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While I personally find this kind of thing extremely annoying, to me, the main problem is the _difficulty_ of determining quality. The Donut media guys did a (r

While I personally find this kind of thing extremely annoying, to me, the main problem is the _difficulty_ of determining quality. The Donut media guys did a (relatively unscientific) video comparing a whole bunch of products from the 50s to modern day across several price points. What they found was that the things that "looked" the same now were simultaneously worse and also much cheaper. They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price. It was just that the brands and names that used to be quality were now usually not as much. So it is often the case that today, you can get something for cheaper than you ever could in the past (albeit not at a great quality), and if you are willing to pay higher prices (but often about the same as you would have paid in the past), you can still get good or even better quality. The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also gotten harder in many cases. edit: found the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4C62HC1HSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4C62HC1HSo

CWuestefeld 6mo ago
That's a worthwhile observation. It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available. It means that people who couldn't in the past afford something at all, are now more likely to have some path to getting it. And even if you could afford the higher quality, you may not need it anyway. I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater. But you're right, when you do need the higher quality, it can be tough to differentiate.
- eesmith 6mo ago
  There are a lot of products which are nowhere near my Pareto frontier, but for the most part I lack the information needed to make that judgement. The result is that I, like others, spend too much on crappy products.
- bluGill 6mo ago
  > I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater. I've been burned too often with this thinking. All too often the cheap tool isn't just light duty so it breaks, it is not good enough to do the job at all. If the motor is too weak the tool won't do the job. If the wrench isn't precise enough it will round the bolt - this is worse than breaking: you can't fix the thing at all anymore with any quality of tool. I don't need the best tools, but I need one that is enough quality to do the job, and the cheap tools generally fail.
  - SoftTalker 6mo ago
    Anecdotally my experience is the opposite. I bought an angle grinder from Harbor Freight for something like $10 on sale. It's not something a pro could use every day but it has absolutely been fine for what I do with it: cutting the occasional piece of metal stock, sharpening the lawn mower blade once a year, etc.
    - deleted 6mo ago
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    - convolvatron 6mo ago
      be careful in promoting that strategy. HF is pretty bad, I had a friend go through 3 them in a day because he didn't have one on the job site and HF wasn't too far away. the next step up is about 2x the price and will last a good year with professional use and maybe more if you can be bothered to replace the brushes. so I'm glad that's working out for you, but there is more bottom to be found. I bought an attachment that came with a grinder that was so dinky and toy-like that it didn't last 20 minutes of light use. this thread is covered with discussion about the problem of information asymmetry and rapidly decaying brands. to me the real issue is economic efficiency. the low end tool gets a double economic win, lower material and production costs, and increased frequency of purchase. every one of those purchases involves shipping, potential retail space, people's time spent shopping and returning crap. leading to a lot of outright waste. to me this really undermines the promise of capitalistic efficiency, since it prioritizes local optimization to an extreme over global optimization.
- II2II 6mo ago
  I agree that it is nice to have the option when you don't need the quality. It is also nice to have the option when you are trying something new and don't know if you want to invest in quality. Yet the article goes further than that. They are suggesting that companies are capturing a significant fraction of the market, so there is less pressure to produce quality goods. Whether this is resulting in lower quality goods overall, people are debating over. On the other hand, it does seem to be making it difficult to determine what goods are higher quality.
- adgjlsfhk1 6mo ago
  > It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available. The problem is that there is no way for consumers to know whether they are getting the good version or the shit version. This creates a structural incentive to not produce good versions since consumers will assume that the good version is just an over-priced shit version (because the expensive version is often just an over-priced shit version)
- tshaddox 6mo ago
  How much of the price reduction is directly attributable to externalities, for example the fact that to replace the lifetime of one expensive item there are going to be 10 cheap versions of the item tossed in the trash?
- rangerelf 6mo ago
  The problem isn't the availability of lower quality versions of a high-quality product, it's the transformation of a formerly high-quality product into a shitty-quality version, meanwhile, maintaining the same price, or worse, a higher price, than the former high-quality version of itself. The price tags on tools don't go down with time, but the quality of the tools certainly does. I'm all for tiering product lines, harbor freight is doing it right by offering their top-of-the-line in the Hercules brand, a "pretty good for non contractor" line with Bauer, and then there's lower tiers for one-offs. But if I look for, and buy, a Porter Cable tool, I'm buying it because I expect a certain performance and quality, but it's in fact a rug pull right now. That should be fraud.
gaze 6mo ago
I mean I get your argument but it feels like one should adjust for wage growth instead. One labor unit of value converts to a shittier backpack.
- CWuestefeld 6mo ago
  The other side of that coin is that someone whose units of labor demand less value can still get into the market.
  - gaze 6mo ago
    see terry pratchett's boots theory of economic fairness. They'll get into the market with something that costs more long term...
    - account42 6mo ago
      Exactly, and many who could have saved up for the original quality product are also lured into getting the crappier one that doesn't last as long - often without being aware of that deal.
fwipsy 6mo ago
Perhaps it's gotten harder to determine by eye, but Google will still point you towards trustworthy brands in 2 minutes. The problem is people don't care or can't be bothered to Google.
- qup 6mo ago
  I care and can be bothered, but Google is now itself a worse product than it used to be. It pushes sponsors links and garbage top-ten lists with Amazon sponsored links and other seo optimized content and none of it can be trusted. People commonly use a reddit tag to search for products, so companies started creating accounts to shill for their products there too, make it look organic and all. You can't find the best of any product in two minutes on Google, not with any confidence.
- randallsquared 6mo ago
  Will it? How do you know? If you don't know a reviewer who is trustworthy, how can you find one? There's enormous amounts of slop (both human and generated -- this was already a problem before the last couple years), and when some channel has signal, it attracts more noise generators. The subreddit or review site is only useful until it's well known, and then there's increasing pressure on mods or owners to cash in. The immediately obvious path here is paying for the reviews or recommendations directly, like Consumer Reports, but there are two major problems with that: first, the amount consumers can afford to pay doesn't support the additional cost of actually buying all the units and exhaustively testing them, when CR and similar sites are competing against supplier-supported sites, and second, if you care about specific features or aspects of a product, it's unlikely that the reviewer tested that specifically. I wish I knew of a good solution. In reality, what's probably going to mitigate in the short term is having your agent scour all the available information and make recommendations, at comparatively great expense.
- johanvts 6mo ago
  I think Google has turned to garbage and especially for product reviews there is a flood of affiliate marketing grifters in every category. It takes effort and sometimes payment to find good reviews these days.
- 6mo ago
hombre_fatal 6mo ago
I watched some comparison videos like that, but the old product was always more expensive than what you'd tend to buy today. Same seems to be true in that video you linked. And when you buy an equivalently-priced product today, it's better than it was 50 years ago. I only skipped through the video though. The problem I have is that there's no easy way to go to an ecommerce marketplace and pick "I want to spend more for higher quality". You have to do your own external research.
- bluGill 6mo ago
  That is what I miss the most from the old stores. I knew when I went to Sears I'd get a good enough thing. I could often find the exact same thing under a different name for less elsewhere if I looked (Sears made no secret that their house brands were someone else's product with the Sears name on it). I knew I could often find better if I looked. However I could trust that it was a good enough product for my needs and so only a few people had any reason to try elsewhere. (the above used to apply stores like J.C. Pennies, and Wards - though Wards was already failing when I was a kid) Amazon has everything, but I don't want everything. I want someone to the comparisons for me so decide what is good enough. Reviews are worthless - even when not a scam (which many are), most people buy one and so they can only report it works they don't know how it compares to some other model that they didn't buy.
  - initatus 6mo ago
    This is me with Costco. They're selective with what they stock, their margins are capped so I know I'm not getting fleeced buying abject junk. I have bought stuff from them based on trust of the store and not knowledge of the product. It's the opposite of amazon, where not only do I have no trust in anything, everything feels adverserial. If I'm not vigilant, I will get hosed. I find it extremely unpleasant.
    - simplyluke 6mo ago
      In some ways. The asterisk on it that gets really frustrating for me is that there are often SKUs manufactures make for them that are actually worse in meaningful ways. I almost bought my Bosche dishwasher from them last year, because it was a bit cheaper than getting it at lowes. And then I noticed buried in the detail that the reason for that was it didn't have an auto-open drying feature that was one of the main reasons I was buying the dishwasher. I guess this is kind of the opposite side of it though. I had done a bunch of research, and if I'd wanted to skip that and just buy the dishwasher at costco I would have ended up with a very good option at a reasonable price, even if it didn't have every feature possible, and costco would have done the work of eliminating all the cheap builder-grade junk for me.
Eisenstein 6mo ago
Akerlof famously wrote about this in 'The Market for Lemons'. "Suppose buyers cannot distinguish between a high-quality car (a "peach") and a low-quality car (a "lemon"). Then they are only willing to pay a fixed price for a car that averages the value of a "peach" and "lemon" together (pavg). But sellers know whether they hold a peach or a lemon. Given the fixed price at which buyers will buy, sellers will sell only when they hold "lemons" (since plemon < pavg) and they will leave the market when they hold "peaches" (since ppeach > pavg). Eventually, as enough sellers of "peaches" leave the market, the average willingness-to-pay of buyers will decrease (since the average quality of cars on the market decreased), leading to even more sellers of high-quality cars to leave the market through a positive feedback loop. Thus the uninformed buyer's price creates an adverse selection problem that drives the high-quality cars from the market. Adverse selection is a market mechanism that can lead to a market collapse." * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
psadauskas 6mo ago
Its also gotten harder to trust them to maintain that quality, too. A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners, or even start selling a slightly different product with the same model number. Or you find a decent brand that makes good products, they get popular and grow and in come the MBAs with ideas on how to increase profits. Or they get bought by Private Equity and carry on only by brand momentum.
- kqr 6mo ago
  > A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners I think this is true, but for far less malicious reasons. Favourable reviews lead to popularity, which increases production pressures, which makes it harder to source quality materials and maintain a quality process while satisfying demand. I have heard of several indie makers who, faced with sudden popularity, have to make the tough choice of speeding up the process at reduced quality (and thus dissatisfy customers) or be unable to fill orders (and thus dissatisfy customers). Everyone handles it differently but it's not pleasant for anyone.
  - ctoth 6mo ago
    Maybe they should just cap the number of orders at the number of items they can make and ask anybody else to sign up on a list? Anybody who chooses option 1 is obviously evil?
    - queenkjuul 6mo ago
      100% this. If you can't deliver the product i want, then fine. Don't lie to me and deliver a product inferior to what i ordered for the same price without warning. That's straight up malice. Naturally the kind of thing that would be defended on HN nonetheless
  - lepton 6mo ago
    Maintain quality but raise prices to throttle demand to a sustainable rate? Hard to do instantaneously of course; easier said than done etc
eudamoniac 6mo ago
> They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price This is what so many don't understand, especially among the youth / reddit crowd. They expect their $25 jeans to be equivalent quality to the $25 or even $100 jeans from 60 years ago, for some reason. There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be. There's also very few people who understand just how expensive things were back then, likely a result of having infinite cheap crap available. They don't know that in 1970, in today's money, a fridge was ~$4000, a burger and fries was $17, and a typical dress was $350. The only thing that has changed is that there are now options for cheap shitty things. You can still buy a very nice $4000 fridge if you want to.
- bluGill 6mo ago
  I bought some $100 jeans a few months ago, hoping they would be better than the $25 I used to buy 30 years ago. They are not better than the $25 jean I can buy elsewhere today.
  - square_usual 6mo ago
    Not every $100 pair is made the same, and price is not a proxy for quality. You can definitely get a $100 pair that is meaningfully better than a $25 pair today.
- eesmith 6mo ago
  "a burger and fries was $17"? That doesn't seem right. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mcdonalds-old-photos/ https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mcdonalds-old-photos/ shows a menu at McDonalds from the early 1970s. A hamburger and fries was $0.63 or (assuming 1970 and adjusting for inflation) $5.36 now. A quarter pounder and fries was $1.27, or $10.81 now. Add $0.15 or $0.20 for a soda ($1.28 or $1.70). That's a lot less than $17. Add $1.28 To double check, in 1983 a hamburger and fries was $1.82 - https://archive.org/details/ucladailybruin92losa/page/n542/mode/2up?q=%22price+of+a+hamburger%22+%22mcdonald%27s%22 https://archive.org/details/ucladailybruin92losa/page/n542/m... . That corresponds to $6.03 now. What sort of hamburger places were you thinking of that charged 3x the price of McDonald's, and do they only charge $17 now? Read More: https://www.tastingtable.com/1817109/big-mac-price-comparison/ https://www.tastingtable.com/1817109/big-mac-price-compariso...
drBonkers 6mo ago
> They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price. I argue you must evaluate against median purchasing power; it accounts for inflation and (lack of) wage increases. Comments from your linked video: > The problem with the “adjusted for inflation” argument is that it does not factor in buying power. The increase in wages has risen at out half the rate of inflation, so sure; $20 in 1975 would be $124 today, but the minimum wage in 1975 was $2.10 an hour as opposed to $7.25 today, giving you half the buying power you had 50 years ago. > healthcare, housing, and education ... have increased by an insane margin leaving people with less money once that has been paid for (if at all). > It's even worse when you consider that people are paying 45-55% of their monthly income on a house that cost 20x more than it would have in 1975. Your buying power is fucked from all sides.
- Ajedi32 6mo ago
  Median purchasing power has increased by 12% since 1979 (data doesn't go back to 1975) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
  - BobbyJo 6mo ago
    Real wages were down ~15-20% from 1970 to 1979... so, not a good year to anchor on.
    - Ajedi32 6mo ago
      Where are you sourcing that data from? The graph I linked using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't go back that far, so comparing to 1970 would not be possible.
      - BobbyJo 6mo ago
        US Census tracks income, its just harder to pull out since they don't provide nice charts like the fed.
palmotea 6mo ago
> The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also gotten harder in many cases. And there's a perverse effect to that difficulty: even if you really want high quality, it can be so hard to be sure you're getting it that you give up and just by the cheapest thing, because at least then you know you're not getting taken advantage of (by buying crappy for premium prices).
- cratermoon 6mo ago
  My rule is to never buy the cheapest thing, because to a point, you get what you pay for. But my other rule is not to spend extra for brand recognition or supposed higher quality. There's a middle range where you get reasonable value, better-than-crap stuff. Too low and you're buying junk, too high and you're overpaying, perhaps for brand or reputation, for something you can get elsewhere for less.
  - giraffe_lady 6mo ago
    This has been the wisdom for a long time but in some areas, clothing especially, it has finally fallen apart. Currently with clothes the cheapest are arguably good value, you get shit but at cheap prices. And high end you at least get good materials: it may not be "worth it" but if you want high quality fabric, which is extremely real, this is what you're paying. The midrange is the worst of both, quality barely if at all higher than the bottom level, but prices significantly higher. This is too complicated to approach by looking at brands too. Accounting for diffusion lines, subbranding, white labeling etc there are almost no companies that make only bad or only good quality, and the quality is not very well correlated to price or brand prestige either. For clothing there are currently very few general value signals that are still working, a huge contrast to 10 but even 5 years ago.
  - queenkjuul 6mo ago
    Agree with the sibling reply--clothing in particular this paradigm is dead, but it's dying out in general, too. I'm frequently finding myself with mid-range products of barely better quality than the bargain basement.
  - 6mo ago
idontwantthis 6mo ago
I find that the cheaper option is often so much cheaper that buying several replacements is better than buying the better one. Ninja blenders vs Vitamix for example. Adding in the fact that I have no trusted evidence that Vitamix is actually better, I’d be fine replacing my Ninja every year vs amortizing the Vitamix over five or more years. And for the record my Ninja has been great so far.
- tristor 6mo ago
  > I find that the cheaper option is often so much cheaper that buying several replacements is better than buying the better one. Ninja blenders vs Vitamix for example. Adding in the fact that I have no trusted evidence that Vitamix is actually better, I’d be fine replacing my Ninja every year vs amortizing the Vitamix over five or more years. And for the record my Ninja has been great so far. I understand this logic, but the flaw here is that you are only considering bare functionality, not quality of function. This comes up a lot in small appliances and things like power tools, but is especially relevant in the kitchen. It's not only that you can perform a task better with a better quality product, it's that the result of the task is better for you. What do I mean by that? Well most cheaper products heavily utilize plastics, and shed microplastics due to friction wear during operation, where-as better quality products typically have more metal and glass construction and are designed with more isolation between the result of the task and the machine performing it. The attitude you have here is common, and not necessarily incorrect from one perspective, but it is driving things like fast fashion and the proliferation of plastic on plastic contact in food prep in home kitchens, two of the highest contributing factors to microplastics ingestion, which is a problem that has strong correlations to population-scale hormonal imbalances, as well as key growing diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Our society is literally contributing to killing ourselves in order to shave a few pennies per-unit off basic everyday tools and conveniences.
- simplyluke 6mo ago
  I understand that logic, but as a counter, my time and frustration are worth something to me. I've actually owned both a Vitamix and a Ninja, and start basically every morning with a blended combo of protein/fruits/frozen greens, so it's a great example. A lot of the premium for me in a better product isn't just lasting longer and not throwing things away constantly, it's avoiding the frustration of using worse tools. The vitamix has been thoughtless for me in 6 years of daily use other than sharpening the blade every so often and replacing the bearing for the blade once (both easily done by me at home). I wake up bleary eyed, throw my stuff in there, and let it eat for a minute while I get my coffee going. The ninja on the other hand did a consistently worse job, required me to remove it and shake the contents of the blender, and then randomly fried itself one day in a way that I had no chance at fixing and scrambled my breakfast plans for multiple days. What's daily frustration worth for a half decade of my life? At least to me, a lot more than the premium to get the better tool.
rizzom5000 6mo ago
With some product categories there are independent testing laboratories that do a fairly good job of determining quality. The automotive industry comes to mind. It seems it's a revealed preference that most people really don't care that much about quality, or there would exist a host of companies like Consumer Reports to meet the demand. Complaining on social media about enshittification and evil corporations does not put skin in the game. I myself constantly complain about the atrocious quality of most consumer software products, but I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to pay for a subscription to an independent testing report.
moolcool 6mo ago
> The Donut media guys Actually the speeeed guys, now. They left because Donut went to shit after getting purchased by Private Equity. Surprise, surprise.
- drob518 6mo ago
  There's some irony for you.
imcritic 6mo ago
Doesn't the problem of quality now being barely distinguishable mean that manufacturers would aim to fool consumers by setting high prices to low quality goods to mimic as high quality goods (which probably can't be cheap by definition)? If that is so - the rest of your points become invalid.
- bluefirebrand 6mo ago
  I personally think many clothing brands are doing this. You absolutely cannot assume higher price points mean higher quality anymore
everdrive 6mo ago
I think this is a good analysis, and the topic is more nuanced than we might originally think. For me the modern problem is not that no quality products exist, but rather there is very little to actually help consumers understand when they're being fleeced by a luxury product which is no better than the "cheap" product. So many of these exist. They are "fancier" and have more feature, but do not actually have a better build quality or have better reliability. The other big modern problem would be repair-ability. A lot of the old 1950s products might not be any better once you adjust for inflation but a LOT of them are significantly cheaper and easier to repair.
tshaddox 6mo ago
I think there are also 2 senses in which it's difficult to determine quality. The first sense is just that many things require expert attention, special tools, and or a lot of time to evaluate the quality. And for niche items, there might just not be a reputable reviewer out there. This is frustrating, but somewhat unavoidable. The second sense is more insidious. Sometimes companies deliberately obfuscate the source and identity of products, making it difficult to even know if a product you saw a review of is the same product you'll get if you buy it now. I believe companies also do this simply to make price comparison impossible. This is an abominable practice, and in my view should be extremely illegal. I'm very much a free market guy, but clearly labeling and identifying the products you sell should be a bare minimum requirement to gain access to any market.
yason 6mo ago
> The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also > gotten harder in many cases. There was a brief window in time where price would be a useful signal. Among all cheap crap, good quality did cost but also deliver. Then someone figured they can leverage branding to sell crap for the price of good quality items, and now even if you're willing to spend money you can't be sure you're actually getting the good stuff. Buying not maybe the cheapest but the second cheapest is more expensive overall but unfortunately also more manageable.
moritzwarhier 6mo ago
Aren't all of your points already addressed in the article? > Someone in the industry pushed back on an earlier version of this piece with a fair point: VF Corp's brands still operate with their own design teams and their own headquarters. The brands aren't literally merged. And the premium tiers within North Face and JanSport still use quality materials. The Summit Series from TNF still has Cordura. You can still find a JanSport with YKK zippers if you know where to look. > All of that is true. But it actually makes the argument worse, not better. (emphasis mine) > The fact that VF Corp kept the premium tiers intact while degrading the entry-level and mid-range products means this was a deliberate segmentation strategy. They still make the good version. They just also sell a garbage version under the same trusted name, in the same stores, to the people who don't know the difference. The brand reputation built by decades of quality products is now being used to move cheap products to buyers who trust the logo. > Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to. Admittedly, they still equate higher price with quality, but it doesn't change much about the problem that economies of scale degenerate into market failure when there is no real competition anymore.
peacebeard 6mo ago
Yeah feels like the only way to find a quality product now is to find a good niche reviewer on YouTube and watch 5 hours of content.
esalman 6mo ago
I'd also recommend the Project Farm review of backpacks- https://youtu.be/cSm48oVCaWc?si=AbTyU9mzOJc5vfbR https://youtu.be/cSm48oVCaWc?si=AbTyU9mzOJc5vfbR
oxag3n 6mo ago
It is difficult and requires time investment. I often searched BIFL sub-reddit to find things quality things and it did fail me in the past. After years of broken dishware created a weird collection, I followed the BIFL advice and bought Corelle glass dishes. Only three years later of daily heavy use and dishwasher all the dishes have degraded edge, which looks and feels just like chipped glass. Looking through specialized forums helps sometimes, but then you are looking at Hermès dishware and doubting what are you paying for - quality or art.
Gud 6mo ago
I often see this argument but I don’t buy it. People used to study the items they were buying, not look at the brand. You (probably) live in a hyper capitalistic society where many corporations promote their brands through lies and deception. That is a very strong filter already - avoid the (mostly American) transnational giant corporations and buy from companies that are mostly local and aren’t hyperscaling. Sure the mainstream brands are shit but there are dozens, hundreds of brands for a fair price point that aren’t for every shitty corporation. Don’t buy Levi’s, buy Nudies.
maxglute 6mo ago
How much of it is people lost skill to determine quality. When everyone did some mending, population had baseline ability to discern quality in clothing, and clothing companies less likely to pull shenanigans.
m000 6mo ago
> So it is often the case that today, you can get something for cheaper than you ever could in the past (albeit not at a great quality), and if you are willing to pay higher prices (but often about the same as you would have paid in the past), you can still get good or even better quality. But with the advent and advances of several decades, aren't you supposed to be able to get better quality for cheaper today?
kimos 6mo ago
A subreddit or forum like this is a good resource: https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/ https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/ But it turns every decision into an exhausting research and optimization project.
- account42 6mo ago
  It's only a good resource until unscrupulous marketers catch up. Which probably already happened.

CWuestefeld 6mo ago

That's a worthwhile observation. It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available. It means that people who couldn't in the past afford something at all, are now more likely to have some path to getting it. And even if you could afford the higher quality, you may not need it anyway. I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater. But you're right, when you do need the higher quality, it can be tough to differentiate.

eesmith 6mo ago
There are a lot of products which are nowhere near my Pareto frontier, but for the most part I lack the information needed to make that judgement. The result is that I, like others, spend too much on crappy products.
bluGill 6mo ago
> I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater. I've been burned too often with this thinking. All too often the cheap tool isn't just light duty so it breaks, it is not good enough to do the job at all. If the motor is too weak the tool won't do the job. If the wrench isn't precise enough it will round the bolt - this is worse than breaking: you can't fix the thing at all anymore with any quality of tool. I don't need the best tools, but I need one that is enough quality to do the job, and the cheap tools generally fail.
- SoftTalker 6mo ago
  Anecdotally my experience is the opposite. I bought an angle grinder from Harbor Freight for something like $10 on sale. It's not something a pro could use every day but it has absolutely been fine for what I do with it: cutting the occasional piece of metal stock, sharpening the lawn mower blade once a year, etc.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - convolvatron 6mo ago
    be careful in promoting that strategy. HF is pretty bad, I had a friend go through 3 them in a day because he didn't have one on the job site and HF wasn't too far away. the next step up is about 2x the price and will last a good year with professional use and maybe more if you can be bothered to replace the brushes. so I'm glad that's working out for you, but there is more bottom to be found. I bought an attachment that came with a grinder that was so dinky and toy-like that it didn't last 20 minutes of light use. this thread is covered with discussion about the problem of information asymmetry and rapidly decaying brands. to me the real issue is economic efficiency. the low end tool gets a double economic win, lower material and production costs, and increased frequency of purchase. every one of those purchases involves shipping, potential retail space, people's time spent shopping and returning crap. leading to a lot of outright waste. to me this really undermines the promise of capitalistic efficiency, since it prioritizes local optimization to an extreme over global optimization.
II2II 6mo ago
I agree that it is nice to have the option when you don't need the quality. It is also nice to have the option when you are trying something new and don't know if you want to invest in quality. Yet the article goes further than that. They are suggesting that companies are capturing a significant fraction of the market, so there is less pressure to produce quality goods. Whether this is resulting in lower quality goods overall, people are debating over. On the other hand, it does seem to be making it difficult to determine what goods are higher quality.
adgjlsfhk1 6mo ago
> It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available. The problem is that there is no way for consumers to know whether they are getting the good version or the shit version. This creates a structural incentive to not produce good versions since consumers will assume that the good version is just an over-priced shit version (because the expensive version is often just an over-priced shit version)
tshaddox 6mo ago
How much of the price reduction is directly attributable to externalities, for example the fact that to replace the lifetime of one expensive item there are going to be 10 cheap versions of the item tossed in the trash?
rangerelf 6mo ago
The problem isn't the availability of lower quality versions of a high-quality product, it's the transformation of a formerly high-quality product into a shitty-quality version, meanwhile, maintaining the same price, or worse, a higher price, than the former high-quality version of itself. The price tags on tools don't go down with time, but the quality of the tools certainly does. I'm all for tiering product lines, harbor freight is doing it right by offering their top-of-the-line in the Hercules brand, a "pretty good for non contractor" line with Bauer, and then there's lower tiers for one-offs. But if I look for, and buy, a Porter Cable tool, I'm buying it because I expect a certain performance and quality, but it's in fact a rug pull right now. That should be fraud.

gaze 6mo ago

I mean I get your argument but it feels like one should adjust for wage growth instead. One labor unit of value converts to a shittier backpack.

CWuestefeld 6mo ago
The other side of that coin is that someone whose units of labor demand less value can still get into the market.
- gaze 6mo ago
  see terry pratchett's boots theory of economic fairness. They'll get into the market with something that costs more long term...
  - account42 6mo ago
    Exactly, and many who could have saved up for the original quality product are also lured into getting the crappier one that doesn't last as long - often without being aware of that deal.

fwipsy 6mo ago

Perhaps it's gotten harder to determine by eye, but Google will still point you towards trustworthy brands in 2 minutes. The problem is people don't care or can't be bothered to Google.

qup 6mo ago
I care and can be bothered, but Google is now itself a worse product than it used to be. It pushes sponsors links and garbage top-ten lists with Amazon sponsored links and other seo optimized content and none of it can be trusted. People commonly use a reddit tag to search for products, so companies started creating accounts to shill for their products there too, make it look organic and all. You can't find the best of any product in two minutes on Google, not with any confidence.
randallsquared 6mo ago
Will it? How do you know? If you don't know a reviewer who is trustworthy, how can you find one? There's enormous amounts of slop (both human and generated -- this was already a problem before the last couple years), and when some channel has signal, it attracts more noise generators. The subreddit or review site is only useful until it's well known, and then there's increasing pressure on mods or owners to cash in. The immediately obvious path here is paying for the reviews or recommendations directly, like Consumer Reports, but there are two major problems with that: first, the amount consumers can afford to pay doesn't support the additional cost of actually buying all the units and exhaustively testing them, when CR and similar sites are competing against supplier-supported sites, and second, if you care about specific features or aspects of a product, it's unlikely that the reviewer tested that specifically. I wish I knew of a good solution. In reality, what's probably going to mitigate in the short term is having your agent scour all the available information and make recommendations, at comparatively great expense.
johanvts 6mo ago
I think Google has turned to garbage and especially for product reviews there is a flood of affiliate marketing grifters in every category. It takes effort and sometimes payment to find good reviews these days.
6mo ago

hombre_fatal 6mo ago

I watched some comparison videos like that, but the old product was always more expensive than what you'd tend to buy today. Same seems to be true in that video you linked. And when you buy an equivalently-priced product today, it's better than it was 50 years ago. I only skipped through the video though. The problem I have is that there's no easy way to go to an ecommerce marketplace and pick "I want to spend more for higher quality". You have to do your own external research.

bluGill 6mo ago
That is what I miss the most from the old stores. I knew when I went to Sears I'd get a good enough thing. I could often find the exact same thing under a different name for less elsewhere if I looked (Sears made no secret that their house brands were someone else's product with the Sears name on it). I knew I could often find better if I looked. However I could trust that it was a good enough product for my needs and so only a few people had any reason to try elsewhere. (the above used to apply stores like J.C. Pennies, and Wards - though Wards was already failing when I was a kid) Amazon has everything, but I don't want everything. I want someone to the comparisons for me so decide what is good enough. Reviews are worthless - even when not a scam (which many are), most people buy one and so they can only report it works they don't know how it compares to some other model that they didn't buy.
- initatus 6mo ago
  This is me with Costco. They're selective with what they stock, their margins are capped so I know I'm not getting fleeced buying abject junk. I have bought stuff from them based on trust of the store and not knowledge of the product. It's the opposite of amazon, where not only do I have no trust in anything, everything feels adverserial. If I'm not vigilant, I will get hosed. I find it extremely unpleasant.
  - simplyluke 6mo ago
    In some ways. The asterisk on it that gets really frustrating for me is that there are often SKUs manufactures make for them that are actually worse in meaningful ways. I almost bought my Bosche dishwasher from them last year, because it was a bit cheaper than getting it at lowes. And then I noticed buried in the detail that the reason for that was it didn't have an auto-open drying feature that was one of the main reasons I was buying the dishwasher. I guess this is kind of the opposite side of it though. I had done a bunch of research, and if I'd wanted to skip that and just buy the dishwasher at costco I would have ended up with a very good option at a reasonable price, even if it didn't have every feature possible, and costco would have done the work of eliminating all the cheap builder-grade junk for me.

Eisenstein 6mo ago

Akerlof famously wrote about this in 'The Market for Lemons'. "Suppose buyers cannot distinguish between a high-quality car (a "peach") and a low-quality car (a "lemon"). Then they are only willing to pay a fixed price for a car that averages the value of a "peach" and "lemon" together (pavg). But sellers know whether they hold a peach or a lemon. Given the fixed price at which buyers will buy, sellers will sell only when they hold "lemons" (since plemon < pavg) and they will leave the market when they hold "peaches" (since ppeach > pavg). Eventually, as enough sellers of "peaches" leave the market, the average willingness-to-pay of buyers will decrease (since the average quality of cars on the market decreased), leading to even more sellers of high-quality cars to leave the market through a positive feedback loop. Thus the uninformed buyer's price creates an adverse selection problem that drives the high-quality cars from the market. Adverse selection is a market mechanism that can lead to a market collapse." * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

psadauskas 6mo ago

Its also gotten harder to trust them to maintain that quality, too. A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners, or even start selling a slightly different product with the same model number. Or you find a decent brand that makes good products, they get popular and grow and in come the MBAs with ideas on how to increase profits. Or they get bought by Private Equity and carry on only by brand momentum.

kqr 6mo ago
> A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners I think this is true, but for far less malicious reasons. Favourable reviews lead to popularity, which increases production pressures, which makes it harder to source quality materials and maintain a quality process while satisfying demand. I have heard of several indie makers who, faced with sudden popularity, have to make the tough choice of speeding up the process at reduced quality (and thus dissatisfy customers) or be unable to fill orders (and thus dissatisfy customers). Everyone handles it differently but it's not pleasant for anyone.
- ctoth 6mo ago
  Maybe they should just cap the number of orders at the number of items they can make and ask anybody else to sign up on a list? Anybody who chooses option 1 is obviously evil?
  - queenkjuul 6mo ago
    100% this. If you can't deliver the product i want, then fine. Don't lie to me and deliver a product inferior to what i ordered for the same price without warning. That's straight up malice. Naturally the kind of thing that would be defended on HN nonetheless
- lepton 6mo ago
  Maintain quality but raise prices to throttle demand to a sustainable rate? Hard to do instantaneously of course; easier said than done etc

eudamoniac 6mo ago

> They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price This is what so many don't understand, especially among the youth / reddit crowd. They expect their $25 jeans to be equivalent quality to the $25 or even $100 jeans from 60 years ago, for some reason. There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be. There's also very few people who understand just how expensive things were back then, likely a result of having infinite cheap crap available. They don't know that in 1970, in today's money, a fridge was ~$4000, a burger and fries was $17, and a typical dress was $350. The only thing that has changed is that there are now options for cheap shitty things. You can still buy a very nice $4000 fridge if you want to.

bluGill 6mo ago
I bought some $100 jeans a few months ago, hoping they would be better than the $25 I used to buy 30 years ago. They are not better than the $25 jean I can buy elsewhere today.
- square_usual 6mo ago
  Not every $100 pair is made the same, and price is not a proxy for quality. You can definitely get a $100 pair that is meaningfully better than a $25 pair today.
eesmith 6mo ago
"a burger and fries was $17"? That doesn't seem right. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mcdonalds-old-photos/ https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mcdonalds-old-photos/ shows a menu at McDonalds from the early 1970s. A hamburger and fries was $0.63 or (assuming 1970 and adjusting for inflation) $5.36 now. A quarter pounder and fries was $1.27, or $10.81 now. Add $0.15 or $0.20 for a soda ($1.28 or $1.70). That's a lot less than $17. Add $1.28 To double check, in 1983 a hamburger and fries was $1.82 - https://archive.org/details/ucladailybruin92losa/page/n542/mode/2up?q=%22price+of+a+hamburger%22+%22mcdonald%27s%22 https://archive.org/details/ucladailybruin92losa/page/n542/m... . That corresponds to $6.03 now. What sort of hamburger places were you thinking of that charged 3x the price of McDonald's, and do they only charge $17 now? Read More: https://www.tastingtable.com/1817109/big-mac-price-comparison/ https://www.tastingtable.com/1817109/big-mac-price-compariso...

drBonkers 6mo ago

> They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price. I argue you must evaluate against median purchasing power; it accounts for inflation and (lack of) wage increases. Comments from your linked video: > The problem with the “adjusted for inflation” argument is that it does not factor in buying power. The increase in wages has risen at out half the rate of inflation, so sure; $20 in 1975 would be $124 today, but the minimum wage in 1975 was $2.10 an hour as opposed to $7.25 today, giving you half the buying power you had 50 years ago. > healthcare, housing, and education ... have increased by an insane margin leaving people with less money once that has been paid for (if at all). > It's even worse when you consider that people are paying 45-55% of their monthly income on a house that cost 20x more than it would have in 1975. Your buying power is fucked from all sides.

Ajedi32 6mo ago
Median purchasing power has increased by 12% since 1979 (data doesn't go back to 1975) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
- BobbyJo 6mo ago
  Real wages were down ~15-20% from 1970 to 1979... so, not a good year to anchor on.
  - Ajedi32 6mo ago
    Where are you sourcing that data from? The graph I linked using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't go back that far, so comparing to 1970 would not be possible.
    - BobbyJo 6mo ago
      US Census tracks income, its just harder to pull out since they don't provide nice charts like the fed.

palmotea 6mo ago

> The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also gotten harder in many cases. And there's a perverse effect to that difficulty: even if you really want high quality, it can be so hard to be sure you're getting it that you give up and just by the cheapest thing, because at least then you know you're not getting taken advantage of (by buying crappy for premium prices).

cratermoon 6mo ago
My rule is to never buy the cheapest thing, because to a point, you get what you pay for. But my other rule is not to spend extra for brand recognition or supposed higher quality. There's a middle range where you get reasonable value, better-than-crap stuff. Too low and you're buying junk, too high and you're overpaying, perhaps for brand or reputation, for something you can get elsewhere for less.
- giraffe_lady 6mo ago
  This has been the wisdom for a long time but in some areas, clothing especially, it has finally fallen apart. Currently with clothes the cheapest are arguably good value, you get shit but at cheap prices. And high end you at least get good materials: it may not be "worth it" but if you want high quality fabric, which is extremely real, this is what you're paying. The midrange is the worst of both, quality barely if at all higher than the bottom level, but prices significantly higher. This is too complicated to approach by looking at brands too. Accounting for diffusion lines, subbranding, white labeling etc there are almost no companies that make only bad or only good quality, and the quality is not very well correlated to price or brand prestige either. For clothing there are currently very few general value signals that are still working, a huge contrast to 10 but even 5 years ago.
- queenkjuul 6mo ago
  Agree with the sibling reply--clothing in particular this paradigm is dead, but it's dying out in general, too. I'm frequently finding myself with mid-range products of barely better quality than the bargain basement.
- 6mo ago

idontwantthis 6mo ago

I find that the cheaper option is often so much cheaper that buying several replacements is better than buying the better one. Ninja blenders vs Vitamix for example. Adding in the fact that I have no trusted evidence that Vitamix is actually better, I’d be fine replacing my Ninja every year vs amortizing the Vitamix over five or more years. And for the record my Ninja has been great so far.

tristor 6mo ago
> I find that the cheaper option is often so much cheaper that buying several replacements is better than buying the better one. Ninja blenders vs Vitamix for example. Adding in the fact that I have no trusted evidence that Vitamix is actually better, I’d be fine replacing my Ninja every year vs amortizing the Vitamix over five or more years. And for the record my Ninja has been great so far. I understand this logic, but the flaw here is that you are only considering bare functionality, not quality of function. This comes up a lot in small appliances and things like power tools, but is especially relevant in the kitchen. It's not only that you can perform a task better with a better quality product, it's that the result of the task is better for you. What do I mean by that? Well most cheaper products heavily utilize plastics, and shed microplastics due to friction wear during operation, where-as better quality products typically have more metal and glass construction and are designed with more isolation between the result of the task and the machine performing it. The attitude you have here is common, and not necessarily incorrect from one perspective, but it is driving things like fast fashion and the proliferation of plastic on plastic contact in food prep in home kitchens, two of the highest contributing factors to microplastics ingestion, which is a problem that has strong correlations to population-scale hormonal imbalances, as well as key growing diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Our society is literally contributing to killing ourselves in order to shave a few pennies per-unit off basic everyday tools and conveniences.
simplyluke 6mo ago
I understand that logic, but as a counter, my time and frustration are worth something to me. I've actually owned both a Vitamix and a Ninja, and start basically every morning with a blended combo of protein/fruits/frozen greens, so it's a great example. A lot of the premium for me in a better product isn't just lasting longer and not throwing things away constantly, it's avoiding the frustration of using worse tools. The vitamix has been thoughtless for me in 6 years of daily use other than sharpening the blade every so often and replacing the bearing for the blade once (both easily done by me at home). I wake up bleary eyed, throw my stuff in there, and let it eat for a minute while I get my coffee going. The ninja on the other hand did a consistently worse job, required me to remove it and shake the contents of the blender, and then randomly fried itself one day in a way that I had no chance at fixing and scrambled my breakfast plans for multiple days. What's daily frustration worth for a half decade of my life? At least to me, a lot more than the premium to get the better tool.

rizzom5000 6mo ago

With some product categories there are independent testing laboratories that do a fairly good job of determining quality. The automotive industry comes to mind. It seems it's a revealed preference that most people really don't care that much about quality, or there would exist a host of companies like Consumer Reports to meet the demand. Complaining on social media about enshittification and evil corporations does not put skin in the game. I myself constantly complain about the atrocious quality of most consumer software products, but I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to pay for a subscription to an independent testing report.

moolcool 6mo ago

> The Donut media guys Actually the speeeed guys, now. They left because Donut went to shit after getting purchased by Private Equity. Surprise, surprise.

drob518 6mo ago
There's some irony for you.

imcritic 6mo ago

Doesn't the problem of quality now being barely distinguishable mean that manufacturers would aim to fool consumers by setting high prices to low quality goods to mimic as high quality goods (which probably can't be cheap by definition)? If that is so - the rest of your points become invalid.

bluefirebrand 6mo ago
I personally think many clothing brands are doing this. You absolutely cannot assume higher price points mean higher quality anymore

everdrive 6mo ago

I think this is a good analysis, and the topic is more nuanced than we might originally think. For me the modern problem is not that no quality products exist, but rather there is very little to actually help consumers understand when they're being fleeced by a luxury product which is no better than the "cheap" product. So many of these exist. They are "fancier" and have more feature, but do not actually have a better build quality or have better reliability. The other big modern problem would be repair-ability. A lot of the old 1950s products might not be any better once you adjust for inflation but a LOT of them are significantly cheaper and easier to repair.

tshaddox 6mo ago

I think there are also 2 senses in which it's difficult to determine quality. The first sense is just that many things require expert attention, special tools, and or a lot of time to evaluate the quality. And for niche items, there might just not be a reputable reviewer out there. This is frustrating, but somewhat unavoidable. The second sense is more insidious. Sometimes companies deliberately obfuscate the source and identity of products, making it difficult to even know if a product you saw a review of is the same product you'll get if you buy it now. I believe companies also do this simply to make price comparison impossible. This is an abominable practice, and in my view should be extremely illegal. I'm very much a free market guy, but clearly labeling and identifying the products you sell should be a bare minimum requirement to gain access to any market.

yason 6mo ago

> The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also > gotten harder in many cases. There was a brief window in time where price would be a useful signal. Among all cheap crap, good quality did cost but also deliver. Then someone figured they can leverage branding to sell crap for the price of good quality items, and now even if you're willing to spend money you can't be sure you're actually getting the good stuff. Buying not maybe the cheapest but the second cheapest is more expensive overall but unfortunately also more manageable.

moritzwarhier 6mo ago

Aren't all of your points already addressed in the article? > Someone in the industry pushed back on an earlier version of this piece with a fair point: VF Corp's brands still operate with their own design teams and their own headquarters. The brands aren't literally merged. And the premium tiers within North Face and JanSport still use quality materials. The Summit Series from TNF still has Cordura. You can still find a JanSport with YKK zippers if you know where to look. > All of that is true. But it actually makes the argument worse, not better. (emphasis mine) > The fact that VF Corp kept the premium tiers intact while degrading the entry-level and mid-range products means this was a deliberate segmentation strategy. They still make the good version. They just also sell a garbage version under the same trusted name, in the same stores, to the people who don't know the difference. The brand reputation built by decades of quality products is now being used to move cheap products to buyers who trust the logo. > Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to. Admittedly, they still equate higher price with quality, but it doesn't change much about the problem that economies of scale degenerate into market failure when there is no real competition anymore.

peacebeard 6mo ago

Yeah feels like the only way to find a quality product now is to find a good niche reviewer on YouTube and watch 5 hours of content.

esalman 6mo ago

I'd also recommend the Project Farm review of backpacks- https://youtu.be/cSm48oVCaWc?si=AbTyU9mzOJc5vfbR https://youtu.be/cSm48oVCaWc?si=AbTyU9mzOJc5vfbR

oxag3n 6mo ago

It is difficult and requires time investment. I often searched BIFL sub-reddit to find things quality things and it did fail me in the past. After years of broken dishware created a weird collection, I followed the BIFL advice and bought Corelle glass dishes. Only three years later of daily heavy use and dishwasher all the dishes have degraded edge, which looks and feels just like chipped glass. Looking through specialized forums helps sometimes, but then you are looking at Hermès dishware and doubting what are you paying for - quality or art.

Gud 6mo ago

I often see this argument but I don’t buy it. People used to study the items they were buying, not look at the brand. You (probably) live in a hyper capitalistic society where many corporations promote their brands through lies and deception. That is a very strong filter already - avoid the (mostly American) transnational giant corporations and buy from companies that are mostly local and aren’t hyperscaling. Sure the mainstream brands are shit but there are dozens, hundreds of brands for a fair price point that aren’t for every shitty corporation. Don’t buy Levi’s, buy Nudies.

maxglute 6mo ago

How much of it is people lost skill to determine quality. When everyone did some mending, population had baseline ability to discern quality in clothing, and clothing companies less likely to pull shenanigans.

m000 6mo ago

> So it is often the case that today, you can get something for cheaper than you ever could in the past (albeit not at a great quality), and if you are willing to pay higher prices (but often about the same as you would have paid in the past), you can still get good or even better quality. But with the advent and advances of several decades, aren't you supposed to be able to get better quality for cheaper today?

kimos 6mo ago

A subreddit or forum like this is a good resource: https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/ https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/ But it turns every decision into an exhausting research and optimization project.

account42 6mo ago
It's only a good resource until unscrupulous marketers catch up. Which probably already happened.