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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 qual

• 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.
    • inglor_cz 1y ago
      Interesting. I rarely have problems with IKEA products, but I had quite many problems with bespoke wooden pieces of furniture.
      • nubinetwork 1y ago
        I find it depends on what you buy... my couch and table are fine, my bed wobbles and squeaks a fair bit... /shrug
        • bee_rider 1y ago
          > my bed wobbles and squeaks a fair bit... Well, that isn’t necessarily a bad sign I guess.
        • inglor_cz 1y ago
          Well, you are right, my only IKEA bed was bad and I spent over USD 1500 (in CZK) for a solid hand made bed, which will likely outlast me.
        • brewdad 1y ago
          I’ve found many beds ship with the minimum viable hardware to hold them together. You might see if you can find better screws/bolts/etc and replace the cheap ones that come with your frame.
          • xattt 1y ago
            Another semi-permanent option is to run lines of wood glue before connecting pieces together.
    • baq 1y ago
      IKEA has some of the best quality cheap furniture. To get something noticeably better you need to spend at least 2x for any given item; 3-5x is common for not at all fancy stuff.
  • delfinom 1y ago
    Those plastic clips work better than the traditional backing nails they used to use. Those nails couldn't hold back shit in the presses wood they used.
    • xp84 1y ago
      I have to agree, I just bought these and was at first skeptical, but they seem like a much better engineered solution. The two-part clip expands in the hole, greatly increasing friction to keep it in vs a static (and smooth!) nail, and their heads are also bigger than those little tacks reducing chances of the hole in the backboard failing.
  • wazoox 1y ago
    Ah ah I have several white "Billy", the oldest dating back to the late 80s. The shelves are painted solid wood planks. The latest one has shelves made of beehive cardboard.
• moffkalast 1y ago
  It's possible for that to be true while also there being competitors that are just making a name or themselves and aren't cutting corners. Incumbents in areas of low competition always get complacent and attempt to maximize profits without any further investment. Quality really only depends on the competition, since it removes those who lack it.
  • layer8 1y ago
    True, but as I said I often fail to find a good replacement when surveying the market for alternatives. Sometimes everyone copied the product but didn’t copy the original quality.
    • moffkalast 1y ago
      In that case it might've been that the original product wasn't cost effective to produce in the first place, or that most people buying it don't really care much about quality but just about the price, so that's what each provider optimizes for instead?
      • layer8 1y ago
        One recent example is a sturdy fold-out clothes drying rack I owned. All reviews praised its quality. My unit unfortunately got damaged in a heavy storm when I left it outside by mistake. The manufacturer got bought up in the meantime, and the product now is more flimsy and unstable, metal axes have been replaced by plastic ones. And I haven’t found any other model comparable to the old one on the market. I’d be willing to pay double or triple the price because of how good it was, and it wasn’t particularly inexpensive to start with. I very much doubt that such a product can’t be manufactured sustainably in robust quality.
        • Xcelerate 1y ago
          It’s gotten absurd. I’ll easily pay 10x the regular price of some object if I’m confident it will last a very long time and I won’t have to think about it anymore. I’ve replaced all the crappy LED bulbs in my house with Yuji Sunwave brand. I’ve not had a single bulb flicker or go out in years now, and the quality of the light is superb (i.e. more akin to what everyone used to have with incandescent bulbs). I bought a Control Freak induction cooktop in 2018. The whole family uses it far more than the cheap gas range that came with the house and is a pain to clean. Similarly, I replaced all the Food Network brand pots and pans I had in college that were chipping paint and rusting with Demeyere versions. Not a single problem since. And to your point, I’ve probably gone through six clothes drying racks by now that all break down after a short time. I have yet to find a high-quality one. It sounds expensive, but I suspect that in the long-term, the approach of buying higher quality up front ultimately ends up cheaper in terms of time and replacement costs. I’ve debated replacing some home appliances with commercial or restaurant versions, but there are some notable tradeoffs with that unfortunately, as the purpose of the appliance becomes somewhat different than a home use case. Of course this strategy is all well and good if you can foot the initial high cost of the products, which many people cannot on the typical family income. There’s been a lot written about how those of lower income are often taken advantage of in this way—they end up paying a higher “lifetime cost” for lower quality products and service, because the system attempts to produce the minimum viable affordable product, which then sets the bar for the “new normal”.
• bamboozled 1y ago
  It's also interesting, as you said, that everyone seems to want to defend crap. It's like corporations keep spreading the idea that you're always getting more for your money and everyone just seems to parrot that verbatim. My life is a constant struggle when it comes to finding nice things.
  • AndrewDavis 1y ago
    I gave up and started buying $4 rshirts. Why? Because each year the clothes I'd buy were were on quality than my previous clothes. When buying a $4 shirt I know the price:quality ratio, it's cheap:crap. Whereas majority of the time buying more expensive it might be slightly better, but it's still expensive:crap.
    • Gigachad 1y ago
      Try Uniqlo. Their $20 shirts have lasted me years. I haven’t thrown a single one out yet and I just have got around 90 uses out of some of the older ones so far.
      • bee_rider 1y ago
        Huh, that’s a funny number. I guess since we cycle through our laundry, that’s a couple years of use?
    • II2II 1y ago
      I remember a number of years back when people were equating the feeling of sturdy and heft with quality. Just feelings. No actual metrics. I would constantly look down at my beaten up plastic junk and shake my head. At least my junk still worked. Everyone else seemed to be replacing their stuff all the time because their favourite products were only designed to give the illusion of quality. In reality, the very things that gave those products the illusion of quality were diminishing the longevity of the product or ensuring that it could not withstand any abuse.
• IronyMan100 1y ago
  I had the same impression when buying clothes. I often buy the Shirts Form H&M. I have some old Shirts and the quality IS a Lot better. No loose Threads, the colors did Not wash out for and after washing they stayed how they are. Today all of that is not the Case anymore.
• trial3 1y ago
  exactly! i came to this thread to smugly type “capitalism” in a comment. but i’d like to, less smugily, posit that it’s really just enshittification. MBA-driven physical-goods enshittification. It’s cheaper to use cheaper glues. To slightly change the fabric blend towards polyester. Thinner gauge wiring. There are tradeoffs towards more complex devices being made, sure, but that’s not exactly what “quality” is, to me. There’s an extensive discussion about the iphone vs a snake-era nokia, which i feel like misses the point entirely
  • bsenftner 1y ago
    I think the "MBA-driven physical-goods enshittification" is a simplification and a cop-out because this is not just MBA-driven. This is across the board in all of society, and I believe the reason being that people, in general and enmass, are not being taught how to live with active critical analysis, and as a result when they choose an enshittificating decision, they do not realize it. They are not connecting the ramifications beyond their own mini-benefit. This is with the entire general population.
    • ARob109 1y ago
      Making physical goods low quality, cheap, and therefore disposable is the equivalent of rent seeking. Instead of growth and innovation, it’s how can the Company get recurring revenue after first sale. The balance for the Company is finding a quality to price point ratio where either 1) the customer doesn’t care if it breaks because it was cheap and they know it’s cheap or 2) it’s cheap and breaks but the utility of it to the customer warrants (or with some goods, necessitates) them buying a replacement. In the second case, the trade off would also include brand risk, but in the world of Amazon and TEMU, you can just sell the same thing under a new random name, there is no brand identity.
      • bsenftner 1y ago
        You make my comment's point without realizing, emphasizing my point.
    • 1y ago
• agumonkey 1y ago
  I agree too. And originally the company had multiple motivations to produce high quality. For pride reason (express your skills, new challenger mindset) and to gain brand recognition. Once that's settled, this forces get replaced by profit/ growth mindset. A subtle variant of this is incorrect metrics. In 2000s, full featured audio chipsets started to show up, all in one chip 24bit audio. Soon everything used these, the 24bit resolution wasn't enough to make a good audio interface... (I think it was noisier) But it was too late, most devices used this and old audio cards were priced out.
• jonplackett 1y ago
  Isn’t this all just Late Stage Calitalsm? I don’t think it’s ‘efficiency’ in the same way spaceX is run. Yeah they cut costs, but they got better quality results. With clothes / appliances etc we have reduced quality at our expense - while the companies doing it make more money than ever.
  • ericmay 1y ago
    No - the term Late Stage Capitalism gets thrown around a bunch as a scarecrow for anything seemingly bad going on, but in this case it’s more likely a symptom of lack of education of materials and/or people not caring, and resource depletion/competition due to overpopulation and rise in living standards across the world. > With clothes / appliances etc we have reduced quality at our expense - while the companies doing it make more money than ever. Specifically this is an issue of government failure and cultural malaise - food quality anyone? We need to vote better, and vote with our dollar better. Stop buying dumb DJI drones to race around and buy a nice sweater instead.
    • wiz21c 1y ago
      > resource depletion/competition due to overpopulation and rise in living standards across the world. Interesting take. Any source ?
      • ericmay 1y ago
        Nope just personal observation. There are only so many lobsters and marble quarries, and we can only raise so many sheep for high quality wool. Most of the hardwood trees are gone too. That’s why we have switched to plastic and other industrial materials to keep building suburban houses and we spend all day on Netflix.
    • jfengel 1y ago
      Capitalism gives the market what it demands. You can't tell consumers what they should want. Government failure an cultural malaise are what "late stage capitalism" predicts. It then predicts a collapse of the whole thing under its own weight. It doesn't, however, give any pointers on where to go from there.
• microflash 1y ago
  This has been especially pronounced in medical equipments where there’s this unnecessary race to introduce “digital experiences”. An example is hearing aids. A few years ago, it was relatively easy to get an analog model with dedicated volume buttons and off switch. Now, most of the models come without off switch and need Bluetooth pairing with an app installed on your phone. What used to be plug and play is now a clunky mess of hand offs between brittle components.
  • Forgeties79 1y ago
    More failure points means more people throwing up their hands and buying a new one
  • atoav 1y ago
    I run a media-lab at a art university and both HDMI and USB-C is flaming garbage. What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire and negotiates the acceptable resolution on the fly. What you get is something that does too much, doesn't work half the time and does things nobody cares about. Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image. And don't get me started on DRM/HDCP.. The number of broken HDMI cables (as fraction of cables rented out) is way bigger than for any other connector, suggesting it is completely unsuitable and a broken design. Whenever I can I go for SDI video, I do. You plug it in and it works. Why "consumer" techology has to be so much more pain than pro stuff makes me wonder.
    • SpaceNugget 1y ago
      > Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image. That's entirely the fault of your crappy smart display with some crappy OS and has entirely nothing to do with HDMI as a standard. I would think as a plug and play standard for A/V stuff, HDMI is one of the farthest along the "just works" spectrum for the vast majority of people. Occasionally I see a device where there's something stupid like switching to a different HDMI source doesn't switch the audio source and you have to use some dumb OSD menu with many nested levels to get to the audio sources, but again, that's not HDMI's fault. I have had quite a few broken HDMI cables in lecture halls at uni and in meeting rooms at various work places, but I think that's the reality of any connector that gets plugged and unplugged tens of times per day (especially by people who don't care and don't have to pay for them when they break). They just need to replace the cables more often.
• ludicrousdispla 1y ago
  I used to be a loyal buyer of a specific Eddie Bauer T-Shirt over at least a decade, until I bought four of them online a few years ago from their website. Despite my ordering all the same size and style, each shirt is a different length (varying by as much as two inches) and fabric weight. Haven't bought one since and won't do so again.
  • int_19h 1y ago
    On the other hand, I bought a pair of hiking boots back in 2011 that are still going strong. So much so that I got another pair of boots by the same company a couple of years ago - same exact model, same size etc - solely as a spare in case they stop making them. Fits like a glove. The trick? The company in question is Belleville, and they make boots for the US military; they just also happen to be good hiking boots. I suspect that people in charge of logistics as DoD don't like it when things suddenly change, which would explain why they still have the same model still going for 25+ years, and why the sizes and everything else stays the same.
  • cptaj 1y ago
    I've come to accept that, at least in latam, shirt sizes no longer have any real meaning. Every manufacturer in the world has a different opinion as to what those letters mean.
    • brewdad 1y ago
      There is truth to this and it has certainly been true of women’s sizing for many years where everyone wants to be a size 2 (or whatever your number is) but no size 2 is the same across brands. It’s an entirely different problem when I buy two pairs of presumably the same pair of jeans in the same style and size yet one can barely be buttoned up and the other requires a belt at all times.
      • heisenbit 1y ago
        And then there is the adventure of asymmetric cuts. Quality control has been outsourced to the customer. The return rates have increased a lot, some of it going straight into the bin.
• steveBK123 1y ago
  This is far more prominent in women’s clothing. My wife always says how buying from the same brands over the years that materials get thinner and thinner, as well as becoming more and more synthetic blend %s until it’s practically disposable.
  • Gigachad 1y ago
    I have noticed that woman’s clothing seems incredibly poor quality a lot of the time. Incredibly thin, and just looking at stuff on the racks and stores it was extremely common to find minor defects and loose threads.
    • steveBK123 1y ago
      Part of it may be matching to the use case. Men will buy a shirt and wear it until its seams break in 2-10 years. Women will buy blouses or dresses with cuts/colors that only work in certain seasons to be worn for a specific occasion that won’t come to pass again soon. Now where women have more trouble is just in the utility work wear shopping space because that clothing is utilized frequently and until it fails.
      • Der_Einzige 1y ago
        So many people of HN need to google the terms “raw denim” and “selvedge denim”. Companies like naked and famous make high quality BIFL tier work wear clothes aimed at women. Normies just don’t know about it cus denim heads are autistic.
        • steveBK123 1y ago
          I think even normies know about the selvedge denim. But where are the quality tee shirt, Oxford, polo, etc pieces that don’t fall apart in 2 years?
          • Der_Einzige 1y ago
            Gustin makes them, also wash on cold and hang dry. Normies do NOT know about selvedge/raw denim at all.
• theptip 1y ago
  It’s a great point. I sometimes wonder how long it is before open-source manufacturing can fill the gap. For a long time it’s been the case that it’s prohibitively expensive to do bespoke manufacturing using eg 3D printing and CAD lathes, vs. the cost attainable using mass manufacturing. But perhaps a “made in America” option that can only compete on quality, not on price, could focus on “bring your own design” and fabricating nice, durable, repairable designs that apparently can’t be found elsewhere. I guess the problem is that modern products need quite complex integrated electronics which are hard to build in an OSS paradigm.
• yard2010 1y ago
  Razer deathadder is a great example. I didn't want to "upgrade" to the new model until I didn't have the choice and I'm stuck with enshitified, plastic version of what used to be a nice piece of hardware.
• A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
  I think there is something to it. My favorite analogy for this is the car. I had a 2003 Acura TL once. By far, the best car I owned between the value, comfort and its specs. Compared to today's version, I can't help but notice that 2003 TL was one of company's initial foray's into US market so they had to offer something decent, useful or at least something that stood out.
• AznHisoka 1y ago
  Its this way for me, with restaurants, especially those that have expanded a lot. A good example of this for me is the restaurant Dig Inn. It used to be one single place and was called “The Pump Energy Food” and used to my goto place for lunch. Then it changed names and expanded to 2-3 other locations and was still relatively good. It then started expanding a lot more and now the food absolutely sucks
  • LorenPechtel 1y ago
    Yeah. You do not want my wife to like your restaurant. Every single restaurant she has ever liked has within a few years it's either gone or she no longer likes it because of price increases or quality decreases (usually associated with a change in ownership.)
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• ants_everywhere 1y ago
  When I worked at a big tech company, the life quality of software engineers was undergoing what old timers perceived as a significant decline. The official response of the CFO was that the quality can't be declining that much because people aren't quitting an an accelerating rate. This is the same phenomenon as your suspicion. There's some metric (e.g. people keep buying our widgets) and you stress test demand for it by making it cheaper to produce. If demand holds up there's no problem from the company's perspective. From the consumer's perspective, every project is doing this and the entire world is declining in quality but prices aren't going down.
  • MarkPNeyer 1y ago
    You are pointing directly at the philosophical bedrock of western civilization, something which most white collar elites implicitly believe but don't state outright. It shows up right away in the article: > ... quality is an inherently subjective concept, as it depends on the preferences of each consumer. For most of history, people believed the opposite. For thousands of years, people in every major civilization believed that there WAS an objective notion of quality (i.e. value). The idea that these things are purely subjective is a very recent concept in human history. In the west, and places influenced by it - most elites come to believe that value is purely subjective. We talk, instead, about people's _preferences_ - but we can't measure feelings, just actions. "Some things are more valuable than others" is a very different belief from "people prefer some things over others". In a world that only recognizes what it can measure, the idea that value is subjective reduces to "people do some things and not other things", and _any_ action which can reliably be motivated - whether that's having babies or getting divorced, losing weight or watching porn, eating healthy or eating junk food - _all_ that our economy cares about is, "can you reliably produce that outcome at scale." This is all a natural consequence of the idea that value isn't real. People can't be wrong in what they want, and what they want is revealed in what they do. Therefore, literally all that matters is, can you motivate some kind of action - whatever that action is? If you can, you're 'adding value.' Motivating people to go out and commit crimes could itself, be valuable - if you were, say, the operator of a private prison. As long as your motivational technique isn't too direct and obvious, it's profitable for you. You're creating demand for business! What would the world look like if value were _real_, we could sense it intuitively, but we could not measure it, and had persuaded ourselves it were entirely subjective? I think it would look exactly as it does now: a prevailing sense that quality is declining. We would observe drops in numerous large-scale metrics like "does humanity value life enough to create more humanity", while metrics like "time people spend doing measurable things" would go way up, along with a creeping sense that something was deeply wrong. If value _were_ purely subjective, I would have expected that we'd have locked into some functioning propaganda loop by now. If value is purely subject, and there's no hardwired human nature to value some outcomes over others, What would be better for the economy than convincing everyone that EVERYTHING IS AWESOME all the time?
• wwfn 1y ago
  I think that's a good take. Market pressure for durability decreases with brand awareness. Though I think the article argues there's little market pressure regardless. I'm also worried it's all survivorship bias. If you acquired 100 items in 2010 and 5 of them lasted until 2025, it's hard to say if the 5 surviving would be the same 5 from another household or if the items you still have were all on the hardier end of that particular items quality distribution. Another house with 100 items from 2010 will have a different 5 remaining in 2025. If that's the case, the chance you'd buy those 5 again and even have 3 with the same 15 year life span is (1/20)^3 (I think. is that math right?)
  • layer8 1y ago
    I wouldn’t mind that much if switching to another brand/model would solve the problem. But sometimes I order half a dozen of the most well-reviewed alternatives, and they are all worse in some way in comparison.
    • wwfn 1y ago
      I feel that pain! This comes up for me most often with running shoes. By the time the model shoe I've loved wears out, it'll be out of production and the n+1 iteration re-balanced whatever decisions to make the shoe a worse-for-me fit. (It's tempting to think the big-sneaker cabal conspires to ensure consumers are perceptually exploring options)
  • derbOac 1y ago
    Survivorship bias is an important thing to consider, but the weird thing about it is that although sometimes (usually?) people have a blind spot for it, other times I think it gets used as a kind of "just so" explanation for degradation in quality because it's hard to refute. My experience with clothing kind of suggests it's not just survivorship bias. I once had a pair of pants that lasted maybe 10 years or so with regular washing, each use (yes I know, not ideal, I don't do that anymore), and I had to replace them. When I ordered a new pair, from the same company, same model, I noticed the new ones didn't last nearly as long, maybe 2 years, and seemed thinner. I emailed the company about this, and they acknowledged that they had made the fabric thinner, and even gave me the old and new fabric densities. I think clothing is one area where new brands have come in to partially move the needle back toward quality a teeny weeny bit, but experiences like that, tracking the actual material quality of the same products over time, leads me to conclude it's not always just random survivorship bias.
• chung8123 1y ago
  The distribution of peoples needs even out. The quality settles where the "good enough" is. That could be super high quality or just mediocre. Once that settles the super high quality has a new price point (economies of scale are no longer being subsidized by the people that need less). If that price point is too much for the people of quality to pay the product disappears.
• chrsw 1y ago
  In my first job out of engineering school 15 years ago I was working on a project to give people something they never had before. Today most of my work goes towards making something that already exists cheaper. Not to pass on the savings to the customer of course, but to make the company's books look better and to make investors happier.
• maxglute 1y ago
  Same popular product gets value engineered over iterations to be worse. At same time, most category of products likely has competitors that have cropped up over last 20 years that has much better quality to price ratio.
• calrain 1y ago
  Everyone has their own way of measuring quality. Mine is that a Billy bookcase that I bought from Ikea 25 years ago is must stronger and more stable than a Billy bookcase I bought from Ikea 5 years ago. And, when looking at what Ikea is selling in 2025 as a Billy bookcase, it's worse yet again. But, with the cost of living increasing, companies have to cut corners to keep pricing down. I wonder where the inflection point is where used items become more valuable than the new items being made at current quality levels, including degradation due to age.
  • thomassmith65 1y ago
    It's ironic to use Ikea as an example. When Ikea first expanded beyond Scandinavia, it was the 'fast fashion' of furniture: beautiful design, but sometimes made of particleboard or polyurethane foam. There's nothing unusual about that today.
  • makeitdouble 1y ago
    You could have bought a Besta or Hemmes bookshelf, accounting for inflation it would be closer in price to the Billy you bought 25 years ago. Assuming a product introduced 25 years ago has exactly the same role in the lineup today sounds crazy to me TBH.
    • _DeadFred_ 1y ago
      Isn't that the point though? Quality of the basic model Maytag washer I bought 25 years ago versus one today. Quality of a Reese's cup I bought 25 years ago versus one today. Quality of Levi's I bought 25 years ago versus a pair today. Quality of the Billy that I bought 25 years ago versus today. Quality of the Billy HAS declined.
      • makeitdouble 1y ago
        That's fair if we only strictly care about the Billy line and it's history. From there we can't generalize to any other product without acknowledging IKEA's internal decision process or their vision for Billy across the years. To parent's point > where the inflection point is where used items become more valuable than the new items being made at current quality levels, including degradation due to age. Buying the actual modern equivalent of what Billy was 25 years ago answers that question.
• divan 1y ago
  I was searching recommendations at r/BuyItForLife the other day and saw a pattern of used-to-be-known-for-quality manufacturers scaled up and moved production abroad, which resulted in drop in quality.
  • layer8 1y ago
    Yes. Recommendations like that are not reliable, because the fact that a product has proven to hold up well for 10 or 20 years doesn't at all imply that it’s current incarnation will as well. The general trend is that it won't.
• hliyan 1y ago
  Here's how I see it: in the absence of growth in market share or cost-reducing innovation, the only remaining strategy for profit maximization is the delivering of progressively lower quality products for progressively higher prices. This obviously destroys the brand over time, but brands can be recycled/reinvented. A purely rational and self-interested (i.e. unencumbered by moral sentiment or empathy) economic agent would, in this case, calculate the longest time period a brand could be sustained at the highest price and the lowest production cost, before the brand is lost. If the ROI during that period justifies the investment, such an agent would execute the strategy.
  • Ygg2 1y ago
    Then from a purely rational and self-interested citizenry would hold any economic agents on the hook for future cleanups of land, water or air.
    • rcbdev 1y ago
      Thankfully, the citizenry is irrational and self-interested, which enables an entire cottage industry of sheisters, marketers and psychologists, which then engineer our attention spans and purchasing decisions.
    • bradly 1y ago
      Turns out a large enough number of humans can be controlled by ads that cost less money than the money they generate by controlling these humans.
    • cyanydeez 1y ago
      Theyd also nationalize certain products to minimize unnecessary waste and churn.
    • hilux 1y ago
      I like the idea, but "purely rational citizenry" is a theoretical construct. And even if they/we were purely rational, there's the intractable problem of measuring the cost of future cleanups stretching into forever. Plus the danger (certainty) of corporations paying out their current executives and then declaring bankruptcy.
• grafmax 1y ago
  Increased financialization of the economy plays a role as well. It tends to consolidate market players though M&A. That in turn that allows firms to similarly profit from rent-seeking in captured and semi-captured markets, leading not just to lower quality but higher prices as well. Rising corporate profit margins have been a major contributor to the inflation of the past few years.
• fidotron 1y ago
  > Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. Yes, many people confuse technological development with quality improvements. Technology can improve quality, but it can also be used in other ways. My personal view is the west, especially North America, never recovered from the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable, at least compared with today, with the result that all sorts of objects were radically heavier than their newer equivalents. You take away the need for handling such enormous weights for everything everywhere and it becomes possible to replace almost our entire infrastructure with things that are simply much flimsier. It is that combined with the culture of low expectations that puts up with the results.
  • SweetLlamaMyth 1y ago
    It seems strange to me to attribute this to the 70s oil crisis vs factors like expectations of unceasing profit growth leading looking for any and all efficiencies, or globalization making extra translate into increased shipping costs from the other side of world.
    • fidotron 1y ago
      What is efficient varies based on changes in the prices of different elements of the process. Energy, materials, logistics, labor, these all vary over time, with the oil crisis being a huge step change both in costs to businesses and consumer behavior.
    • kmeisthax 1y ago
      [dead]
  • randallsquared 1y ago
    The curves largely break about 1971 across a wide set of areas, but the energy connection is interesting. J Storrs Hall argues in "Where is My Flying Car?" that the proximate cause is breaking the increasing availability of energy per person, which could only have been continued with very widespread nuclear, and that the turn from nuclear was a symptom of a culture of increasing regulation and excess caution, such that the only major industry that escaped the trap in the 70s and continued existing growth curves was computing. Now that computing has advanced sufficiently and is being applied to everything else, we're finally getting sudden, major advances again in other areas (electric and autonomous cars, drones, reusable rockets, pharma...), but computing is in the race against smothering that most industries lost in the 20th, and it remains to be seen whether stagnation or abundance will win. A side note is the resurgence of nuclear, and supersonic flight, etc, which suggests that maybe the problem was more about post-war culture than a systemic turn away from growth and prosperity... we'll see!
• ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  As long as there are customers who will pay for low quality, and there is no external [read: "regulatory"] goad, there will be vendors that will sell it. Basic human (and capitalist) nature. Not good, but not evil, either. It's just the scorpion and the frog story. It sucks, trying to actually create things with higher levels of Quality. It's a lot more expensive to add even rather incremental levels of Quality, and companies that try, usually (but not always) get ground into the dirt. If we deliberately create substandard quality, it can really eat at our souls. I think many folks are able to work out a deal with their conscience, but I was never able to do that, so I worked for most of my career at a company that was all about Quality. This whole thing brings to mind the Vimes Boots Theory: https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots-theory-of-socio-economic-unfairness/ https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...
  • Der_Einzige 1y ago
    That boots model is fascinating compared the the actual boot market in the USA. I can get an excellent pair of made in America, vibrax/goodyear welted extremely sturdy boots for 200 USD - maybe less. Redwing, danger, etc other PNW brands all exist and sell at this price point. Compare to popular fashion boots like timberlands which are also 200 USD and reasonably sturdy but no Goodyear welt or proper sole so they fail in 5 years or less of regular wear.
• Forgeties79 1y ago
  My favorite example is the GoPro Hero 4 Black, which I still have and regularly use.
• ainiriand 1y ago
  That situation happened to me with Logitech mice, they were really great some years ago. Now they are not the long lasting products they were.
  • contingencies 1y ago
    Enjoying M240 at the moment. No issues as yet.
  • LorenPechtel 1y ago
    Actually, they seem to have gotten their act together. I love their trackballs. They dropped the warranty to 1 year--and even then every one failed within warranty. Disgusted but buying one every year was better than using an inferior product. But my latest has been sitting here for years, no erratic clicks.
• mountainb 1y ago
  It is often easier to make another sale of a downgraded product using earned customer goodwill than it is to continuously innovate, delight existing customers, and win new ones based on quality. It's less risky just to run a brand into the dirt, get paid, and screw any shareholders remaining. Also many of these kinds of activities are illegal, but people do it anyway on the reasonable calculation that they won't be sued and that the government won't investigate them.
• azlev 1y ago
  I bought the same Ray-Ban sunglasses model 15 years ago and 2 years ago. The older one is way better. Cellphone is the opposite: the new one is way better. So all in all, it's just capitalism: if quality sells more, people buy quality (whatever quality means). If cheaper sells more, companies cut costs. I think the answer change from time to time.
• atoav 1y ago
  I design and repair electronics for the past decade and quality has gone down, significantly so. A part of this is increased complexity introducing more failure modes, but the main reason is bean counters trying to reduce the BOM cost as far as they can get away with. This naturally means the perfect product (from a bean-counter-perspective) uses the cheapest components and fails reliably one day after the warranty has run out. They even have succeeded in selling people bean counting solutions as "design". So instead of a satisfying 1.50 € power switch and a 2.50€ rotary switch you get a SMD push button for 0.05 € and have to memorize multiple gestures for that button. Long press means off or something among those lines. People hate it, but it is cheap.
• jjav 1y ago
  > 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. Yes, absolutely. Quality has gone down across the board in nearly everything. What has gone up is more features. So at a high level comparison it seems like the newer thing does a lot more than the older same thing. Which is true, but that is not a measure of quality. Many of the added features are gimmicks that provide no meaningful value and at the same time the product is far more brittle and built much cheaper, so the overall quality is far lower.
• danaris 1y ago
  Like with much in the political situation, I think it's sort of a polarization. The quality of some things has gone up significantly. This is going to be the things where improvements in technologies have made improved quality easier and cheaper (and that's not just electronics—materials technology, better manufacturing, etc can do this). It's also in products where other technological improvements have made it viable for there to be independent and artisanal (or similarly small-batch high-quality) production of them. The quality of other things has declined precipitously. These are more likely to be commodities where improving quality still costs more, and the "innovation" they've done is in finding ways to make it cheaper and worse without it just always failing immediately (clothing is a prime example here). Overall, I think that if you look into any given case of a product's quality getting better or worse over the past couple of decades, you'll almost invariably find that either way it's because that's how the manufacturers can make more money.
• teiferer 1y ago
  > 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. I'm sure that's one component. I can also imagine that another component is that in order to broaden the customer base, there is cost pressure as well as the pressure to appeal to more people. The initial market may have consisted of more quality focused nerds who were ok with spending a little more to get a robust thing with more knobs to tune behavior, while the mass market is fine with buying new stuff all the time, given that it's cheaper, and they don't care about fine tuning things, just want it to work out of the box, until they anyway buy a new thing in a year or two.
• n_e 1y ago
  I've been surprised to see that several cycling products have gotten better over time. For example I have bought these bottles https://www.zefal.com/en/bottles/545-magnum.html https://www.zefal.com/en/bottles/545-magnum.html three times over ten years: - the first time, the mouthpiece was attached by two plastic prongs. The prongs eventually failed - The second time I bought them, the mouthpiece was attached by four prongs - The last time I bought them, the hard plastic mouthpiece was replaced by a more comfortable plastic mouthpiece. I also bought these pedals three times https://www.lookcycle.com/fr-en/products/pedals/road/race/keo-blade https://www.lookcycle.com/fr-en/products/pedals/road/race/ke... : - With the first version, small rocks got stuck between the carbon spring and the body of the pedal, making it impossible to clip in and eventually dislodging the spring - The second version fixed that by adding a plastic cover over the spring, and also improved the bearing seals (which was also a problem with the first version) - The third version made the angles on the outside of the pedal less acute, making it harder to damage the pedals in a fall
  • eviks 1y ago
    How easy would it be do discover this info without personal experience?
• makeitdouble 1y ago
  > buy the successor model from the same brand This might be the key issue. Let's say you bought a Roomba 10 years ago, and now go buy the successor model. Will it be any good ? probably not. At least not as good as the competition who got better than iRobot. It will be the same for cars. If you bought a Nissan 10 years ago, I wouldn't be surprised if the successor isn't as good. Same for cameras, computers, bikes etc. More than ever blind brand loyalty isn't paying off and even with brands staying at the top of their game the "successor" or best buying strategy might not be obvious. Some see the world as having become more complex, I'd argue having stagnating signals was worse.
• mousethatroared 1y ago
  The state of modern cars is scary.
  • Zambyte 1y ago
    The state of modern personal electric vehicles (PEVs) is outstanding though; good enough to replace owning a car for most people! I personally have been riding an electric scooter this summer, and paired with a nice backpack, it has comfortably replaced all of my regular driving. For people who want to carry more than me, an e-bike with panniers or a cargo e-bike would likely meet your needs. Electric longboards and electric unicycles are also worth considering, and I have seen a couple of those around my city, but the e-scooters and e-bikes have dominated due to their capacities and how easy they are to ride.
    • mousethatroared 1y ago
      I have two problems with EVs: - I believe they're more immoral than ICE vehicles. They're existence displaces batteries for hybrids (yes I did the math) - They're not practical for me for my use scenario. I have kids.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • Zambyte 1y ago
        I'd love to see your math on how my 50 pound electric scooter is more immoral than a 2 ton ICE car. Also I don't see your point about kids.
• mrgoldenbrown 1y ago
  The math on advertising and brand loyalty has changed. There was an article posted to HN this week that explained it pretty well I think. It's easy to start a new brand now, so it's OK to risk ruining your current brand. The decline in quality isn't bewildering, it's exactly what our form of capitalism encourages. https://www.gojiberries.io/advertising-without-signal-whe-amazon-ads-confuse-more-than-they-clarify/ https://www.gojiberries.io/advertising-without-signal-whe-am...
• api 1y ago
  Your suspicion makes total sense. A major problem with the whole model of production is that if you make a good product and saturate the market you die. It’s not the result of some conspiracy to make shit products. It’s a simple outcome from the fact that purchases are one time while businesses are ongoing, combined with shareholder demands to boost growth. Those demands in turn come from things like pension funds that have promised a return to their customers. One “solution” is to build subscriptions into everything but there’s already a customer revolt against that for obvious reasons. It’s obnoxious. I think the best solution is to decouple and unbundle production. Have small design houses (or even individuals) that design products and have low ongoing costs and big manufacturing concerns that make things. Something always needs to be made so they always have business. Design products around commodity parts as much as possible to make retooling affordable. This kind of already exists in the form of boutiques with kickstarter and Etsy products, or at least those folks have trailblazed this model.
  • _DeadFred_ 1y ago
    'big manufacturing concerns that make things' Don't we already have this, isn't this called 'China' for most American businesses that no longer make things in the USA/in-house?
• dspillett 1y ago
  > 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, I'm sure that is certainly part of it, especially when multiple players are competing at least partly on price or apparent value. One consideration once price based competition is significant is that absolute quality may drop while measures of quality/price value improve¹. Another issue is that when something is new, to the company or the buying audience, it is often a flagship product/service so gets a lot more attention. As things become something the company rattles off as a matter of course and we consumers interact with them daily, that level of attention per production unit diminishes considerably. As well as playing directly into this, possibly leading to an actual drop in quality, mass production has a less obvious effect on the perception of quality. If you are making hundreds or less and a couple fail, they are probably noticed before leaving the factory and if not the consumer gets a relatively personal service with fixing/replacing the item. If you are making hundreds of thousands many more bad units get into circulation (the absolute failure rate increasing even if the failure ratio drops) and processing returns is less logistically easy. That perception problem has become more significant in the last couple of decades as unhappy voices always tended to be louder and social media can act as a megaphone for both happy and unhappy voices. This is a complex area with many things feeding into actual quality issues, the perception of them, and sometimes the perception of the matter being worse than it really is overall. -------- [1] for instance, maybe in a made up example quality goes down by 5% when cuts or mass production bring the price down by more than 10%, so buyers get better for the same money but worse absolutely
• jvanderbot 1y ago
  On reflection (being an engineer) it makes sense this would happen even without malice. Engineering teams on existing products are incentivized to keep innovating. It's ideal if you can reinvent a part of a product or process while maintaining functionality but often it's easier to get an 80/20. So, a large number of small corner cuts reduce overall quality and costs. If in fact you try to increase functionality, that's actually a new product. The inevitable S curve of profits from any given product means businesses are incentivized to move improvements to new products, leaving old ones to be cut to death.
• epolanski 1y ago
  Levis and Nike are common offenders here. Quality has dropped insanely low. Fast fashion brought down most of the fashion industry up to luxury level.
• brookst 1y ago
  Perhaps something to that, but there is also consumer pressure to not raise prices. Think of those things you bought 5 / 10 / 15 years ago and adjust pricing for inflation… would you pay that much now? We have become addicted to cheap. Same phenomenon with airlines: everyone bemoans how awful the experience is, and virtually everyone buys the cheapest possible ticket.
  • klik99 1y ago
    People buy cheap because they don't have an option. People are "addicted to cheap" because of growing wealth inequality.
• beaugunderson 1y ago
  > 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. My most recent experience with this was a Fjällräven 30L backpack. I'd had it for years, loved it to death but it was getting a bit ripped up. Went into the store, bought the exact same model, went out to the RV where I had my current one and did a comparison. I was shocked. No padding on the straps, nice padding on the back replaced with hard foam, many of the nicely designed little details gone. I went back in and returned it and just opted to repair my old one a bit (replaced a broken buckle and sewed up some holes).
  • sershe 1y ago
    I complained the same way about Speed 40, my 2011 one is more intact than 2018 one and I use it more even after buying the newer one. According to people in the outdoor industry the materials are noticeably more flimsy cause everyone wants ultralight ultralight ultralight ultralight. Nobody wants sturdy. Just look at carbon poles .. these things have no reason to exist unless you are setting a winter record on PCT. But they all but replaced much sturdier aluminum poles. Interestingly a few years ago this brand was suggested to me as one of those bucking the trend, but I guess that didn't last.
  • x0x0 1y ago
    And that's not exactly a bargain brand, either. Wild.
• trod1234 1y ago
  The economics are simple when you know and understand the main driver, but its inconvenient, and there are entities that want it hidden, because you have bad people doing bad things, and wanting to hide those things, and historically leftist leaning places/people do all of the above to a greater or lesser degree rather then engaging in actual truth telling. The simple fact, that will probably get your post downvoted to remove from view, is this reduction of quality is driven by fiat money-printing. It may be non-reserve issued debt (Basel3), or government subsidy, or contract. There are many sources, laundered, and the economy for the most part today has been silently nationalized, which is why it fails. Bailout is required to overcome the end of the boom/bust cycle and continue forward for a time thereafter, it happens cyclically (a true-up, the difference between actual production and fraud/loss) and it requires exponential amounts each time which are taken from every person holding money. There have been at least 4 instances that I can see where this has happened since the 1970s changeover to fiat (de-peg from gold/petrodollar). The inflation/debasement in purchasing power causes companies to debase their product, to keep up with the escalator of inflation to continue on moving forward. This is worsened when you have foreign entities using slave labor through controlling their own currency, to destroy domestic business; such as manufacturing over a long period of time. There is obviously an objective point where eventually that can't continue, because the economics of money-printing fail, but that point is what many leftists knowingly or unknowingly aim for; the ones that know just don't want others to know the emperor has new clothes because knowing and communication of that knowledge allows reaction and adaption, and there are some people who believe if an individual can't express words, or convey meaning, then that negative behavior associated with that conveyance (in their deeply flawed perspective) doesn't exist, and they can make people better that way. The strategy for doing this is through sieving and concentration of resources into fewer and fewer hands, while retaining control of such resources. The lead market players today based in money-printing can control and continue operating because of their preferential banking ties, while competitors cannot enter or compete in the market because the market no longer meets the conditions of a market. Namely adversarial price discovery which requires visibility, and non-cooperation. Money-printing/banking isn't given for free, it forces many entities to cooperate; and adversarial independent decisionmaking is needed for economic calculation. Mises wrote about this extensively in broad strokes. There are quite a large number of impossible hysteresis problems that mark the system the boomer's pivoted to as unsustainable, hyperbolic, and inevitably fails to impossible to solve hysteresis problems (where knowledge of a state needed to react doesn't provide sufficient time to change course because the effects precede that knowledge). Artificial distortions, trending towards chaos will grow and self-sustain, eventually causing whipsaws that cause it to fail, but that takes time since the point of failure is stage 3 ponzi, where monetary properties lose all value seemingly overnight. Where objectively, outflows exceed inflows. This is what also drives enshitiffication, why the business growth curve is an S adoption curve (following ponzi), and the inevitability of consolidation/hostile takeover. The leftist connection is the strategy of sieving, you have to concentrate wealth in few hands first before you can seize it from those hands, and this is what the Fed has been doing. A gradual fabian-based induction to non-market socialism, while ensuring the political power base remains through bad actors that call out other bad actors decrying the public, and others in the group instigating and inducing bad actions while undermining, subverting, and making the resilient system brittle, at every point. Destroying the rule of law through shock doctrine and demoralization up to just prior to bringing it to crisis for the seizure, and re-normalization where either a socialist/communist takeover occurs, or when that fails; a rise of fascism to power. The same regime-change plan that all governments use (give or take). Also, the same driving dynamics that led to Hitler's rise to power. Jamming communications so people don't catch on and can't react is part of that plan, which is why you have so many bots running around, and the platforms are complicit with the same people as those who want to enable this. Jamming doesn't work without the plausible deniability of karma systems that allow the platforms to grant moderator powers to a large group of sockpuppet accounts (sybil attacks), controlled by a surreptitious moderator. Who may also utilizes many psychological blindspots we all have to manipulate, and damage readers through structured distortion of reflected appraisal (or narrative control, memetics, or belief contagion to the layman, which includes Le Bon's works as a basis). People are easily manipulated when they don't know the mechanism behind the how. Cialdini in his book Influence touch on the foundations, except reflected appraisal, but to understand distorted reflected appraisal you have to understand how torture works, and what it is really, and if you knew you would see it in almost everything today. Torture is the structured imposition of psychological stress in sufficient exposure to cause involuntary hypnosis. Your stated suspicion is a well crafted induction of a common lie that's been repeated so many times, many believe its truth, but it fails under close objective examination. If the lie were true, you would have competitors coming into the market, and staying in the market; but its not because of the asymmetrical connection to a money printer; directly or indirectly. Lowering prices below market value to drive competitor companies out of business has occurred in many places where a leveraged buyout or hostile takeover wasn't possible. You need to operate on debt to compete, but in so doing you become food for takeover, until the parasitic nature has nothing left to eat. That hasn't happened yet, but its probably going to happen in our lifetime. These dynamics in the historic lifecycle is what is driving the adoption towards BRICS, and the chaos we see everywhere. Eventually you get to a point where everything breaks, and you've been trapped by decisions your parents or grandparents generation chose through aggregate. Decisions that result in worsening conditions, and your and your family; and their children's futures, being collapse into violent law of nature, or submission to enslavement and a life of suffering before death. Either result in a loss of control from the choice upfront, that decreases until a point of no return, after which the dynamics cannot be stopped, but you can get out of the way, it just requires a ruthlessness, education, and knowledge that has been deprived from nearly everyone raised in recent generations today. Lone wolves die because they are weak, the movies promoting this concept are (5GW).
• deanmoriarty 1y ago
  I totally agree! Philips diamondclean toothbrush anyone? The first one lasted literally 10 years, it was one of the best consumer purchases I ever made. Ever since then each replacement has crapped out within a year or two, despite same usage pattern. I bought one at Costco on sale and after returning it broken after just six months, a record for a $100+ device, the clerk at the return counter said they have piles of those. Crazy.
• slowmovintarget 1y ago
  I've had that experience in three categories, all for different reasons. I have clothing that I bought shortly after high school, and it's now more than 25 years old and still good. It's tougher and thicker cotton than anything I seem to be able to buy now. Aside from clothing getting worse (made overseas, made cheaply, or from poor materials), the textiles themselves have gotten worse. Cotton crops have yielded fibers of very low quality in recent years, especially post-pandemic. Once-dependable brands no longer make clothing that lasts. Brooks Brothers used to be the last hold out for high quality clothing in the U.S., and they sold their brand and turned to crap even before the pandemic. Appliances are another thing. Washing machines routinely lasted more than twenty years. Same for refrigerators. The microwave my parents got as a wedding gift didn't have a lot of features, but it kept on heating for 30 years. Now, it's difficult to find machines that don't need replacing in 5 years, and microwaves are almost exclusively made in China. The good stuff that you used to be able to get just isn't made by manufacturers that attempt to make durable items. They're made to shave margins and turn to junk in a few years. The third thing extends to all manner of consumer goods, and it is actually a materials and chemicals issue. So many of the things that worked really well, were made from materials that turned out to be actively harmful. Harmful plastics, harmful coatings on non-stick pans, and while I can still go out and purchase those things if I wanted, we've had to eliminate or replace them with worse alternatives. Tea, when brewed from loose leaf in a pot and strained through a metal strainer instead of plasticized tea bags (they're not actually paper) means you need actual high-quality tea instead of the junk that's on grocery store shelves. It turns out that's actually difficult to come by. Porcelain and glass not made in China (China's porcelain and glass all--all--have unsafe lead levels) is also difficult to find. There very few safe sources: France and Turkey for porcelain, and Italy for glass. There are a whole series of reasons, but consumer goods, are, in fact, worse than they used to be. It's not just fuzzy nostalgia.