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> The quality of their product has ceased to matter. If people will still pay, you would of course cut quality to increase margins. Walmart figured out that qu

> The quality of their product has ceased to matter. If people will still pay, you would of course cut quality to increase margins. Walmart figured out that quality was a secondary concern to the customer, who is quite happy to buy a lawnmower that starts twice for $90 over one that lasts years for $180.

Spooky23 3y ago
Bad example. That $90 mower works as well as a $600 Honda, it just has fewer fancy features. Walmart is the master of the commodity. It’s dumb not to buy many things there. Whole Foods will sell you a gallon of vinegar for $7, Walmart will same the same product probably made at the same place for $2.50.
- jsiepkes 3y ago
  Can you buy a spare part for your $90 mower if it breaks?
  - selestify 3y ago
    Does it matter if the whole thing costs less than the replacement part for a more expensive mower? (Disclaimer: I have no idea about lawnmowers or their costs. I’m engaging based purely on economic decision making.)
    - CapstanRoller 3y ago
      >I’m engaging based purely on economic decision making. Unfortunately the environmental cost of producing disposable junk continues to be externalized and not factored into the economic decision-making spreadsheet.
      - selestify 3y ago
        That’s a fair point. How could we ensure disposal-related externalities are factored into the cost of a product?
        jsiepkes 3y ago
        The EU is working on legislation to take the full product life cycle cost in to account when importing products. It means taking in to account the cost of disposal or recycling in import duties. Which seems fair. I mean why do I have to pay for the disposal of someone's 90 Euro lawn mower? Aside from environmental cost this is clearly also intended to reduce reliance on low-labour cost countries. Since these usually tend to have regimes which might not "philosophically fully align with ours". Western countries went to China and started selling opium. China went to the west and started selling low quality cheap stuff. I think the later might even be more addictive then the former...
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Even if you could you'd probably have to fix it yourself, because the guy in town who used to run a general repair shop retired/died from old age 10 years ago and never managed to find a young guy to take over the business. I knew a guy who used to repair anything from work boots to sewing machines to televisions, but he gave it up in his 80s with nobody to replace him. I've heard this is very common, those kind of handyman repair shops mostly don't exist anymore.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    For the engine, sure. It’s all made by like 2 companies. I use a Murray lawn mower that my dad bought for $40 in 1995 at Walmart. The evil of Walmart isn’t the products, it’s their predatory destruction of competition in rural areas. Once you hit the suburbs, they lose that power.
- GauntletWizard 3y ago
  There's a ton of both. And there's a consumer problem where it's slow and painful and most importantly - expensive in the most valuable commodity, time, to do the research on products. America is built on the assumption that people have agency to make choices. We have been robbed of that time and agency by the deluge of things competing for our attention, but also by the amount of things that we need to think about. There should be economies of scale - it shouldn't matter which toothpaste you buy, because journalism should keep them honest, but it doesn't because there's too many options for that and they're all corrupt.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    There’s always someone who trades convenience for $, is ignorant, or doesn’t really care. I don’t think toothpaste is “corrupt” per se, I think everyone needs toothpaste, and very subtle differences may equate to millions of units of sales.
parker_mountain 3y ago
They're not happy about it. I think a lot of people make that decision under a form of (personal financial) duress. Or put better than I could, by the master of pithy observations: The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
- dooraven 3y ago
  it's just wrong though, the reason why people are rich is that they have more income streams by producing more valuable things, not consuming less. It's a nice idiom to have when you use labour to trade for income and your income doesn't increase by your efforts but the reason why people are rich is more based on their production than their consumption. The analogy makes sense for middle class folk though, but a rich person will stay rich regardless of what they buy as long as their production output is stil desirable.
  - CPLX 3y ago
    The reason people are still rich is the same reason nobody would watch sports if they didn’t reset the score at the end of each game. “Today the New York Yankees will play the Montreal Expos. Our game begins with the Yankees having a score of 79,613 runs and the Expos having a score of 12,177 runs.” If this is how baseball worked how much energy do you think the Yankees would spend recruiting a hot new pitcher versus starting one of the owners kids?
    - Terr_ 3y ago
      I'd like to add that those teams could have always been playing equally-well. This phenomenon happens even in simpler models, where it's easy to see that the eventual "winner" is only there through pure long-term luck, with zero distinguishing merit or intelligence etc.: > If you simulate this economy, a variant of the yard sale model, you will get a remarkable result: after a large number of transactions, one agent ends up as an “oligarch” holding practically all the wealth of the economy, and the other 999 end up with virtually nothing. > It does not matter how much wealth people started with. It does not matter that all the coin flips were absolutely fair. It does not matter that the poorer agent's expected outcome was positive in each transaction, whereas that of the richer agent was negative. Any single agent in this economy could have become the oligarch—in fact, all had equal odds if they began with equal wealth. In that sense, there was equality of opportunity. But only one of them did become the oligarch, and all the others saw their average wealth decrease toward zero as they conducted more and more transactions. To add insult to injury, the lower someone's wealth ranking, the faster the decrease. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...

Spooky23 3y ago

Bad example. That $90 mower works as well as a $600 Honda, it just has fewer fancy features. Walmart is the master of the commodity. It’s dumb not to buy many things there. Whole Foods will sell you a gallon of vinegar for $7, Walmart will same the same product probably made at the same place for $2.50.

jsiepkes 3y ago
Can you buy a spare part for your $90 mower if it breaks?
- selestify 3y ago
  Does it matter if the whole thing costs less than the replacement part for a more expensive mower? (Disclaimer: I have no idea about lawnmowers or their costs. I’m engaging based purely on economic decision making.)
  - CapstanRoller 3y ago
    >I’m engaging based purely on economic decision making. Unfortunately the environmental cost of producing disposable junk continues to be externalized and not factored into the economic decision-making spreadsheet.
    - selestify 3y ago
      That’s a fair point. How could we ensure disposal-related externalities are factored into the cost of a product?
      - jsiepkes 3y ago
        The EU is working on legislation to take the full product life cycle cost in to account when importing products. It means taking in to account the cost of disposal or recycling in import duties. Which seems fair. I mean why do I have to pay for the disposal of someone's 90 Euro lawn mower? Aside from environmental cost this is clearly also intended to reduce reliance on low-labour cost countries. Since these usually tend to have regimes which might not "philosophically fully align with ours". Western countries went to China and started selling opium. China went to the west and started selling low quality cheap stuff. I think the later might even be more addictive then the former...
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Even if you could you'd probably have to fix it yourself, because the guy in town who used to run a general repair shop retired/died from old age 10 years ago and never managed to find a young guy to take over the business. I knew a guy who used to repair anything from work boots to sewing machines to televisions, but he gave it up in his 80s with nobody to replace him. I've heard this is very common, those kind of handyman repair shops mostly don't exist anymore.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  For the engine, sure. It’s all made by like 2 companies. I use a Murray lawn mower that my dad bought for $40 in 1995 at Walmart. The evil of Walmart isn’t the products, it’s their predatory destruction of competition in rural areas. Once you hit the suburbs, they lose that power.
GauntletWizard 3y ago
There's a ton of both. And there's a consumer problem where it's slow and painful and most importantly - expensive in the most valuable commodity, time, to do the research on products. America is built on the assumption that people have agency to make choices. We have been robbed of that time and agency by the deluge of things competing for our attention, but also by the amount of things that we need to think about. There should be economies of scale - it shouldn't matter which toothpaste you buy, because journalism should keep them honest, but it doesn't because there's too many options for that and they're all corrupt.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  There’s always someone who trades convenience for $, is ignorant, or doesn’t really care. I don’t think toothpaste is “corrupt” per se, I think everyone needs toothpaste, and very subtle differences may equate to millions of units of sales.

parker_mountain 3y ago

They're not happy about it. I think a lot of people make that decision under a form of (personal financial) duress. Or put better than I could, by the master of pithy observations: The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

dooraven 3y ago
it's just wrong though, the reason why people are rich is that they have more income streams by producing more valuable things, not consuming less. It's a nice idiom to have when you use labour to trade for income and your income doesn't increase by your efforts but the reason why people are rich is more based on their production than their consumption. The analogy makes sense for middle class folk though, but a rich person will stay rich regardless of what they buy as long as their production output is stil desirable.
- CPLX 3y ago
  The reason people are still rich is the same reason nobody would watch sports if they didn’t reset the score at the end of each game. “Today the New York Yankees will play the Montreal Expos. Our game begins with the Yankees having a score of 79,613 runs and the Expos having a score of 12,177 runs.” If this is how baseball worked how much energy do you think the Yankees would spend recruiting a hot new pitcher versus starting one of the owners kids?
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    I'd like to add that those teams could have always been playing equally-well. This phenomenon happens even in simpler models, where it's easy to see that the eventual "winner" is only there through pure long-term luck, with zero distinguishing merit or intelligence etc.: > If you simulate this economy, a variant of the yard sale model, you will get a remarkable result: after a large number of transactions, one agent ends up as an “oligarch” holding practically all the wealth of the economy, and the other 999 end up with virtually nothing. > It does not matter how much wealth people started with. It does not matter that all the coin flips were absolutely fair. It does not matter that the poorer agent's expected outcome was positive in each transaction, whereas that of the richer agent was negative. Any single agent in this economy could have become the oligarch—in fact, all had equal odds if they began with equal wealth. In that sense, there was equality of opportunity. But only one of them did become the oligarch, and all the others saw their average wealth decrease toward zero as they conducted more and more transactions. To add insult to injury, the lower someone's wealth ranking, the faster the decrease. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...