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Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality
- inigyou 3mo agoI've come to the conclusion this proliferates because it's very hard to start a business. If there was tons of competition the market would decide.
- NoboruWataya 3mo agoThe legal and regulatory obstacles to starting a business probably don't help but IMO the bigger issue is trying to break into markets that are dominated by massive global players who benefit from economies of scale and access to funding that newer companies don't have. The other side of this is that consumers don't have the information required to properly differentiate between competitors. If I'm shopping for a new TV I have no idea where or how it is made which is why so many people default to brand names as very rough proxies for quality. That information asymmetry is exactly what websites like this are trying to combat, but it's clearly an uphill struggle.
- inigyou 3mo agoI'm not only talking about legal and regulatory issues, indeed. I think one of the big ones is rent. Suuuure you can just take some months to invent a product, but if you start with a $3000 loss per month, that's a high bar to clear. Another one is lack of pressure. The person who invented the TV was surely thinking about how much money he would make or how much he would change society. But now there are so many TVs for under $500, what would I really add by making a new one that wouldn't have been optimized and battle-hardened and would be otherwise identical to all the others? (From the reverse side too, why would I buy a $1000 TV identical to a $500 one? Market for lemons. Fairphone's in this position.)
- pjc50 3mo ago> if you start with a $3000 loss per month This is a question of access to capital. Since we're all on the VC site we should understand how that works; for things like that it's very important to get "angel" investors who are comfortable putting in less-than-six-figures to get a product to the stage where it is proven for bigger investors. I'm glad that everyone's quoting Market for Lemons now, but it doesn't quite apply to Fairphone. Fairphone aren't trying to cheat you, there's no information asymmetry here; they're just providing a feature ("fairness") which you can't easily get elsewhere and that turns out to be really expensive. At the other end of the "market entry" problem: this is why RAM is so expensive right now, you can't just spin up a new DRAM line in your garage even if you're Sam Zeeloof.
- inigyou 3mo agoWhy would a capitalist fund something that will obviously not make money, like a random Finnish dude's operating system, when there's already Microsoft Windows?
- m4xp 3mo agoI think it's just human nature, people that are ruthless with buisness are more likely to stay afloat compared to the moral alternative that always on the edge of collapsing
- fifticon 3mo agoIt makes sense to ask WHY this is hard. People can disagree endlessly on why. But a big part is, that antitrust/monopoly legislation has been almost completely dismantled and detoothed within the last 35 years, starting back with Reagan, and accelerating through the 90's when Clinton was at the wheel. The tiny bit that is still left, is only enforced either when parties fail to pay the bribe, or are bribed to enforce it, by other actors. Once you allow markets to consolidate into a single monolith, any new competitors will only be allowed to live, until they become big enough for the established incumbent to notice and then squish, with their unlimited access to resources. There is little incentive to start a competing business, if you know the trajectory is "IF SUCCESS THEN SQUISH".
- inigyou 3mo agoAnti-monopoly failing is the effect, not the cause - how is there a monopoly to start with?
- danaris 3mo agoYou may be poorly educated as to how antitrust is supposed to work. Breaking up monopolies that already exist is only one of its purposes and tools. It is also there to prevent mergers that will be detrimental to the public. Past a certain (very low) scale threshold, this should be assumed to be "almost all of them". Rather than the government having to prove that a merger would be detrimental, the companies wanting to merge should be required to prove that the merger would be beneficial to the public in long-term ways that do not require specific (and easily breakable) "commitments" on their part to do things like keep prices low.
- bbqbbqbbq 3mo agoI don't think you can just say the market would decide when it is so easy to hide corner cutting and sell the thing cheaper.
- inigyou 3mo agoFYI you don't seem to be aware that you are shadowbanned.
- xxs 3mo agothere is no such thing here
- inigyou 3mo agoYes there is. Shadowbanned users have all of their comments automatically dead until they get at least 1 vouch. You can verify this. Create an account using Tor and post a comment. All accounts created with Tor are shadowbanned. Go to that comment link with your main account, which must have showdead=yes in the options.
- danaris 3mo agoAnd this is why the destruction of antitrust in the US in the latter part of the 20th century has screwed us all. The massive wave of consolidation that followed that (ongoing to this day) makes the barrier to entry for every market much, much higher. The very fact that the most common desired endgame for a startup is "exit"—ie, being bought out by a larger company—should demonstrate this very well. If we want quality, customer service, decent prices, or anything like them to come back, we need to restore real antitrust, not the morally-and-intellectually-bankrupt Chicago School bullshit that's been pushed on us for decades, benefiting only the already-wealthy.
- comrade1234 3mo agoI read years ago about a drill which was sold at Walmart with the same sku as in higher-end stores but the Walmart version had plastic gears. This was due to pricing pressure by Walmart on the manufacturer. Me, personally, I seek out first Swiss brands then German brands when buying most things. I'm willing to pay extra. In fact I'm a little pissed off this week because I ordered some oxygen absorbers off a Swiss website that listed a Swiss address but they were shipped directly from china. Investigating the site more closely, yeah, it's just a fake website made to look Swiss.
- Schlagbohrer 3mo agoThere are Chinese machine manufacturers who use fake German brand names because for a long time Germany was selling the manufacturing machinery to China and they have a good national brand image.
- dan_hawkins 3mo agoYou don't need a fake brand: use Philips.
- xxs 3mo ago>Philips not a german brand
- bsenftner 3mo agoI did a little research study back in 2003 where I went to various grocers and purchased the same product at these grocers and compared. Walmart has larger boxes, and less contents, universally, for pretty much everything in a box, and they charge 1/3 more for their 2/3rds of what you get everywhere else. They make nearly 50% more profit from that little slight of hand. And try discussing this with any shoppers and they will say "but the box is bigger", <- actual statement from a CS PhD, demonstrating how it does not matter your education, once outside of that specialization you're an idiot.
- 3mo ago
- Schlagbohrer 3mo ago"Worse on purpose" is just "Minimum viable product"
- piyuv 3mo agoThe definition of “viable” matters
- hypercube33 3mo agoIt's just crapitalism - make thing as cheap as possible and charge as much as possible.
- inigyou 3mo agoWhat you call crapitalism is actually just capitalism.
- Ker102 3mo agoIts because of monopolies
- tweakimp 3mo agoThe "minimum viable product" is part of the development process. If you are already at a certain quality and choose to make it worse, this is something else. Enshittification or just greed come to my mind.
- lotsofpulp 3mo agoThe “minimum” means minimum price. There is a big market for the lowest price product in case a customer wants the lowest quality product because they only need to use it a couple times or for a trivial task. Buying a cheap tool at Harbor Freight first and then going for the more expensive tool is a good way to save money.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3mo ago> The “minimum” means minimum price. But "worse on purpose" products typically decrease the quality (and cost to make) without decreasing the sale price to match. It's exploiting the product's reputation for being premium not minimum.
- NoboruWataya 3mo agoInteresting (and very helpful!) that they keep a list of good brands. I wonder how they judge that - do they just look at ownership?
- simonbarker87 3mo agoLooks like that’s one factor. A number of brands I expected to be marked as Avoid based on who owns them were indeed marked as such. Pleased to see a few of my chosen brands were marked as good. Shame that basically no sun glasses company is good.
- gorgoiler 3mo agoIncredibly depressing, but a good and important thing to read! Not to sound overly cheerful, but shout out to my Makita DHP484 combo drill/driver and 100 piece bit set that, for a low three figure price, is far more powerful and capable than the noisy old corded monster it replaces.
- Ker102 3mo agoThats why competition is so important in the market
- tremon 3mo agoThis is why independent review organizations are so important in the market.
- 1970-01-01 3mo agoOne massive unmentioned counterexample: High quality Chinese tools continue to proliferate and sucker-punch these brands for being so egregious with quality. They are now the high quality standard if you know what brands to look for, and not because their competition got worse as mentioned here, they are simply iterating and improving and making better tools and designs than they did 10 years ago. Sometimes you are getting the exact same tool as the name-brand but with less warranty for a fraction of the price. "Corporate Greed" is self-correcting in a free and fair market! Vote with your wallet. Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/harborfreight/comments/1v1ujxe/hmmm_scarily_similar/ https://www.reddit.com/r/harborfreight/comments/1v1ujxe/hmmm... Which directly contradicts the blog's post about Knipex never selling-out on quality: https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-power-tools-got-worse-on-purpose https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-power-tools-got-worse-... >Knipex is family-owned out of Germany. They make what many consider the best pliers on the planet. Part of a larger group (Knipex Group) but not publicly traded, not for sale.
- vee-kay 3mo agoIn my experience in recent years, Oppo and Vivo phones look better, they are more robust and last longer than iPhones and Samsung premium phones. When giants like Apple and Samsung fail to innovate enough (and when they price their best products beyond the reach of the middle class of most nations), then upstarts will take their throne. This may be good for industry so there's healthy competition, but it is unfortunate because China's CCP has a policy that Chinese companies must store and share customer and company data in China. So anyone using Chinese electronic gadgets is saying goodbye to their data security and privacy, even if it is an expensive gadget by a bigshot Chinese company (e.g., Lenovo was caught bundling adware on its premium laptops some years ago - search for "Lenovo Superfish" to know more). https://legioncyber.com/lenovos-security-failures-and-hidden-risks/ https://legioncyber.com/lenovos-security-failures-and-hidden...
- mindslight 3mo agoI recently bought one of the Yukon tool chest / benches and the experience totally flipped my opinion of HF. I've been a customer for a while, but always considered them lower-quality in the back of my mind. The tool chest came in perfect condition, easy purchase. Whereas the Huskies I had bought previously were a hassle that involved returning multiple damaged-in-box units back to the store, driving an hour to another store with stock, dodgily swapping parts (drawer slides and top) to make a good one, etc. It's of course never just one thing - I had been waiting for the Husky to show up in stock again (it has a 24 inch depth vs 18), but at this point it seems like HD has discontinued the 24 in favor of enshittifying with 18 inches instead. And of course I've been shying away from HD recently because of the F-word. It's like these companies want to self-immolate (or put more technically, they create short term boosts by arbitraging away their reputation).
- xnx 3mo agoThis entire site can be boiled down to: products get decrease in quality when customers don't know or don't care what quality is. Price is a clear and obvious thing to measure, quality is much more difficult. Consumers get little or no formal education in quality, and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly. Any review site that is paid for by ads or affiliate links has the default position of trying to get you to buy something.
- eventualcomp 3mo agoThe market for lemons is always bustling, I guess [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
- DangitBobby 3mo agoWhy do I no longer have any reliable signals for quality? Price, brand, materials, and word of mouth are all you really get, but price and materials are meaningless and brand and word of mouth stop mattering as a company starts to coast on its reputation for higher margin. Genuinely don't know how customers are supposed to choose quality when they want it. I always want it.
- brookst 3mo agoAgree, but there’s also an element of consumer irrationality. Lower price + lower quality means you can buy more of what you want now, even if it means that you’ll end up with net less of what you want in the long term. Most consumers, me included, are not making purely rational decisions based in price and quality, even in domains where they are qualified to judge quality.
- xnx 3mo agoTrue. Maybe the hidden part of the equation is "effort". Modern marketing strategy is to "flood the zone" with misleading information and half-truths so as to make the very act of making a rational selection exhausting.
- docjay 3mo ago
- trollbridge 3mo agoIt is really disappointing how this site’s text appears to be mostly AI generated (60% or so on Pangram). I guess you could say this site is… worse on purpose.
- Rygian 3mo agoRelated: "A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
- bigfishrunning 3mo agoThanks, I hate it
- xxs 3mo agoyou can say shit here
- Rygian 2mo agoThe title of the video contains the asterisk.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- theturtletalks 3mo agoI call this the cycle of disruption. A company makes a really good product as first challenging incumbents. They get so big, they eventually become the incumbent. All this time, they’re probably losing money on the product or breaking even. Eventually, investors will want returns on their investment. This will first happen with prices increases to save the quality of the product. Once they can’t raise prices anymore, the quality will be decreased. By this point, the brand is strong enough to get sales even on this worse product. Then another company will come in and make the same product but better than the incumbent. The cycle continues. My point is find these new companies that are trying to get market share by making a higher quality product. And if you really like that product, buy 2.
- bitmasher9 3mo agoOnce a product becomes so big it cannot increase in market share the only way to increase the total amount of profit it generates it by reducing the cost to produce the product or increasing the price.
- ramgine 3mo agoThis seems like what he said but less words
- pjc50 3mo agoIt feels like this observation should be in Marx somewhere (but in way more words badly translated from German)
- bitmasher9 3mo agoIt’s a more acute observation about market dynamics than what is usually found in Marx. Marx heavily discusses how humanity interacts with capitalism, and focuses its market analysis on the labor market.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- skeater15 3mo agoI find it odd how corporate greed is always the focal point. But its never consumer greed. The consumer is the one who dictate's a market. So cheap, low quality products are the direct result of consumers paying for a less expensive product. The consumer has proven it doesn't care about quality. So as much as corporations are greedy so are consumers.
- brookst 3mo agoExactly this. Oh no, these airline seats are cramped and miserable and were backed in like sardines, what’s wrong with these airlines, but I’ll buy whatever ticket is the cheapest.
- DangitBobby 3mo agoCompanies organize and consumers can't. Seems pretty obvious.
- tekla 3mo agoIt's obvious because no thinking. How do consumers lack the ability to choose what they want? Of course unless, you think they are dumb because they don't choose what YOU want them to choose.
- DangitBobby 3mo agoWhat? I said organize, I didn't say they can't make their own choices. Why are we pretending there's no such thing as the tragedy of the commons or other negative affects for uncoordinated groups at scale? I also didn't say they were "dumb", I said they couldn't coordinate. So in addition to not thinking you didn't bother to read my comment.
- danaris 3mo agoConsumers can't choose what they want because what they want isn't on the market. All they can choose is what companies want to sell them. Free Market Theory can only reveal people's preferences when you have a spherical market in a frictionless vacuum. In the real world, there are numerous confounding factors that make those ideas deeply counterproductive.
- groundzeros2015 3mo ago“corporate greed” is a signal to me of low quality commentary. The opening premise of Econ is that consumers want all the goods for free and producers want to give nothing in exchange for as much money as they can.
- mingus88 3mo agoThe problem here is that when the consumers try it they go to actual jail. Meanwhile the producers have been richly rewarded for getting away with their side of it. So yeah, corporate greed actually has a meaning in this context for people.
- pwillia7 3mo agoYou should do clothing brands like PVH brands (CK, Hilfiger, VS, and more) where they have a high end line and use it to build a brand and then sell a totally different cheap line of terrible goods with the same name on it in different stores. Luxury consolidation with LVMH and the enshittification there would be a good one too
- voxleone 3mo agoI remember the emphasis on quality - and on safety and security - in the 1990s. A substantial part of company life revolved around Quality Circles, quality meetings, quality inspectors, and the 5S methodology. A ton of money invested in the pursuit of compliance with ISO 9000 standards. It's disconcerting to see how little of that mentality has survived, and it leaves me with a certain personal feeling of defeat. But one has to recognize that the weakening of regulatory enforcement, reduced labor bargaining power, increased pressure for quarterly earnings, and less aggressive antitrust enforcement - all developments I associate with the broader neoliberal shift and the retreat of social democracy - have greatly contributed to what we now call the enshittification of products and services. My use of the term extends beyond Doctorow's original definition.
- asimpletune 3mo agoWhat if there was a way to tax things that encouraged people to buy things that would last longer and then let the market correct? Basically, we've done our experiment of hyper-disposable consumerism. It was great and the world has gotten richer. But not it seems like we should parlay that benefit into transitioning into a new era of quality.
- ChrisArchitect 3mo agoRelated discussions on articles from this site: Power Tools Got Worse on Purpose https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147665 Brands got worse on purpose https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849221 Backpacks got worse on purpose https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777209
- tencentshill 3mo agoAdditional information: The prompter for these articles works at Palantir.
- fallinghawks 3mo agoAbout 4-5 years ago I bought a Bosch 500 dishwasher. Loved it. Excellent performance. The top silverware rack could be adjusted to fit slightly larger items. There was a very basic clock display to tell you how long the cycle would take. And of course you could delay start by whatever number of hours. Well, last year I moved, and as it happens, the dishwasher failed and I leapt on the chance to replace it with another Bosch 500. The salesman showed me a new addition to the model (an alleged potscrubber) but didn't tell me what they had taken away. I should have looked more closely. I assumed I was getting largely the same dishwasher. After purchase I discovered that all those things I listed in the first paragraph were gone. Rack is no longer adjustable. The clock has been replaced with a trio of LEDs indicating >2 hours, 1-2 hrs, and <1 hour. And you cannot delay start at all from the control panel. You have to download their app of course, get a sign in of course, and then you can delay start from the app. It's absolutely trashy of Bosch to take features away while raising the price several hundred dollars.
- wannabe44 3mo agoSlop on purpose