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Same here. I like to think that it's because I have good taste and know how to find value for money. But I guess this may be why those products ultimately fail

Same here. I like to think that it's because I have good taste and know how to find value for money. But I guess this may be why those products ultimately fail commercially; they're providing too much value for their low price; they can't stay competitive in a monetary system characterized by infinite inflation where there is intense pressure to keep prices down and consumers are forced to buy inferior products (the ones which they can afford) due to their lagging or stagnant wages. Consumer product companies which are not willing to keep degrading the quality of their products over time will inevitably become unprofitable. Unfortunately, charging consumers more is often not an option for them because there simply aren't enough high end premium consumers to make up for their loss of regular consumers... The masses of regular consumers just don't have the money anymore. The elite keep getting richer but they are shrinking in numbers. This shrinking pool of increasingly wealthy individuals is not interested in consumer-grade high quality products; they go straight for the absolute top of the range luxury products and although they spend many times more on a per-product basis, in aggregate, they spend much less than regular consumers would have as a group. Our monetary system systematically erodes total economic value by rewarding unproductive, rent-seeking members of society at the expense of productive members.

catchclose8919 4y ago
Not sure why you're downvoted, but I'm 100% like you. Tbh, lots of non-overpriced products that I really like tend to disappear or be hard to find, so I just learned to settle for (a) a healthy enough cheap enough alternative that is never close to being as enjoyable but "whatever, it works", or (b) an X times more expensive quasi-luxury-class equivalent that has similar qualities and is from a common enough quasi-luxury-class producer with big market presence. But there's a second avenue of though to explore: some people care for the qualities of the product itself, and some might argue that these kinds of people (we?) are a minority, most follow trends, either marketing phabricated or grass-roots word-of-mouth trends, so if a good quality products fails to be trendy, it will have horrible economical performance at least compared to the expectations set for such a product (R&D spent and all), so has higher chances to get pulled off than a bad performing low end products, that will stick around for more, and might by sheer luck "catch a trend" at some point. Personalized production is what will save us in the end I guess, but when it reaches mainstream will also coincide with most people becoming jobless, so I don't know how the quality of goods and life will look like overall then, can't find my crystal ball :) (I guess the utopian scenario would be that anything mass-produced even decent quality is dirt cheap by then and affordable on UBI, and all the made-to-order-by-robots will be the various degrees of luxury - white sneakers? 0.01$ same model but factory made with dotted texture on violet gradient and printed with the face of your cat? 1000.00$, and hand-customized post-factory might be the new mid-class as human labour could become cheap again?)

catchclose8919 4y ago

Not sure why you're downvoted, but I'm 100% like you. Tbh, lots of non-overpriced products that I really like tend to disappear or be hard to find, so I just learned to settle for (a) a healthy enough cheap enough alternative that is never close to being as enjoyable but "whatever, it works", or (b) an X times more expensive quasi-luxury-class equivalent that has similar qualities and is from a common enough quasi-luxury-class producer with big market presence. But there's a second avenue of though to explore: some people care for the qualities of the product itself, and some might argue that these kinds of people (we?) are a minority, most follow trends, either marketing phabricated or grass-roots word-of-mouth trends, so if a good quality products fails to be trendy, it will have horrible economical performance at least compared to the expectations set for such a product (R&D spent and all), so has higher chances to get pulled off than a bad performing low end products, that will stick around for more, and might by sheer luck "catch a trend" at some point. Personalized production is what will save us in the end I guess, but when it reaches mainstream will also coincide with most people becoming jobless, so I don't know how the quality of goods and life will look like overall then, can't find my crystal ball :) (I guess the utopian scenario would be that anything mass-produced even decent quality is dirt cheap by then and affordable on UBI, and all the made-to-order-by-robots will be the various degrees of luxury - white sneakers? 0.01$ same model but factory made with dotted texture on violet gradient and printed with the face of your cat? 1000.00$, and hand-customized post-factory might be the new mid-class as human labour could become cheap again?)