8 ms·

Let's make quality the norm again

335 points by ingve 12d ago

ls-a 11d ago
[dead]
thelastgallon 11d ago
People are buying EVERYTHING indiscriminately, accelerating enshittification. Just make anything, advertise with influencers, meta ads, etc and sell stuff is the mantra. If people learn to value their money, only pay for the best and let the bad products die, things will change.
epolanski 12d ago
There's few things where the drop in quality is astronomical, one of them being clothing. Clothes used to last a life time till few decades ago. Right now you buy stuff that after the first wash already looks worn out, terrible or starts falling apart. Major known brands are guilty of this too, often regardless of price. So people end up with closets filled of junk that they look terrible in anyway. I wish there was a line of brands and even better shops that focused on quality fabrics and sewing processes for clothing that lasts for ages as it used to.
- PMunch 11d ago
  > Major known brands are guilty of this too, often regardless of price. I think this is part of the problem. Everyone wants high-quality (for the most part), but no-one wants to pay more than necessary. If known brand is no longer an indicator of quality, how do you determine that you want to spend say 2-5x the price on something? Reading reviews and such gets you part of the way, but they often focus on new products and performance or style. And it's not always easy to find a review for the thing you are looking to buy. Besides, who has time to wade through reviews for every purchase? So we end up buying the cheaper options because at least then you will only be out a little bit instead of feeling tricked spending more for the same product.
  - eru 11d ago
    You can look for reviewer that care about the same things you care about? > Besides, who has time to wade through reviews for every purchase? Claude does! And most purchases I make are repeat purchases, so I don't have to read the reviews again.
    - recursive 11d ago
      Claude is subject to the same enshittification market forces. Think of the value Claude could unlock by having trusted commercial partners that just happen to have the best product in a market segment.
      - eru 11d ago
        Claude was just an example. You can use an open source model or even run it locally.
        mitxela 10d ago
        They are subject to exactly the same enshittification factors. How much would you pay DeepSeek to train their model to always say you make the best clothes?
        eru 10d ago
        Once an open weights model is published, you can keep using that model (with exactly the same sha256 hash). It's hard to be sneaky.
        mitxela 10d ago
        So you don't plan to ever use any open model newer than 2025?
        eru 9d ago
        Sorry, I don't follow. Could you please explain? Suppose someone releases a new open weight model tomorrow. Other people try it and write their reviews. I'll check if anyone mentions any enshittification. If not, I'll go and use it. I don't see what this has to do with 2025?
- scrlk 11d ago
  The share of household spending on clothing has gone from 10%+ to under 5% in Western countries. When you're spending that much, it's not a surprise that clothing was "BIFL" both in quality and upkeep (repair rather than replace). The overall revealed consumer preference has been "more and cheaper", not "less and higher quality", which still exists as a niche if you are willing to go down the tailoring route, not off the peg.
  - dtech 11d ago
    The thing is mainly there are no quality options available. It's mostly all cheap shit or slightly more expensive, but still equally shit. So how can this reveal preference if there are no options? I would argue the surge in vintage clothing ecosystems is an indication there is an unmet demand.
    - scrlk 11d ago
      You can still go to a tailor and commission jackets, trousers and shirts, made with the same quality of fabrics and manufacturing techniques. With shoes, you can still go and buy hand welted shoes. It all comes at a price but I don't disagree that we have a barbell problem here (ie cheap fast fashion or bespoke, with nothing in the middle).
    - Gigachad 11d ago
      There’s certainly options above temu junk. Maybe it doesn’t meet your bar but I’ve found the 100% cotton stuff from Uniqlo to be massively higher quality than the average. I’ve got tshirts from them I’d guess I’d worn and washed 80+ times.
    - Borealid 11d ago
      There absolutely are still rich-people brands that sell absurd quality at absurd price. See, for example, Marine Layer in San Francisco, or boutiques like Red Ants Pants.
      - boelboel 11d ago
        Not just rich people, I pay maybe 3 times more for my T-shirts than the average person. I'm certain they last me at least twice as long, probably 3 times and they're way nicer to wear.
- eru 11d ago
  You can go to a tailor and get custom stuff, if you want to. In fact, thanks to the internet it has never been easier.
  - Sharlin 11d ago
    There’s some amount of gradient between use-once and fully bespoke clothing, and most people’s economic means are positioned somewhere on that gradient. Indeed it’s a U curve of sorts – cheap clothing can be surprisingly expensive (see also the Vimes Boots Theory).
    - eru 11d ago
      I never bought Vimes Boots Theory. Yes, it can be expensive to be poor, but the rich really do consumer more dollars-of-boot per day, because they can afford it. > There’s some amount of gradient between use-once and fully bespoke clothing [...] Bespoke clothing mostly fits you better. It doesn't necessarily last longer. (But you can ask for harder wearing material or longer lasting manufacturing techniques, of course.)
      - Gigachad 11d ago
        I think the “the rich” in this story is just someone who can afford not garbage boots, and not what we would consider rich today. It’s also possible the situation has changed enough with modern manufacturing that it’s no longer as relevant.
      - Sharlin 11d ago
        The "rich" mapped to our world are the middle class (which only barely exists in Ankh-Morpork, just like it only barely existed historically in the real world). We could define "middle class" as the people who can afford to buy boots that last, but can’t afford to buy boots that don’t have to last. Exactly the bottom of the U curve I mentioned. This is why wear-once ultra-fast fashion is attractive in the first place: not only is it cheap (in a very short-sighted sense) but it allows the less-than-affluent to signal affluence (by never wearing the same outfit twice – we call this "being fashionable" but of course being fashionable has historically been about signaling wealth first and foremost).
- clan 11d ago
  I thought I "knew" this but this T-Shirt video let me down the rabbit hole: https://youtu.be/CMoZjcpgivM https://youtu.be/CMoZjcpgivM Which means I now feel obligated to recommend: https://youtube.com/@theironsnail https://youtube.com/@theironsnail https://youtube.com/@shiftfashiongroup https://youtube.com/@shiftfashiongroup Both have great videos on garment quality. But with the inevitable caveat that they are in the business themselves. I take it as an insiders perspective and watch out for content marketing (while being tainted!). It seems to be easier to find better clothes if you are a bit of a hipster type. Those kind of stores still care for quality. My friend has such a shop and tells me that even for them it gets harder to source good vendors as it is a continuous race to the bottom.
- piva00 11d ago
  > I wish there was a line of brands and even better shops that focused on quality fabrics and sewing processes for clothing that lasts for ages as it used to. They still exist, at least here in Europe. I quit buying cheap clothing a decade ago, getting quality items is much more expensive but at the same time I've had basic t-shirts that I wear most days last me 5-8 years; trousers that are almost 10 years old and the only blemish is a bit of faded colours; underwear lasting 5+ years, etc. The issue is very few people have the disposable income and are willing to pay 40-80€ on a good quality t-shirt with heavy premium quality cotton (280-300gsm) sewn in Portugal, Spain, or Italy, or 45€ on a 3-pack of underwear made in Scandinavia, or 20-30€ on a pair of great quality woolen socks. I do it because I have experienced how much longer they can last, and also had the experience of overpaying on what seemed to be a good quality item and didn't last, it's really hard to find a good signal for what's quality since price alone doesn't do it, you need to buy the stuff and hope it will be good quality and if it's not you learn to not buy it again, it can get expensive if you are unlucky or didn't do proper research. In the end it can be exhausting for a normal person just looking for good quality to find those items, it took me years to settle on the brands I buy from.
  - nottorp 11d ago
    > with heavy premium quality cotton Just to nitpick, I doubt i could wear a heavy premium quality cotton tshirt in the current summers. I can barely stand a flimsy thin cotton tshirt... I'm willing to pay extra for quality linen for those summers, except everyone lies and their linen can be up to 100% cotton :)
    - piva00 11d ago
      Haha, yeah, completely understandable, I have a few linen pieces (shorts, shirts, a couple of t-shirts) for the occasions I go to a hot place during summers but I live in Scandinavia where summers are, to me, the perfect level of warmth. I generally avoid the peak summer in southern Europe (both due to the heat but also overcrowding), and when I visit my family in Brazil it's also usually off-peak summer. I really cannot handle very hot weather, it's nice for a day or two but a week of constant 30+C is definitely not my happy place.
- j1elo 11d ago
  Clothing is also a bit of a special thing. Some people will just get bored or tired of wearing the same trousers or the same old coat every year during 10 years. So it is simply not worth it to spend a mini fortune on a great quality one. This tends to happen more when one is young. Growing older usually means that a good old dusty 15 years great quality coat is seen as it being perfectly ok. I guess that's also what provides that feeling that some people when they approach middle age they "always look the same"... It's not cheap to have a large and varied wardrobe and at the same time filled with high quality garments.
  - worthless-trash 11d ago
    What i wouldn't give for the same socks to be available for 10 years though.
piker 12d ago
While it does relate to price discovery--i.e., some folks just aren't willing to pay for an additional unit of quality at 10x--my theory is that the decline in quality is another hidden form of inflation. Thing continues to cost X even though regulations have increased costs Y, ship production to China and scrimp on the inputs. (Or have market forces do that for you.)
- marcus_holmes 11d ago
  It's part of the growth paradigm - that everything must continue to grow. Let's say your product is mature. Your market is pretty much saturated; everyone who wants to use this product is using either yours or a competitor's. You and your competitors are finely balanced, you could reduce your prices and get more market share, but that wouldn't increase your profits. You have optimised your manufacturing process to the point where further efficiency would cut into resilience and create more risk than it would be worth. Your shareholders demand growth. Doing the same numbers as last year is not good enough. So what do you do? Reduce costs. Cut quality. Shrinkflate. Enshittify. Your customers won't notice immediately. Your competitors are also doing the same. You only need this strategy to work for a couple of years until you can move on to another role, and consequences are something your successor will deal with. Meanwhile your shareholders are happy and your bonus is secure.
  - chronogamous 10d ago
    How does cutting quality, shrinkflating and enshittifying fit in a paradigm where everything must continue to grow? It is willfully destroying the value of something you know to be valuable. By engaging in such practices you are as guilty as any competitors that are doing the same, and you're as criminally insane as any shareholder that would encourage what will inevitably be the downfall of the company. You're involved in taking a quality product off the market by collaborative enshittification together with your so-called competitors: the quality product your company used to make will no longer be available to consumers, and shareholders will hold shares in whatever will be left of it, which is bound to be worth less than the quality product it once was. This has nothing to do with growth. This paradigm of constitutes a lose-lose situation, where only you (the one moving on to another role, leaving consequences as something your successor will have to deal with) will experience a temporary 'profit', until you are actually in need of the very product you used to be able to manufacture. Deliberate destruction of valuable resources, products or services does not equal growth.
juleiie 12d ago
The way I see it we all have 30-60 modern slaves working for each one of us. More or less depending on the country and personal consumption. So I don’t have such determination in complaining about the quality of the goods that I participated in exploited labour of. It’s all working somehow more or less. Seems like it could stop any moment. The continuous decrease in quality is rather the least of my worries. What worries me is the fragile state of global affairs and heavy fog of war obscuring the future. I am AI accelerationist after all not because I believe in utopias but because of how dire the situation is. AGI/ASI might buy us couple of decades or more. The risk/reward calculation heavily favours pedal to the metal. So no, T-shirt quality is not my primary concern.
- eru 11d ago
  People in poor countries have gotten massively richer over the last few decades. Especially those that participate in global trade, ie those that you could even call 'your slaves'. After all, some poor soul in North Korea who doesn't trade with you can hardly slave away to your benefit. More specifically, people in PR China have gotten massively richer since the late 1970s. How does that square with your slavery thesis? I might also add that if anything, goods from China have become better value for money since then. Even as their people have moved further and further away from slave status.
  - jdw64 11d ago
    No. China is a colonial structure of extreme 1-tier cities, 2-tier cities, and the lower cities beneath them. It's called hukou... That's also why ordinary Chinese young people don't want to go down to the provinces. People in China's first-tier cities live well and are more up to date than almost anywhere, but in the lower cities, they are not free. I usually think that popular literature reflects a country's social conditions, and even in China's xianxia, there are ranks, and people act according to those ranks. To say that all of China has become wealthy would be an overstatement, given that there are many problems starting with the migrant worker issue. Of course, China is a great power, and the wealthy programmers in first-tier cities are extraordinarily talented.
deleted 11d ago
[deleted]
momocowcow 11d ago
Thank god for the little norwegians living in their utopian bubble
altern8 11d ago
I think about this a lot because I try to never buy anything Chinese or low quality unless I have to. Unfortunately, from my experience artisans aren't willing to do the work anymore, even if you pay them premium. For instance, a carpenter here in Poland that decided to be a carpenter would rather cut up pre-made cabinets to your specs than make them from scratch using wood, even if I pay them 10x. Then, people aren't willing to pay premium for stuff. For some reason, they would rather buy 20 products that last year than 1 product that can last 20 or more. It's a problem for me because I value quality and would be willing to pay premium, but I just can't ever find anything.
- chpatrick 11d ago
  Spoiler alert, almost everything is made in China, including the premium stuff.
  - altern8 11d ago
    I definitely have to do a lot of work every time I need something, but I can often find products that aren't made in China (normally Germany). If not, I usually just don't buy it new and just go to the thrift store. I can usually find what I need, made 30 years ago that will probably last me for the rest of my life.
    - dakolli 11d ago
      Those things made 30 years are filled with carcinogens. the Chinese make great stuff, your opinion comes off like programmed xenophobia, lay off the twitter.
      - altern8 11d ago
        That's just my opinion, man. If you think that the Chinese make great stuff, buy it. I don't have a Twitter account.
        dakolli 11d ago
austin-cheney 11d ago
There are economic impacts to raising quality: 1. Higher quality requires better trained technicians. That means fewer people will be able to participate due to any of missing experience, costs of training/education, and opportunity costs. 2. Higher quality generally requires third party certification, such as the CE or FCC identifiers on electronic equipment. Certification costs time and money resulting in a form exclusivity. 3. Higher quality means goods/services with increased durability, which requires fewer updates or repurchases. That is great, for the producer, if everything comes with a warranty but is bad if patching is an extra expense. Now consider what that means for software, a fully unregulated industry. It means some form of credentials for developers instead of frameworks or tech stacks. It means paying money to third parties to validate every patch release. It also means applying a warranty to all commercially licensed software. These things would raise the price of software and eliminate most people currently employed.
- prologic 11d ago
  Not to mention, it would raise the cost of Software as a Service businesses as the cost of building and maintaining software goes up, as well as the technical expertise to maintain those systems. That would have a flow-on effect of reduced market as low-medium income folks are effectively priced out of the market, no long paying for "cloud services, and so on... It would be a disaster.
- eru 11d ago
  I don't buy your list. For example, higher quality doesn't require third part certification. Reputation (and warranties) can work without third parties. I do agree that third party certification is one possible avenue.
  - pknomad 11d ago
    How so? Any sort of profession that warrants high quality service requires certifications (bar exam, USMLE, PE, etc) Same goes for products too. It’s not a reasonable solution for the consumers to perform an exhaustive research to get high quality guarantee. I don’t find non official third party all that compelling. See Amazon marketplace as an example.
RicoElectrico 11d ago
There's an interesting paper about expectations of quality: The LL game: the curious preference for low quality and its norms https://diegogambetta.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/the_ll_game.pdf https://diegogambetta.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/the_ll_...
- rramadass 11d ago
  This looks quite interesting; thanks for sharing. A related concept is Jugaad - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad Often interpreted as "good enough" with no connection to Quality at all. Even when the context/environment changes to afford better quality (both manufacturing and cost) quality is never pursued unless mandated by National/ISO standards etc. One way to maybe understand this is through Robert Axelrod's books; The Evolution of Cooperation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation and The Complexity of Cooperation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Cooperation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Cooperation But the actors are never fully rational, there is always a clique which manipulates/influences and therefore there is never a "fair" market. Human motivations and behaviour are always the key and so you need Behavioral Game Theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_game_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_game_theory (see book of the same name by Colin Camerer) Finally, Nassim Taleb's ideas are also very relevant here. Markets work on "Trial and Error" and "Chance", there is no "fair/efficient invisible guiding hand" but only a guiding hand by cliques which have no "skin in the game" when it comes to downsides and "asymmetric risk" benefiting corporate capitalism. But the system as a whole functions because it is somewhat "Antifragile" i.e. the chaotic interactions and successes/failures within the system somehow strengthens the whole.
jdw64 11d ago
It would be nice if quality became a standard, but the problem is that the world has become too complex. On top of that, I think the disappearance of friction is a big part of it. In the past, if a garment factory was located in a certain country and the quality was poor, it was often directly tied to that country's reputation. But as the world began to lose friction and entered the era of globalization, much of the work was passed down to subcontractors, and the big problem is that consumer complaints don't get passed down to the subcontractors either. And within this structure, multiple subcontractors can't survive; as subcontractors grow, they begin to centralize into one. In such a structure, it's not that the original contractor controls the brand quality of the subcontractor. Rather, the subcontractor that has grown huge begins to control the quality ceiling of the entire market. On top of that, for a company to sustain continuous growth, a given product must not last too long, right? Because a product that can be used for 20 or 30 years means people won't have to buy that product line again.
dakolli 11d ago
[flagged]
- throwaway454664 11d ago
  "European tries not to repeat hackneyed clichés about Americans for 30 Seconds: Challenge level impossible"
  - MadameMinty 11d ago
    If those were merely "clichés" you wouldn't feel insecure enough to make a throwaway account to say so.
- matchbok3 11d ago
  Where do you live? Somewhere with "taste", I imagine? Please tell us.
stabbles 11d ago
With sufficient competition, the incentives of companies would change if consumers would be willing to rent instead of owning products. Then planned obsolescence is not to their benefit.
- alansaber 11d ago
  ...some kind of subscription as a service model? looks up dramatically
- Devasta 11d ago
  Why would planned obsolescence not be to their benefit in a world where things are rented? You still renting the old Xbox? Try renting this new Xbox instead, the verification cans come in additional flavors!
  - daveoc64 11d ago
    That would apply more to things like a washing machine or microwave - things that don't become obsolete quickly.
- matsemann 11d ago
  I do think our consumer rights in Norway help a bit on this (the article is a page to the consumer agency here). We have 5 years mandated "warranty" on almost all purchases. Which means selling a cheap blender that breaks after two years, you as a shop/producer/importer have to eat the cost to provide a new one if it happens. Which means that the chance of something breaking becomes priced in, so you can't really get away with selling something flimsy a bit cheaper to trick the consumer.
  - stabbles 11d ago
    5 years is great, but I'm sure in Norway they advertise "no flip" / "no turn" / "single-sided" mattresses as a feature too ;)
- Saline9515 11d ago
  Most cars are rented nowadays and they are less durable than ever. It's better for the manufacturer to lease and then get you to upgrade periodically to keep you as a novelty-seeking consumer. Long warranty is better as there is no other incentive who has to pay if the product breaks down. Cars should have a 7 years warranty by default for instance.
myrmidon 11d ago
I personally see two effects that are very detrimental here: 1) "Quality brands", where you pay a premium to get high quality/durability products, are economically incentivized to "sell-out" (cash in the brand name by producing as cheaply as possible). This is because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important than anything else. 2) Increasing trend towards no-name products (or ephemeral brands). This means that producers can sell cheap trash with no drawback whatsoever; slightly more expensive quality products become unmarketable because every customer will assume you're just trying to sell them the same cheapest shit for more. I used to think that brand products were a universal money waste for suckers, but now I think they can be a very valuable mechanism. What would really help in my view though is to force companies to stick with their brand, to incentivize them to invest into it and to make "cashing out" on good brands a universally bad decision.
- mattacular 11d ago
  Also it doesn't even matter if the rare company making a high quality product long enough to get a positive brand rep is incentivized to sell out (although I don't disagree with you that is a pressure to act in short term interests) thanks to this great thing called: private equity!
- DanielHB 11d ago
  > "cashing out" on good brands a universally bad decision. For the company yes, not for the executive bonuses. It is quite notable how the long-lasting companies that are household names somehow managed to resist this urge. Most of them are private. People need to compartmentalize things in order to make sense of the universe, but doing so for companies (and governments) is just counterproductive. Whenever you think about a company to draw any good conclusions you always need to think about all the people who work there, from the factory worker to the executive.
- kqr 11d ago
  > Quality brands are economically incentivized to sell-out [...] because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important That probably happens a lot, but there's another mechanism by which it could happen, that requires no malice: the brand gets a quality reputation, which increases demand for its products, and they are unable to produce quality products at the rate needed to satisfy that demand. Then it's easy to reason that it'd be a net benefit for everyone to loosen the quality requirements a tiny bit, in order to satisfy the demand of more customers. People used to the quality will barely notice any difference, and then twice as many people can get that experience. That works once, but when applied again, and again, and again, and again it becomes a problem, even with zero ill intent.
FinnLobsien 11d ago
I agree with this. It's curious that we always talk about "things used to last forever and weren't only made by corporations chasing infinite growth", when those things are often still available, but are almost invisible because we now discover everything through social media or SEO. You can find great-quality, long-lasting products at great prices (great price doesn't equal cheap, but great for what you get). I use capable LLMs on high reasoning to run a prompt like this: "I want to buy a high-quality [category] that will/has/can [requirements here]. I do not want to pay for a brand name that doesn't improve. Start by finding manufacturing clusters in [region of the world, e.g. Europe] where [category] is made, then find the businesses making [category] in that cluster that I can buy from. Normal online stores are okay, but also try non-obvious avenues: -local business registers -stores that may only be available in the local language -factories that sell samples directly" -cooperatives that sell products from multiple local manufacturers (I modify this prompt, but it's the skeleton) To verify a given product/brand/store, a great follow-up prompt has been: "Now find me big brands offering a product of similar quality (ideally measured by objective characteristics) and show me how much it is vs. [store name here]" This has showed me incredible finds. It's become how I buy most things that go beyond basic trinkets, and I often pay less for far higher quality.
- mrheosuper 11d ago
  Could your post some example result, so we can judge by ourselves
Eddy_Viscosity2 11d ago
The answer is competition. Quality declines when companies no longer have to meaningful compete in the marketplace. The only other solution is regulation and force quality through punishment for noncompliance. Competition works better.
- Gigachad 11d ago
  Competition partially causes this though. When you have 100 brands selling the same thing it became a race to the lowest price.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 11d ago
    My experience is competition invokes two races happening at the same time, one for lowest price and one for highest quality. You can get a cheap car or really high quality car. Same goes for clothes, restaurants, basically anything where there is lots of market choices and competition.
    - steinvakt2 11d ago
      An Audi typically requires more maintenance and repair than a Toyota though. You’re not paying for quality (as in durability/longevity)
    - nradov 11d ago
      That doesn't make any sense. The most expensive cars are also the least reliable. Rich people have multiple cars so when the Bentley has an electrical glitch they just drive the Porsche.
      - Eddy_Viscosity2 11d ago
        Quality means different things to different people. But the fact that Bentleys and Porsche exist support that case that not everything in a competitive markets drives things to the lowest cost product.
AyanamiKaine 11d ago
I think what people associate with "quality" is vastly different from each other. For example I believe there is a deeper quality that cannot be easily found in a more quality product. Quality can be expressed in many ways and felt throughout the life. But people don't care for that. They mostly care for cheap and good enough. I don't want to attack that way of life its simply one with tradeoffs like a life with more quality. More quality can mean more expensive, the need to engage with something a bit more, etc. Leibl famously needed over 3 months to just draw the hands of one model for "Three Women in Church" it certainly has some quality to it. In the modern world seldom you will find one that wants to pay for such work or even spending 3 months of work on painting hands.
pif 11d ago
Quality was never the norm: cheap always beat quality with a hand tied behind his back! Western working class has spent decades complaining about cheap imports from China... while feeding that market with their own money. Western frequent fliers keep reminiscing about the grandiose pre-deregulation era or air travel, but cry a river when their low-cost carrier of choice actually enforces the limit on cabin baggage. Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
- red369 11d ago
  Why such a personal attack? I don't think I even know you! I'm kidding, but what you say is hitting pretty close to home. I always mean to vote with my wallet, and I usually try, but for every Mikrotik router or Framework laptop I buy, there are so many Aukey Magsafe chargers, or McDodo Lightning to USB hubs. BTW, I'm not specifically calling out Aukey or McDodo, but for me those decisions were based on moments of weakness where I needed something to solve a problem, but I wasn't convinced it was significant enough that it was worth paying for what I thought was the best solution (The Aukey being the most recent purchase, and the McDodo having a memorable name). As an example, I was recently looking for a replacement for my fraying 2m USB-C to Lightning cable, and Apple's is US$30 and it looks like it's made of the same buttery-soft plastic as all the short-lived cables that came with past phone purchases. Anker is finally a valid option where I now live - so I guess I should be giving them my business. They're a similar price, but look more resilient. I haven't quite reached USB-C on all my devices, so whenever I'm buying some accessory, it may only work with a device or two, and there's a decent chance that I might need to shuffle things around, and need a different length or a different connector on the input end. That was a lot to write on an unimportant topic, and I didn't even touch on the temptation I sometimes cave into to fly a low-cost spin-off of a good airline. I also share the feeling with another sibling-poster, that digital subscriptions all seem to be either free, or double digits a month, for just one small aspect of my digital existence. Things that only cost a few dollars a month are easy decisions, like Bitwarden, or leasing a domain name, or iCloud+. For anything that crosses into double digits a month, I never get around to it if there is a free alternative which I don't feel horrible about using. A grand-fathered Google Workspace, the free-tier of Protonmail, etc. However, I do feel guilty for not also paying for Kagi, Protonmail/Fastmail, Mullvad, etc. Should I be giving some money to Firefox in some way? I wish more of these companies that were doing the right thing would offer a cheap tier that was a no-brainer, and there was a service where I could bundle together a bunch into one subscription. Feeling pretty entitled as I write this :) But lacking that, I end up just sticking with the free options, and then every now and again donating some small amount to a cause I think is worth supporting - Lichess, Putty, VLC, etc.
sholladay 11d ago
One big problem is that prices are easy to compare, while quality is not. I recently bought a tub that was advertised as stainless steel on Amazon. I was suspicious but decided to take a chance. Turns out it is galvanized, not stainless. I’m not sure the average person knows the difference. To be charitable, perhaps that’s even why the listing advertised it that way. But the difference matters significantly in terms of performance and quality, especially for certain kinds of products and use cases. There’s no “sort by quality, best to worst” system like there is for price. No “genuine stainless only” filter. You just have to know certain things. Shopping in person obviously helps, but you still have to know what to look for. Refrigerators are a good example of this. Most people shop for them in person, yet it’s not at all obvious whether model A or model B will last longer. You can try to use price as a proxy for quality, but the more expensive refrigerators are actually more likely to fail years earlier because of the added component complexity. They’re basically banking on the fact that you don’t know how to read a wiring diagram. To combat that, lots of people turn to YouTube or reviews to figure out quality. And sure, you can find some good sources that will tell you that top freezers will last longer than a French door model at basically any price, and they might even explain why. But all of those platforms are muddied with perverse incentives, affiliate programs, sponsorships, etc. Again, not always obvious. We need to make quality obvious. We need to make it comparable, sortable, filtrable, and guaranteed. Poor design needs to be a valid reason to return an item. Manufacturers should be required to label products with an estimated lifespan. Give tax breaks or other incentives to products that include a warranty for its full lifespan. We have to figure out how to improve the efficiency of making high quality goods, so that everything doesn’t just get more expensive. There should be a public database of the best known designs and techniques for making long lasting items. Patents that relate to longevity could be given extra time to encourage research, but then after, say, 3 years there could be a requirement to license the technology so that it can go mainstream. This doesn’t solve everything. Some products need more specific approaches. Food quality is a problem. Housing needs to be both more affordable and higher quality. But I think with enough changes to incentives, the culture could shift towards seeing the value in making things well.
- bluGill 11d ago
  I finally subscribed to consumer reports. It is the only independent place we can trust for that information. However they only review a subset of the things I want to buy.
baq 11d ago
…are you willing to pay for it though? If yes, is there enough of you? If yes, is there a way to tell low quality from high? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
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danesparza 11d ago
This is a false pretense. Quality was never the norm. What is no longer the norm is getting first-hand experience with a product before you buy it. Everything comes in the mail and it's a surprise to the consumer after they buy it. That's nuts!
- functionmouse 11d ago
  Seriously. Did this person never have to fix relatives' IE6?
  - mitxela 10d ago
    IE6's quality problems were: not conforming to standards (that didn't exist in the time of IE1!) and having too many toolbars installed, which is not IE's problem.
  - jeroenhd 10d ago
    IE6 itself rarely broke. It was usually malware abusing all the extension functionality that broke IE6. The non-standard browser runtime was a massive pain for anyone working in tech, but when it came to the implementation quality of that non-standard browser runtime, IE6 wasn't all that bad for the user. It was insecure as hell, of course, but so were all browsers at the time. Focusing on quality was a bit easier when complex security considerations weren't really necessary.
  - danesparza 10d ago
    Did I miss something? Did this article have to do with IE6? It feels like you are responding to something that wasn't said.
exabrial 11d ago
Careful, this is going to hurt a lot of feelings.
sershe 11d ago
Tech workers in the US are probably around 90-99 percentile wage. Take something where the quality is well known and measurable, and can be purchased for extra money. How often do you fly first class, or even pay 10-20% extra to have more legroom, early boarding or a more convenient flight times versus picking the cheapest option that you can make work? People will demonstrably shop primarily on price no matter what... The producers respond to that.
- returningfory2 11d ago
  This is a really good point. Related, Matt Levine has recently been writing about how the AI labs are paying huge amounts of money to tech/math/AI people but these people don't actually know how to spend it. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-09-10/dallas-gets-some-equities https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-09-10/dal... As opposed to the typical finance worker who knows very well how to spend.
- mitxela 10d ago
  Sometimes "quality" really doesn't matter. Flying any higher than premium economy is one of those times. Will it get you to your destination any faster? Will you feel better when you get off the plane? It's like I could pay to sleep in a hotel tonight, and it'll be really nice, but I choose to sleep in my bed at home instead. There won't be any difference tomorrow.
tonymet 11d ago
Ikea compressed wood dresser = $125. Proper oak dresser = $5000 . What consumer is capable and willing to make that trade off. Much of that cost is because we nuked the American timber industry ? Appealing to the fabricators (or even consumers) who are 4-8 degrees downstream of this policy will get you nowhere.
- megaman821 11d ago
  Was there a time when an oak dresser was much cheaper in inflation adjusted dollars? Furniture that lasts forever is an anti-feature for some. They want to change their furnishings about as often as cheap furniture lasts anyway. I mostly buy quality furniture, but sometimes I don't know what I really want and Ikea and Wayfair are great for that. Cheap enough to donate after I decide what quality piece I really want.
  - tonymet 11d ago
    yes. And you're reversing cause and effect. Do the consumers prefer a disposable lifestyle or is that a cope?
- criddell 11d ago
  There might not be any trade-off in your example. You're assuming that a solid wood piece of furniture is superior to the flatpack alternative and you can't really say that without knowing what the consumer needs. I have a little Ikea Lack table that holds my printer. I paid less than $10 for the table and I don't even think it's wood (cardboard maybe?). It's getting close to 20 years old and is in great shape.
  - tonymet 11d ago
    "there's no aesthetic difference between this beautiful portrait and the contemporary pile of trash in the corner"
    - criddell 11d ago
Night_Thastus 11d ago
Consumers, fundamentally, care about two things: * Price * Features Those are tangible, obvious things. They are not subtle. They do not take months or years to discover or become obvious. They are (mostly) not vague or ambiguous. Does this car have lane assist? Yes or no. Will this car last me 20 years? ...maybe? That's a very hard question to answer. It's messy and complicated and has a lot of clauses to it. So, consumers buy whatever is the cheapest available with the features they want, or the most feature-rich they can with their budget. This demand forces manufacturers to respond. They find a way to cram more functionality in, at a cheaper price. If they don't, they will simply get eaten up by those who do, overseas or otherwise. You can say you want quality and reliability all you want - it changes nothing. At the end of the day, the vast majority keep voting with their wallet - and they want CHEAP.
- autoexec 11d ago
  > Consumers, fundamentally, care about two things: * Price * Features Consumers also care about accessibility. It doesn't matter to me if product X is amazing and affordable if I can't find it in any store anywhere near me or if amazon never shows it in search results because all they want to push is amazon basics and products made by FSLHVHSLR If no company anywhere sells what I want, then I have no choice but to compromise and today there is a whole lot of compromising going on. Companies are more interested in selling what is most profitable to them, not what consumers actually want. Very often consumers are forced to buy what little is offered to them. The consumer "voting with their wallet" will always lose when companies also vote with theirs because theirs is much much bigger.
- aidenn0 11d ago
  Consumers care about a lot of things besides that, it's just that (as you mention) those are the two most legible things to consumers. Your specific example of cars is, IMO, not correct: Honda, for years, could charge a premium on their new cars due to a reputation for reliability increasing resale values. For less expensive things, how much time should I spend researching quality USB-C to HDMI dongles? It's plausible that the chip in the $5 on amazon WOPEIME (or whatever) branded dongle is the same as the in the $25 Belkin one. For intermediate things, time-pressure might matter. If my clothes washer were to fail today, I'm doing laundry by hand until I can get a new one in my house, so I'm probably playing quality roulette with several hundred dollars of my money at Best Buy.
Animats 11d ago
Easy solution if you like tariffs: all imported items over $100 must have a 10 year full warranty.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...
- pphysch 11d ago
  Is it easy? What if an organization avoids liability through shell companies and financial engineering? "The company managing your warranty was acquired by Foobar Inc and their sole building burned down destroying all records. We apologize for the inconvenience."
  - pydry 11d ago
    Demand collateral
    - Animats 11d ago
      That's what bonds are for. US customs requires prepaid bonds for other things. Importers who don't have enough assets would have to post a bond to cover repairs for the product. They get it back at 10 years.
      - pasc1878 11d ago
        A way to get the right to repair for the rest of the world. Apple/MS/Google would have to keep their products working for 10 years.
  - Joel_Mckay 11d ago
    When most fortune 500 companies burned brand-goodwill to sell disposable versions of products, it is credulous to believe all problems are external. =3
  - Dylan16807 11d ago
    Well there is the option to make Amazon responsible for what they sell...
drblast 11d ago
Enshittification is definitely real, but let's not look at the past with rose-colored glasses. A lot of things you can buy today are vastly superior to things available 50 years ago. It used to be remarkable to drive a car 100k miles without major repairs. Volvo dealerships in the 80's and 90's would give you a badge at 100k milestones to advertise how reliable their cars were compared to others. Anything tech related is just light years ahead of what it used to be, and for far cheaper. 65"+ OLED TVs for less than a couple grand are pretty much science fiction come to life. Gaming consoles are super-computers compared to an NES. For many appliances, if you pay an inflation-adjusted cost for what a 1980's family would pay you can get something that will last forever. Last year I bought a commercial microwave for about $300 that has a single dial, hardly any features, and likely will last longer than the first microwave my family owned and also paid ~$300 for. Adjusting for inflation my new microwave is vastly better and cheaper than my childhood one. I play guitar - in 1954 a new Stratocaster sold for $249, which is about $3k in today's dollars. And $249 today will get you a guitar that's easily as good as most 1954 Strats. If you spend the inflation-adjusted equivalent you're in ultra-luxury territory. Want good furniture? That's ALWAYS been expensive, but you'd typically buy a table for the equivalent of $5k in today's dollars and expect it to last a lifetime. You can spend $5k on real wood furniture today, but nobody does. Housing materials are much better and cheaper with the possible exception of copper pipes and anything made of real wood. Certainly builders of McMansions are cutting corners at every opportunity, but if you do your own building/finishing these days a lot of materials are available that will outlast their 1980's equivalent, and the cheap options are better. I think a lot of this is a lack of perspective - everyone wants better things but nobody actually wants to pay for it.
- tristor 11d ago
  > I think a lot of this is a lack of perspective - everyone wants better things but nobody actually wants to pay for it. I think that's part of it, but I also think it's largely an issue of information asymmetry. Brands used to be a proxy for quality, and price could also be a proxy for quality, but that is no longer the case. That means it takes significantly more effort to research a product category to find a good product and people don't want to expend that effort. I am one of those weird people that enjoys that research, so I'm often the one people in my friend group ask for product recommendations because they are more than happy to spend the money, just not the time. It's a discovery problem at the end of the day. When all the existing indicators become unreliable and advertising is inundated with scams and frauds, there's no way for good products to connect to good customers, so /everyone/ suffers.
atoav 11d ago
The main problem is that most business are run by people who have no believe at all that you could run a successful company without tricking people into buying your product. That means they don't even try. The rare exception are companies where rhe founder is e.g. a principled engineer, or some German family business that does nothing but ball bearings in the 4th generation and their business model is basically to be the best at ball bearings. Something like that. But so many publicly traded companies appear to basically have become stock gambling dens that accidentally produce some products on the side out of legacy reasons. Many are of the kind that use quality only as a marketing statement and when it comes to the engineering choice they will not even shell out 10 cents more for stainless screws to hold the thing together. The reasons why there is little quality products is because the incentives all point in the other direction for most companies. And where they don't it is usually a special niche product or the intrinsic values of one or a few individuals making the choice to put their ideals above their wallet. If we want this to change we have to change the incentive structure.
jhoechtl 11d ago
Easy: Items must work without internet connection so they cannot be updated online.
seizethecheese 11d ago
Quality already is the norm for many products. For example, I own Sennheiser headphones, an iPhone and a MacBook. (Sure maybe not the absolute top of the line, but definitely more expensive than commodity products.) I find great utility in cheap low cost products for things that I don’t know I’ll use more than once. For example, I’m glad I bought the cheapest roller blades a few years ago because I used them twice. I also buy a lot of cheap toys for my kids, they may use them only a few times and also quantity really has a certain quality (novelty is good for kids). I find the moralizing and lecturing around quality to be distasteful. These holier than thou types really think they know better than the buyer.
- Telaneo 9d ago
  > For example, I own Sennheiser headphones, an iPhone and a MacBook. (Sure maybe not the absolute top of the line, but definitely more expensive than commodity products.) If anything, all of these are probably in the sweetspot for value. I have a hard time calling them the norm, at least not unless you're in the know and are knowingly looking for good value. I had to go through 3 sets of headphones before I got a Sennheiser set I was happy with and lasted 10 years. There are countless shitty Android phones and Windows laptops out there, and people do buy them.
arionhardison 11d ago
Was quality ever the norm? IIRC Enshittification predates AI/LLMS by a few years.
nayuki 11d ago
In certain personal projects, I have the opposite philosophy where I don't want quality. I got addicted to designing models and 3D-printing them a year ago. Over time, I learned to reduce the amount of safety factor and make items just strong enough for their application - which saves material and printing time. I wouldn't skimp on something like a carrying handle for the printer, where failure would mean damaging the printer. But I would reduce the amount of plastic used in things like art pieces (3DBenchy - who needs structural strength?), end caps for various objects, prototypes for dimensioning. Moreover, sometimes I'm happy to see my parts break because I was thinking of redesigning it or did so already, hence I would be itching to print the new version. Aside from that, just knowing I can reprint a part anytime (without modifications) makes me much less worried about breaking or losing a part.
- switchbak 11d ago
  True … I’m the same, but I consider that good engineering. Designing it with the use in mind, factoring in all the stresses adequately but only just. That’s more like how an airplane is made: weight/strength only where it’s truly necessary. I wouldn’t say that’s low quality though, just something with a lot more care put into it.
erichocean 11d ago
Meditations on Moloch[0] explains why this is impossible at scale--too many defectors, asymmetric information, and no way to police defection. [0] https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
miketromba 11d ago
There’s a horizontal body overflow bug on this page on mobile. The irony
lateatdesk 11d ago
I think we're asking too much of buyers here. You shouldn't need to learn about fabrics and stitching, then check who owns the brand now, just to buy a shirt that lasts.
- imoverclocked 11d ago
  So, given reality, how would you suggest this gets done?
  - Henchman21 11d ago
    The way we used to do it? Based on human reputation, so you know, if you're a dick you prob won't get a lot of customers.
    - imoverclocked 11d ago
      Being “a dick” and having a high quality product are often orthogonal to each other. Reputation also requires brand recognition which often lends itself to enshittification as companies get established.
deleted 11d ago
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chickensong 11d ago
In a world of shrinkflation and enshittification, I just wanted to give a shout out to Feetures socks[0] which I love. It's a family-owned business and all they make is socks. They're anatomically designed, so if you can't handle sorting L/R these aren't for you. Not only are they a high-quality sock, they have a lifetime guarantee as well. No affiliation, just a satisfied customer. [0] https://feetures.com/ https://feetures.com/
BatchJob 11d ago
Unfortunately, there is no quality available at this time.
camd32 11d ago
I understand the strong desire to help the environment, but why lead with that? I think it's become apparent that the average person doesn't really care about the environment. People do care about maximum convenience and minimal cost , which usually leads to waste. We should try harder to create a system that aligns the incentive of taking care of the Earth than we try to force people to care about the environment. Remember, if your reasoning is that "if people would just XYZ", it's bad reasoning.
- 0dayz 11d ago
  Maybe for Americans but certain countries the people there do on average care.
- roer 10d ago
  According to page 116 of the report of this EU survey: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3752 https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3752, Sweden and Denmark have climare change as their number 1 and number 2 most important topics to be addressed in the European Parliament respectively. It makes sense to extend that to the OP which is norwegian and say that a lot of the target audience probably cares I do however agree that making the cheapest/best solutions also be good for the environment would be ideal.
lynx97 11d ago
I would PAY Apple $500 if they'd dedicate a year of development only to fixing known issues. The number of sort-of-well-known bug grows from year to year, and it feels like they only accumulate, never go away. VoiceOver of my (touch-id-only) iPad said "Face not recognized" yesterday, because it failed to read my finger rpint. This is getting comically bad.
yuxi258 11d ago
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spjt 10d ago
I think there is a bit of survivor bias here. People like to say "everything is shit now, I've had this item for 20 years and it still works." But that's because they can see that 20 year old item, not all the shit they bought 20 years ago that broke and they got rid of.
mrhcon 10d ago
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335 points by ingve 12d ago

ls-a 11d ago

[dead]

People are buying EVERYTHING indiscriminately, accelerating enshittification. Just make anything, advertise with influencers, meta ads, etc and sell stuff is the mantra. If people learn to value their money, only pay for the best and let the bad products die, things will change.

epolanski 12d ago

There's few things where the drop in quality is astronomical, one of them being clothing. Clothes used to last a life time till few decades ago. Right now you buy stuff that after the first wash already looks worn out, terrible or starts falling apart. Major known brands are guilty of this too, often regardless of price. So people end up with closets filled of junk that they look terrible in anyway. I wish there was a line of brands and even better shops that focused on quality fabrics and sewing processes for clothing that lasts for ages as it used to.

PMunch 11d ago
> Major known brands are guilty of this too, often regardless of price. I think this is part of the problem. Everyone wants high-quality (for the most part), but no-one wants to pay more than necessary. If known brand is no longer an indicator of quality, how do you determine that you want to spend say 2-5x the price on something? Reading reviews and such gets you part of the way, but they often focus on new products and performance or style. And it's not always easy to find a review for the thing you are looking to buy. Besides, who has time to wade through reviews for every purchase? So we end up buying the cheaper options because at least then you will only be out a little bit instead of feeling tricked spending more for the same product.
- eru 11d ago
  You can look for reviewer that care about the same things you care about? > Besides, who has time to wade through reviews for every purchase? Claude does! And most purchases I make are repeat purchases, so I don't have to read the reviews again.
  - recursive 11d ago
    Claude is subject to the same enshittification market forces. Think of the value Claude could unlock by having trusted commercial partners that just happen to have the best product in a market segment.
    - eru 11d ago
      Claude was just an example. You can use an open source model or even run it locally.
      - mitxela 10d ago
        They are subject to exactly the same enshittification factors. How much would you pay DeepSeek to train their model to always say you make the best clothes?
        eru 10d ago
        Once an open weights model is published, you can keep using that model (with exactly the same sha256 hash). It's hard to be sneaky.
        mitxela 10d ago
        So you don't plan to ever use any open model newer than 2025?
        eru 9d ago
        Sorry, I don't follow. Could you please explain? Suppose someone releases a new open weight model tomorrow. Other people try it and write their reviews. I'll check if anyone mentions any enshittification. If not, I'll go and use it. I don't see what this has to do with 2025?
scrlk 11d ago
The share of household spending on clothing has gone from 10%+ to under 5% in Western countries. When you're spending that much, it's not a surprise that clothing was "BIFL" both in quality and upkeep (repair rather than replace). The overall revealed consumer preference has been "more and cheaper", not "less and higher quality", which still exists as a niche if you are willing to go down the tailoring route, not off the peg.
- dtech 11d ago
  The thing is mainly there are no quality options available. It's mostly all cheap shit or slightly more expensive, but still equally shit. So how can this reveal preference if there are no options? I would argue the surge in vintage clothing ecosystems is an indication there is an unmet demand.
  - scrlk 11d ago
    You can still go to a tailor and commission jackets, trousers and shirts, made with the same quality of fabrics and manufacturing techniques. With shoes, you can still go and buy hand welted shoes. It all comes at a price but I don't disagree that we have a barbell problem here (ie cheap fast fashion or bespoke, with nothing in the middle).
  - Gigachad 11d ago
    There’s certainly options above temu junk. Maybe it doesn’t meet your bar but I’ve found the 100% cotton stuff from Uniqlo to be massively higher quality than the average. I’ve got tshirts from them I’d guess I’d worn and washed 80+ times.
  - Borealid 11d ago
    There absolutely are still rich-people brands that sell absurd quality at absurd price. See, for example, Marine Layer in San Francisco, or boutiques like Red Ants Pants.
    - boelboel 11d ago
      Not just rich people, I pay maybe 3 times more for my T-shirts than the average person. I'm certain they last me at least twice as long, probably 3 times and they're way nicer to wear.
eru 11d ago
You can go to a tailor and get custom stuff, if you want to. In fact, thanks to the internet it has never been easier.
- Sharlin 11d ago
  There’s some amount of gradient between use-once and fully bespoke clothing, and most people’s economic means are positioned somewhere on that gradient. Indeed it’s a U curve of sorts – cheap clothing can be surprisingly expensive (see also the Vimes Boots Theory).
  - eru 11d ago
    I never bought Vimes Boots Theory. Yes, it can be expensive to be poor, but the rich really do consumer more dollars-of-boot per day, because they can afford it. > There’s some amount of gradient between use-once and fully bespoke clothing [...] Bespoke clothing mostly fits you better. It doesn't necessarily last longer. (But you can ask for harder wearing material or longer lasting manufacturing techniques, of course.)
    - Gigachad 11d ago
      I think the “the rich” in this story is just someone who can afford not garbage boots, and not what we would consider rich today. It’s also possible the situation has changed enough with modern manufacturing that it’s no longer as relevant.
    - Sharlin 11d ago
      The "rich" mapped to our world are the middle class (which only barely exists in Ankh-Morpork, just like it only barely existed historically in the real world). We could define "middle class" as the people who can afford to buy boots that last, but can’t afford to buy boots that don’t have to last. Exactly the bottom of the U curve I mentioned. This is why wear-once ultra-fast fashion is attractive in the first place: not only is it cheap (in a very short-sighted sense) but it allows the less-than-affluent to signal affluence (by never wearing the same outfit twice – we call this "being fashionable" but of course being fashionable has historically been about signaling wealth first and foremost).
clan 11d ago
I thought I "knew" this but this T-Shirt video let me down the rabbit hole: https://youtu.be/CMoZjcpgivM https://youtu.be/CMoZjcpgivM Which means I now feel obligated to recommend: https://youtube.com/@theironsnail https://youtube.com/@theironsnail https://youtube.com/@shiftfashiongroup https://youtube.com/@shiftfashiongroup Both have great videos on garment quality. But with the inevitable caveat that they are in the business themselves. I take it as an insiders perspective and watch out for content marketing (while being tainted!). It seems to be easier to find better clothes if you are a bit of a hipster type. Those kind of stores still care for quality. My friend has such a shop and tells me that even for them it gets harder to source good vendors as it is a continuous race to the bottom.
piva00 11d ago
> I wish there was a line of brands and even better shops that focused on quality fabrics and sewing processes for clothing that lasts for ages as it used to. They still exist, at least here in Europe. I quit buying cheap clothing a decade ago, getting quality items is much more expensive but at the same time I've had basic t-shirts that I wear most days last me 5-8 years; trousers that are almost 10 years old and the only blemish is a bit of faded colours; underwear lasting 5+ years, etc. The issue is very few people have the disposable income and are willing to pay 40-80€ on a good quality t-shirt with heavy premium quality cotton (280-300gsm) sewn in Portugal, Spain, or Italy, or 45€ on a 3-pack of underwear made in Scandinavia, or 20-30€ on a pair of great quality woolen socks. I do it because I have experienced how much longer they can last, and also had the experience of overpaying on what seemed to be a good quality item and didn't last, it's really hard to find a good signal for what's quality since price alone doesn't do it, you need to buy the stuff and hope it will be good quality and if it's not you learn to not buy it again, it can get expensive if you are unlucky or didn't do proper research. In the end it can be exhausting for a normal person just looking for good quality to find those items, it took me years to settle on the brands I buy from.
- nottorp 11d ago
  > with heavy premium quality cotton Just to nitpick, I doubt i could wear a heavy premium quality cotton tshirt in the current summers. I can barely stand a flimsy thin cotton tshirt... I'm willing to pay extra for quality linen for those summers, except everyone lies and their linen can be up to 100% cotton :)
  - piva00 11d ago
    Haha, yeah, completely understandable, I have a few linen pieces (shorts, shirts, a couple of t-shirts) for the occasions I go to a hot place during summers but I live in Scandinavia where summers are, to me, the perfect level of warmth. I generally avoid the peak summer in southern Europe (both due to the heat but also overcrowding), and when I visit my family in Brazil it's also usually off-peak summer. I really cannot handle very hot weather, it's nice for a day or two but a week of constant 30+C is definitely not my happy place.
j1elo 11d ago
Clothing is also a bit of a special thing. Some people will just get bored or tired of wearing the same trousers or the same old coat every year during 10 years. So it is simply not worth it to spend a mini fortune on a great quality one. This tends to happen more when one is young. Growing older usually means that a good old dusty 15 years great quality coat is seen as it being perfectly ok. I guess that's also what provides that feeling that some people when they approach middle age they "always look the same"... It's not cheap to have a large and varied wardrobe and at the same time filled with high quality garments.
- worthless-trash 11d ago
  What i wouldn't give for the same socks to be available for 10 years though.

piker 12d ago

While it does relate to price discovery--i.e., some folks just aren't willing to pay for an additional unit of quality at 10x--my theory is that the decline in quality is another hidden form of inflation. Thing continues to cost X even though regulations have increased costs Y, ship production to China and scrimp on the inputs. (Or have market forces do that for you.)

marcus_holmes 11d ago
It's part of the growth paradigm - that everything must continue to grow. Let's say your product is mature. Your market is pretty much saturated; everyone who wants to use this product is using either yours or a competitor's. You and your competitors are finely balanced, you could reduce your prices and get more market share, but that wouldn't increase your profits. You have optimised your manufacturing process to the point where further efficiency would cut into resilience and create more risk than it would be worth. Your shareholders demand growth. Doing the same numbers as last year is not good enough. So what do you do? Reduce costs. Cut quality. Shrinkflate. Enshittify. Your customers won't notice immediately. Your competitors are also doing the same. You only need this strategy to work for a couple of years until you can move on to another role, and consequences are something your successor will deal with. Meanwhile your shareholders are happy and your bonus is secure.
- chronogamous 10d ago
  How does cutting quality, shrinkflating and enshittifying fit in a paradigm where everything must continue to grow? It is willfully destroying the value of something you know to be valuable. By engaging in such practices you are as guilty as any competitors that are doing the same, and you're as criminally insane as any shareholder that would encourage what will inevitably be the downfall of the company. You're involved in taking a quality product off the market by collaborative enshittification together with your so-called competitors: the quality product your company used to make will no longer be available to consumers, and shareholders will hold shares in whatever will be left of it, which is bound to be worth less than the quality product it once was. This has nothing to do with growth. This paradigm of constitutes a lose-lose situation, where only you (the one moving on to another role, leaving consequences as something your successor will have to deal with) will experience a temporary 'profit', until you are actually in need of the very product you used to be able to manufacture. Deliberate destruction of valuable resources, products or services does not equal growth.

juleiie 12d ago

The way I see it we all have 30-60 modern slaves working for each one of us. More or less depending on the country and personal consumption. So I don’t have such determination in complaining about the quality of the goods that I participated in exploited labour of. It’s all working somehow more or less. Seems like it could stop any moment. The continuous decrease in quality is rather the least of my worries. What worries me is the fragile state of global affairs and heavy fog of war obscuring the future. I am AI accelerationist after all not because I believe in utopias but because of how dire the situation is. AGI/ASI might buy us couple of decades or more. The risk/reward calculation heavily favours pedal to the metal. So no, T-shirt quality is not my primary concern.

eru 11d ago
People in poor countries have gotten massively richer over the last few decades. Especially those that participate in global trade, ie those that you could even call 'your slaves'. After all, some poor soul in North Korea who doesn't trade with you can hardly slave away to your benefit. More specifically, people in PR China have gotten massively richer since the late 1970s. How does that square with your slavery thesis? I might also add that if anything, goods from China have become better value for money since then. Even as their people have moved further and further away from slave status.
- jdw64 11d ago
  No. China is a colonial structure of extreme 1-tier cities, 2-tier cities, and the lower cities beneath them. It's called hukou... That's also why ordinary Chinese young people don't want to go down to the provinces. People in China's first-tier cities live well and are more up to date than almost anywhere, but in the lower cities, they are not free. I usually think that popular literature reflects a country's social conditions, and even in China's xianxia, there are ranks, and people act according to those ranks. To say that all of China has become wealthy would be an overstatement, given that there are many problems starting with the migrant worker issue. Of course, China is a great power, and the wealthy programmers in first-tier cities are extraordinarily talented.

deleted 11d ago

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momocowcow 11d ago

Thank god for the little norwegians living in their utopian bubble

altern8 11d ago

I think about this a lot because I try to never buy anything Chinese or low quality unless I have to. Unfortunately, from my experience artisans aren't willing to do the work anymore, even if you pay them premium. For instance, a carpenter here in Poland that decided to be a carpenter would rather cut up pre-made cabinets to your specs than make them from scratch using wood, even if I pay them 10x. Then, people aren't willing to pay premium for stuff. For some reason, they would rather buy 20 products that last year than 1 product that can last 20 or more. It's a problem for me because I value quality and would be willing to pay premium, but I just can't ever find anything.

chpatrick 11d ago
Spoiler alert, almost everything is made in China, including the premium stuff.
- altern8 11d ago
  I definitely have to do a lot of work every time I need something, but I can often find products that aren't made in China (normally Germany). If not, I usually just don't buy it new and just go to the thrift store. I can usually find what I need, made 30 years ago that will probably last me for the rest of my life.
  - dakolli 11d ago
    Those things made 30 years are filled with carcinogens. the Chinese make great stuff, your opinion comes off like programmed xenophobia, lay off the twitter.
    - altern8 11d ago
      That's just my opinion, man. If you think that the Chinese make great stuff, buy it. I don't have a Twitter account.
      - dakolli 11d ago

austin-cheney 11d ago

There are economic impacts to raising quality: 1. Higher quality requires better trained technicians. That means fewer people will be able to participate due to any of missing experience, costs of training/education, and opportunity costs. 2. Higher quality generally requires third party certification, such as the CE or FCC identifiers on electronic equipment. Certification costs time and money resulting in a form exclusivity. 3. Higher quality means goods/services with increased durability, which requires fewer updates or repurchases. That is great, for the producer, if everything comes with a warranty but is bad if patching is an extra expense. Now consider what that means for software, a fully unregulated industry. It means some form of credentials for developers instead of frameworks or tech stacks. It means paying money to third parties to validate every patch release. It also means applying a warranty to all commercially licensed software. These things would raise the price of software and eliminate most people currently employed.

prologic 11d ago
Not to mention, it would raise the cost of Software as a Service businesses as the cost of building and maintaining software goes up, as well as the technical expertise to maintain those systems. That would have a flow-on effect of reduced market as low-medium income folks are effectively priced out of the market, no long paying for "cloud services, and so on... It would be a disaster.
eru 11d ago
I don't buy your list. For example, higher quality doesn't require third part certification. Reputation (and warranties) can work without third parties. I do agree that third party certification is one possible avenue.
- pknomad 11d ago
  How so? Any sort of profession that warrants high quality service requires certifications (bar exam, USMLE, PE, etc) Same goes for products too. It’s not a reasonable solution for the consumers to perform an exhaustive research to get high quality guarantee. I don’t find non official third party all that compelling. See Amazon marketplace as an example.

RicoElectrico 11d ago

There's an interesting paper about expectations of quality: The LL game: the curious preference for low quality and its norms https://diegogambetta.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/the_ll_game.pdf https://diegogambetta.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/the_ll_...

rramadass 11d ago
This looks quite interesting; thanks for sharing. A related concept is Jugaad - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad Often interpreted as "good enough" with no connection to Quality at all. Even when the context/environment changes to afford better quality (both manufacturing and cost) quality is never pursued unless mandated by National/ISO standards etc. One way to maybe understand this is through Robert Axelrod's books; The Evolution of Cooperation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation and The Complexity of Cooperation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Cooperation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Cooperation But the actors are never fully rational, there is always a clique which manipulates/influences and therefore there is never a "fair" market. Human motivations and behaviour are always the key and so you need Behavioral Game Theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_game_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_game_theory (see book of the same name by Colin Camerer) Finally, Nassim Taleb's ideas are also very relevant here. Markets work on "Trial and Error" and "Chance", there is no "fair/efficient invisible guiding hand" but only a guiding hand by cliques which have no "skin in the game" when it comes to downsides and "asymmetric risk" benefiting corporate capitalism. But the system as a whole functions because it is somewhat "Antifragile" i.e. the chaotic interactions and successes/failures within the system somehow strengthens the whole.

jdw64 11d ago

It would be nice if quality became a standard, but the problem is that the world has become too complex. On top of that, I think the disappearance of friction is a big part of it. In the past, if a garment factory was located in a certain country and the quality was poor, it was often directly tied to that country's reputation. But as the world began to lose friction and entered the era of globalization, much of the work was passed down to subcontractors, and the big problem is that consumer complaints don't get passed down to the subcontractors either. And within this structure, multiple subcontractors can't survive; as subcontractors grow, they begin to centralize into one. In such a structure, it's not that the original contractor controls the brand quality of the subcontractor. Rather, the subcontractor that has grown huge begins to control the quality ceiling of the entire market. On top of that, for a company to sustain continuous growth, a given product must not last too long, right? Because a product that can be used for 20 or 30 years means people won't have to buy that product line again.

dakolli 11d ago

[flagged]

throwaway454664 11d ago
"European tries not to repeat hackneyed clichés about Americans for 30 Seconds: Challenge level impossible"
- MadameMinty 11d ago
  If those were merely "clichés" you wouldn't feel insecure enough to make a throwaway account to say so.
matchbok3 11d ago
Where do you live? Somewhere with "taste", I imagine? Please tell us.

stabbles 11d ago

With sufficient competition, the incentives of companies would change if consumers would be willing to rent instead of owning products. Then planned obsolescence is not to their benefit.

alansaber 11d ago
...some kind of subscription as a service model? looks up dramatically
Devasta 11d ago
Why would planned obsolescence not be to their benefit in a world where things are rented? You still renting the old Xbox? Try renting this new Xbox instead, the verification cans come in additional flavors!
- daveoc64 11d ago
  That would apply more to things like a washing machine or microwave - things that don't become obsolete quickly.
matsemann 11d ago
I do think our consumer rights in Norway help a bit on this (the article is a page to the consumer agency here). We have 5 years mandated "warranty" on almost all purchases. Which means selling a cheap blender that breaks after two years, you as a shop/producer/importer have to eat the cost to provide a new one if it happens. Which means that the chance of something breaking becomes priced in, so you can't really get away with selling something flimsy a bit cheaper to trick the consumer.
- stabbles 11d ago
  5 years is great, but I'm sure in Norway they advertise "no flip" / "no turn" / "single-sided" mattresses as a feature too ;)
Saline9515 11d ago
Most cars are rented nowadays and they are less durable than ever. It's better for the manufacturer to lease and then get you to upgrade periodically to keep you as a novelty-seeking consumer. Long warranty is better as there is no other incentive who has to pay if the product breaks down. Cars should have a 7 years warranty by default for instance.

myrmidon 11d ago

I personally see two effects that are very detrimental here: 1) "Quality brands", where you pay a premium to get high quality/durability products, are economically incentivized to "sell-out" (cash in the brand name by producing as cheaply as possible). This is because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important than anything else. 2) Increasing trend towards no-name products (or ephemeral brands). This means that producers can sell cheap trash with no drawback whatsoever; slightly more expensive quality products become unmarketable because every customer will assume you're just trying to sell them the same cheapest shit for more. I used to think that brand products were a universal money waste for suckers, but now I think they can be a very valuable mechanism. What would really help in my view though is to force companies to stick with their brand, to incentivize them to invest into it and to make "cashing out" on good brands a universally bad decision.

mattacular 11d ago
Also it doesn't even matter if the rare company making a high quality product long enough to get a positive brand rep is incentivized to sell out (although I don't disagree with you that is a pressure to act in short term interests) thanks to this great thing called: private equity!
DanielHB 11d ago
> "cashing out" on good brands a universally bad decision. For the company yes, not for the executive bonuses. It is quite notable how the long-lasting companies that are household names somehow managed to resist this urge. Most of them are private. People need to compartmentalize things in order to make sense of the universe, but doing so for companies (and governments) is just counterproductive. Whenever you think about a company to draw any good conclusions you always need to think about all the people who work there, from the factory worker to the executive.
kqr 11d ago
> Quality brands are economically incentivized to sell-out [...] because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important That probably happens a lot, but there's another mechanism by which it could happen, that requires no malice: the brand gets a quality reputation, which increases demand for its products, and they are unable to produce quality products at the rate needed to satisfy that demand. Then it's easy to reason that it'd be a net benefit for everyone to loosen the quality requirements a tiny bit, in order to satisfy the demand of more customers. People used to the quality will barely notice any difference, and then twice as many people can get that experience. That works once, but when applied again, and again, and again, and again it becomes a problem, even with zero ill intent.

FinnLobsien 11d ago

I agree with this. It's curious that we always talk about "things used to last forever and weren't only made by corporations chasing infinite growth", when those things are often still available, but are almost invisible because we now discover everything through social media or SEO. You can find great-quality, long-lasting products at great prices (great price doesn't equal cheap, but great for what you get). I use capable LLMs on high reasoning to run a prompt like this: "I want to buy a high-quality [category] that will/has/can [requirements here]. I do not want to pay for a brand name that doesn't improve. Start by finding manufacturing clusters in [region of the world, e.g. Europe] where [category] is made, then find the businesses making [category] in that cluster that I can buy from. Normal online stores are okay, but also try non-obvious avenues: -local business registers -stores that may only be available in the local language -factories that sell samples directly" -cooperatives that sell products from multiple local manufacturers (I modify this prompt, but it's the skeleton) To verify a given product/brand/store, a great follow-up prompt has been: "Now find me big brands offering a product of similar quality (ideally measured by objective characteristics) and show me how much it is vs. [store name here]" This has showed me incredible finds. It's become how I buy most things that go beyond basic trinkets, and I often pay less for far higher quality.

mrheosuper 11d ago
Could your post some example result, so we can judge by ourselves

Eddy_Viscosity2 11d ago

The answer is competition. Quality declines when companies no longer have to meaningful compete in the marketplace. The only other solution is regulation and force quality through punishment for noncompliance. Competition works better.

Gigachad 11d ago
Competition partially causes this though. When you have 100 brands selling the same thing it became a race to the lowest price.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 11d ago
  My experience is competition invokes two races happening at the same time, one for lowest price and one for highest quality. You can get a cheap car or really high quality car. Same goes for clothes, restaurants, basically anything where there is lots of market choices and competition.
  - steinvakt2 11d ago
    An Audi typically requires more maintenance and repair than a Toyota though. You’re not paying for quality (as in durability/longevity)
  - nradov 11d ago
    That doesn't make any sense. The most expensive cars are also the least reliable. Rich people have multiple cars so when the Bentley has an electrical glitch they just drive the Porsche.
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 11d ago
      Quality means different things to different people. But the fact that Bentleys and Porsche exist support that case that not everything in a competitive markets drives things to the lowest cost product.

AyanamiKaine 11d ago

I think what people associate with "quality" is vastly different from each other. For example I believe there is a deeper quality that cannot be easily found in a more quality product. Quality can be expressed in many ways and felt throughout the life. But people don't care for that. They mostly care for cheap and good enough. I don't want to attack that way of life its simply one with tradeoffs like a life with more quality. More quality can mean more expensive, the need to engage with something a bit more, etc. Leibl famously needed over 3 months to just draw the hands of one model for "Three Women in Church" it certainly has some quality to it. In the modern world seldom you will find one that wants to pay for such work or even spending 3 months of work on painting hands.

pif 11d ago

Quality was never the norm: cheap always beat quality with a hand tied behind his back! Western working class has spent decades complaining about cheap imports from China... while feeding that market with their own money. Western frequent fliers keep reminiscing about the grandiose pre-deregulation era or air travel, but cry a river when their low-cost carrier of choice actually enforces the limit on cabin baggage. Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.

red369 11d ago
Why such a personal attack? I don't think I even know you! I'm kidding, but what you say is hitting pretty close to home. I always mean to vote with my wallet, and I usually try, but for every Mikrotik router or Framework laptop I buy, there are so many Aukey Magsafe chargers, or McDodo Lightning to USB hubs. BTW, I'm not specifically calling out Aukey or McDodo, but for me those decisions were based on moments of weakness where I needed something to solve a problem, but I wasn't convinced it was significant enough that it was worth paying for what I thought was the best solution (The Aukey being the most recent purchase, and the McDodo having a memorable name). As an example, I was recently looking for a replacement for my fraying 2m USB-C to Lightning cable, and Apple's is US$30 and it looks like it's made of the same buttery-soft plastic as all the short-lived cables that came with past phone purchases. Anker is finally a valid option where I now live - so I guess I should be giving them my business. They're a similar price, but look more resilient. I haven't quite reached USB-C on all my devices, so whenever I'm buying some accessory, it may only work with a device or two, and there's a decent chance that I might need to shuffle things around, and need a different length or a different connector on the input end. That was a lot to write on an unimportant topic, and I didn't even touch on the temptation I sometimes cave into to fly a low-cost spin-off of a good airline. I also share the feeling with another sibling-poster, that digital subscriptions all seem to be either free, or double digits a month, for just one small aspect of my digital existence. Things that only cost a few dollars a month are easy decisions, like Bitwarden, or leasing a domain name, or iCloud+. For anything that crosses into double digits a month, I never get around to it if there is a free alternative which I don't feel horrible about using. A grand-fathered Google Workspace, the free-tier of Protonmail, etc. However, I do feel guilty for not also paying for Kagi, Protonmail/Fastmail, Mullvad, etc. Should I be giving some money to Firefox in some way? I wish more of these companies that were doing the right thing would offer a cheap tier that was a no-brainer, and there was a service where I could bundle together a bunch into one subscription. Feeling pretty entitled as I write this :) But lacking that, I end up just sticking with the free options, and then every now and again donating some small amount to a cause I think is worth supporting - Lichess, Putty, VLC, etc.

sholladay 11d ago

One big problem is that prices are easy to compare, while quality is not. I recently bought a tub that was advertised as stainless steel on Amazon. I was suspicious but decided to take a chance. Turns out it is galvanized, not stainless. I’m not sure the average person knows the difference. To be charitable, perhaps that’s even why the listing advertised it that way. But the difference matters significantly in terms of performance and quality, especially for certain kinds of products and use cases. There’s no “sort by quality, best to worst” system like there is for price. No “genuine stainless only” filter. You just have to know certain things. Shopping in person obviously helps, but you still have to know what to look for. Refrigerators are a good example of this. Most people shop for them in person, yet it’s not at all obvious whether model A or model B will last longer. You can try to use price as a proxy for quality, but the more expensive refrigerators are actually more likely to fail years earlier because of the added component complexity. They’re basically banking on the fact that you don’t know how to read a wiring diagram. To combat that, lots of people turn to YouTube or reviews to figure out quality. And sure, you can find some good sources that will tell you that top freezers will last longer than a French door model at basically any price, and they might even explain why. But all of those platforms are muddied with perverse incentives, affiliate programs, sponsorships, etc. Again, not always obvious. We need to make quality obvious. We need to make it comparable, sortable, filtrable, and guaranteed. Poor design needs to be a valid reason to return an item. Manufacturers should be required to label products with an estimated lifespan. Give tax breaks or other incentives to products that include a warranty for its full lifespan. We have to figure out how to improve the efficiency of making high quality goods, so that everything doesn’t just get more expensive. There should be a public database of the best known designs and techniques for making long lasting items. Patents that relate to longevity could be given extra time to encourage research, but then after, say, 3 years there could be a requirement to license the technology so that it can go mainstream. This doesn’t solve everything. Some products need more specific approaches. Food quality is a problem. Housing needs to be both more affordable and higher quality. But I think with enough changes to incentives, the culture could shift towards seeing the value in making things well.

bluGill 11d ago
I finally subscribed to consumer reports. It is the only independent place we can trust for that information. However they only review a subset of the things I want to buy.

baq 11d ago

…are you willing to pay for it though? If yes, is there enough of you? If yes, is there a way to tell low quality from high? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

deleted 11d ago

[deleted]

danesparza 11d ago

This is a false pretense. Quality was never the norm. What is no longer the norm is getting first-hand experience with a product before you buy it. Everything comes in the mail and it's a surprise to the consumer after they buy it. That's nuts!

functionmouse 11d ago
Seriously. Did this person never have to fix relatives' IE6?
- mitxela 10d ago
  IE6's quality problems were: not conforming to standards (that didn't exist in the time of IE1!) and having too many toolbars installed, which is not IE's problem.
- jeroenhd 10d ago
  IE6 itself rarely broke. It was usually malware abusing all the extension functionality that broke IE6. The non-standard browser runtime was a massive pain for anyone working in tech, but when it came to the implementation quality of that non-standard browser runtime, IE6 wasn't all that bad for the user. It was insecure as hell, of course, but so were all browsers at the time. Focusing on quality was a bit easier when complex security considerations weren't really necessary.
- danesparza 10d ago
  Did I miss something? Did this article have to do with IE6? It feels like you are responding to something that wasn't said.

exabrial 11d ago

Careful, this is going to hurt a lot of feelings.

sershe 11d ago

Tech workers in the US are probably around 90-99 percentile wage. Take something where the quality is well known and measurable, and can be purchased for extra money. How often do you fly first class, or even pay 10-20% extra to have more legroom, early boarding or a more convenient flight times versus picking the cheapest option that you can make work? People will demonstrably shop primarily on price no matter what... The producers respond to that.

returningfory2 11d ago
This is a really good point. Related, Matt Levine has recently been writing about how the AI labs are paying huge amounts of money to tech/math/AI people but these people don't actually know how to spend it. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-09-10/dallas-gets-some-equities https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-09-10/dal... As opposed to the typical finance worker who knows very well how to spend.
mitxela 10d ago
Sometimes "quality" really doesn't matter. Flying any higher than premium economy is one of those times. Will it get you to your destination any faster? Will you feel better when you get off the plane? It's like I could pay to sleep in a hotel tonight, and it'll be really nice, but I choose to sleep in my bed at home instead. There won't be any difference tomorrow.

tonymet 11d ago

Ikea compressed wood dresser = $125. Proper oak dresser = $5000 . What consumer is capable and willing to make that trade off. Much of that cost is because we nuked the American timber industry ? Appealing to the fabricators (or even consumers) who are 4-8 degrees downstream of this policy will get you nowhere.

megaman821 11d ago
Was there a time when an oak dresser was much cheaper in inflation adjusted dollars? Furniture that lasts forever is an anti-feature for some. They want to change their furnishings about as often as cheap furniture lasts anyway. I mostly buy quality furniture, but sometimes I don't know what I really want and Ikea and Wayfair are great for that. Cheap enough to donate after I decide what quality piece I really want.
- tonymet 11d ago
  yes. And you're reversing cause and effect. Do the consumers prefer a disposable lifestyle or is that a cope?
criddell 11d ago
There might not be any trade-off in your example. You're assuming that a solid wood piece of furniture is superior to the flatpack alternative and you can't really say that without knowing what the consumer needs. I have a little Ikea Lack table that holds my printer. I paid less than $10 for the table and I don't even think it's wood (cardboard maybe?). It's getting close to 20 years old and is in great shape.
- tonymet 11d ago
  "there's no aesthetic difference between this beautiful portrait and the contemporary pile of trash in the corner"
  - criddell 11d ago

Night_Thastus 11d ago

Consumers, fundamentally, care about two things: * Price * Features Those are tangible, obvious things. They are not subtle. They do not take months or years to discover or become obvious. They are (mostly) not vague or ambiguous. Does this car have lane assist? Yes or no. Will this car last me 20 years? ...maybe? That's a very hard question to answer. It's messy and complicated and has a lot of clauses to it. So, consumers buy whatever is the cheapest available with the features they want, or the most feature-rich they can with their budget. This demand forces manufacturers to respond. They find a way to cram more functionality in, at a cheaper price. If they don't, they will simply get eaten up by those who do, overseas or otherwise. You can say you want quality and reliability all you want - it changes nothing. At the end of the day, the vast majority keep voting with their wallet - and they want CHEAP.

autoexec 11d ago
> Consumers, fundamentally, care about two things: * Price * Features Consumers also care about accessibility. It doesn't matter to me if product X is amazing and affordable if I can't find it in any store anywhere near me or if amazon never shows it in search results because all they want to push is amazon basics and products made by FSLHVHSLR If no company anywhere sells what I want, then I have no choice but to compromise and today there is a whole lot of compromising going on. Companies are more interested in selling what is most profitable to them, not what consumers actually want. Very often consumers are forced to buy what little is offered to them. The consumer "voting with their wallet" will always lose when companies also vote with theirs because theirs is much much bigger.
aidenn0 11d ago
Consumers care about a lot of things besides that, it's just that (as you mention) those are the two most legible things to consumers. Your specific example of cars is, IMO, not correct: Honda, for years, could charge a premium on their new cars due to a reputation for reliability increasing resale values. For less expensive things, how much time should I spend researching quality USB-C to HDMI dongles? It's plausible that the chip in the $5 on amazon WOPEIME (or whatever) branded dongle is the same as the in the $25 Belkin one. For intermediate things, time-pressure might matter. If my clothes washer were to fail today, I'm doing laundry by hand until I can get a new one in my house, so I'm probably playing quality roulette with several hundred dollars of my money at Best Buy.

Animats 11d ago

Easy solution if you like tariffs: all imported items over $100 must have a 10 year full warranty.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...

pphysch 11d ago
Is it easy? What if an organization avoids liability through shell companies and financial engineering? "The company managing your warranty was acquired by Foobar Inc and their sole building burned down destroying all records. We apologize for the inconvenience."
- pydry 11d ago
  Demand collateral
  - Animats 11d ago
    That's what bonds are for. US customs requires prepaid bonds for other things. Importers who don't have enough assets would have to post a bond to cover repairs for the product. They get it back at 10 years.
    - pasc1878 11d ago
      A way to get the right to repair for the rest of the world. Apple/MS/Google would have to keep their products working for 10 years.
- Joel_Mckay 11d ago
  When most fortune 500 companies burned brand-goodwill to sell disposable versions of products, it is credulous to believe all problems are external. =3
- Dylan16807 11d ago
  Well there is the option to make Amazon responsible for what they sell...

drblast 11d ago

Enshittification is definitely real, but let's not look at the past with rose-colored glasses. A lot of things you can buy today are vastly superior to things available 50 years ago. It used to be remarkable to drive a car 100k miles without major repairs. Volvo dealerships in the 80's and 90's would give you a badge at 100k milestones to advertise how reliable their cars were compared to others. Anything tech related is just light years ahead of what it used to be, and for far cheaper. 65"+ OLED TVs for less than a couple grand are pretty much science fiction come to life. Gaming consoles are super-computers compared to an NES. For many appliances, if you pay an inflation-adjusted cost for what a 1980's family would pay you can get something that will last forever. Last year I bought a commercial microwave for about $300 that has a single dial, hardly any features, and likely will last longer than the first microwave my family owned and also paid ~$300 for. Adjusting for inflation my new microwave is vastly better and cheaper than my childhood one. I play guitar - in 1954 a new Stratocaster sold for $249, which is about $3k in today's dollars. And $249 today will get you a guitar that's easily as good as most 1954 Strats. If you spend the inflation-adjusted equivalent you're in ultra-luxury territory. Want good furniture? That's ALWAYS been expensive, but you'd typically buy a table for the equivalent of $5k in today's dollars and expect it to last a lifetime. You can spend $5k on real wood furniture today, but nobody does. Housing materials are much better and cheaper with the possible exception of copper pipes and anything made of real wood. Certainly builders of McMansions are cutting corners at every opportunity, but if you do your own building/finishing these days a lot of materials are available that will outlast their 1980's equivalent, and the cheap options are better. I think a lot of this is a lack of perspective - everyone wants better things but nobody actually wants to pay for it.

tristor 11d ago
> I think a lot of this is a lack of perspective - everyone wants better things but nobody actually wants to pay for it. I think that's part of it, but I also think it's largely an issue of information asymmetry. Brands used to be a proxy for quality, and price could also be a proxy for quality, but that is no longer the case. That means it takes significantly more effort to research a product category to find a good product and people don't want to expend that effort. I am one of those weird people that enjoys that research, so I'm often the one people in my friend group ask for product recommendations because they are more than happy to spend the money, just not the time. It's a discovery problem at the end of the day. When all the existing indicators become unreliable and advertising is inundated with scams and frauds, there's no way for good products to connect to good customers, so /everyone/ suffers.

atoav 11d ago

The main problem is that most business are run by people who have no believe at all that you could run a successful company without tricking people into buying your product. That means they don't even try. The rare exception are companies where rhe founder is e.g. a principled engineer, or some German family business that does nothing but ball bearings in the 4th generation and their business model is basically to be the best at ball bearings. Something like that. But so many publicly traded companies appear to basically have become stock gambling dens that accidentally produce some products on the side out of legacy reasons. Many are of the kind that use quality only as a marketing statement and when it comes to the engineering choice they will not even shell out 10 cents more for stainless screws to hold the thing together. The reasons why there is little quality products is because the incentives all point in the other direction for most companies. And where they don't it is usually a special niche product or the intrinsic values of one or a few individuals making the choice to put their ideals above their wallet. If we want this to change we have to change the incentive structure.

jhoechtl 11d ago

Easy: Items must work without internet connection so they cannot be updated online.

seizethecheese 11d ago

Quality already is the norm for many products. For example, I own Sennheiser headphones, an iPhone and a MacBook. (Sure maybe not the absolute top of the line, but definitely more expensive than commodity products.) I find great utility in cheap low cost products for things that I don’t know I’ll use more than once. For example, I’m glad I bought the cheapest roller blades a few years ago because I used them twice. I also buy a lot of cheap toys for my kids, they may use them only a few times and also quantity really has a certain quality (novelty is good for kids). I find the moralizing and lecturing around quality to be distasteful. These holier than thou types really think they know better than the buyer.

Telaneo 9d ago
> For example, I own Sennheiser headphones, an iPhone and a MacBook. (Sure maybe not the absolute top of the line, but definitely more expensive than commodity products.) If anything, all of these are probably in the sweetspot for value. I have a hard time calling them the norm, at least not unless you're in the know and are knowingly looking for good value. I had to go through 3 sets of headphones before I got a Sennheiser set I was happy with and lasted 10 years. There are countless shitty Android phones and Windows laptops out there, and people do buy them.

arionhardison 11d ago

Was quality ever the norm? IIRC Enshittification predates AI/LLMS by a few years.

nayuki 11d ago

In certain personal projects, I have the opposite philosophy where I don't want quality. I got addicted to designing models and 3D-printing them a year ago. Over time, I learned to reduce the amount of safety factor and make items just strong enough for their application - which saves material and printing time. I wouldn't skimp on something like a carrying handle for the printer, where failure would mean damaging the printer. But I would reduce the amount of plastic used in things like art pieces (3DBenchy - who needs structural strength?), end caps for various objects, prototypes for dimensioning. Moreover, sometimes I'm happy to see my parts break because I was thinking of redesigning it or did so already, hence I would be itching to print the new version. Aside from that, just knowing I can reprint a part anytime (without modifications) makes me much less worried about breaking or losing a part.

switchbak 11d ago
True … I’m the same, but I consider that good engineering. Designing it with the use in mind, factoring in all the stresses adequately but only just. That’s more like how an airplane is made: weight/strength only where it’s truly necessary. I wouldn’t say that’s low quality though, just something with a lot more care put into it.

erichocean 11d ago

Meditations on Moloch[0] explains why this is impossible at scale--too many defectors, asymmetric information, and no way to police defection. [0] https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch

miketromba 11d ago

There’s a horizontal body overflow bug on this page on mobile. The irony

lateatdesk 11d ago

I think we're asking too much of buyers here. You shouldn't need to learn about fabrics and stitching, then check who owns the brand now, just to buy a shirt that lasts.

imoverclocked 11d ago
So, given reality, how would you suggest this gets done?
- Henchman21 11d ago
  The way we used to do it? Based on human reputation, so you know, if you're a dick you prob won't get a lot of customers.
  - imoverclocked 11d ago
    Being “a dick” and having a high quality product are often orthogonal to each other. Reputation also requires brand recognition which often lends itself to enshittification as companies get established.

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chickensong 11d ago

In a world of shrinkflation and enshittification, I just wanted to give a shout out to Feetures socks[0] which I love. It's a family-owned business and all they make is socks. They're anatomically designed, so if you can't handle sorting L/R these aren't for you. Not only are they a high-quality sock, they have a lifetime guarantee as well. No affiliation, just a satisfied customer. [0] https://feetures.com/ https://feetures.com/

BatchJob 11d ago

Unfortunately, there is no quality available at this time.

camd32 11d ago

I understand the strong desire to help the environment, but why lead with that? I think it's become apparent that the average person doesn't really care about the environment. People do care about maximum convenience and minimal cost , which usually leads to waste. We should try harder to create a system that aligns the incentive of taking care of the Earth than we try to force people to care about the environment. Remember, if your reasoning is that "if people would just XYZ", it's bad reasoning.

0dayz 11d ago
Maybe for Americans but certain countries the people there do on average care.
roer 10d ago
According to page 116 of the report of this EU survey: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3752 https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3752, Sweden and Denmark have climare change as their number 1 and number 2 most important topics to be addressed in the European Parliament respectively. It makes sense to extend that to the OP which is norwegian and say that a lot of the target audience probably cares I do however agree that making the cheapest/best solutions also be good for the environment would be ideal.

lynx97 11d ago

I would PAY Apple $500 if they'd dedicate a year of development only to fixing known issues. The number of sort-of-well-known bug grows from year to year, and it feels like they only accumulate, never go away. VoiceOver of my (touch-id-only) iPad said "Face not recognized" yesterday, because it failed to read my finger rpint. This is getting comically bad.

yuxi258 11d ago

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spjt 10d ago

I think there is a bit of survivor bias here. People like to say "everything is shit now, I've had this item for 20 years and it still works." But that's because they can see that 20 year old item, not all the shit they bought 20 years ago that broke and they got rid of.

mrhcon 10d ago

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