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The cited research that buyers use price as an indicator of quality was from 1985. Does that hold true these days? My gut suspects not? Perhaps in the early a

The cited research that buyers use price as an indicator of quality was from 1985. Does that hold true these days? My gut suspects not? Perhaps in the early and mid 80s you could still buy quality products, but now is seems 99% of things are just mass-produced where ever it is cheapest. People are conditioned on Amazon to find the same product from a jumble-of-letter manufacturer who is selling the exact same thing at the lowest price. I do not trust that if I buy a "known brand" for a product that it is going to be any different from a similar same no-name thing that is 20-30% of the price (...and very possibly built in the same factory). If it's all low quality crap (which a lot of the time it is) then you may as well get the cheapest one Sadly you need to rely on things like YouTube videos to actually get any kind of idea on if the item is trash or not, and even then there is the risk of paid-reviews so you need to take multiple sources into account, who they are, trust levels etc. it's sad. Either that or - and I know this is madness - go to a physical store and inspect the goods before you buy it. I would argue that the article is correct that quality is often secondary to speed of delivery and cheapness though. Amazon has totally won there.

fragmede 1y ago
If I buy a $100 projector vs a $1,000 one, or a $20 curling iron vs a $200 one, the order of magnitude difference does make for a better product, I find.
- 9dev 1y ago
  Maybe. But what about the Audi vs. Volkswagen? A Ninja blender vs. a KitchenAid? A memory card from SanDisk vs. a no-name brand? A shirt from Fred Perry vs. H&M? And these were brands you probably know. What about the products in niches, where you don’t have experience, or products are sufficiently similar? Do you always know whether a product is more expensive because of the brand, or because it’s objectively better?
  - ekianjo 1y ago
    because car brands belong to very few auto makers, a lot of cars with different names use the same chassis across brands, the same engine, and probably the same electronics as well. so you end up with most of the difference being esthetics these days, at least for cars within roughly the same price range.
- typewithrhythm 1y ago
  I don't think it's the price giving information there though. I can find many projectors being sold in the 1000 range that do not compare to the best in the 100 range. Yes I agree that there are better products for more money, it's just that I have to filter by something else because I can't trust that the price corresponds to performance for any given listing.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    > I can find many projectors being sold in the 1000 range that do not compare to the best in the 100 range. I don't believe you. Link? That extra $900 gets a iot more lumens and portability and CPU and ports and such that the $100 ones I've seen just don't have.
    - typewithrhythm 1y ago
      You are missing the point, if you go and find reliable reviews for each price point, a good product in the 1000 bracket will be better. The point is that if you go to a store or Amazon, you can find crap products at any price point, so much so that you cannot look at the price to get any information about quality.
- CommenterPerson 1y ago
  FYI Consumer Reports' "Best Buy" ratings used to reliably indicate very good quality and low price. The seem to have changed it to "Recommended" and enshittified it.
neom 1y ago
Anchoring still exists and is something people use, price for sure impacts how people view things, if you make 3 price points for your product, say... $20/mth, $200mth and $25000/mth, you can often push people into the middle package more easily, it's called the Goldilocks effect. Pricing and positioning well is a lot of work simply because people for sure still use price as a strange yardstick, and as someone who figures out how to price things and position them for a living, it can be very...frustrating.
dqv 1y ago
> The cited research that buyers use price as an indicator of quality was from 1985. Does that hold true these days? > My gut suspects not? You are correct that price is no longer an indicator of quality. Look at this stick vacuum review, for example: https://vacuumwars.com/vacuum-wars-best-cordless-vacuums/#1 https://vacuumwars.com/vacuum-wars-best-cordless-vacuums/#1 A $374 vacuum ranks at #4 while a $1049 vacuum ranks at #8. That is a HUGE price gap for items that are supposed to be of similar quality. The reason for the gap is irrelevant to this discussion too, because we are talking about the relation between price and quality. And people try to blame the consumer for both sides of the issue. People shrug and say it is the consumer who demands cheaper products and that is why they are of such low quality (despite what you say, which is that price and quality are much less connected than what people selling you things want you to believe), but then when those same consumers initiate returns, people cry foul like the consumer is somehow maliciously buying shit quality products and returning them to spite honest companies who just want to do right by their customers. Look at how this article is written: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/retail-returns-890-billion-problem-rcna183359 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/retail-returns-890-bill... Notice anything in that "Why returns are a big problem" section? A neat rhetorical trick which attempts to get inattentive readers to believe that the bulk of all returns are just people trying on clothes and returning the ones they don't like. Now, if it really were the bulk of all returns, they would have surely mentioned this, because it would buttress their point. They did not, because they can not, because, I have a suspicion that the $890 billion worth of returns is primarily due to reverse/negative demand for shit products. I suspect those return numbers creeping up year over year are consumers getting annoyed with retailers for not curating products in a way that considers quality and longevity. As the featured article mentions, Amazon does mark products as frequently returned, but I am not sure it really helps that much. > Sadly you need to rely on things like YouTube videos to actually get any kind of idea on if the item is trash or not, and even then there is the risk of paid-reviews so you need to take multiple sources into account, who they are, trust levels etc. it's sad. Either that or - and I know this is madness - go to a physical store and inspect the goods before you buy it. And even then, they miss important details, because most reviews only talk about the product in terms of the out-of-box experience. But how good is the product after two years? After four? Even the vacuum review I linked does not really comment on longevity. > I would argue that the article is correct that quality is often secondary to speed of delivery and cheapness though. Amazon has totally won there. I think it is starting to change where people are getting really tired of shit quality and that is going to continue to be reflected in the returns data. Returns do not make customers whole - they do not get a refund for the time they had to spend researching, procuring, and ultimately returning the product. I imagine companies are going to be in for a rude awakening when they have to reverse course and not only increase quality but also decrease the price because no one wants to spend hard-earned money on expensive junk during a recession.

fragmede 1y ago

If I buy a $100 projector vs a $1,000 one, or a $20 curling iron vs a $200 one, the order of magnitude difference does make for a better product, I find.

9dev 1y ago
Maybe. But what about the Audi vs. Volkswagen? A Ninja blender vs. a KitchenAid? A memory card from SanDisk vs. a no-name brand? A shirt from Fred Perry vs. H&M? And these were brands you probably know. What about the products in niches, where you don’t have experience, or products are sufficiently similar? Do you always know whether a product is more expensive because of the brand, or because it’s objectively better?
- ekianjo 1y ago
  because car brands belong to very few auto makers, a lot of cars with different names use the same chassis across brands, the same engine, and probably the same electronics as well. so you end up with most of the difference being esthetics these days, at least for cars within roughly the same price range.
typewithrhythm 1y ago
I don't think it's the price giving information there though. I can find many projectors being sold in the 1000 range that do not compare to the best in the 100 range. Yes I agree that there are better products for more money, it's just that I have to filter by something else because I can't trust that the price corresponds to performance for any given listing.
- fragmede 1y ago
  > I can find many projectors being sold in the 1000 range that do not compare to the best in the 100 range. I don't believe you. Link? That extra $900 gets a iot more lumens and portability and CPU and ports and such that the $100 ones I've seen just don't have.
  - typewithrhythm 1y ago
    You are missing the point, if you go and find reliable reviews for each price point, a good product in the 1000 bracket will be better. The point is that if you go to a store or Amazon, you can find crap products at any price point, so much so that you cannot look at the price to get any information about quality.
CommenterPerson 1y ago
FYI Consumer Reports' "Best Buy" ratings used to reliably indicate very good quality and low price. The seem to have changed it to "Recommended" and enshittified it.

neom 1y ago

Anchoring still exists and is something people use, price for sure impacts how people view things, if you make 3 price points for your product, say... $20/mth, $200mth and $25000/mth, you can often push people into the middle package more easily, it's called the Goldilocks effect. Pricing and positioning well is a lot of work simply because people for sure still use price as a strange yardstick, and as someone who figures out how to price things and position them for a living, it can be very...frustrating.

dqv 1y ago

> The cited research that buyers use price as an indicator of quality was from 1985. Does that hold true these days? > My gut suspects not? You are correct that price is no longer an indicator of quality. Look at this stick vacuum review, for example: https://vacuumwars.com/vacuum-wars-best-cordless-vacuums/#1 https://vacuumwars.com/vacuum-wars-best-cordless-vacuums/#1 A $374 vacuum ranks at #4 while a $1049 vacuum ranks at #8. That is a HUGE price gap for items that are supposed to be of similar quality. The reason for the gap is irrelevant to this discussion too, because we are talking about the relation between price and quality. And people try to blame the consumer for both sides of the issue. People shrug and say it is the consumer who demands cheaper products and that is why they are of such low quality (despite what you say, which is that price and quality are much less connected than what people selling you things want you to believe), but then when those same consumers initiate returns, people cry foul like the consumer is somehow maliciously buying shit quality products and returning them to spite honest companies who just want to do right by their customers. Look at how this article is written: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/retail-returns-890-billion-problem-rcna183359 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/retail-returns-890-bill... Notice anything in that "Why returns are a big problem" section? A neat rhetorical trick which attempts to get inattentive readers to believe that the bulk of all returns are just people trying on clothes and returning the ones they don't like. Now, if it really were the bulk of all returns, they would have surely mentioned this, because it would buttress their point. They did not, because they can not, because, I have a suspicion that the $890 billion worth of returns is primarily due to reverse/negative demand for shit products. I suspect those return numbers creeping up year over year are consumers getting annoyed with retailers for not curating products in a way that considers quality and longevity. As the featured article mentions, Amazon does mark products as frequently returned, but I am not sure it really helps that much. > Sadly you need to rely on things like YouTube videos to actually get any kind of idea on if the item is trash or not, and even then there is the risk of paid-reviews so you need to take multiple sources into account, who they are, trust levels etc. it's sad. Either that or - and I know this is madness - go to a physical store and inspect the goods before you buy it. And even then, they miss important details, because most reviews only talk about the product in terms of the out-of-box experience. But how good is the product after two years? After four? Even the vacuum review I linked does not really comment on longevity. > I would argue that the article is correct that quality is often secondary to speed of delivery and cheapness though. Amazon has totally won there. I think it is starting to change where people are getting really tired of shit quality and that is going to continue to be reflected in the returns data. Returns do not make customers whole - they do not get a refund for the time they had to spend researching, procuring, and ultimately returning the product. I imagine companies are going to be in for a rude awakening when they have to reverse course and not only increase quality but also decrease the price because no one wants to spend hard-earned money on expensive junk during a recession.