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

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.