on amazon, which isn't name brand. (Chinese products with made up brand names don't count.)
- drcongo 5y ago
  I was trying to buy a Flexi brand dog lead on Amazon yesterday, and despite my search including the brand name, and me filtering the results by brand "Flexi", more than half the results were sponsored listings for Chinese knockoffs that people are drop-shipping from Ali. I gave up and went to a shop.
  - alan-hn 5y ago
    How do you know they were dropshipped from alirxpress
  - lozenge 5y ago
    If it can deliver in 2 days, it's not "drop shipping".
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Show me a single example. Not to mention aliexpress shipping usually takes about 6-8 weeks. There are no items where it’s 5 times as much for the same item with the same speed to your door. I buy things in aliexpress all the time. You’re paying in unavailability. Much of the time orders are actually batched
  - chii 5y ago
    Not quite 5x, but if you try to buy a HDMI cable off aliexpress, it takes about 2 months to get here. It's about half the price of similar length cable on amazon.

Fatnino 5y ago

They aren't quite dropshippers. Aliexpress has something like 9 weeks wait for shipping. I happily pay 4-5x the price for a $1 part because I'll actually have it in hand this week rather than 2 months from now.

generj 5y ago
They will ship much faster if you pay for e.g. DHL but this is cost prohibitive for most people unless ordering in bulk. But yes, it’s totally rational to pay a premium to get parts in 2 days versus 5 weeks.

deleted 5y ago

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traceroute66 5y ago

> This is all part of a larger phenomenon I like to call the "Amazon syndrome". Say what you like about Amazon, but their no-quibble returns policy is second to none, even in places like Europe that have high-levels of consumer protection enshrined in law. From my own personal experience: Amazon: Bought an IT component on Amazon (sold by third-party, not "sold by Amazon"). Item that arrived was not as described (lower spec than promised). Filed a return on Amazon, Amazon paid for the return shipment and refunded me as soon as the courier scanned the collection barcode. Third-party: Bought a new PC from a reputable reseller (with whom I'd dealt with before occasionally over the years). PC arrived, hardware was OK but the BIOS was completely FUBAR (corrupted beyond salvage). Requested a return and a refund. Despite consumer law being strong in my country, the seller made it so painful and was dragging out the process so much (no doubt so they could push me past the consumer law deadline) that I gave up. I now have an expensive doorstop that is completely unusable. I still buy from third-parties, but generally only low-risk stuff or higher-risk if I've got recent prior really good experience (or if there's no choice, e.g. things that have to be bought from "authorised resellers"). Otherwise for random stuff, if Amazon stock it and its not outrageously above the going price, I'll just buy it on Amazon for the peace of mind.

emteycz 5y ago
Buy from large EU eshops like Alza (if it operates wherever you are, or the local alternative) - much better experience even than Amazon, in all things considered.
CptFribble 5y ago
Amazon judges how quickly/whether to issue a return based on an algorithm weighted by your lifetime total value. If you shop a lot on Amazon, occasionally returning an item will be 0 hassle for you. If you don't shop on Amazon that often and get unlucky, they will hassle you about the return (you can google this for confirmation). Prime customers are also generally treated much better, obviously because they have a much higher LTV. That third-party seller probably gave you so much grief about the return because their sales volume is much lower, so individual returns cost them a much more significant % of their revenue. Also, easy returns doesn't mean the items are being reused/the process is good for the environment. Industry surveys show around 25% of returns wind up in a landfill, and this number varies greatly based on what the item is - clothes are thrown away much more often. Basically, Amazon and other high-volume low-quality retailers simply sell so many products at so high a markup that they can absorb the cost of throwing away some XX% of the products that get returned as a cost of doing business.

User23 5y ago

> This is all part of a larger phenomenon I like to call the "Amazon syndrome". You can validly blame Amazon for a lot of things, but the embrace of Chinese Chabuduo culture isn’t one of them. That is an international trade issue, which is to say a political responsibility of the federal government in the USA and evidently the EU in Europe.

jcampbell1 5y ago

The last thing I bought that fits this description was a new pair of ski goggles. The cheap $20 Chinese ones work great as far as I can tell. The local stores start at around $150. Am I missing something? I had a lot of fun with the $130 of easy money.

Shaanie 5y ago
There's some things that the $150 goggles might have that the cheap ones don't (anti-fogging, UV protection, durability etc). Or they're just marked up, who knows.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Presumably the brand name goggles are made by the same brands that sell $150 sunglasses. Are there differences? Probably. But they’ll probably also still fog at least based on my past experience. Maybe they’re better these days.
aembleton 5y ago
How do you know the Chinese ones provide you with UV protection? Eyewear is one of the things I won't buy online because I don't trust the online stores to check that their stock meets regulations.

yc-kraln 5y ago

What you are describing is what has happend to almost all markets which are primarily price sensitive over time; you end up with a bifurcation of quality such that there isn't a "middle" anomoyre. Another example is groceries (specifically, meat). You used to have almost an even distribution of meat quality, from the cheapest garbage, to fairly affordable and quality, up to the extremely high quality pampered stuff. You used to have independent butcher shops all over the place who could survive in the middle. Then, people got price concious and super markets sprang up, putting huge price pressure. Ultimately, in many areas you now only have one option, which is the cheapest possible meat produced in the worst possible conditions (slaughtered in the US, shipped to China for processing, shipped back. Really.), and maybe if you're lucky, you have access to extremely expensive gourmet meats costing 20X+ as much, with nearly nothing in-between.

yc-kraln 5y ago
Adding an example to this after reading down the front page more: Smart TVs are the same; you either get garbage which shows you ads, or you have to pay 10x more for a normal panel.

zihotki 5y ago

To be fair, at least in EU, there are many cases from my experience when buying the same item from Amazon was actually cheaper than on Aliexpress. Plus 1-2 days shipping. It's always worth to check the item in several places.