20 ms·

The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

• sershe 1y ago
  When I was growing up we had an old Soviet fridge at our dacha. It was at least 30 years old (maybe more, it's age was definitely compared to my mother's on multiple occasions) and it was working 3 months out of a year in unheated uninsulated room in up to 90 degree heat, while sitting idle thru Russian winter. The only issue with it was that the door didn't close too well. My more conscientious family would bend down to push it gently, whereas I would just kick it. It took me less time to quit smoking than to quit kicking fridges every time I close the door. I think I was still kicking fridges in the US in 2010 after last seeing that one in 2000. It was also small and didn't have any features other than producing some amount of cold air. But it worked! It still works for all I know. If most hand wringing in this thread is to be taken at face value this is what we should pivot to :)
• game_the0ry 1y ago
  When quality goes down, most of the time, its bc a corporation is trying to cut costs. I have 2022 Toyota 4runner. The frame is already getting surface rust. I have been noticing new Toyotas have been needing new engines, other major problems. even Toyota is riding hi on a reputation from the past. When that happens, you should take your dollars elsewhere, so I bought another car.
• phtrivier 1y ago
  Begs an interesting question : some people can still afford quality items that last (namely, the people that sell throwaway shit to everyone else ; or, more precisely, the people who earn rents from companies that sell throwaway shit etc...) Are things getting shittier for them, too ? Are luxury brands immune to "energy is getting expensive, and corporate needs to buy shares back and increase dividend, so we have to cut costs everywhere" ? In other words, are growing inequality going to end up having billionaires who functionally live the same quality of life as upper-middle-class from the end of 90s ?
  • JonChesterfield 1y ago
    It definitely takes more effort to identify non-shit products than it used to, but I would assume said billionaires have delegated that to someone else so won't notice.
  • frereubu 1y ago
    This is a great thread about wealth and craftsmanship. Wealthy people used to appreciate craft, which has morphed into spending lots of money on a brand rather than an understanding of what it is that they're buying: https://bsky.app/profile/dieworkwear.bsky.social/post/3lswmj67cok23 https://bsky.app/profile/dieworkwear.bsky.social/post/3lswmj...
    • jcgrillo 1y ago
      Excellent thread, nicely juxtaposed to this utterly insane sentence: > One is that attributes like durability — which used to be a major factor in how people judged a product’s quality — have lost relevance. I've noticed this in clothing and vehicles. If you want to own a durable car, you need to get an old one. Mid 1990s seems optimal for most manufacturers, some skew earlier (e.g. Mercedes-Benz which peaked about half a decade earlier). If you want durable shoes, it's very hard to beat a set of custom Limmers which are made pretty much the same way they were in the 1950s. Neither option is cheap, but you get something for it--knowing your car won't strand you with some bewildering array of christmas tree lights on the dashboard, and that your feet will be fine if you have an unplanned 20mi hike.
    • nradov 1y ago
      The actual wealthy people still appreciate craft, at least for certain things. It's mainly the socially insecure nouveau riche who buy brands as a signaling mechanism.
    • panick21_ 1y ago
      Go and learn about the 1700 century and how people spent all their money on spices because it was trendy with other nobles. Why did they build certain buildings? Because nobles in other places built those buildings. The idea that people in the past where more sophisticated, and more intelligent is simply not true.
• esperent 1y ago
  > clothes are unrecognizable after the second wash What clothes are these? I don't buy any kind of expensive brands. I don't take any care when washing. I don't own a lot of clothes so I wear each item weekly. And my clothes last me for several years at least. The dyes have gotten noticeably better than when I was a child - when was the last time you had colors run in the wash?
  • ginko 1y ago
    I tried to get all kinds of expensive tshirts but I have yet to find a brand that won't develop holes around the seams after a year of weekly wear.
  • Ccecil 1y ago
    Costco garbage don't bleed :) Seriously though...
  • jabjq 1y ago
    I bought some dark blue trousers at C&A and after a dozen washes they are noticeably losing their colouring. Yes, I know, Cheap&Awful. I’m poor.
    • rambambram 1y ago
      Wearing the same now, can agree.
  • sgt101 1y ago
    I bought some wrangler jeans, because I remembered that I had a pair years ago that fit me better than levis, the levis were quite expensive and the wranglers cheap. They were ok for the first wear - but not great to be honest. Then I washed them and they were unwearable. Didn't do anything fancy, just a cool wash, dried them on the line. They turned to cardboard.
    • drdec 1y ago
      That's kind of what happens to denim when you air dry it. They are fine. Wear them a bit and you won't notice. If it bothers you next time tumble dry them on low.
• anarticle 1y ago
  This article is really trying to gaslight us into believing it is only pessimism, when decline in quality is very real. The best example is that ikea no longer sells solid wood tables, they are particle board with wood grain stickers. The exciting part is they are more expensive than the original hardwood versions.
  • jabjq 1y ago
    I have a solid wood table that I bought at Ikea a few years ago. I think it’s made of bamboo. Isn’t that hardwood? Even if it’s compressed I don’t think it’s made of grain. It definitely doesn’t have stickers.
    • ck45 1y ago
      Bamboo is not solid wood, it's bamboo stems glued together.
      • noinsight 1y ago
        Bamboo isn’t even wood, it’s grass.
  • TrueTom 1y ago
    Particle boards with wood grain stickers are the actual good stuff now. Ikea is literally selling cardboard with woodgrain stickers (that's not a joke).
  • ozgrakkurt 1y ago
    It seems to support your point if you go through the whole article. It goes over both perspectives.
  • frereubu 1y ago
    That's what Ikea furniture has been made of for as long as I can remember (a few decades).
    • 1y ago
• navane 1y ago
  It's called inflation guys. Most innovation is selling an inferior product for a lower price. Most of us can only afford that. It's the same old inflation, but repackeged to keep the official inflation number down.
  • 7bit 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • petesergeant 1y ago
      > mansplanation Whatever this bullshit is it doesn’t feel like it has a place here.
  • ath3nd 1y ago
    This is not inflation, it's divorced from all factors, these companies are raking in record profits, and they still squeeze out price increases, smaller seats, worse customer service, just because you have no alternative, you gotta take it. It's called "Enshittification": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification. It's just the free market and the corporations giving a big middle finger to its clients. It's the same reason Microsoft can do all of the above: - "The company reported better-than-expected results, with $25.8 billion in quarterly net income, and an upbeat forecast in late April" - "Microsoft on Tuesday said that it’s laying off 3% of employees across all levels, teams and geographies, affecting about 6,000 people." - "These new job cuts are not related to performance, the spokesperson said." Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/13/microsoft-is-cutting-3percent-of-workers-across-the-software-company.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/13/microsoft-is-cutting-3percen... If you are thinking this is in any way tied to inflation, it's not. It's just greed and the absence of laws to curb that greed. So you are gonna get less and worse for more money, and like it, because the monopolies are lobbying the governments and can do literally what they want to do in countries susceptible to it. When Broadcom tried these kinds of stunts in civilized countries, they quickly got shown their place: - https://www.networkworld.com/article/4015489/dutch-court-forces-broadcom-to-support-vmware-migration-after-85-price-hike-backlash.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/4015489/dutch-court-for... - https://licenseware.io/broadcom-faces-eu-scrutiny-over-controversial-vmware-licensing-practices/ https://licenseware.io/broadcom-faces-eu-scrutiny-over-contr... Does 800% and 1500% price increase sound to you like related to inflation? Enshittification is not out of our hands if we elect governments that have our interest in mind.
• jabjq 1y ago
  Maybe you shouldn’t elect politicians who increase your public debt perennially by printing money like there’s no tomorrow. Perhaps that way the money you earn would be worth something and you would be able to afford quality products. It’s hard, I know.
• dazc 1y ago
  I think it's inevitable that businesses will optimise for profit at the expense of quality as far as they are able without tarnishing their brand. Sports shoe companies, for example, have proven that you can take this to extremes so long as your brand is well-established.
• vdupras 1y ago
  In inflation calculation, is quality taken into account? I guess not, given the inherent problem stated in the article. If that's the case, even if it's true that we can say "sure, quality is declining, but it's fine, just fine", it would follow that inflation is actually much higher than reported. When you buy a fridge today, it buys you the "fridge service" for a much shorter time span, forcing you to invest a lot more money into that service over a given time span. That's a steep inflation of fridge price that isn't counted in official statistics. This should be taken into account in inflation calculation. If this was, it would give a much fairer view of the decline in purchasing power.
  • littlestymaar 1y ago
    It is, in theory (hedonic price adjustment can go both ways), but I don't know how accurate their measurement is. Edit, now that I checked it looks like hedonic price adjustment measurements are performed on only 7.5%[1]of the goods in the CPI basket, and the main goal seems to be to avoid overestimating inflation by tracking quality improvements better. [1]: https://www.nber.org/digest/20239/correcting-quality-change-when-measuring-inflation https://www.nber.org/digest/20239/correcting-quality-change-...
    • vdupras 1y ago
      The examples that the article give are "memory size and CPU speed for computers or horsepower and miles per gallon for cars", that is, technological improvements that would be a reason to adjust inflation value further down because "quality" went up. Without, of course, taking overall lifetime of the product. So this would in fact make the inflation misreporting problem even worse.
• zer00eyz 1y ago
  > According to a 2024 report by the software company Salesforce, 62% of these services in Spain are already automated. Today, it’s easier to converse with a machine than with a real person. Whats adorable is that the author thinks this has anything to do with AI. Shitty AI is an excuse to get rid of customer service. It's a move that most of tech made a long time ago. How many times BEFORE AI have you heard the lament from someone that "Thank fully I am internet famous, or blew up on social media. because other wise google/etsy/ebay/Facebook would never have fixed their automated decision to pull the rug out from under me" > The conclusion is clear: society isn’t adapting to the pace of technological advancement. Uhhh, the change already happened, in the attention economy the only thing that matters is your social clout (credit?). > packaged foods with more preservatives than ingredients. Heirloom tomatoes in the grocery store. Avocado year round, Brussel sprouts that dont taste like ass. Whole Foods, and other more 'local' choices. > According to the expert, the main factor driving this criticism is that the great promise of capitalism — if you work The problem is that there are lots of people all over the globe who are willing to do MORE for LESS and we are in a global marketplace. Adapt or die. > buy a house Except you can have all this. Plenty of people do: "buying a house" is very literally the same as it ever was: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N > The real problem isn’t buying pants that don’t last or traveling in an uncomfortable plane. The real problem is that, with each purchase, we support two of the most polluting industries on the planet. The author could have done a far better job in highlighting all the waste that goes into a pair of pants. Oil for synthetics, Waste from fabric making and dying. Scraps from the cutting process only to have them thrown away after a year to make another pair. Instead we got a bunch of "feel good" talking points that you can nod along to even if they are misinformed.
  • JadeNB 1y ago
    > Whole Foods, and other more 'local' choices. Whole Foods used to be the place to go for quality throughout the store. It seems to me that now you can still get plenty of quality, but it's not guaranteed if you just go and grab something off the shelf. Instead, you have to know what's worth buying and what's not. (I can't back this up with examples, because exactly this phenomenon means that I don't shop at Whole Foods as much. I could be wrong.)
• i5heu 1y ago
  So the health service did not get worse but there are now more elderly which have an effect… And this does not result in the health service having lower quality for the individual? This is a very funky way to frame this.
• dmezzetti 1y ago
  It's called "lowest cost technically acceptable". Publicly traded companies are driven by quarterly earnings and increasing net margins. You do that by selling products at the lowest cost possible where buyers will still buy it. A bigger decline is coming if we let "vibe coding" and what we call AI replace human workers at scale. The technology isn't there yet for full automation but everything is blindly surging ahead due to the allure of it and the same reason as the first paragraph above.
  • palata 1y ago
    > It's called "lowest cost technically acceptable". I like this wording better than "programmed obsolescence". I don't really believe that "programmed obsolescence" is common. If anyone in a company leaked that the company actively designs the product to stop working after some time, it would make the news. I call it "premature obsolescence", which sounds more passive to me: the product doesn't last as long as it could because the company doesn't actively work on making it last as long. Because it's cheaper of course. Hence "lowest cost technically acceptable". "It's not that we make a bad product, but rather that we don't make a good product", in a way. There is no need, consumers buy it even if it's not good.
    • qwery 1y ago
      Planned obsolescence is very much an actively employed, functional, business strategy. I think you're only considering one aspect of planned obsolescence -- where the product is designed to have a short lifetime. I don't know why you would believe that that isn't part of "business as usual", but there's more than one way to make a product obsolete. The typical case is when a company releases yearly model refreshes for a product with an operational life far in excess of 12 months. This stategy is most common in markets with a monopoly or oligopoly, in saturated product segments. Have you ever heard the phrase "last year's model"?
      • palata 1y ago
        Not sure I like the tone. Yes, I have heard the phrase "last year's model". Say you buy a smartphone, and you want it to last for 7 years. If you buy the model from 2025, the manufacturer commits to supporting it until 2032 (it already exists). Now if you buy the 2025 model in 2029, it will still last until 2032, so in 2029 it actually makes sense to not buy the model from 2025. But I would say that it's pretty great that the manufacturer commits to supporting the devices for 7 years. Planned obsolescence suggests that the company has been actively investing resources into it. "This lightbulb lasts for 4 years, have our engineers find a way to make it die after 1 year" is the typical example of that. Now of course, as a customer, you can buy the 2025 model, and throw it away in 2026 to buy the new model.
• booleandilemma 1y ago
  You don't get ahead by focusing on quality and caring about your customers. The guy who cuts corners gets ahead. Maybe someone will respond "why should a business care about you?" and that just proves my point. We've created a zero empathy, greed-driven society and then we wonder why quality is declining.
• dottjt 1y ago
  I'm not sure if this is quite related, but I can't help but feel that a lot of the ills of society that we're witnessing is simply coming down to the fact that we're living a lot longer as people. I feel like knowing that we might live well-beyond our working age has caused all sorts of odd/irrational behaviours in the way we approach life. I think for example, having to save for retirement makes us rethink how we spend our money. Which then means people are ultimately spending less on other things i.e. clothing. Then it becomes a kind of vicious cycle of hoarding wealth, but then expecting everything else to be cheap (at any cost). Whereas it's like, if you expected that you would die in your 50s/60s you'd probably be happier spending your money on stuff that you felt served you better, irrespective of the cost, cause you're still working and able to service that lifestyle.
  • ath3nd 1y ago
    Have you considered that it's not that we are spending money on cheap stuff, it's that even expensive stuff is built to not last with the incentive you come back for more? You do realize there are whole R&D departments working on planned obsolescence. - Apple's planned obsolescence on batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate - Window's 10 to 11 garbage hardware requirements: https://www.euroconsumers.org/microsoft-security-windows-10-planned-obsolescence/ https://www.euroconsumers.org/microsoft-security-windows-10-... If an OS's new version is supposedly...faster and better written, why does it require newer hardware? - Apple's right to repair fight: https://sustainablebrands.com/read/apple-support-right-to-repair https://sustainablebrands.com/read/apple-support-right-to-re... and then, when they saw they can't support this position anymore, suddenly becoming a champion of sustainability - Apple's refusal to change their idiotic charging cables to a standard one, so they can sell you crap that works on no other device. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66778528 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66778528 I know Apple are mentioned a lot here, but they are a perfect example of what happens when nobody calls out a monopoly on their shady practices. > but I can't help but feel that a lot of the ills of society that we're witnessing is simply coming down to the fact that we're living a lot longer as people. Ah yes blame it on the consumer, who dares to live longer. > Whereas it's like, if you expected that you would die in your 50s/60s you'd probably be happier spending your money on stuff that you felt served you better, irrespective of the cost, cause you're still working and able to service that lifestyle. I don't get the logic here. If I knew I would live to 100, would it not make sense to buy stuff that serves me well over the long run (i.e more expensive)?
• bitter_michael 1y ago
  This article's thesis is all over the place, but the discussion here brings up an interesting topic: the decline in quality is relative to your evaluation function. If you want long lasting products, then maybe the cheaper furniture is of lower quality. If you want something light weight and affordable, then ikea is higher quality. Assuming there is a uniform product evaluation function seems like lazy journalism. The addition of AI was also odd
  • ozgrakkurt 1y ago
    But we are not in control of the evaluation function. It is heavily manipulated by ads and other patterns. You can control your own evaluation if you are actively working on it but market moves based on majority so it doesn’t matter
    • nradov 1y ago
      Nonsense. If you want really nice, high quality furniture then you can just pay a local craftsman to make it for you. This is always an option regardless and some of us are not easily manipulated by ads. Of course good furniture will be expensive.
      • omeid2 1y ago
        The mass production discount must not be overlooked, whatever most people want becomes the most cost effective, and it appears that most people want cheap, and so anything beyond the absolute minimum costs a lot more relative to the quality.
        • Rotundo 1y ago
          I don't believe the "people want cheap" spiel. Sure, they want affordable. As consumers can not tell the quality of products beforehand, and price is certainly no guarantee of quality, the only logical choice is to buy cheap. I wish there was a sort of rating of product quality [1], so I can choose the optimum price/quality for a product. [1] Reviews suck for this purpose. Half of them say things like "Fast shipping, five stars!". By the time defects show up months later and the one-star reviews arrive, the product is discontinued anyway.
• ArtTimeInvestor 1y ago
  And somehow we still see great reviews about everything. I looked at this hotel made from containers recently: https://www.booking.com/hotel/de/tin-inn-montabaur.html https://www.booking.com/hotel/de/tin-inn-montabaur.html I thought it is an interesting concept. And it has a rating of 8.5 out of 10 on booking.com, which means "Very good". But then I read through the details and the reviews (sorted by new) and see: You can hear your neighbors. You cannot open the windows. Staff enters the room before your checkout time. The rooms and the stuff inside the rooms are dirty. Lots of broken amenities, including the air condition. For check-in you have to enter your passport-id (where does it end up?). And on and on an on ... How is that "Very good"? What threshold should one assign to book something on booking.com these days? 9.9/10?
  • user____name 1y ago
    Online reviews follow an inverted gaussian distribution it seems like, the majority of users never bother, it's either the fans/bots or the angry ones.
  • jcgrillo 1y ago
    Grade inflation seems like another facet of the same economic problem.
  • Ashkee 1y ago
    It’s tough to trust ratings when the details tell a different story. Using something like HiFive Star to track and compare reviews across sites helped me get a clearer picture before booking. Made choosing a place less stressful and more reliable.
• KoolKat23 1y ago
  Barriers to entry keep going up, access to capital is going down and required return on capital is high. People are going to maximize short term profits.
  • topspin 1y ago
    As part of that, there is a strong trend toward consolidation, and little competition emerging to challenge the oligopolies that have formed.
• jstummbillig 1y ago
  Quality has improved across many dimensions in nearly every domain I’m familiar with. In fact, I’d argue there are very few products or services that couldn’t be made today to a higher standard than at any point in the past, if we chose to prioritize that. But what’s often mistaken for a decline in quality is really a shift in priorities: toward affordability, efficiency, and accessibility. And that’s fantastic. Products that were once expensive and exclusive are now available, at good-enough quality, to billions more people around the world. Yes, that trade-off can mean shorter lifespans or less repairability. But on balance, widening access is a moral win, and one made possible by the very progress the article seems to mourn.
  • djfivyvusn 1y ago
    I'm not convinced the widening access to American consumerism is a moral win. The amount of fossil fuels we're dependent on as a species is obscene. I worry for our children. There is no offramp, only growth.
    • panick21_ 1y ago
      This is one of these philosophies that I hate more then almost any other. The idea that is bad that poor Indian and Chinese people now have access to anything from clean water to planes is absurd. You can sit there in your luxury house and cry about consumer culture but for millions of people its basic stuff that they have access to for the first time. And in Europe, despite increasing quality of live, both total energy consumption and fossil fuel consumption is going down. Now part of this is export of emissions to China but China own growth explains the majority of it. Continued growth is good, and only continued growth and better technology will get humanity off fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have been a net good for society and still are!
      • myaccountonhn 1y ago
        The reason it's seen as bad is because there are not enough natural resources to sustain such a consumption, and many of these countries (esp India) will practically become unhabitable if global warming continues like it does. There are very few signs that technology will be able to fix this. No one is against clean access to water...
• raspasov 1y ago
  "Following his reasoning, it cannot be stated in absolute terms that an iPhone 15 is of “better quality” than a 2003 Nokia." This statement suffers from either viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses or from total cultural relativism in the most pejorative sense. I'm not sure about 2003, but around 2009, I owned a Nokia N900, which was arguably the flagship Nokia phone at the time. I can confidently state that current iPhones are _way_ better than that phone. On paper, the N900 phone was amazing: it had GPS, Wi-Fi, multitasking, a camera, a touchscreen, and (!) a hardware keyboard, and more. It had a desktop-class browser, on paper. But nothing quite worked well. It was far too bloated for the hardware capabilities of the time. When you came home, it never damn switched properly to WiFi, or it took forever. The same applies to switching off WiFi and switching to cellular when you leave home. The GPS always took minutes to establish a location and easily lost connection due to small obstructions. I recall that I compared it to a friend's iPhone at the time; the N900's GPS was embarrassingly bad and slow. I can confidently say that today's flagship iPhones (or even Androids) are significantly better quality than the N900, in every way possible.
  • AndyMcConachie 1y ago
    This author doesn't really understand quality and starts out by defining it purelt in subjective terms. Then makes the mistake in the rest of the article by following this subjective reasoning by talking about perceptions of quality as a stand in for actual quality. Go read Zen anf the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for a decent, if not weird, introduction to thinking about quality. Quality is both subjective and objective and therein lies the rub. This author does not understand that.
    • blueflow 1y ago
      I'm surprised. What is the objective aspect of quality? Can you have quality without a human-intended purpose?
      • RangerScience 1y ago
        It’s worth noting that the author of Zen and the Art literally went crazy in pursuit of this. I don’t mean this to say “you have asked a bad question”, but rather to say, “you have asked so large a question that a man once went insane in trying to answer it.”
• joegibbs 1y ago
  For public services, every year people get older, more of the economy has to be reallocated towards looking after them. More spending on pensions rather than education, more old people using all the health services (since they use up so much more than young people). The upper-middle class in the US is also bigger than ever, and all those upper-middle interests are getting saturated: AMEX lounges, expensive resorts. Air travel is also a lot more affordable for the common person than back in the golden age.
• haunter 1y ago
  >clothes are unrecognizable after the second wash Or maybe just don't buy cheap thrash? I bought some T-shirts while in Covid from a sports brand and 5 years later they are still as if they were new :shrug: Of course price =/= quality, but when almost everyone is ordering their new clothes from Shein then what do you really expect?
• throwaway-0001 1y ago
  [dead]
• SwordAndCitadel 1y ago
  Capitalism is the reason for declining quality. The incentive isn't to make quality products and services - the incentive is to monopolize an industry, and then squeeze every last cent from the captured consumers. Line must go up!
  • panick21_ 1y ago
    And yet almost no industry is actually a monopoly, funny how that works. Even even if it is, most of the time its only in certain region. And even then, often the pricing power of those 'monopolies' is not very strong. In fact, historically most monopolies were state sanctioned, and that is still mostly true. Literally non of the things mentioned in the article are monopolies. Cloths, absolutely not even close to a monopoly. AI, nope. Flying, nope. Maybe airplanes is duopoly for certain kinds of planes and that is one of the closest things to a monopoly. And yet despite that, prices for actually flying between places are incredibly low, the expect opposite of what you expect to happen in a typical monopoly. Food industry, no monopoly. Computer, no monopoly. Hotels, no monopoly. Property, no monopoly. In fact the largest global industries (just google list): Global Life & Health Insurance Carriers Global Car & Automobile Sales Global Commercial Real Estate Global Pension Funds Global Oil & Gas Exploration & Production Global Car & Automobile Manufacturing Global Direct General Insurance Carriers Global Auto Parts & Accessories Manufacturing Global Engineering Services Global Wireless Telecommunications Carriers Not a single monopoly in the list. So please tell me what you are talking about. Maybe some Health insurance have some limited monopoly in some place. Please post here, from your monthly budget, how much of that budget goes to what you would call monopolies?
    • SwordAndCitadel 1y ago
      I would argue that almost every industry has been increasingly monopolized. Look at the historic number of players in every major industry - it's indisputable that the trend has been towards consolidation, not increased competition. What's more - the companies that dominate various industries are majorituly owned by the same financial entities, which in turn own each other. Think of the biggest players in each industry, and search to determine who owns the most stock in those companies. You will find the same organizations over and over again - Blackrock, Citadel, States Street, etc.
• bornfreddy 1y ago
  > ...that the great promise of capitalism — if you work, you can have a decent life, buy a house, and go on vacation — is no longer being fulfilled;... That's... not capitalism at all? Socialism maybe, but absolutely not capitalism. In average, those that work will have a good life (or at least, in average, better life than those who don't), but there is no guarantee on a single case, or even that this life will be good enough.
  • raspasov 1y ago
    So many concepts conflated in that article, I start to wonder if an LLM genius was involved in its creation.
• buran77 1y ago
  > Many products are hard to compare due to the enormous price difference Well that explains a lot, doesn't it? The article is right overall but occasionally glances over the importance of the "quality/price" ratio. As the price went down, buying habits changed, and by extension the manufacturing habits. When things are cheap nobody wants to keep them forever, they get exchanged sooner to "keep up with the times". My anecdote, when I bought my first fridge (a tiny 70-100l I think) it cost 2.5x the average net salary in my country, and it still broke down often, but it could be repaired so it lasted 20+ years. I think today a fridge costing 2.5x the average salary - for the US this would be a ~$10-12k fridge - will be more reliable but unrepairable so when it's done, it's done.
  • 0wis 1y ago
    Not that sure. I know Bosch, Liebherr and Samsung fridges bought in the 2000’s that lasted 10+ years, some of them that keeps running even after being used heavily (being moved, used by families of 5…etc). They are repairable and some got repaired. They are 2-3000€+. Which is 2-3x the average monthly salary. An other thing to account for is the price of repairs. If your appliances costs less than one hour of a mid-skill technician, it’s hard to justify the spending. Same for doing it yourself if you’re time is worth a lot. The only solution is to by high end, which is always risky and more cash intensive. Most people will prefer buying cheap and change to new if required
    • buran77 1y ago
      You start by saying "not that sure" but then continue to support my point. So now I'm also not that sure what you mean. 3000€+ in the early 2000s is easily 5000€ today accounting for inflation. Even if you mean they are 3000€ today, at that price point the market is needle thin. The best selling fridges on Amazon.de right now are in the 300€ region, maybe 500-600€ if you want to go "premium". So you're saying a fridge that's 10-15 times more expensive than the cheap best sellers is also better. This is exactly the quality/price trap. People remember the quality from "way back when" but forget the price. We mostly just traded quality/longevity for cheaper and faster replacement. Quality didn't necessarily go down, it's just people target cheaper products today.
• Tractor8626 1y ago
  Nothing bewildering. There is simple explanation. Your country's economy going downhill. You are no longer prosperous country you once was.
  • luibelgo 1y ago
    Which country?
    • Tractor8626 1y ago
      Whatever country you see declining quality in.
• astrobe_ 1y ago
  > For some consumers — although we know there won’t be many — the Nokia’s extreme durability may be more valuable than the iPhone’s technological innovations I still use a phone of the generation after Nokia - it must be 20 years old now. The thing is, for everyday use voicemail and SMS are enough for me. I don't need more technology. And certainly not the kind of technology that make people walk like zombies on the street. If you remember the old Youtube video about viewers not noticing a gorilla in the middle of basketball players because viewers were instructed to count something, this is exactly that. > there’s another, lesser-known but even more effective method: convincing consumers that a product is outdated for aesthetic or symbolic reasons, even if it still works. Long story short, durability is the greatest enemy for businesses. They have decades of experience of fighting against it. IIRC Europe introduced laws against planned obsolescence, but businesses probably did start to switch to "perceived obsolescence" when consumers proved the existence of planned obsolescence. It's not even something evil to do for some categories of products. Good household appliances use less energy, even good ICE cars probably are more efficient than they used to be, etc. It seems that it defines a different metric for product quality, total cost of ownership. > However, Rodríguez argues that, generally speaking, automation does improve customer service. [...] The initial investment in technology is extremely high, and the benefits remain practically the same. We have not detected any job losses in the sector either. If companies really are investing in order to improve their customer service, that's big news.
  • blfr 1y ago
    That's great for your use but meanwhile my phone has now better eyesight than I do (and I'm 20/20), carries all my notes and photos, answers random questions about prions, and offers fully e2e encrypted instant communication with virtually anyone across the world.
• blfr 1y ago
  Most things are still available at the same quality your parents remember, thanks to ecommerce much more avilable, but sadly also at a similar real price your parents remember which we find extortionary by comparison to all the cheap crap flooding the market. You can have a tailored suit/shirt, hardwood furniture, grass-fed beef, vacuum to last decades, etc, but it will cost around the same in real terms and you're used to prices from Zara/Lidl. Some things have truly declined because the demand collapsed so much that they basically got discontinued in the 1st world (that tailored shirt is coming from Ceylon) but others have improved tremendously by soaking up that drive for quality (check any independent coffee shop). Not to mention the true pinnacles of modern manufacturing. Because for the price of a decent camera my father could get, I have a 100x zoom camera in my pocket, with a 7" touch screen, and 5g connectivity, also somehow all the books I could have ever read.
  • klabb3 1y ago
    > Most things are still available at the same quality your parents remember Just no. The old reputable brands are enshittifying the same way. I’ve multiple times seen it first hand, with brands like Levi’s and Fjällräven. One year of wear is enough to disform the textile entirely. The fabric from those older clothes are still sturdy and whole, with only discoloration at the folding spots. No holes either from decades of use. I magically found a sturdy canvas backpack 10 years ago and went back to the store recently to check what they had: same brand, but now all polyester. The difference in quality is immense. Especially textile: clothes and shoes. I don’t expect the same prices, I’m happy to pay more for quality. But the brand alone often means nothing.
    • walterbell 1y ago
      Uniqlo has a vertically integrated Japanese supply chain, including custom textiles. Their clothing has been relatively consistent.
      • mitthrowaway2 1y ago
        Japanese companies have largely bucked the trend of declining quality, at least within their domestic market. I'm not sure if it's related to decades of Japanese deflation or just because of a more discerning quality-conscious consumer base. Uniqlo has done a decent job of carrying that quality consciousness over to the rest of the world.
• michaelsshaw 1y ago
  > is that the great promise of capitalism — if you work, you can have a decent life, buy a house, and go on vacation — is no longer being fulfilled; I'd just like to comment on this line in particular. The promise of capitalism isn't this, but, rather, if you own capital (i.e. are a capitalist), you explicitly do not have to work. There is no promise made to the workers, except that in some way they are compensated for their work. There are other systems wherein if you don't work (and aren't retired/disabled), you don't get paid. But capitalism is one of them in which non-workers get paid, and usually with a disgusting disparity between the rate of the two classes.
• lmpdev 1y ago
  Anyone else starting to see this as an unconscious but inevitable outcome of the world’s tail-end stage of becoming developed? Moore’s law has ended. The LHC found nothing of note. Childhood mortality and Polio have been defeated. The periodic table is effectively complete. R&D is having limited returns. This AI capex spend is just hardware and data catching up to R&D from the 1980s. We were born thinking the curve from the 1950s onwards was a god-given eternal exponential. But since about the early 2000s we’ve quietly known the curve was logistic, and not god-given. Economists and the well-off are in denial about exponential growth. We’ve hit the current carrying capacity for an economy of n-billion silicon-flinging apes on a globe with a limited number of resources. Businesses are still in high gear expecting growth eternal. This puts a chain of pressure down from CEO through every decision maker in the organisation: “at the end of the day, this number has to go up and this number go down”. Businesses used to make the lives of their customers a little better through their products or services. The only model left, now that all the large pile of low-hanging fruit of innovation are gone, is to aggressively extract money from customers. Perhaps this is all just stemming from business assumptions of exponential growth being flawed. Should we require MBAs to know what a logistic curve is? I don’t know a lot, but I know that the current business paradigm and the products and services I interact with everyday are very optimised. But not optimised for me. They’re optimised for businesses maligned to my goals, but the only businesses left offering anything.
  • panick21_ 1y ago
    Moore's law might have ended but Wright's law didn't, and even if it did, it would still be progress, we don't have exponential development in everything. Continues improvement is still continuous. > The LHC found nothing of note. That's just wrong. > Childhood mortality and Polio have been defeated. Childhood mortality has not been defeated. And while Polio has been, many other things haven't. > The periodic table is effectively complete. People in the next 100 years will add more. And even so, there is so much about materials we don't understand its actually insane. There are many things we learn about materials that is just as or more relevant then discovering a new element. > R&D is having limited returns. It has always had limited returns. And in some ways it has huge returns. Making an airlplane 1% more efficient today has a much larger overall impact then making a plane 10% more efficient 50 years ago. > This AI capex spend is just hardware and data catching up to R&D from the 1980s. That's just dismissive of 30+ years of research and work. You might as well argue that its just 200 years of catching up to the vision of Ada. > But since about the early 2000s we’ve quietly known the curve was logistic, and not god-given. From a global perspective there is no slowdown, its only relative to US experience. > Businesses are still in high gear expecting growth eternal. This puts a chain of pressure down from CEO through every decision maker in the organisation: “at the end of the day, this number has to go up and this number go down”. This has literally been every business for 5000 years. > Businesses used to make the lives of their customers a little better through their products or services. And they still do. > The only model left, now that all the large pile of low-hanging fruit of innovation are gone, is to aggressively extract money from customers. That's just not accurate. Go look up how much investment in next generation notes cost TSMC and then tell me all they do is extract money from consumers. Tell me that the restaurant down the street who works hard creating incredibly food is just extracting money from consumers in some kind of aggressive way. When SpaceX deployed a whole new infrastructure around the globe, was that just extracting money because innovation is impossible, or was it massive innovation and massive infrastructure spending? This is just a cynical world-view glorifying the past. When in effect, innovation wasn't easy. Go look up how many people died in air accidents, or car accidents. Go look up how many mainframe and minicomputer companies came and went, trying to invent the future. If anything the length companies now-days go to, to prevent a single death is actually kind of crazy. > Perhaps this is all just stemming from business assumptions of exponential growth being flawed. There are tons of business that don't expect exponential growth. There are even many that expect to shrink. And tons of business who do expect it don't get it. And yet the world keeps turning for those business too. Capitalism can work perfectly fine in situation of now growth, plenty of countries have seen little growth for decades. And yet food still gets delivered to stores. Trains and cars keep going around. And so on and so on. But even in those places, companies don't stop trying to grow. Maybe we will live in a world where no company will ever grow and wont for decades, even in that world, MBA and everybody else will still try to grow companies. Even if the world experienced a 50 year decline, that wouldn't change anything. Teach them about logistic curves all you like. > But not optimised for me. The world doesn't evolve around you. Shocking that you had to realize that like this.
• TomMasz 1y ago
  Couldn't help noticing they reference the now-shuttered FakeSpot for detecting AI-written product reviews.
• drdec 1y ago
  Most of the people on this board are upper middle to lower upper class (thinking American, apologies to my non US friends). Such people can afford products outside the grasp of most Americans. What naturally happens to such products is that the manufacturers find a way to broaden their customer base. They find ways to bring the price point down so they can sell more. For most people this is a boon. They can afford a luxury or convenience they otherwise wouldn't be able to. Overall most people are better off when this happens. For the first group of people however, they are worse off. They cannot get the same product as before. Such is life.
  • Arn_Thor 1y ago
    The parable of boots seems apt here. In the extreme, expensive pair can last for a decade while people who can only afford the cheap pair will have to keep buying a new one every year. Yes, the fact that any family can afford a new shelving unit is great! But the fact that it’ll last them just a few years is not good; they’ll spend more in the long run
    • Pingk 1y ago
      Except it's getting so difficult to find the companies producing the more durable alternative, so everyone is forced to buy the flimsy piece that falls apart
      • AdrianB1 1y ago
        It is not that hard, if you do the minimum effort to educate yourself. For example 20 years ago I struggled to find motorcycle gear in Eastern Europe, it was very hard and stuff was extremely expensive for the salaries in this region. I bought initially cheap stuff that broke fast, then the next generation I knew what to buy and I have now equipment that is over 10 years old that I am using with great pleasure. It is similar in most cases I have to buy something, but it takes some effort to look for options.
    • Ray20 1y ago
      Only the parable does not work. Objectively. The fact that the poor are forced to spend more because they cannot afford something is complete bs. I can't imagine any area (maybe except perhaps interaction with government bureaucracy) where the parable would be relevant. Shoes that last a decade are cost a lot more than five pairs of cheap shoes that last two years. And the same with furniture and everything else. "Pay less in the long run" is a pure marketing ploy for dumb pompous people with money to make them pay more.
• anovikov 1y ago
  Some counterpoints: Apple devices of today are of near perfect quality with almost no mechanical, electronic, or software quirks. Gone are the days of keyboards that got stuck after a month of use, cables that wore down in a month too, phones you had to hold in a particular way or they lost signal, useless Maps app forced upon you, phones that bent in the pocket, exploding batteries, endless shit like that. Sure we continued loving Apple through all this, but by about 2020 or so, everyone who wasn't an Apple fan started to kinda see us like we all see Trump's fans, sorta... It was hard to justify for any person outside of the Apple bubble. Another counterpoint: hotel quality has arguably improved a great lot in the last 10 year or so. Especially, after Covid. That's rather perplexing, especially since airlines are going in the opposite direction while they two are usually a part of the same purchase by the same people and logically i'd expect their trajectories to be similar. Bigger counterpoint: cars. 10-year old electric cars today drive like new because well, there's nothing to wear out there. Our kids will see lots of 40-50 year old cars on roads, with completely worn out interiors but still driving just fine. Probably with batteries replaced once or twice thus driving a lot better than when they were new because 2035 batteries will have a lot higher density, C-ratings, and will heat less than 2015 batteries, and replacement will cost less than replacement of a gearbox on a 2015 Volvo goofed up by incompetent servicemen.
• fym 1y ago
  The author is romanticizing a past that never was. A deep sense of melancholy clouds his writing. I always find it puzzling how some pathologies manage to disguise themselves as wisdom.
  • cantor_S_drug 1y ago
    Southpark is always prescient in this regard. Memberberries has been a meme on reddit for ages. Maybe the author should immerse himself in popular culture so that the same objections that are commonly made could be avoided.
• zkmon 1y ago
  I live in a developed country. People buy a new home here, and find the kitchen counter top surface bulges up easily when a hot plate is placed on it. Turns out that the surface is a laminate that is not heat resistant. Family business houses used to invest in long-term success through brand, reputation and durability. Startups or hired CEOs focus on short-term goals and invest in creating superficial perceptions that can help the sale.
  • nradov 1y ago
    They don't have granite counter tops in your country?
    • sgt 1y ago
      They probably went for the laminated granite...
    • LorenPechtel 1y ago
      He didn't pick the tops. We got to spec this place from the builder's options. Granite would have been a few percent of the total price of the house and granite comes with the problem that it's somewhat porous. We decided on Corian countertops--it's basically a plastic resin, a bit scratchable (but on the flip side it's full depth material so you can buff out some damage), but totally waterproof and no grout lines. Now there's a version that uses quartz in the resin, much tougher but otherwise similar.
  • rr808 1y ago
    > kitchen counter top surface bulges up easily when a hot plate is placed on it This is pretty normal when I was growing up. You should never put a hot anything on a countertop.
    • zkmon 1y ago
      You hardly ever see any real stone, real wood, real brick, or real walls. Also, floor tiles are not glued or cemented to floor. They are just a floating layer of plastic (in case of laminate).
• singingwolfboy 1y ago
  https://archive.is/7BmHJ https://archive.is/7BmHJ
• casey2 1y ago
  True, software used to mean something and never crash (if it did we wouldn't use it, we had standards back then after all) 9 nines and all that. Nowadays people just want what aint good for em
• anthk 1y ago
  The original article in Spanish: https://elpais.com/ideas/2025-07-13/el-asombroso-fenomeno-de-la-calidad-menguante.html https://elpais.com/ideas/2025-07-13/el-asombroso-fenomeno-de...
• TrackerFF 1y ago
  At least when it comes to musical instruments, cheap instruments today are astronomically better than the cheap instruments I grew up with - and they are cheaper. The manufacturing process has become so good that what you get for $350 today, is about the same standard as what you'd pay $500-$800 for 30 years ago (which is probably closer to $1000-$1500 today). As far as clothes go - I the cheap junk back in the day didn't last too long, either. Cheap supermarket jeans would last me maybe 1 season, before something ripped. Granted they probably only cost $20 back then - but the quality isn't too different from the H&M you purchase today for $50.
  • dijit 1y ago
    Counter-anecdote. I bought some Jeans from ASDA (owned by Walmart now, not sure about then) for 5GBP in 2005.. FIVE, POUNDS. Crazy cheap by any measure; they were extremely thick, to the point where you could stand them up with no person inside them. They lasted me for over 10 years. New jeans (at any price point) seem to wear out in the inner thigh inside of a year, and I am not as active as I was back then due to age. I also haven’t gained a significant amount of weight to account for this. I thought it could be caused by cycling, but I stopped cycling and the wear outs still happen. I thought it could be the quality of what I was buying so I bought more and more expensive jeans, alas, the same was true. The best Jeans I ever owned are simultaneously the cheapest. (side note; I also noticed that nearly all Jeans these days contain “elastane” which is basically plastic, which probably contributes to the degradation - Elastane didn’t exist for jeans in 2005, they were mostly still 100% cotton until the legging jeans fad and then it started making its way into normal jeans).
    • tonyedgecombe 1y ago
      > ASDA (owned by Walmart now, not sure about then) Not any more, they got bought by two rather dodgy petrol station owners.
      • rizs12 1y ago
        you mean two owners of a massive petrol station chain. What's dodgy about them?
• bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  I was going to write something like this at one time, only mine would be better because it would make frequent mentions of The Space Merchants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants >Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that the quality of life is improved by all the products placed on the market.
• arexxbifs 1y ago
  Yes, consumerism makes us throw out and replace perfectly working things. That doesn't mean there's not a decline in quality _as well_. > One is that attributes like durability -- which used to be a major factor in how people judged a product's quality -- have lost relevance. > some companies design certain products -- especially household appliances -- stop working after a certain period of time. This isn't a conspiracy theory, but a proven fact. So, in many cases we no longer factor in durability because we know that consumer products don't offer that quality _by design_. > healthcare services may not be worse than they were a few years ago. "The big problem is that they haven't adapted to the pace of social change. They haven't evolved enough to serve the entire elderly population, whose demographic size is increasing every year" But then they are, in fact, of worse quality for a large group of the population. > five out of 10 consumers openly reject virtual assistants. The conclusion is clear: society isn't adapting to the pace of technological advancement. No, that's not a clear conclusion. Another conclusion that could be drawn is that the adaptation of AI technology in customer service has lowered the quality to a point customers don't even care to bother with. I.E., the pace of technological advancement, in this case, isn't ready for the demands of society. > It's difficult to prove that today's products are worse than those of 20 years ago. No, it's not. Some products and consumption patterns may be harder to compare. In other cases, we have clear examples of engineered decline in quality. One example: soap companies changing not just the size of the soap (shrinkflation) but also altering the ingredients to make the bar of soap last about half as long as before. Ever look under the bed at a hotel? After the pandemic, the quality of cleaning has declined substantially, at least in my country. My previous landlord lowered the indoor temperature and raised the rent, all in the same year. House prices keep going up, but building standards are lowered. In short: there are very real and measurable declines in quality because economies are tanking and, as the article correctly states, "the promise of capitalism" is no longer being fulfilled.
• thatjoeoverthr 1y ago
  I’ve noticed a significant drop even recently, having recently bought the single worst pair of shoes at a brand name store. They basically dissolved like tissue paper within a week. I’ve never seen anything like it. My working assumption right now is this two phenomena together. One, a sneakier kind of “shrinkflation”. You can make a can of coke smaller but you can’t do this with shoes. But you can swap out materials or hire more careless manufacturers. Two, the breakdown of communication caused by AI, earlier fake reviewers and the death of the media at the hands of the web. Taken together, you can get away with a lot more without liquidating your brand simply because word won’t spread.
  • ralfd 1y ago
    > simply because word won’t spread Shame the shoe brand!
    • gotoeleven 1y ago
      According to the amazon page, TOTOFOYAGOO has been a trusted brand since June 11th 2025.
• simianparrot 1y ago
  Airplane tickets used to cost a lot more for economy class, even adjusted for inflation and fees. To get the equivalent service and quality today you simply have to pay more, you just have the choice of paying very little for very low quality because there’s more flights and more planes. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/even-with-fees-the-miracle-of-flight-remains-a-real-bargain-cost-of-air-travel-per-mile-has-fallen-by-50-since-1980/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/even-with-fees-the-miracle-of... Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes. I’m not saying that a high price label guarantees high quality, just that the spectrum of cost vs quality has broadened, even within big name brands. There’s now cheap and expensive Nike ranges, for example, where there used to be only the quality expensive tier. But if you look at the cost of, say, quality furniture today and adjust for inflation, it’s going to be around the same as quality furniture 50 years ago. We just have the choice to pay a lot less for much worse now.
  • elaus 1y ago
    > Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes. I wish that were my experience as well. However, I've found that most brands simply add a huge markup for their name while investing very little into quality. As a result, you end up paying three times the price for just 20% better quality. When it comes to electronics, I feel like I can judge that for myself, and my gut feeling about clothing was confirmed after falling down a YouTube rabbit hole of "clothing teardowns."
  • JKCalhoun 1y ago
    I don't disagree with your point, but I suppose my wish then is that there were not low-quality (low-cost) everything in the world right now. <ramble> I'm not unsympathetic regarding the poor, I grew up poor myself. And my single working mother raising two kids got by on hand-me-down furniture from her mother (probably, as you and the article suggest, of decent quality though). Having the option for (new) inexpensive everything allows us to accept low-quality; even encourages it (as has been pointed out, there's a Dopamine hit from purchasing a new thing … I don't know if the same rush comes from purchasing a used piece of furniture from a Goodwill — I suspect though it does somewhat). And, as we know, the landfills, oceans, become the destination for all this consumption. I admit that I am surprised that I am finding myself wishing that we, the Western world, were poorer again. It seems though that manufacturing has caught up to (down to?) the ability to provide new crap for us even if we were poorer. One wonders what the Great Depression would resemble in the 21st Century. Would we still have the latest, but crappy, gadgets and such? I sure can't imagine new car sales would not be seriously impacted. </ramble>
• weinzierl 1y ago
  People fall largely in two categories: Those who condemn the past and those who glorify it. Of course the reality is between. Whenever something experiences mass adoption, of course quality will decline, e. g. airplane seats with mass adoption of flying. But so, so many things improved dramatically in quality. I could give you endless examples but just think about cars. Despite anecdata to the contrary the reliability of cars increased over the decades. Most 60s cars had rust problems after a couple of years. By the 80s this was largely solved. Most 70s cars had all kinds of mechanical problems but by the 90s this was largely solved. Most 80s cars had lots of electronics problems but by the 2000s this was largely solved. Sure we still have software issues and the whole transition to EV's makes has us deal with new problems, but do I want any of my old cars back? Hell no!
  • deadbabe 1y ago
    Most 2020s cars are completely unaffordable or overpriced and over engineered but maybe by 2040s this will be largely solved. The 2010s was peak car.
    • hnhg 1y ago
      Don't forget the planned obsolescence in 2020s cars.
      • deadbabe 1y ago
        Yup. In the future, you’re probably better off buying a used 2010s model than anything else.
    • weinzierl 1y ago
      I grew up in Germany and as a kid I always thought when I grow up I will drive a Mercedes. Why? Because taxis were 100% Mercedes back then and if a car is good enough to be a taxi it will be good enough for me. Of course I never got a Mercedes because it always was way to expensive. Nowadays every Uber driver seems to drive a BYD Dolphin. They are nice cars and obviously good enough as "taxis". The BYD Dolphin Surf costs 8000 EUR in China (called Seagull there) and between 13000 EUR and 20000 EUR in most other places where it is available.
• spaceman_2020 1y ago
  One word: MBAs
• Workaccount2 1y ago
  Two things: 1. Quality has been dieing mainly because people are addicted to cheap shit. The cheaper things are, the more they can buy. The amount of personal possessions people have nowadays is totally insane and unsurprisingly lots of cheap stuff. 2. Planned obsolescence is not a thing. Maybe it's happened a few times with a few products. But it certainly doesn't deserve a name. I have been on the engineering side of many business and consumer products and swam in waters of the industry for years. No one has ever used that term. There is no engineering associated with it. No books or talks or specialists. It's purely a function of point #1. People want the lowest cost above all else, so lower quality parts get used. Warranty durations are pretty standard too, 1 year 2 year 5 year. You never see a 566 day warranty like you would expect from a calculated failure model. Also, the best way for 25 years now to make a product fail just after warranty is to program it in software. Everything has a microcontroller nowadays. How many devs here have written that code?
  • js8 1y ago
    Regarding planned obsolescence, what do you think of Veritasium's video on the topic? Anyway, I think nobody in the industry needs to be aware of that term, and it can still be in play. Nobody in media really talks about Chomsky media filters, yet they arguably exist. As you mention, all that is needed for planned obsolence is if engineers only consider parts with expected percentile failure after the warranty, and then go by other criteria, e.g. cheapness. This will easily result in a situation where a product that would otherwise last relies on a cheap part that prematurely failed. For example, I had a monitor where the "on" button failed after couple years. I replaced the failed plastic hinge with a piece of cardboard and the monitor still works, good 15 years later.
• rimeice 1y ago
  Shame. This is a poorly made case for an important phenomenon. > “the first thing car ads highlighted was their longevity.“ This is table stakes now for cars so it would be weird for a car company to highlight it. So in the case for cars the baseline quality expectation has significantly increased. The case is much easier to make for fashionable items like clothes and interiors.
• layer8 1y ago
  Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. However, a common experience for me is that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten worse, being cheaper made. And I have a hard time finding a replacement that matches the quality of the old version. It’s a regularly reoccurring frustration. My suspicion is that when products are successful and mature but reach market saturation, profit growth pressure leads to cutting some corners on every iteration, and hence to a slow decline in quality over the years.
  • sershe 1y ago
    I'm in the same camp of the people who like using things forever. However, I find that I'm in a small minority... I am not even talking about clothing, fast fashion etc., people around me are constantly doing kitchen renovations, changing cars every few years, phones every year, etc. What's the point of building for durability if there's no demand for it? Moreover, if you look at expensive cars or furniture, the markup on them has to be higher than cheap stuff. Honda Fit is like 20% of the price of a BMW, but I bet doesn't cost 20% to manufacture... So if people wanted quality it would be better for companies to produce more of the expensive option. Either companies are dumb or people don't want quality. I just recently got a coffee grinder that costs 3 times as much as my old one and it's actually better across multiple dimensions, including material e.g. metal vs plastic . But how many units do you think the plastic junk at 0.33x the price sells vs mine?
  • xattt 1y ago
    E.g. the race to the bottom of the Billy bookcase. In the last 5 years, IKEA has started using plastic fasteners to secure the backing.
    • bamboozled 1y ago
      I break this promise from time to time, but every time I buy an IKEA product lately, I vow never to do it again.
      • 1y ago
• mihaic 1y ago
  While it's something with a myriad of causes, the main one to me is the decrease of real wages for the middle class, not just consumer culture. Some products and services managed to decrease in price to match this, and but the culture of craftsmanship had to be sacrificed to match lower purchasing parity. Product culture ends up being the culture in which the middle class are engaged in.
• rob_c 1y ago
  >declining quality Just like this article I'm afraid. If it's making a point it's lost by meandering to too long. If it's point it's simply longevity then it's missed the point about how LLM are simply here to stay, the genie is out of the bottle with regards to that tool. If the point is some anti hyper-capitalist rant then it's a thinly veiled option piece. If the point is the breakdown of the social contract/elevator. Then why when you're interviewing experts who study this aren't you asking poignant questions like "when do you think this happened?" or "can this be fixed?". Rather than ranting about the dreams of the nuclear (pub intended) family to China and "AI". If it that if you're not chasing these answers you're either afraid to admit you know them or are scared of them?
• koolba 1y ago
  > “Perhaps the best-known example of buying for convenience is paying around €75 per kilo for coffee just because it comes in capsules,” says Vinyals. Maybe not the best example. If there’s ever a product where timeliness is a feature, it’s the morning coffee. A $.70 Nespresso pod may not match a freshly ground light roast pour over, but to the dreary eyed wage slave just rising to seize the day, the taste consistency and convenience are distinct features. > Today, it’s easier to converse with a machine than with a real person. The problem is that no one likes these systems: according to a study by the Cetelem Observatory published last October, five out of 10 consumers openly reject virtual assistants. People fail to realize the cost of interactions too. With minimum wage at nearly $20/hour, a six (6) minute phone call costs $2 more than the $0 marginal cost of an automated phone system. Would you pay a $2 human-interaction-surcharge to order a pizza?
• kkfx 1y ago
  It's a scale problem and a targets one: we are damn many, if we all want a fillet a day we haven't enough cows to satisfy such demand, and that's valid for essentially anything. So far we prove to be very skilled in doing identical stuff on scale, which enable industry hyper-growth but we can't feed production lines with enough raw materials, we can't produce most things in circular manner and even some production naturally renewable can't be completely renewable due to the scale of the demand. In an ideal world we cultivate and farm in proportions where the guano and manure from the species we raise provide enough fertiliser for what we grow. But there are many of us, and to feed everyone, this balance is impossible, so we must crush rocks to nourish plants sufficiently, which is obviously not renewable... We know how to makes wood-frame homes and trees grow up again, but again the demand much surpass the capacity of trees to grow up again and so on. The result it's finding new way to do more with less, and finding them quickly. Some do works well, some do works a bit, many gives only the illusion to work enough and people buy them anyway because an illusion it's still something more than nothing. The target issue is the model, capitalism, issue, in the past we have used money as a means to barter things counter something we all accept. Nowadays we use money to makes more money, so goods are just a mean not a target, and the result is that we do not care about quality, being just a mean if we can sell them it's enough to milk money. To solve this we need to makes money public, creating by governments without fractionary reserves and public debt mechanism, taxed to keep the supply limited enough following the availability of any specific resources, so essentially like Swiss we need to tax just VAT with continuously variables rates following nature and tech, while taxing local properties just to assure local consumption does not exceed a sustainable threshold of resources usage.
• kakadu 1y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_prof... This one seems to tick all the boxes
• TheJCDenton 1y ago
  The main metric has always been care. Care beat quality as a metric, because care is very inefficient to fake and very powerful when genuine. How does the company providing the physical product or the service care ? Most companies right now care about AI. Some integration are impressive. But where's real care about users ? It seems it's not the subject anymore. We may have tricked ourselves into beveling technology will resolve in itself all problems, and it's at its peak with AI. As engineers we can forget sometimes that technology is just a tool and its fine, but as a society it may leads us all in a bad direction.
• paulnpace 1y ago
  This article is absolutely terrible. > There’s one conclusion that comes up repeatedly throughout this report: the perception that everything is of lower quality is more pronounced among older people. The reasons are varied. One is that attributes like durability — which used to be a major factor in how people judged a product’s quality — have lost relevance. Well, wouldn't older people have more perspective from a greater amount of lived experience? Then, in the next sentence, the article assumes away a reason to throw their conclusions out. > José Francisco Rodríguez, president of the Spanish Association of Customer Relations Experts, admits that a lack of digital skills can be particularly frustrating for older adults, who perceive that the quality of customer service has deteriorated due to automation. However, Rodríguez argues that, generally speaking, automation does improve customer service. When the automation on the other end can't understand my problem and I can't talk to a human, then I cannot solve my problem. This is definitively a regression and is occurring more than ever before. I have a problem with getting paid from a large company, and there is no reasonable way outside of hiring a lawyer for me to resolve the problem, and the dollar amount is so low the company knows full well that I will not hire a lawyer to resolve the problem, and it is automation that makes this possible, more than ever. But I'm sure the back-end metrics look great to management and the experts in this article. > It’s difficult to prove that today’s products are worse than those of 20 years ago. Why is "20 years ago" the baseline? And that word "prove" establishes an unattainable bar within such a subjective field of study.
• LastTrain 1y ago
  That page design is a case in point.
• bsenftner 1y ago
  Do not discuss "content" of this article, discuss the reasoning behind and the effect of this article. The author many not even realize this is a propaganda article, using a well known mechanism of "spray to dismay and therefore cripple". This article is a coordinated series of arguments that sum to the statement "you are powerless."
  • rob_c 1y ago
    Not far off. The author either submitted to the inevitable. Or, decided that they don't want to make change. Hate the cheap fashion, make a choice, buy proper products they just cost more and require the slightest of effort to care for. Hate bad writing, move on read something else. Dislike the quality of product X buy Y. Frankly if you had told me the quality of product you would be and to buy for example in the MacBook air for <<$1k a few years ago I'd have laughed. There are food brands which are still going that make the same quality products and don't sacrifice, but they now cost more than the competitors because they don't compromise. And that's just the beginning. The moaning about China, AI, people is just the same "I can't do anything to improve my lot in life" you see too much online. Stop reacting to things happening to you and start doing things.
  • beepbooptheory 1y ago
    The "power" of your consumer choice is a consolation within a life of servitude anyway though right? Like even if the author is totally wrong, that "actually all our products are actually much better thank you, good thing we don't live 50 years ago!" Is that something we can truly be happy about? Is that winning? You too, im sure, feel that itchy emptiness when you have received all your products, when all the plastics has been peeled off and the software has been updated. This is not a battle you even want to win! The power you are defending is already second-hand, is just a sedative. You can want more.
  • cardanome 1y ago
    Objectively as individuals we are absolutely powerless. Nothing we do or don't do makes any difference in the grand scheme of things. Anyone telling us otherwise is selling us snake oil. We as part of a collective are incredibly powerful beyond imagination. When our concerns and our world start to become bigger than just our individual needs, we find strength in numbers. Only then can our individuality truly shine. Seeing us as part of a group, a class and building that sense of community and collective action is long and difficult work.
• markx2 1y ago
  January this year a water pipe burst in the kitchen directly over a Belling Range cooker (some 13+ years old). Switched it off at the mains and awaited a visit from an electrician once the place had dried out. The sparky that arrived had worked for Belling, was very familiar with their products. He checked it over, tested, declared it safe. He then added that if something had been wrong I would have been better to get parts replaced rather than a complete new oven - because Belling products these days are much less reliable. I have no data on that, but I can't but believe someone in the industry.
  • ta8645 1y ago
    Had almost the exact same thing happened here with our clothes dryer. Tech said it was worth replacing the motor on our 20-year-old model, even though it was 70% the price of a new dryer. Said the new ones just aren't built to last, and our restored one would last another 20 years. We also still use the same 40 year old Coleman camping stove every summer, while other campers only get a few years out of much newer models. But recently we found a happy exception, when we replaced our Contigo spill-proof coffee mugs (with a button you press to drink). They were always prone to the mechanism getting gross with milk scum, and were very hard to clean. The new models have an updated design that encloses the mechanism and keeps it much easier to keep clean. The metal seems heavier and high-quality, and the top lip has been folded over so it's not sharp like the old model. They've actually improved them a fair bit, for about the same price as the older ones.
• ysofunny 1y ago
  commodities are a lie. quality is real, commodity markets have been historically abused to "steal through quality" for example, all the best fruits from the global south are not consumed in the countries they grew, but exported for "better profits". this has gone on too long.
• willguest 1y ago
  Is it not a little ironic that, in order to read this article without a subscription, I must agree to share my browser data with 920 interested parties? Needless to say, I declined this unfair trade, but didn't hold out the greatest hopes for this being a particularly enlightening or profound piece.
• devnullbrain 1y ago
  It's all just Baumol's cost disease. Sectors like ours becoming more productive drags up the cost of labour everywhere else. In manufacturing, that increases the incentive to skip any step that needs human input (e.g. increasing the stitch pitch and avoiding saddle stitching in leather). In services, it's your main input cost. We can increase the efficiency of huge swathes of the economy, but eventually humans become a hard bottleneck. It takes a huge technological leap to overcome that.
• hshshshshsh 1y ago
  Just for the west I think. Quality is actually sky rocketing in Asian countries compared to past for example. My best bet is resources were over allocated to West prior because of colonization and it's getting reversed to mean at a rapid pace.
• aiisahik 1y ago
  Quality comes at a cost. That cost has gone down for some types of products (iPhones, TVs) but gone up for other types of products (housing). Clothing cost after accounting for inflation has actually not increased. There are many of high quality textiles companies that only produce hand made organic cotton sourced from sustainable farms etc. Some of them are actually not too expensive - check out Isto from Portugal. Yes, i'm willing to pay $50 for a tshirt instead of the usual $25 from Uniqlo or Zara but most people are not. The article is from Spain - the birthplace of Zara, Inditex and fast fashion. Spain is also known for sitting on cheap plastic chairs outside drinking cheap beer for hours. The quality of housing interiors is pretty poor - despite wood parquet flooring being no more expensive than in other parts of the world, almost every house here (even after renovation) has laminate, concrete or ceramic flooring. Yet plenty of people here have the top of the latest Playstation or iPhone. Which we all get - if housing start costing close to 40% of your paycheck which is typical for a young person in Spain, is that $50 high quality tshirt or $80 / sqm parquet really what you should logically do with your left over money? High quality items has traditionally been a luxury good - one reserved for the rich. Back then we simply did not have the choice to buy low quality items which allowed us to shift more spending on things that we actually cared more about. The real lament is that most of us actually care less about the quality of clothing and furniture than we would like to believe.
• thomassmith65 1y ago
  The argument that customers are demanding lower quality products only makes sense if they have a choice. That isn't really the case (not without a lot of rhetorical contortions, anyhow). When the iPod first appeared, customers did not see its enclosed battery as desirable. They put up with it. Soon enough, no batteries are replaceable. Few car buyers wanted touch screen controls, but the entire auto industry transitioned to them, almost at once. Customers put up with them. The problem is not that companies focus on customers and reluctantly provide crappy products. The problem is that customer focus died shortly after the year 2000.
• Koffiepoeder 1y ago
  To websites that talk about declining quality and then return a 403 for tor users: sweep your own front door first please! I have the luck to be able to circumvent via a residential IP, but users from oppressive regimes may be less fortunate.
• kerkeslager 1y ago
  This is only bewildering to people who refuse to admit the problems of our current economic system because our current economic system benefits them. Advertising needs to go. Advertising is why worse products at higher prices beat out better products at lower prices. Advertising isn't information, it's lies: nobody tells you the problems with their product or things their competitor does better. We don't need advertising to find out about products: word of mouth, experts, and independent review sites are much better sources of information already. And it's a huge drain on our economy: once you let one company advertise, then advertising is no longer optional for all their competitors. Advertisers of HN will surely refuse to admit these pretty basic, obvious facts, use their advertising platforms to make sure pro-advertising talking points are louder than reason, and the enshittification of everything will continue.
• felineflock 1y ago
  Seems related to this other submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44609969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44609969
• romaaeterna 1y ago
  Off-shoring much of the manufacturing of American consumer goods to an overseas competitor known for quality issues, and the growth of online retailers that do not police for quality or counterfeits, may have something to do with the overall trend.
• benrutter 1y ago
  From the intro: > Airplane seats are getting smaller and smaller, clothes are unrecognizable after the second wash, and machines now answer our calls. The author talks about a range of motivations behind these, but it seems like there's an obvious one we're missing. All these changes make products more profitable. I would love to live in a society that prioritises sustainability and quality of life for its citizens. We currently only achieve those things if they're a byproduct of profit for coorporations. Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but I definitely don't see these changes as bewildering. Quality has been intentionally lowered when it conflicts with profit since at least the Phoebus cartel[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
  • ryukoposting 1y ago
    Have you ever actually used a long-life incandescent lightbulb? They suck. It's like your bedroom is lit by the miserable little lamp in your oven. That's because Tungsten lighting has inherent tradeoffs between life span, and every other desirable characteristic. Brightness, spectral quality, and energy efficiency all improve as you make the filament thinner, and thus less durable. The Phoebus cartel is an example of planned obsolescence, but it's a bad example for your argument because it made lightbulbs much, much better at their intended purpose. Consumer number-gawking incentivized manufacturers to make their product objectively worse, and the cartel solved that problem.
    • benrutter 1y ago
      No I haven't - has anyone? It sounds like you have, so I won't argue. I am no expert on what the actual consumer impact of the Phoebus Cartel was, maybe it wasn't a great choie of example. Wikipedia doesn't make it sound positive for consumers overall: > Regulators in the UK and some independent engineers have noted that there are benefits to shorter bulb lifespans, as shorter-life bulbs can be brighter for the same wattage. Nevertheless, both internal comments from cartel executives and later findings by a US court suggest that the cartel's direct motivation for the change was to increase profits by forcing customers to buy bulbs more frequently.
• skc 1y ago
  This is a feeling that definitely becomes more acute the older one gets. Try shopping for toys for your kids today. Every time I'm with my 7 year old browsing the toy aisles I fondly remember my Tonka truck from when I was his age. I outgrew it and it was still in perfect condition. My sons toys barely last a month.
• hermitcrab 1y ago
  The lack of local purchasing is driving some of this. Whenever I buy t-shirts from Amazon, they are always very thin. You can't feel the quality via the web page, so why make it anything better than 'acceptable'?
  • chadcmulligan 1y ago
    Shirts are one of those things that are difficult to buy something of quality for some reason, even the same brands differ batch to batch.
    • hermitcrab 1y ago
      I think I should probably stick to buying clothes from local shops.
• tiffanyh 1y ago
  People love inexpensive goods. Inexpensive goods leads to reduced quality (to a point it’s acceptable).
• gttalbot 1y ago
  Quality has not gone up. Products are deliberately made to fail sooner by Chinese manufacturers who are reducing costs on super tiny margins. The mantra that "consumers get lower prices and everything is better as a result" deliberately elides any discussion of quality and reliability.
• hermitcrab 1y ago
  My biggest worry is what AI is going to do to software development, I fear that we will soon be submerged in a sea of low(human)-effort, low quality software. As an Indie product developer, I plan to keep developing software the 'old fashioned' way, with a focus on quality.
• hermitcrab 1y ago
  I'm still wearing stuff I bought 20 or 30 years ago. It appals me that someone would wear something a few times and then discard it. If you are doing that just because you worry what other people think, then you must have a very weak personality.
• CommenterPerson 1y ago
  Few observations over the past few decades (my paycheck went up by slightly less than the US inflation rate during this time): Air travel is much more affordable to me. It has become psychologically nasty which makes the overall deal feel worse, while it is actually better in $ terms. Housing build quality is worse, things need more frequent repairs, cost is higher probably due to increase in land value. Much more trashy food in the grocery store aisles, one needs to be aware and shop carefully. Politics especially in the US has gotten FAR worse. The internet after the early promise has gotten FAR worse (better in bandwidth and far worse via enshittification). Cars improved till around 2010 and now worse for the dollar (too much electronics, and repairs are prohibitively expensive).
• mensetmanusman 1y ago
  This is what record high corporate profits feels like.
• sgt 1y ago
  > Airplane seats are getting smaller and smaller, This is infuriating. Due to better nutrition, we all got bigger. Our parents were smaller in comparison, and our grandparents seem tiny. I'm 6'6" and I'm on the tall end, but I see more and more giants roaming the Earth (and they do seem like giants if you're used to be the tallest in the room). Yet they make airplane seats smaller. I have to pay hundreds of dollars extra just to buy extra leg room and all that crap. It's frustrating.
• joduplessis 1y ago
  This is one of the reasons I do like Apple products. I've owned many PC's/Android phones/etc. - none of them come even close the longevity of Apple hardware (the exceptions are real, for sure).
  • Ylpertnodi 1y ago
    My atari STE (4mb upgrade) is still going strong, and is stll rock (and roll) steady for music.
• Meneth 1y ago
  Quality is being sacrificed on the altar of Moloch [1]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140730043944/http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140730043944/http://slatestarc...
• high_byte 1y ago
  very insightful to read the comments here. it seems quality isn't universally declining, but the variance in quality is increasing, and finding good quality is nearly impossible in the influx of product offers. reviews are fake, to most short term profit margins are more important than reputation.
• neogodless 1y ago
  Can we discuss food packaging a bit? What's better -- often food packaging has clever ways to be resealable so you can use it without letting your food get stale. What's worse -- the above is combined with "make it as thin as possible to not fall apart before it gets home. Quite frequently... I try to carefully open a resealable package, and completely shred it ruining the part that is supposed to reseal. I imagine this is regional, but our local deli meat bags... well this adds a second issue... the bags are super thin, but then they put strong stickers folded across the resealable portion. It's nigh impossible to get the sticker lifted without ripping a hole in the bag and again, ruining the "resealable" feature.
  • rob_c 1y ago
    Here's a dirty little secret. These companies are so fine tuned that they notice a 0.05% drop in revenue. Don't like what they do. Don't buy it and see if they change. If they change something and you vote with your cash they notice. The biggest lie is that you don't matter because you're statistically insignificant. If you believe that they lose 0.005% vs 0.05%. For better or worse look at Bud Light. The customer is always the opinion they listen to. 50% loss in profits or 0.5% this gets blamed on someone ultimately and they tend to revert unpopular decisions when they're not related to regulatory changes.
• l0b0 1y ago
  No mention of value engineering? Isn't that what every big company does to a successful product? Barely-noticeable quality decreases compound over years, and more noticeable ones are rationalized away as necessary for survival. It doesn't take a genius to see where that leads. Also enshittification, the more general trend where an initial offering is excellent, maybe even provided at a loss, to spread the word and provide great feedback, and then more and more money is squeezed out of it while riding consumer satisfaction lag, until the offering is taken behind the shed and mercy killed.
• efitz 1y ago
  I think one of the indicators of of declining quality is the unwillingness to support products (beyond initial installation support), and that the unwillingness to make products supportable. Did it break after two years? Make it so inconvenient that they’ll just buy a new one. Failure is seen as an upgrade opportunity, and repair is seen as a captive revenue stream rather than an opportunity for other businesses or DIYers. If you can tolerate or enjoy the style, Louis Rossmann is a great watch on YouTube.
• mousethatroared 1y ago
  "Psychologist Albert Vinyals, author of El consumidor tarado (The Disordered Consumer) " Well that's one way to translate "tarado". Moron would be the correct way though.
• specialp 1y ago
  One factor around this is private equity buyouts. PE has been snapping up a lot of well established smaller companies and squeezing more profits out of them. Part of this is value engineering the products and offerings. These companies have built up names over a long time based on good products so you can ride the name and existing customers for a bit and maximize profits. By the time people get fed up the investment has paid off.
• next_xibalba 1y ago
  This is very simple. Growth has declined. When growth declines, you can’t rely on scale economies to expand your margins. So you have to take cost out of your product or service. And if you do that long enough, you start cutting not just fat but then muscle, then bone.
• AngryData 1y ago
  This has been a problem since industrialization and I think is inherent in capitalist systems which strive towards maximum profit margins over every other factor. Where ever a corner can be cut it will be in the name of profit, reputation be damned because they can just use advertising, marketing, and marketplace dominance to suppress concerns over quality as they boil the frog. Declining product quality was even one of the major complaints luddites had over factory looms, it wasn't just that they were being replaced with lesser skilled workers and their wages cut, but the quality of fabric from the factory looms they built just got worse and worse over time so they couldn't even claim their loss of wages was worth having better clothes, they got worse wages and worse clothes. Everyone likes to hem and haw over free market supposedly fixing such problems, but completely ignores the huge amount of friction in moving markets that require massive tons of capital to even challenge to the smallest degree. And even if you get the overall established market to change practices for a small time span it is only through essentially open war with one another as the companies battle it out; and as soon as there is either a clear dominating winner, or a few of the larger companies essentially decide peace is better and stop truly challenging each other for dominance, everything goes right back to reducing quality and increasing profit margins. The big companies know being at perpetual war in the market, which is what would be best for consumers in providing the best prices and products, makes their position less stable and leaves them vulnerable to new challengers, and instead tend to default towards unspoken collusion with other big established companies in order to not rock the boat. It makes the companies more stable and profitable, but is worse for consumers, and gets even worse for consumers when those companies start looking at other ways to entrench their position through politics and law.
• osigurdson 1y ago
  Perhaps the author should take a look in the mirror. The article sounds suspiciously LLM like on a site filled with garbage ads.
• scotty79 1y ago
  Free market is a volume increase and cost reduction device. There's only so much cost you can reduce without affecting quality. And the reduction doesn't ever stop.
• trentnix 1y ago
  Creativity and competence have become a commodity in the eyes of the modern management. Employees are headcount and customers are blood bags to bleed until there’s nothing left. Each and every one is an economic unit to mobilize and squeeze. And when creativity and competence are commodities, companies expect they can replace creativity and competence with another SaaS platform or another vendor who'll do the dirty work. Companies don’t dare hire new graduates and train them. They don't try to educate them on how to build and maintain things while preserving the fresh thinking that comes with youth and inexperience. Those days are gone because the MBA wizards have decided long term investment, investment into an industry or one's community, is bad business. The pied pipers of modern business thinking openly encourage “minimum viable” as the secret to success. “Minimum viable” is only a a fly’s eyelash from “not viable”. That results in “nearly not viable” schlock filling the shelves anywhere things are sold. Modern business philosophy is literally that, for years, we’ve made things too good. That thinking infects every level of business, from development to manufacturing to service and support. Companies instruct their teams and vendors to fly as close to the sun as possible. They use words like “agile” and “lean” and “efficient”, when in most cases they are just using those words to wallpaper over shoddy work. And because the way we used to do things is always wrong, companies hire one “consultant” after another poisoning the well with this garbage. The need for “consultant” help never ends, as the real money in consulting is in prolonging problems. When all of that outsourcing, outsourcing of thinking and outsourcing of actual production, doesn’t adequately insulate the decision makers from accountability, companies embrace “big data” and decision committees and auditors and anything else that shields the org chart from real scrutiny. Companies refuse to trust anyone who actually has their ear to the ground in favor of some artificial signal discerned from the mountain of white noise collected from inconsistent and uneven sources. Nobody trusts the prophet in their own hometown, but the prophet from the next town is an oracle. All of that, coupled with a consumer market that is neither educated nor savvy enough to discern quality and unwilling to pay for what quality actually costs, results in the sorry state we are experiencing. This can't sustain.
• anovikov 1y ago
  Or actually, just simply remember computers of 15-20 years ago. How many times per day you had to press "Ctrl-Alt-Del" or even "Reset", to reboot a stuck one? When was the last time you had to do it these days?
• steve76 1y ago
  [dead]
• throwaway984393 1y ago
  [dead]
• baxuz 1y ago
  Quality has become something reserved for the rich. To get a garment or an item of the same quality that was available 20-30 years ago, I'd have to pay 10-100x the price. And I wouldn't even know where to start looking or how to get them. You can by a "professional" set of Zwilling or Fissler cookware from Germany, which is actually made outside of Germany, and corrodes and warps way worse than a set of pots from the 1990s. Pitting from dishwashers, bad welds, delamination that occurs when using the boost function on the induction hob... The quality that was present in those pots from the 90s are now reserved for actual professional cookware sets not found in regular catalogues, which costs upwards of 300€ per pot. Same goes for garments. If you want cotton spun from high-quality yarn that won't pill or fray within 1 year, the only place you will find it is by the yard at the tailor's, or in brands you don't even know the name of. Meanwhile, I am still rocking the same T-shirt that I wore in elementary school 30 years ago. Office chairs — I have an Italian one from early 2000s and it's a beast. Both the mechanism and the upholstery. Today's "best" office chair — the SteelCase Leap is a rickety piece of trash by comparison. You can see the same decline in materials if you compare a Herman Miller Aeron from the early 2000s and ones built today. Look at the Kitchen Aid stand mixer. The old ones had metal internals, and powerful, reliable motors. The new ones are much weaker, have nylon load bearing parts, and have a life span of 5 years tops. Cutlery, tools... Everything has become worse, and there is a new category of "premium" items which are anything but. And the biggest problem is that people's standards have been lowered to incredibly low levels. It's like they don't even understand how bad the things they are using actually are.
  • bigbadfeline 1y ago
    Same in the US.
• like_any_other 1y ago
  > One is that attributes like durability — which used to be a major factor in how people judged a product’s quality — have lost relevance. [..] Now, no one knows what their pants are made of. Why would they? In a year, we’ll stop wearing them because they’ll no longer be fashionable. Is this describing aliens? Because of all the people in my social circle, maybe one is like this.
• lycopodiopsida 1y ago
  It is quite ironic that this article is littered with ads for temu…
• fancyfredbot 1y ago
  This article manages to undermine itself with ridiculous quotes: "There is no attachment, respect, or emotional journey with a garment you spend less than 20 years with.” "we spend $3 on a carton of juice instead of squeezing oranges" Perhaps by including words of wisdom like these they hope to demonstrate that their thesis of a decline in quality extends to journalism?
• disambiguation 1y ago
  Settling for less can be economically optimal; planned obsolescence for producers (securing revenue), riding the bus for consumers (affordability).
• PaulHoule 1y ago
  This was a big theme in the 1970s, one book that captures that Zeitgiest is this https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/145212225-by-marvin-harris-why-nothing-works https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/145212225-by-marvin-harr... and there were a lot of books offering answers such as https://www.amazon.com/Quality-Free-Certain-Becomes-Business/dp/0070145121 https://www.amazon.com/Quality-Free-Certain-Becomes-Business... There are two theories of quality: (1) quality is conformance to a specification and (2) quality is conformance to customer requirements. The answer to type (1) quality is to reduce variance. One response to type (1) quality is to say something like "you can't get good help today", e.g. blame the worker, which has elements such as "they come to the factory drunk somedays", "they are smoking pot all the time", "they don't care". Crosby says management should take responsibility because management hires the workers, trains the workers, supervises the workers, designs the work process, fires the workers, etc. There's a dark side to type (1) quality thinking in that reducing variance lets you reduce the mean. For instance, a metal pail needs a certain thickness of metal on the bottom, if you go under a threshold the bottom fails. Because of variance you can't make a pail with exactly that thickness, you have to be several standard deviations above the threshold. Get that variation down and you can reduce the mean, use less metal. (Saves money at the factory, costs less to ship, less global warming, etc.) Now you have a system with less reserve, if a new source of variation shows up you are making crap pails again. Thinking about type (2) quality involves a conversation with customers to understand what their requirements are. The Toyota Corolla and Cadillac Escalade are both excellent vehicles from the perspective of customers who have different values. If customers aren't being heard, you have problems in the type (2) department -- in Doctorow's "enshittification" scenario the voice of neither end users nor advertisers or vendors are being heard. In cases such as Meta, even ordinary shareholders are unheard and the inevitable consequence of that is "it sucks." See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
  • zzo38computer 1y ago
    Sometimes the specification is no good, and sometimes the customer requirements are different for many customers, in some cases being something which is less common (or that they try to make it appear less common (even to the customers) in order to try to be dishonest).
• AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  I grew up in the 1970s. I remember my dad having to regularly lube the joints of his truck, crawling under it with a grease gun to reach the Zerk fittings. I remember vehicles needing a tuneup every 3000 miles, and reaching 100,000 was an achievement. Cars today? First tuneup at 100,000 miles. You can say that cars are a lot more fragile today - get in a crash and they fall apart. That's true, but it's deliberate, and it's not deliberate so that they can make them cheap. It's deliberate so that fewer people die.
• Animats 1y ago
  Meanwhile, in China, there's a push from the top to improve quality.[1] Government policy previously favored production quantity and increased market share. Mission accomplished. Now there's overcapacity in many areas. So the new policy push is to increase quality to add value. The government is willing to let low-quality companies go out of business. This is very obvious in China's electric vehicles. There used to be several hundred manufacturers, most producing really crappy cars. Now, there are fewer manufacturers, and the cars are much better. Ford's CEO on the BYD Shark: “It’s a great product. It’s sold well. They’re trying to sell in high volume in Mexico, but it’s also being localized in Thailand. If we want to be a global player in pickups, like we are now, we have to compete.” Tools from China used to be total crap, and now they are at least OK. There's a strong trend towards branded products from China, rather than white-label production. Brand reputation starts to matter. [1] https://qualityinspection.org/cheap-and-crappy-to-excellent-quality-the-transformation-of-china-made-products/ https://qualityinspection.org/cheap-and-crappy-to-excellent-...
• knallfrosch 1y ago
  Furniture really is the prime example. I've heard endless complaints about IKEA, along the lines of "I move two times and it's broken." You ask people whether they have a sturdy childhood wardrobe that they could use. The idea seems disgusting. You ask them what other options they considered. The comment appears to be offensive. How many people have researched and considered a company's service hotline quality before deciding to buy? Noone. People love to hate "evil" companies and expect laudations for knowing the concept of "planned obsolence" (they heard it once.) It's easy, it's someone else's fault. But mention their own responsibility as capitalist consumers and they'll quickly leave the discussion.
• antithesizer 1y ago
  Reading through this comment section of people whose 'big brains' won't even allow them to come to the correct conclusion about whether or not products have declined in quality over time, I am awestruck by the fact that knowledge of anything is ever possible under any circumstances. Truly, human beings deserve no respect. Only pity.
• kldg 1y ago
  just gonna throw this out there: I started a garden plot this year, all dug up by hand with a mattock, and harvested my first bush beans today; hecking great. I got components in yday for a variable DC-DC power supply (though I can't seem to find the DACs I know I have because I have everything inventoried -- but I'll find them). Will give me wireless control and read of test routines for products I review (funnily enough, given point about reviews in article) via an ESP32. China takes my eCAD design and ships me PCBs I've had no issue with, and at less than $1/board (granted, it takes them a couple weeks, but I'm in no rush). if you don't like what society's offering up, DIY. nothing wrong with being a little antisocial sometimes, even if only for exercise; "what would Terry do?" hoist the bird, fly the flag, and reject glowies.
• mark-r 1y ago
  I have a picture from a vacation I took in 2003, and the shirt I was wearing still hangs in my closet. I don't know if that will be the case for anything I buy today because I don't expect to live another 22 years.
• tmnvix 1y ago
  My own theory is that we used to make the trade off between quality and cost. Now we make a trade off between quality, cost, and convenience - with convenience being heavily weighted. Consider the rise of bottled water, or Apple (it just works...) People have shown that they will pay a huge premium for convenience. That premium might be paid in the form of sacrificed quality or it might be paid in dollars.
• southernplaces7 1y ago
  The article itself easily gives light to what drives certain declines in longevity (if that's your only measure of quality, since there are others too): "Psychologist Albert Vinyals, author of El consumidor tarado (The Disordered Consumer) (2019), recalls that years ago, the first thing car ads highlighted was their longevity. “Now we don’t even consider it,” he notes over the phone. “My grandmother, when she went to buy clothes, looked at the type of fabric they were made of. Now, no one knows what their pants are made of. Why would they? In a year, we’ll stop wearing them because they’ll no longer be fashionable.”" People don't care. As sheer product diversity and sourcing increased across the last several decades, so many products have become so much cheaper as a percentage of disposable income that people just stopped caring about how durable they are. The logic is sound from the standpoint of a consumer for most products for which durability isn't an absolute must: Just accept a cheaper thing because it's not too cumbersome to replace it sooner rather than later. This has slowly worn down a general tendency towards careful thriftiness that previous generations had internalized and made the latest generations internalize that durability doesn't matter as much. That many products marketed as high quality and sold at such prices also end up being poorly made doesn't help either: If you can't even trust the outcome when you make an effort to be careful, why bother?
• LorenPechtel 1y ago
  I think at least part of the problem is that we very often can't determine quality very well. And that which can't be measured gets corners cut on it. For many products I believe we could address this fairly well with a simple consumer protection law: Products must state an estimated mean time to failure, workmanship must be fully warrantied to at least 1/2 of this time.
• sp_c 1y ago
  We get the leftovers from the ultra rich. Quality can still be found but the cost is crazy. Vs ‘back in the day’ when quality products were more affordable and available to more people.
• zzo38computer 1y ago
  Some people do want a good quality and do want to keep using the same one for many years, so what they say is not necessarily true of everyone. However, often the good quality things can be difficult to find (even if it is available, which in some cases it will be but often it isn't), or something has some advantages and some disadvantages over the other one which also makes it difficult to find an actually good one. Like they say sometimes people discard things for other reasons and buy new things too often, but some people don't want to do that, and shouldn't discard and keep buying new things too much. But, the quality is often bad too, with worse durabilty and worse quality in many other ways too. The other thing that is done is making it incompatible which can also make it difficult to actually have one which is of a good quality, especially if the specifications which may be required for such a thing are of a bad quality (which is also common). (It is true even with computer programs. FOSS can help a bit, although even programs that are made FOSS can be of a bad quality in many ways, it does at least allow people to try to improve them if they want to do. It is one part of one reason why I and some people might write some programs differently than others are commonly made.)
• jjk166 1y ago
  One needs to distinguish between quality, consistency, value, and utility. My parents have a fridge that has been running consistently without issue for 40 years. It is a quality fridge. What fraction of the fridges made at the same time by the same company are also still running? I can't say for certain but I certainly haven't encountered one since my childhood. They may have been capable of high quality, but not consistently high quality. My parents just lucked out. The fridge lacks most features of more modern fridges like water filtration or an ice maker, and the design of its shelves weren't particularly ergonomic. A similar fridge would be much cheaper today, at least adjusted for inflation. Put another way, a modern fridge of the same price point would be more valuable. But the fridge has spent the past 25 years as a backup fridge mostly for longer term storage of bulk items, so the lack of features have not really impacted its utility. Keeping things cold is the primary purpose of a fridge, everything else is a gimmick. Things have across the board gotten more consistent and cheaper for a given value. A lot of products have suffered feature bloat which detracts from their utility. I don't believe there has been any meaningful shift in quality in the past few decades - for the most part its just people misremembering the past, cherry picking anecdotes, or being deliberately obtuse about how they actually use products and services. Some specific industries may have seen changes, but there is not a bewildering phenomenon across the board.
• swrdrvrsd 1y ago
  imagine thinking this is a mystery
• Amaury-El 1y ago
  A lot of stuff looks flashier and cheaper now, but when you actually use it, something just feels off. Older versions from the same brand often felt more solid and better designed. It’s not just that quality dropped. It feels like the focus has shifted from durability to profit, faster updates, and short-term user metrics.
• whatever1 1y ago
  This a result of the investors demand for more profits, every single year. The only way to achieve this, reliably, is to squeeze your cash cow until it bleeds. Reduce BOM, introduce more ads, lock down repairs, introduce an annual subscription for a crucial function etc
• bgnn 1y ago
  It's fascinating to me that people find there's no noticable quality decline. It might be the case for US, as the quality of food and textile wasn't great in 90s or 2000s. It's very noticable in Europe though, especially in southern Europe. You could buy local food for so cheap, same for textile. I remember the first time my parents bought big-farm grown chicken at a local shop in 1997. I was fascinated and so happy because they also had chicken burgers (instead of buying a whole chicken at the butcher). Then came big dairy made yogurt and cheese, around 2000. There was even a failed experiment with factory made packaged bread, but nobody buys stale bread here, so that didn't work out. Now nobody remembers the taste of free range chicken from the villages, or any small scale farm for that matter. Change in textile is a bit more complicated and quality decline has hit only in the last 10 years or so but to an even larger scale. I have tshirts I bought 15 years ago for 1-2 Euros looking almost new, but now tshirts in any proce range don't last a year most of the time. I only buy 100% cotton but somehow the fabric quality is so low.
• nominallyfree 1y ago
  Inflation is the answer. It never went away. It just got disguised as labor exploitation and quality decline. And now it's back. We will get the worst of two worlds now. Inflation rising and low quality, highly polluting, exploitative industry.
• globnomulous 1y ago
  Unfortunately, I see no mention of a closed related issue that nobody ever seems to discuss or even question: the Internet has turned most people into 24-hours-per-day shoppers. Who decided that we should want to live this way and just accept it unquestioningly? Being at home used to mean being able to shut off browsing, buying, and consuming and to shut out the people and companies that want us to think about purchasing this or that. I've stopped doing this. I now avoid every part of the Internet and every electronic practice that subjects me to this awful facet of our culture. My life has improved, and I'm certain my brain has benefited.
• da-x 1y ago
  There something about this. I am on my 6th smartphone, it is the first phone of which the screen accumulates scratches. Google Pixel 9. None of my previous phones needed a screen protector.
• Igwe_404 1y ago
  The tie-break between producing better products and why some organisations get out competed even with better facilities and product fine-tuning is this, when starting out one should not think only of trying to change the world,if you have what it takes to be the great one,fine but a better approach is this, for every project,idea,invention etc try to find the utility delta of the state of the art in that field and how your product is going to affect the people under the curve. Your product may not change the world but it sure does make a lot of sense to start out from a well understood and occupied niche, and as we continue to transition to synthetic data these kind of planning will prove indispensable as products/brands get reinvented,replaced or legalese opaque reporting obfuscation gets the better part of our collective pretentious studies
• gonational 1y ago
  We're still in the early phases of millennials getting their first jobs and saving up to get apartments, etc. Gen Z is right there with them. The result has been a generation of the workforce that didn't learn good work ethic and skills in their teenage drug years (from approx 13 to 31). I worked from 13 on, but I have friends who didn't get their license until they were 19, didn't work until after finishing their gender studies degree, and now aren't qualified for their job monitoring the self checkout at Publix. That is why quality has declined.