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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

by piker 11d 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 10d 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.
  - marcus_holmes 9d ago
    Because it's only profits that must grow every year. And if you can't increase prices, or market share, or the market size, then you must cut costs. And if the only way to cut costs is to destroy the product, then that's what must happen.
    - chronogamous 9d ago
      Without a product to sell, you'd think that eventually profits would seriously decrease. Then again, as you probably already gathered, I may not be the average consumer, and as such, I am quite rigid when it comes to quality. When the day comes when there are no longer any reasonably workable computers for sale, I may even stop buying computers. As for tvs, with all the trouble I would have to go through to figure out if and where I could still buy a tv that is 100% guaranteed to be dumb, I'm pretty sure I'll never buy a tv again in my lifetime (which, taken the average lifespan in my country, could likely be some 30 more years).
iamflimflam1 11d ago
To me, this is why we have regulation. The CE mark in Europe and the UL mark in the US is supposed to provide a floor on quality. That floor can be increased if we as a society decides that this is required. You might be unwilling to pay for this increased quality, but you don't have a choice.
- alright2565 11d ago
  The CE mark is worthless, since it is a self-certificaton. The UL mark is valuable, as are the other test lab marks. However, while an ethical storefront would require it, Amazon does not. I've bought plenty of things that are not listed, and if I want safe products I generally have to include "UL" or "ETL" in my search. Even that doesn't always work, I've seen products on there claiming a listing in the title but photo shopping the place where the UL logo ought to be off of their product images.
  - mschuster91 11d ago
    [dead]
  - pif 11d ago
    > The CE mark is worthless, since it is a self-certificaton. Boeing 737 MAX tragedy did happen because of self-certification abuse, still I would not call FAA certification worthless.
    - alright2565 11d ago
      Boeing is a company worth billions of dollars. "UKCSR" is not, there is absolutely no consequence to them getting shut down due to unsafe products. They'll just come back tomorrow as "JUSGB."
  - bobthepanda 11d ago
    This is also solvable through regulation though. For example, NYC now requires all sold e bikes to be UL certified because of too many apartment lithium battery fires.
j1elo 11d ago
I'd call it externalized costs of regulation and rising demands on production. If end consumers were able to see an exact and measurable bump in prices the next day a new stronger regulation made production more expensive, voters would be more informed and the whole cost of doing things "better" would be clearer.
Saline9515 11d ago
You are right, it's easier to bake in quality decreases (aka "cost reductions") to keep the price stable than increase the price. Users usually don't see it directly, and since the whole industry does the same there is no real alternative. A good way to see this is in clothing: my wife likes to buy vintage clothes, part because of the style, but also because most of them are actually well made and sturdy. Nowadays it's almost impossible to get the same quality and finishes, even with the more expensive brands. Due to the mass-production of low quality clothing, (most) consumers don't even have a clear idea of what "quality" looks like, which further reduces incentives for manufacturers. For comparison, some niche menswear brands keep the quality stable (as their specific consumer base asks for it). Say Northampton leather shoes for instance (Crockett and Jones et al.), which are still made in the UK (not in an mafia-ran sweatshop in Italia for luxury goods...). Their products are amazing, and...the price grows 5-10% per year steadily.
- irishcoffee 11d ago
  I had to switch from levis jeans to carhartt pants because my levis would rip after 5-6 months, almost like clockwork. No, I am not at all overweight. Carhartt just makes more durable pants, and I hate shopping.
  - thatjoeoverthr 11d ago
    The 5-6 months is in line with other slop brands I’ve tried, e.g. H&M. Sad to see Levis join them in the gutter.
    - seb1204 11d ago
      [dead]
    - hdgvhicv 10d ago
      I had a pair rip about 12 years ago. Cheap jeans from the supermarket - might have been the £4 ones. That’s the only time. In that case I was fortunate I was away from work but going to the airport, went through security with my cheeks hanging out, then went to fat face. Those worked fine (well u til I no ok get fitted their 32” waist), but so do my current “tu” supermarket jeans.
maxglute 11d ago
Well skimpflation, with caveat that a remarkable amount to R&D is spend into value engineering to lowest price points, like you don't get to 50 cent FOB tshirt trivially. And frankly it's revolutionary - enabling developing country wages to buy clothing on a single day wage. That said, it's 2026... if you want quality and only want to pay marginal increment, there's tons of Chinese ODMs turn direct to consumer, i.e. Quince. They'll sell you functionally top quality (spec for spec inputs if not better) with 1x markup vs 10x brand markup/premium.
- Den_VR 11d ago
  The world needs more tariffs until there’s non-chinese ODMs selling top quality
  - thereisnospork 11d ago
    The world needs better economic policy and regulation so non Chinese ODMs can compete on price/quality.
giancarlostoro 11d ago
Video games are a good example of an area where the pricing makes no sense. Inflation has risen, and they make like $20 or whatever off a brand new game in 1990s bucks. Video game prices will go up more and more, it also kind of explains to me why prices rarely drop below $59 anymore, used to be on Steam some AAA games could be snagged up for $20 after a year, now you can barely find them on reasonable sales, they hold on to dear life on pricing.
- 01284a7e 11d ago
  Sidebar: Don't video games have ever growing competition with existing games? I decided not to buy games until I beat the ones I already have. I am now stuck on NES games and will probably be stuck for the rest of my life.
  - 3eb7988a1663 11d ago
    Skyrim came out in 2011 and is at this moment, the 55th highest player count on Steam. Just playing top tier single player games over the past twenty years could keep you incredibly busy.
    - throwup238 11d ago
      Which Skyrim is that? OG Skyrim (Oldrim), Skyrim Legendary edition, Skyrim Special edition, Skyrim VR, Skyrim Anniversary edition, or the Skyrim anniversary upgrade? Are they even the same base SKUs at this point? I don’t want to pull out my gaming desktop but IIRC it was at least three different entries in the Steam library. I wonder if the stats combine them. At this point I’ve spent so much money on Skyrim titles I should get TESVI for free with lifetime DLCs.
      - Telaneo 11d ago
        It's Skyrim Special edition that's on that spot. The OG version hasn't been sold in years on Steam and is tracked separately. The VR edition is sold and tracked separately. The Anniversary edition is sold as DLC for the Special edition, and not as a separate game. I think the Legendary edition was sold as a bundle for the OG version after all the DLCs came out. Either way, it too cannot be bought on Steam any more.
chairmansteve 11d ago
Problem is, you pay 10x for shirt that is made in the same factory as the cheap shiry, just has a different logo.
- jolt42 11d ago
  10x is not a likely number for quality, but for status symbol cost.
- asdff 11d ago
  This has become a sort of unintentional skill in the ecommerce era. Everyone is using china, either the actual "first party" brand that is really just ordering bulk from china and reselling it stateside, or the various clones of that brand. The skill then becomes feeling out which of these various products and clones are coming from the better option of the couple chinese manufacturing companies everyone is using, then buying whichever of these is going for cheapest and least shipping headaches. Usually also if a product has been out for a couple years, there's an initial version widely available then an actual 2.0 version that solves a lot of the issues in the first, more sturdy at now known failure points, etc. That 2.0 version actually usually circulates in the no name brands for a little while before the "first party" brand eventually picks it up for their own line.
  - account42 10d ago
    This misses the quality control aspect. Just because two items come out the same production line doesn't mean they have the same quality.
    - asdff 10d ago
      I mean, it's a gamble either way. The first party product can be flawed too. The no name product could last for decades.
- wafflemaker 11d ago
  Not always. I got a pair of T-shirts from These Glory Days. Wore them like 20% of time last two years and they look better then some others after 2 washes (albeit changed from them after coming back to work, and use work clothes at work, so not like they were used THAT much. So it's not always the expensive stuff that's equal to the cheap stuff. And funny thing, got them on a sale because they were pretty cheap, not really because I knew that they were quality. Though had my wife with me when shopping and she might have "felt" the material and said that it was good for that price. Her mum is a seamstress if I remember the word correctly as somebody who sews clothes.
jolt42 11d ago
I think 10x is quite rare. Quality ends up actually curtailing costs to some degree (eg. fewer returns, cheaper marketing - word of mouth). Buy a Weber grill, I had 2 grills before my Weber that lasted 3 seasons between them. I bought the Weber at about 2.2x the cost of the bargain grills and 17 YEARS later it's still going strong, built like a tank. Saved a lot not buying more cheapo grills.
- xingped 11d ago
  Yes, this is quite common and is usually referred to as "it's expensive to be poor". That said, unfortunately these days it's very difficult to know which brands are still actually quality anymore and which are the ones still coasting on previous good engineering reputation while currently shipping substandard crap to make an extra buck for the bean counters in charge before the ship sinks.
  - jerf 11d ago
    Everything has become a lemon market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons Even if a brand stays solid for 100 years, for all I know as I'm standing there in the store deciding whether to buy something, private equity bought them two quarters ago and hollowed them out. Harvard MBAs/private equity sees brand reputation as just another resource to be converted into money. If I were a billionaire my dream would be to create a logo for the "We Put The Extra 10% In It" program where products could advertise that they put the extra effort in. What is really sad to me is that so often it's not even that much extra effort, which is why I say 10% and not 100% or 10x. So often it's just "used a 5 cent metal part instead of a 1.2 cent plastic part". But without a reliable signal that the effort is there MBAs/private equity turns every market everywhere into a lemon market. Way too much tech is applied in manufacturing to turn everything into a lemon market.
    - jolt42 11d ago
      Yeah, hardly anybody in it for the long-haul. I hear we might be living longer relatively soon, maybe that will change the mindset.
svara 11d ago
Absolutely. It's the most visible in services shrinkflation.
HoldOnAMinute 11d ago
Speed Queen appliances are about 2–2.5x longer-lasting for roughly a 50–75% increase in purchase price.
pydry 11d ago
because quality signals are much more misleading these days. can't trust reviews because theyre spammed with fakes. can't trust brands because private equity buy them out and enshittify.
justonceokay 10d ago
If you watch The Price is Right episodes from the 80s, it is clear that household items have only had mild inflation. Many items are prices a little lower than today but not outrageously so. On the other hand, the quality of the items is often much nicer. So someone might win a $500 desk, but that desk is hand-made out of hardwood. Today you can still buy a $500 desk but it will be IKEA quality. A product of comparable quality would cost many $k Airline tickets are a very clear-cut example of this. Tickets are cheaper than they were in the ‘90s (even with inflation) but you get a lot less for that ticket than you did 30 years ago
- coderenegade 10d ago
  It's less clear cut than that, because modern materials can be better at the job they are designed for. An IKEA kitchen, for instance, might not use traditional wood or stone for its benchtops, but the materials used are actually better in terms of cleaning and handling food on them. It's just that these improvements often get bundled with cheap plastic and parts in other parts of the kitchen to keep costs down. Similarly, cars today are far superior to old cars in terms of safety, and the gains that have been made on the engine side of things are nothing short of incredible. Every modern car is essentially a supercar by the standards of the 90s in terms of oomph per unit of displacement. The problem is that all of the systems have been coupled together, often needlessly, in order to improve telemetry and capture a bigger share of the used market. It's hostile towards the end user. There's no question that the level of quality today is higher, especially where it matters. It's just that value extraction eventually turns hostile towards consumers in the absence of real competition and the need for endless growth.
- saturn8601 10d ago
  You have to look at it from an item by item basis. There are different reasons for each product. You mentioned household items: This is a combination of two things: 1. Improved QA & reduction of parts thanks to the miracle of Moores law. Ex: a TV used to be a huge collection of boards each doing its own function (power, tuning, picture control, audio). Nows its 1-2 board(power + everything else) with typically one big chip doing everything. Less parts = less chance of failure and each part is QA better thanks to software/industrial automation. 2. These things are benefiting from the low cost of living in places like China. As those countries increase their wealth and alternatives are not found this disparity disappears and you finally pay the real cost of the item but you still benefited from Moores law. TVs deflated insanely, other appliances less so but it averages out to 0 again thanks to Moores law. Now look at a desk. The only way it benefits from Moores law is possibly via assembly and techniques used to reduce waste. That probably where IKEA's excellent ability to turn sawdust + glue into furniture comes from. That is real value that is returned back to you in the form of similar raw numerical prices as old wood tables from decades ago. Machinery can automate the creation of a table made out of what is technically "wood" (sawdust was at one point wood wasn't it?) and computer software allowed designers to create appealing designs and more easily optimize them to target that same number people paid in the 70s(even though it isnt the real number inflation adjusted). An old table used real wood that probably came from an old growth tree that no longer exists because the value came from decades (or centuries) of "work" done by nature. Exchanging money for that same amount of value that would reveal the diminished value of the currency if you were to get that same thing today. You cant exchange the exact dollar amount and you are not feeling that the modern IKEA take is an improvement/equivalent over the old growth wood. Essentially the free market could not make a 1-to-1 replica/improved product using something like moores law so that same value costs more today. That difference in quality between the Ikea table and the old wood table is still there its just that most consumers dont see it or dont want to see it since they may not be able to afford the old style of table. >Airline tickets are a very clear-cut example of this. Tickets are cheaper than they were in the ‘90s (even with inflation) but you get a lot less for that ticket than you did 30 years ago This is a mixed bag in my opinion: Airlines have benefited from Moores Law. I watched so many "aviation" youtube channels and my god, the accidents from the early days of aviation are truly nightmare inducing and heartbreaking tragedies. Today thanks to computerization(Moores law), pilots are so much better trained, airplanes are so many orders of magnitude better in terms of safety and fallbacks and fuel is reduced as a result of all of this technology as well. This helped cut costs and also allowed Airlines to provide more classes of service. If you fly first class all in, you get service closer to what you got 30 years ago because you are paying for the same value as 30 years ago. At the same time, fuel itself comes from a non-renewable resource that included dinosaurs, sea algae, and plants that spent a lifetime doing the work to accumulate energy from the sun and then be stored in a format that can be exploited centuries later. You life's comforts comes from all that work done centuries ago and its not unlimited. Thus as fuel becomes harder to get, the numerical dollar amount goes up and is reflected in tocket costs. Its just that the other reductions didn't make it as evident. As a side note with the Iran war and the loss of companies like Spirit, more are now being exposed to the fact that todays dollar isn't the same as yesterdays dollar. Those low cost options are just going away because finally the free ride given to use by cheap fossil fuels is going away and things like moores law have already reached the limit of where you can add value to keep the number close to the 70s dollar number.
_moof 10d ago
Walmart used to be (and maybe still is?) known for doing this. They would get companies to produce lower-quality versions of products under the same name as the standard versions available elsewhere. They could sell them for cheaper and consumers were none the wiser - or so the theory went, anyway. Obviously people caught on.
- greenavocado 10d ago
  People have caught on and nothing can be done because all ten "brands" are produced on the same machine in Ohio
- mitxela 10d ago
  I've noticed this at Aldi too. Boxes of muesli that look 30% cheaper than at other supermarkets... but when you look closer, the box is 3/4 the size and it's only 3/4 full. I don't regularly shop at Aldi.
  - ninalanyon 10d ago
    Don't you look at the unit price? Price per kg or litre.
    - OptionOfT 8d ago
      In the US that's annoying, sometimes they show price per oz, other times price per lbs.
thaumasiotes 10d ago
> my theory is that the decline in quality is another hidden form of inflation That is a well-known phenomenon, usually called "shrinkflation". (After the fact that the easiest way to lower quality while keeping the price consistent is to just give you less stuff for the same price.) Although all economists are made aware of the phenomenon, they seem to be just as prone to the illusion as anyone else. Here you can see Tyler Cowen weighing in on a Twitter debate about the price of a meal at Chipotle: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/08/usa-fact-of-the-day-17.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/08/us... A burrito is sold for the same price (well, 4.6% higher) now that it was 15 years ago. Case closed! Stop complaining about Chipotle's pricing. Is it the same burrito? Deep in the comments "Michael" reports, from current and archived Chipotle menu tools, that a steak burrito bowl in 2015 contained 875 calories and the same exact menu order in 2026 contained 830 calories... with 80 calories out of that 45 calorie difference representing additional steak in the 2015 bowl.
nextlevelwizard 10d ago
This just isn't true. What has happened is that companies try to cut costs at every point to make more and more profit since that is what capitalism just does. There are two ways to submit to capitalism when making products either mass producing the cheapest crap possible with hair thin margins, but since you make so much and they last so little you still make bank. The other is to make ridiculously over priced luxury goods that rich assholes buy because they want lovingly hand crafted quality instead of the cheap crap, but of course you are marking it up 100-1000 times the price just because you can. What cannot survive in capitalistic world is the good mid ground of lovingly produced products that actually last and are good quality, because those don't sell as often as they last for a life time or three and you can't gauge the price. Sure there is a sub section of the economy that literally cannot afford but the cheapest thing, but they need to keep buying same thing year after year as it won't last and thus their children are cursed to suffer the same fate as they cannot inherit any good quality furniture or cars or even houses, everything is just cheaply made consumable with no expectation that it will last longer than a year or two
etruong42 10d ago
I frame it more of a moral problem. Like, at least 90% a moral problem as a conservative estimate. People need to care in aggregate. There are forces that make people care less. Perhaps US healthcare is a prime example. Medical professionals are burning out, prices are going through the roof, and outcomes are getting worse all at the same time. If there are doctors who are working themselves ragged AND people are still paying through the nose, why is healthcare still getting worse? The same forces that we can see as plain as day in U.S. healthcare are affecting... everything.

by piker 11d ago

marcus_holmes 10d 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.
- marcus_holmes 9d ago
  Because it's only profits that must grow every year. And if you can't increase prices, or market share, or the market size, then you must cut costs. And if the only way to cut costs is to destroy the product, then that's what must happen.
  - chronogamous 9d ago
    Without a product to sell, you'd think that eventually profits would seriously decrease. Then again, as you probably already gathered, I may not be the average consumer, and as such, I am quite rigid when it comes to quality. When the day comes when there are no longer any reasonably workable computers for sale, I may even stop buying computers. As for tvs, with all the trouble I would have to go through to figure out if and where I could still buy a tv that is 100% guaranteed to be dumb, I'm pretty sure I'll never buy a tv again in my lifetime (which, taken the average lifespan in my country, could likely be some 30 more years).

iamflimflam1 11d ago

To me, this is why we have regulation. The CE mark in Europe and the UL mark in the US is supposed to provide a floor on quality. That floor can be increased if we as a society decides that this is required. You might be unwilling to pay for this increased quality, but you don't have a choice.

alright2565 11d ago
The CE mark is worthless, since it is a self-certificaton. The UL mark is valuable, as are the other test lab marks. However, while an ethical storefront would require it, Amazon does not. I've bought plenty of things that are not listed, and if I want safe products I generally have to include "UL" or "ETL" in my search. Even that doesn't always work, I've seen products on there claiming a listing in the title but photo shopping the place where the UL logo ought to be off of their product images.
- mschuster91 11d ago
  [dead]
- pif 11d ago
  > The CE mark is worthless, since it is a self-certificaton. Boeing 737 MAX tragedy did happen because of self-certification abuse, still I would not call FAA certification worthless.
  - alright2565 11d ago
    Boeing is a company worth billions of dollars. "UKCSR" is not, there is absolutely no consequence to them getting shut down due to unsafe products. They'll just come back tomorrow as "JUSGB."
- bobthepanda 11d ago
  This is also solvable through regulation though. For example, NYC now requires all sold e bikes to be UL certified because of too many apartment lithium battery fires.

j1elo 11d ago

I'd call it externalized costs of regulation and rising demands on production. If end consumers were able to see an exact and measurable bump in prices the next day a new stronger regulation made production more expensive, voters would be more informed and the whole cost of doing things "better" would be clearer.

Saline9515 11d ago

You are right, it's easier to bake in quality decreases (aka "cost reductions") to keep the price stable than increase the price. Users usually don't see it directly, and since the whole industry does the same there is no real alternative. A good way to see this is in clothing: my wife likes to buy vintage clothes, part because of the style, but also because most of them are actually well made and sturdy. Nowadays it's almost impossible to get the same quality and finishes, even with the more expensive brands. Due to the mass-production of low quality clothing, (most) consumers don't even have a clear idea of what "quality" looks like, which further reduces incentives for manufacturers. For comparison, some niche menswear brands keep the quality stable (as their specific consumer base asks for it). Say Northampton leather shoes for instance (Crockett and Jones et al.), which are still made in the UK (not in an mafia-ran sweatshop in Italia for luxury goods...). Their products are amazing, and...the price grows 5-10% per year steadily.

irishcoffee 11d ago
I had to switch from levis jeans to carhartt pants because my levis would rip after 5-6 months, almost like clockwork. No, I am not at all overweight. Carhartt just makes more durable pants, and I hate shopping.
- thatjoeoverthr 11d ago
  The 5-6 months is in line with other slop brands I’ve tried, e.g. H&M. Sad to see Levis join them in the gutter.
  - seb1204 11d ago
    [dead]
  - hdgvhicv 10d ago
    I had a pair rip about 12 years ago. Cheap jeans from the supermarket - might have been the £4 ones. That’s the only time. In that case I was fortunate I was away from work but going to the airport, went through security with my cheeks hanging out, then went to fat face. Those worked fine (well u til I no ok get fitted their 32” waist), but so do my current “tu” supermarket jeans.

maxglute 11d ago

Well skimpflation, with caveat that a remarkable amount to R&D is spend into value engineering to lowest price points, like you don't get to 50 cent FOB tshirt trivially. And frankly it's revolutionary - enabling developing country wages to buy clothing on a single day wage. That said, it's 2026... if you want quality and only want to pay marginal increment, there's tons of Chinese ODMs turn direct to consumer, i.e. Quince. They'll sell you functionally top quality (spec for spec inputs if not better) with 1x markup vs 10x brand markup/premium.

Den_VR 11d ago
The world needs more tariffs until there’s non-chinese ODMs selling top quality
- thereisnospork 11d ago
  The world needs better economic policy and regulation so non Chinese ODMs can compete on price/quality.

giancarlostoro 11d ago

Video games are a good example of an area where the pricing makes no sense. Inflation has risen, and they make like $20 or whatever off a brand new game in 1990s bucks. Video game prices will go up more and more, it also kind of explains to me why prices rarely drop below $59 anymore, used to be on Steam some AAA games could be snagged up for $20 after a year, now you can barely find them on reasonable sales, they hold on to dear life on pricing.

01284a7e 11d ago
Sidebar: Don't video games have ever growing competition with existing games? I decided not to buy games until I beat the ones I already have. I am now stuck on NES games and will probably be stuck for the rest of my life.
- 3eb7988a1663 11d ago
  Skyrim came out in 2011 and is at this moment, the 55th highest player count on Steam. Just playing top tier single player games over the past twenty years could keep you incredibly busy.
  - throwup238 11d ago
    Which Skyrim is that? OG Skyrim (Oldrim), Skyrim Legendary edition, Skyrim Special edition, Skyrim VR, Skyrim Anniversary edition, or the Skyrim anniversary upgrade? Are they even the same base SKUs at this point? I don’t want to pull out my gaming desktop but IIRC it was at least three different entries in the Steam library. I wonder if the stats combine them. At this point I’ve spent so much money on Skyrim titles I should get TESVI for free with lifetime DLCs.
    - Telaneo 11d ago
      It's Skyrim Special edition that's on that spot. The OG version hasn't been sold in years on Steam and is tracked separately. The VR edition is sold and tracked separately. The Anniversary edition is sold as DLC for the Special edition, and not as a separate game. I think the Legendary edition was sold as a bundle for the OG version after all the DLCs came out. Either way, it too cannot be bought on Steam any more.

chairmansteve 11d ago

Problem is, you pay 10x for shirt that is made in the same factory as the cheap shiry, just has a different logo.

jolt42 11d ago
10x is not a likely number for quality, but for status symbol cost.
asdff 11d ago
This has become a sort of unintentional skill in the ecommerce era. Everyone is using china, either the actual "first party" brand that is really just ordering bulk from china and reselling it stateside, or the various clones of that brand. The skill then becomes feeling out which of these various products and clones are coming from the better option of the couple chinese manufacturing companies everyone is using, then buying whichever of these is going for cheapest and least shipping headaches. Usually also if a product has been out for a couple years, there's an initial version widely available then an actual 2.0 version that solves a lot of the issues in the first, more sturdy at now known failure points, etc. That 2.0 version actually usually circulates in the no name brands for a little while before the "first party" brand eventually picks it up for their own line.
- account42 10d ago
  This misses the quality control aspect. Just because two items come out the same production line doesn't mean they have the same quality.
  - asdff 10d ago
    I mean, it's a gamble either way. The first party product can be flawed too. The no name product could last for decades.
wafflemaker 11d ago
Not always. I got a pair of T-shirts from These Glory Days. Wore them like 20% of time last two years and they look better then some others after 2 washes (albeit changed from them after coming back to work, and use work clothes at work, so not like they were used THAT much. So it's not always the expensive stuff that's equal to the cheap stuff. And funny thing, got them on a sale because they were pretty cheap, not really because I knew that they were quality. Though had my wife with me when shopping and she might have "felt" the material and said that it was good for that price. Her mum is a seamstress if I remember the word correctly as somebody who sews clothes.

jolt42 11d ago

I think 10x is quite rare. Quality ends up actually curtailing costs to some degree (eg. fewer returns, cheaper marketing - word of mouth). Buy a Weber grill, I had 2 grills before my Weber that lasted 3 seasons between them. I bought the Weber at about 2.2x the cost of the bargain grills and 17 YEARS later it's still going strong, built like a tank. Saved a lot not buying more cheapo grills.

xingped 11d ago
Yes, this is quite common and is usually referred to as "it's expensive to be poor". That said, unfortunately these days it's very difficult to know which brands are still actually quality anymore and which are the ones still coasting on previous good engineering reputation while currently shipping substandard crap to make an extra buck for the bean counters in charge before the ship sinks.
- jerf 11d ago
  Everything has become a lemon market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons Even if a brand stays solid for 100 years, for all I know as I'm standing there in the store deciding whether to buy something, private equity bought them two quarters ago and hollowed them out. Harvard MBAs/private equity sees brand reputation as just another resource to be converted into money. If I were a billionaire my dream would be to create a logo for the "We Put The Extra 10% In It" program where products could advertise that they put the extra effort in. What is really sad to me is that so often it's not even that much extra effort, which is why I say 10% and not 100% or 10x. So often it's just "used a 5 cent metal part instead of a 1.2 cent plastic part". But without a reliable signal that the effort is there MBAs/private equity turns every market everywhere into a lemon market. Way too much tech is applied in manufacturing to turn everything into a lemon market.
  - jolt42 11d ago
    Yeah, hardly anybody in it for the long-haul. I hear we might be living longer relatively soon, maybe that will change the mindset.

svara 11d ago

Absolutely. It's the most visible in services shrinkflation.

HoldOnAMinute 11d ago

Speed Queen appliances are about 2–2.5x longer-lasting for roughly a 50–75% increase in purchase price.

pydry 11d ago

because quality signals are much more misleading these days. can't trust reviews because theyre spammed with fakes. can't trust brands because private equity buy them out and enshittify.

justonceokay 10d ago

If you watch The Price is Right episodes from the 80s, it is clear that household items have only had mild inflation. Many items are prices a little lower than today but not outrageously so. On the other hand, the quality of the items is often much nicer. So someone might win a $500 desk, but that desk is hand-made out of hardwood. Today you can still buy a $500 desk but it will be IKEA quality. A product of comparable quality would cost many $k Airline tickets are a very clear-cut example of this. Tickets are cheaper than they were in the ‘90s (even with inflation) but you get a lot less for that ticket than you did 30 years ago

coderenegade 10d ago
It's less clear cut than that, because modern materials can be better at the job they are designed for. An IKEA kitchen, for instance, might not use traditional wood or stone for its benchtops, but the materials used are actually better in terms of cleaning and handling food on them. It's just that these improvements often get bundled with cheap plastic and parts in other parts of the kitchen to keep costs down. Similarly, cars today are far superior to old cars in terms of safety, and the gains that have been made on the engine side of things are nothing short of incredible. Every modern car is essentially a supercar by the standards of the 90s in terms of oomph per unit of displacement. The problem is that all of the systems have been coupled together, often needlessly, in order to improve telemetry and capture a bigger share of the used market. It's hostile towards the end user. There's no question that the level of quality today is higher, especially where it matters. It's just that value extraction eventually turns hostile towards consumers in the absence of real competition and the need for endless growth.
saturn8601 10d ago
You have to look at it from an item by item basis. There are different reasons for each product. You mentioned household items: This is a combination of two things: 1. Improved QA & reduction of parts thanks to the miracle of Moores law. Ex: a TV used to be a huge collection of boards each doing its own function (power, tuning, picture control, audio). Nows its 1-2 board(power + everything else) with typically one big chip doing everything. Less parts = less chance of failure and each part is QA better thanks to software/industrial automation. 2. These things are benefiting from the low cost of living in places like China. As those countries increase their wealth and alternatives are not found this disparity disappears and you finally pay the real cost of the item but you still benefited from Moores law. TVs deflated insanely, other appliances less so but it averages out to 0 again thanks to Moores law. Now look at a desk. The only way it benefits from Moores law is possibly via assembly and techniques used to reduce waste. That probably where IKEA's excellent ability to turn sawdust + glue into furniture comes from. That is real value that is returned back to you in the form of similar raw numerical prices as old wood tables from decades ago. Machinery can automate the creation of a table made out of what is technically "wood" (sawdust was at one point wood wasn't it?) and computer software allowed designers to create appealing designs and more easily optimize them to target that same number people paid in the 70s(even though it isnt the real number inflation adjusted). An old table used real wood that probably came from an old growth tree that no longer exists because the value came from decades (or centuries) of "work" done by nature. Exchanging money for that same amount of value that would reveal the diminished value of the currency if you were to get that same thing today. You cant exchange the exact dollar amount and you are not feeling that the modern IKEA take is an improvement/equivalent over the old growth wood. Essentially the free market could not make a 1-to-1 replica/improved product using something like moores law so that same value costs more today. That difference in quality between the Ikea table and the old wood table is still there its just that most consumers dont see it or dont want to see it since they may not be able to afford the old style of table. >Airline tickets are a very clear-cut example of this. Tickets are cheaper than they were in the ‘90s (even with inflation) but you get a lot less for that ticket than you did 30 years ago This is a mixed bag in my opinion: Airlines have benefited from Moores Law. I watched so many "aviation" youtube channels and my god, the accidents from the early days of aviation are truly nightmare inducing and heartbreaking tragedies. Today thanks to computerization(Moores law), pilots are so much better trained, airplanes are so many orders of magnitude better in terms of safety and fallbacks and fuel is reduced as a result of all of this technology as well. This helped cut costs and also allowed Airlines to provide more classes of service. If you fly first class all in, you get service closer to what you got 30 years ago because you are paying for the same value as 30 years ago. At the same time, fuel itself comes from a non-renewable resource that included dinosaurs, sea algae, and plants that spent a lifetime doing the work to accumulate energy from the sun and then be stored in a format that can be exploited centuries later. You life's comforts comes from all that work done centuries ago and its not unlimited. Thus as fuel becomes harder to get, the numerical dollar amount goes up and is reflected in tocket costs. Its just that the other reductions didn't make it as evident. As a side note with the Iran war and the loss of companies like Spirit, more are now being exposed to the fact that todays dollar isn't the same as yesterdays dollar. Those low cost options are just going away because finally the free ride given to use by cheap fossil fuels is going away and things like moores law have already reached the limit of where you can add value to keep the number close to the 70s dollar number.

_moof 10d ago

Walmart used to be (and maybe still is?) known for doing this. They would get companies to produce lower-quality versions of products under the same name as the standard versions available elsewhere. They could sell them for cheaper and consumers were none the wiser - or so the theory went, anyway. Obviously people caught on.

greenavocado 10d ago
People have caught on and nothing can be done because all ten "brands" are produced on the same machine in Ohio
mitxela 10d ago
I've noticed this at Aldi too. Boxes of muesli that look 30% cheaper than at other supermarkets... but when you look closer, the box is 3/4 the size and it's only 3/4 full. I don't regularly shop at Aldi.
- ninalanyon 10d ago
  Don't you look at the unit price? Price per kg or litre.
  - OptionOfT 8d ago
    In the US that's annoying, sometimes they show price per oz, other times price per lbs.

thaumasiotes 10d ago

> my theory is that the decline in quality is another hidden form of inflation That is a well-known phenomenon, usually called "shrinkflation". (After the fact that the easiest way to lower quality while keeping the price consistent is to just give you less stuff for the same price.) Although all economists are made aware of the phenomenon, they seem to be just as prone to the illusion as anyone else. Here you can see Tyler Cowen weighing in on a Twitter debate about the price of a meal at Chipotle: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/08/usa-fact-of-the-day-17.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/08/us... A burrito is sold for the same price (well, 4.6% higher) now that it was 15 years ago. Case closed! Stop complaining about Chipotle's pricing. Is it the same burrito? Deep in the comments "Michael" reports, from current and archived Chipotle menu tools, that a steak burrito bowl in 2015 contained 875 calories and the same exact menu order in 2026 contained 830 calories... with 80 calories out of that 45 calorie difference representing additional steak in the 2015 bowl.

nextlevelwizard 10d ago

This just isn't true. What has happened is that companies try to cut costs at every point to make more and more profit since that is what capitalism just does. There are two ways to submit to capitalism when making products either mass producing the cheapest crap possible with hair thin margins, but since you make so much and they last so little you still make bank. The other is to make ridiculously over priced luxury goods that rich assholes buy because they want lovingly hand crafted quality instead of the cheap crap, but of course you are marking it up 100-1000 times the price just because you can. What cannot survive in capitalistic world is the good mid ground of lovingly produced products that actually last and are good quality, because those don't sell as often as they last for a life time or three and you can't gauge the price. Sure there is a sub section of the economy that literally cannot afford but the cheapest thing, but they need to keep buying same thing year after year as it won't last and thus their children are cursed to suffer the same fate as they cannot inherit any good quality furniture or cars or even houses, everything is just cheaply made consumable with no expectation that it will last longer than a year or two

etruong42 10d ago

I frame it more of a moral problem. Like, at least 90% a moral problem as a conservative estimate. People need to care in aggregate. There are forces that make people care less. Perhaps US healthcare is a prime example. Medical professionals are burning out, prices are going through the roof, and outcomes are getting worse all at the same time. If there are doctors who are working themselves ragged AND people are still paying through the nose, why is healthcare still getting worse? The same forces that we can see as plain as day in U.S. healthcare are affecting... everything.