4 ms·

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

by 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.
  - WalterBright 11d ago
    And yet it's socialism that has a reputation for shoddy products. How many people want to buy a Lada?
    - tristor 11d ago
      [flagged]
      - tomhow 11d ago
        We've asked you before not to post slurs against groups of people on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. Please stop. We have to ban accounts that do this habitually. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        deleted 11d ago
        [deleted]
    - Xirdus 11d ago
      Both historical socialism and current-stage capitalism suffer from the exact same problem - lack of competition and limited access to information. They arrived there in vastly different ways but in both cases it's very hard both to know how to obtain higher quality goods, and to actually obtain them once you know how. Compare to 1960s USA where it was quite easy to know which car/drill/grill/TV/pants/table/etc. is guaranteed to last you years.
      - WalterBright 11d ago
        I lived through the 60s and know what the goods were. TVs, for example. They had tubes then, and crummy B+W pictures. They were constantly going on the fritz, to the point that drugstores had tube testing stations. You'd bring in the tubes from the TV and test them in this device that looked like an arcade game, and buy replacements. Cars then required a lot more maintenance then. And I mean a lot. I've owned and repaired them. I can go on, but the point is made.
  - VorpalWay 11d ago
    One signal (not fool proof, but often a good signal): what length of warranty do they offer? If some brand has a warranty significantly above the average for the product type, that can be a good sign. And I'm not talking about offering extended warranty programs or such here. Just the basic warranty everyone gets when they buy the product.
    - fxtentacle 10d ago
      I got 3x Bose QuietComfort 35 2 by buying 1. They did honor their warranty, but my impression was that they plan for people not going through the effort of actually requesting a replacement item, even though the warranty says they can.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 11d ago
      A buddy of mine paid a premium to get some fancy umbrella with a lifetime warranty. It had a failure at some point, they replaced it with a worse quality one. Another failure, and he got another step down in quality. So, the company kinda honored the contract.
      - saturn8601 11d ago
        There is also other tricks I fell for. I think I saw a recommendation for Travelpro on Buy it for life(Its been a while so dont remember fully). Nice luggage but expensive. I took a risk and bought it. I received it the day I was rushing to travel and there was some "registration card" that you had to fill out by a certain time that unlocked lifetime warranty else you were stuck with a shorter limited warranty. That card got accidently thrown out by a family member while I was on a trip. It apparently had some serial number or something on it. To make matters worse, the zipper got damaged after 1-2 uses and it was just outside the shorter warranty. I had to go to a local luggage place that had a relationship with them and they were able to get it replaced. (I wanted it fixed but Travelpro only offered replacement). Im hoping it does not break again. If you are going to advertise this warranty just make it the default! I went back to those reddit posts and I started to suspect there is some astroturfing going on so I don't even know if this is a reliable luggage or if it is just junk. It was so expensive and I honestly thought I bought it for life.
  - Thlom 11d ago
    Yeah. On various "Buy it for life" forums it's a daily occurence that someone mentions a brand they bought 5 years ago and then someone chimes in that they were sold or restructured last year and now it's no longer "buy it for life". Some brands kind of split up so products sold in one market is cheap knockoffs while products sold in the home market is still high quality manufactured at the old factory with 100 years old machinery and experienced workers. If you want to buy quality you've got to do deep research first.
    - account42 10d ago
      Perhaps selling a company should mean the trademarks are lost. After all, the entire point of trade marks is to protect consumers.
  - iamnothere 11d ago
    I wish more brands would follow the Newman’s Own charity model. All profits go to charity, so there isn’t an incentive to hollow out the brand, and the products are a reliable quality at a decent price. Apparently they set up an organization to help other people do this: https://100forpurpose.org/ https://100forpurpose.org/
    - AnthonyMouse 10d ago
      The general problem with this is that starting a business generally requires money, which for-profit companies get from investors. For a non-profit to do it they need to get it from donors, and then your actual complaint isn't that nobody is willing to start a company that works that way, it's that people (e.g. you and your friends) haven't donated enough money to make it happen. But something that might be interesting is to start a non-profit whose mission is to create value for customers (i.e. produce non-garbage products), and then all profits go not to a separate charity but to increasing the number of product lines the company produces. Then spin the new product lines off into independent non-profits with the same charter so the organization doesn't become large and bureaucratic or suffer permanent collapse as a result of a single period of poorly chosen upper management.
      - iamnothere 10d ago
        Yes, it’s difficult to start companies like this for the reason you mentioned. Most companies that follow this model come from a singular founder/donor who is interested in charity. I do like the suggestion of building a charity that spins off nonprofit companies.
    - jolt42 10d ago
      When Newman and his friend A.E. Hotchner launched the company in 1982, it started entirely as a joke. They were mixing salad dressing in a barn using a canoe paddle, bottling it in old wine jars to give to friends for Christmas. Once they decided to sell it, Newman felt it would be "tacky" to profit off his own face and celebrity status. Instead, he decided to lean into what he called "shameless exploitation for the common good"
  - saturn8601 11d ago
    Worker owned cooperatives could be a reliable indicator however i'm not sure there are many examples of this being scaled upwards, like could an airline do that? Could they even have an option for a worker owned company provide an alternative for everything in the economy? You need capital to make a competitor and all the capital is rapidly being sucked up by the people enshittifying everything. The answer probably lies in fixing government so that they can go after these players. However to fix government you need massive buy in from both the left and the right and there lies the crux. Our system forces us to cater to the lowest common denominator voter. Until that is fixed we can't go back to the status quo. Maybe its not possible anymore as our currency gets inflated down to nothing. The alternative could be to just live in this enshittified system, leave the US to a country with a functioning government, or just accept that mass consumerism has run its course and lower your lifestyle needs to only own less items but of higher quality that have been researched(this requires time investment so you are forced to research what is good which limits how much you can cover if you consume too much).
    - slumberlust 10d ago
      Would Publix count as a co-op?
      - anjel 10d ago
        Win-Co, a US western states supermkt chain is employee-owned
  - suburban_strike 11d ago
    We need more supply-chain visibility. Currently we have none, hence this problem. Consider all the farm bio-outbreaks. We're told "Americans won't do these [farm] jobs" but they neglect to mention the subpar pay and working conditions. Thus the slaves that take these jobs have no knowledge of their rights, have limited education and literacy, have dubious residence status, and are not inclined to blow the whistle when they witness crops destined for human consumption being fertilized with industrial amounts of human shit (biosolids). Meanwhile, conservatives blame the workers themselves for contaminating the product. This cycle will never end until we have more stakeholders working the fields. Same goes for Tyson and their chicken farms staffed by Somalis. Not saying anything about them specifically but outsourcing all labor to foreigners denies all visibility and access into our own food production. They could get away with packaging human meat and none of us would know it because none of us can afford to work there and see for ourselves. Our regulatory agencies are all compromised and can't be trusted to do it, so it's a free for all. If you had like-minded people positioned close enough to supervise production and ensure that the product meets a certain set of high standards (call this "keeping kosher"), you would no longer have to worry about ingredients being replaced with foam, sawdust and heavy metals to satisfy those MBAs.
  - huurtehoog 10d ago
    People blame MBAs a lot, but most CEOs are Engineers or Economists by training.
    - vjvjvjvjghv 10d ago
      It's the MBA mindset. I think about it in simplified way that in the past a lot of businesses weren't run mainly for profit. So a plumber focused on plumbing first and set prices to have enough profit to live. Once the MBA/PE mindset comes in, they think about maximum profit first and plumbing is just a secondary thing. I have seen that with dentists, vets and many contractors.
      - huurtehoog 10d ago
        It's a common trope but I think it is a 2020 The Atlantic article being half remembered https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/how-mckinsey-destroyed-middle-class/605878/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/how-mckins... History shows profit maximizing behavior in letters dating to 1900 BCE Egypt and 1800 BCE Anatolia by Assyrian merchant houses. I appreciate the analysis you're making, again, but it is low resolution. There's a lot more nuance to what you're saying and it definitely doesn't come down to MBA graduates in the past few decades. The consultancy-private equity complex for example is a big part of the shift in American culture after "Greed is Good" was said out loud in the 1980s. Why this cultural shift happened? "Because MBAs" is not as much of an answer as it is bar talk simplistic hand waving to end a conversation and change subject.
        cestith 10d ago
        The cultural shift happened largely because investment banking, venture capital, and leveraged buyout raiders didn't really exist before in any meaningful way compared to today. People should be careful by the way, especially here, trashing "private equity" altogether when they mean the leveraged buyout folks. Venture capital is a type of private equity, too. The Chicago school hadn't yet convinced everyone that fiduciary responsibility to shareholders was the prime concern of the C-suite and the board either. Those were economists, not MBAs. Deregulating the market also played a part. Leveraged buyouts used to boom when another industry went bust. Companies would save some assets of a company that might otherwise be liquidated altogether, and sometimes rebuilt the company into a healthy one. Think junk bonds, the S&L crisis, the dotcom bust, and such. PE also used to take over lots of family-run businesses with succession issues so the companies could continue. With relaxation of laws and regulations and more examples set by financiers, more of the acquisitions landscape shifted toward the corporate raider type of LBO.
- jolt42 11d ago
  True, recently Rachel Ray sold her dog food brand. I didn't know until my dog started having digestion issues with it. That's how I found out it had been sold and other dogs were also having issues. Apparently buyer cheapened the recipe. At least we have the internet to quickly get the word out that it isn't what it used to be.
  - techpression 11d ago
    There’s a special place in hell for people who would buy a dog food brand only to make worse dog food…
    - ElProlactin 11d ago
      > There’s a special place in hell for people who would buy a dog food brand only to make worse dog food… And yet countless millions of people basically say nothing about how the food they eat is produced.
      - techpression 10d ago
        As someone who works very close to this I’m well aware, it’s also very visible when you look at trends over decades in most populations. It has significant impact on a lot of people.
      - account42 10d ago
        I agree that we shouldn't treat humans worse than animals but one important factor here is that humans are much better at expressing themselves when their body badly reacts to some food. Animals often lack the ability to tell you that something is wrong and some may even be genetically inclined to actively hide any issues from you as showing weakness would have gotten their ancestors killed in the wild.
    - edmundsauto 10d ago
      The steelman is that by lowering the cost, more pets can afford better food than what they currently eat. No comment about whether that is reflected in the consumer facing price or in profits.
- testdelacc1 11d ago
  > it’s expensive to be poor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory “The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
  - jolt42 11d ago
    It really pisses me off there are used car lots that obviously prey on the poor. I asked for their cash price and they wouldn't give me one, or it was ridiculously priced. They just want for people to pay off a debt and all the interest that goes with it.
    - lazyasciiart 11d ago
      Even worse: they want people to fail to pay it off, so they get half the debt amount and then get the car back to do it again.
    - WalterBright 11d ago
      A car dealership makes most of their money off of the financing. > I asked for their cash price and they wouldn't give me one When I bought a car from a dealer, the dealer told me that what I wanted was impossible. So I walked out and got in my car, and started to back out. The salesman came running out and agreed to my terms. The trick to making a good deal is a willingness to walk away. P.S. My accounting teacher used to work at a used car lot. He explained to me that poor people tended to screw themselves by not understanding how financing works. He'd try to explain it to them, and they'd accuse him of trying to screw them, and they'd go for the more expensive option. I tell this story to people who say that learning math in school is irrelevant. I also remember a Frontline episode years ago on 401k plans. One company had an identical plan for all employees. The reporters discovered that the higher paid employees had better returns on the 401k plans. Why was it that the lower paid ones did poorly with them? It was they did not understand how to manage investments.
- Terr_ 11d ago
  > difficult to know which brands are still actually quality anymore I haven't verified its accuracy, but I had a tab open for this from HN a while back: > The Brand Ledger tracks 397 brands, from the tools in your garage to the pans in your kitchen. Who owns them, what they used to be, whether they're still worth buying. https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/ https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/
  - jolt42 11d ago
    It doesn't seem they address the quality of the final products, just how the companies are run. Anecdotally, I know tons of nurses wear Hoka shoes and act like they are to die for, but yet Hoka is on the avoid list. It would be more interesting rather than some vague articles about the brand to actually compare reviews before / after or how they match up against Consumer Reports --- a much more valuable resource in my mind.
  - hn_acc1 11d ago
    Yeah, not sure I would rely on that.. Sure, they have Knipex and Klein on the approved list (which, AFAIK, is true), but then they list Warby Parker (read reddit - has gone WAY downhill), Cutco (by all accounts, a total rip-off and super low-quality knives requiring you to constantly get them sharpened) and Henkels, which also makes some pretty suspect knives, AFAIK.
    - teh_klev 11d ago
      There's two Henckels listed: https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/henckels-international https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/henckels-internatio... https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/zwilling https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/zwilling The first one is on their watchlist and probably the brand you're thinking of?
      - fxtentacle 10d ago
        The first one, "Henckels", openly says that their stuff is from China. But the second link, "Zwilling" says "Approved". But boy was I disappointed that their "Zwilling Peak" branded ceramic hybrid frying pan for $100 says "Made in China".
- BoingBoomTschak 11d ago
  If you want one I continue to really trust almost blindly: Genelec (Finnish pro audio). Not even that expensive for what it is.
- yourapostasy 10d ago
  A current rough rule of thumb I currently use: if private equity buys out a company I'm using, I bail for the next best competitor within a couple years. If it is a US private equity firm, within a year. There are exceptions. It isn't hard though these days to look up the firms' histories and then look up customer conversations on the Net about those historical portco's. More importantly, it isn't hard to look up the people behind the private equity firms (though I find it harder to link specific partners with specific portco's), and avoid the ones you see with a track record you want to dissociate from. Before the Net, this kind of research took days to assemble in libraries. With the Net and LLM's, it is very fast. Remember capitalism is a tool that is supposed to cut both ways, both for the producer and for the consumer. Simultaneously.
- toofy 10d ago
  i think the only solution to this is to force a company to rebrand when they purchase a brand. otherwise we end up exactly where we are, private equity buying out a brand, obfuscating that it’s no longer the same company, slowly sucking the life out of the product and screwing the public over. if we make them always rebrand, we would at least be more aware when purchasing. it’s kind of funny how certain people will tell us to vote with our wallets on a product, but they intentionally obfuscate everything about the product so we can’t make informed purchases. could you imagine if we had to “do your own research” on every single thing you purchase? just think of how many items you purchase from the grocery store alone every month. it’s unreal we allow them to get away with hiding what they’re doing. a great example is the sibling poster who talked about the dogfood being changed and messing up their dogs stomach… just trash behavior by these companies.
  - Jaygles 10d ago
    I'd be for forcing companies to list the top-level "owning" entity on all product labels
- ajsnigrutin 10d ago
  To be fair, mandatory warranty has added a lot to that. Most larger electronics (washing machines, fridges, dryers, ovens, etc.) have a mandatory 5y warranty in most european countries, and since the profit margins are so low, even the cheapest washing machine (~250eur range) has to survive the daily use of a family with three kids (or even multiple daily uses) for at least five years, since even a single replacement/repair eats away profits of dozens others sold. "back in the time", you'd skip the cheapest stuff, now i just say "buy the cheapest one, it'll work for at least five years", and in 99.9%, it's actually true.
- mikestew 10d ago
  Ran into that with an Oxo coffee grinder recently. Old one died, bought the exact same one again. And that motor sounds just a little more tinny than the old one, and the whole thing seems just a little more...rattly than the old one. I am not exactly sure where they cut the corners, but corners were indeed cut. Oh, and the new one was $10 more, so the savings were most definitely not passed onto me.
- Coeur 10d ago
  The problem here is an information imbalance between seller and buyer. This could be solved via regulation (unlikely to happen in the US). Another solution would be independent testing labs / publications. To stay independent, they can't finance themselves using ads. Would people be ok to pay for information, on the internet? For $1000 lawn mower maybe, what about for a $50 kitchen appliance?
- merth 10d ago
  We should demand a full 10-year warranty as proof of quality. If a manufacturer genuinely believes its product is built to last, it should be willing to stand behind it.
wj 10d ago
The Weber kettle grill is one of my favorite examples of quality in another way—function. It is built well but it also is such a wonderfully simple design that provides quite a bit of flexibility. I have the Smokey Mountain which is amazing at holding heat but a total PIA to clean. Have one of their gas grills as well on a built in line, and it is fairly high quality also. Nothing tops the kettle though.
montagg 10d ago
See also: Sam Vimes Boot Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
Agentlien 10d ago
I love my Weber and I was amused to see the instruction manual specifically saying that when it's time to take your outdoor furniture inside for the winter, leave the Weber, it's built to handle it.

by jolt42 11d ago

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.
- WalterBright 11d ago
  And yet it's socialism that has a reputation for shoddy products. How many people want to buy a Lada?
  - tristor 11d ago
    [flagged]
    - tomhow 11d ago
      We've asked you before not to post slurs against groups of people on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. Please stop. We have to ban accounts that do this habitually. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - deleted 11d ago
        [deleted]
  - Xirdus 11d ago
    Both historical socialism and current-stage capitalism suffer from the exact same problem - lack of competition and limited access to information. They arrived there in vastly different ways but in both cases it's very hard both to know how to obtain higher quality goods, and to actually obtain them once you know how. Compare to 1960s USA where it was quite easy to know which car/drill/grill/TV/pants/table/etc. is guaranteed to last you years.
    - WalterBright 11d ago
      I lived through the 60s and know what the goods were. TVs, for example. They had tubes then, and crummy B+W pictures. They were constantly going on the fritz, to the point that drugstores had tube testing stations. You'd bring in the tubes from the TV and test them in this device that looked like an arcade game, and buy replacements. Cars then required a lot more maintenance then. And I mean a lot. I've owned and repaired them. I can go on, but the point is made.
- VorpalWay 11d ago
  One signal (not fool proof, but often a good signal): what length of warranty do they offer? If some brand has a warranty significantly above the average for the product type, that can be a good sign. And I'm not talking about offering extended warranty programs or such here. Just the basic warranty everyone gets when they buy the product.
  - fxtentacle 10d ago
    I got 3x Bose QuietComfort 35 2 by buying 1. They did honor their warranty, but my impression was that they plan for people not going through the effort of actually requesting a replacement item, even though the warranty says they can.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 11d ago
    A buddy of mine paid a premium to get some fancy umbrella with a lifetime warranty. It had a failure at some point, they replaced it with a worse quality one. Another failure, and he got another step down in quality. So, the company kinda honored the contract.
    - saturn8601 11d ago
      There is also other tricks I fell for. I think I saw a recommendation for Travelpro on Buy it for life(Its been a while so dont remember fully). Nice luggage but expensive. I took a risk and bought it. I received it the day I was rushing to travel and there was some "registration card" that you had to fill out by a certain time that unlocked lifetime warranty else you were stuck with a shorter limited warranty. That card got accidently thrown out by a family member while I was on a trip. It apparently had some serial number or something on it. To make matters worse, the zipper got damaged after 1-2 uses and it was just outside the shorter warranty. I had to go to a local luggage place that had a relationship with them and they were able to get it replaced. (I wanted it fixed but Travelpro only offered replacement). Im hoping it does not break again. If you are going to advertise this warranty just make it the default! I went back to those reddit posts and I started to suspect there is some astroturfing going on so I don't even know if this is a reliable luggage or if it is just junk. It was so expensive and I honestly thought I bought it for life.
- Thlom 11d ago
  Yeah. On various "Buy it for life" forums it's a daily occurence that someone mentions a brand they bought 5 years ago and then someone chimes in that they were sold or restructured last year and now it's no longer "buy it for life". Some brands kind of split up so products sold in one market is cheap knockoffs while products sold in the home market is still high quality manufactured at the old factory with 100 years old machinery and experienced workers. If you want to buy quality you've got to do deep research first.
  - account42 10d ago
    Perhaps selling a company should mean the trademarks are lost. After all, the entire point of trade marks is to protect consumers.
- iamnothere 11d ago
  I wish more brands would follow the Newman’s Own charity model. All profits go to charity, so there isn’t an incentive to hollow out the brand, and the products are a reliable quality at a decent price. Apparently they set up an organization to help other people do this: https://100forpurpose.org/ https://100forpurpose.org/
  - AnthonyMouse 10d ago
    The general problem with this is that starting a business generally requires money, which for-profit companies get from investors. For a non-profit to do it they need to get it from donors, and then your actual complaint isn't that nobody is willing to start a company that works that way, it's that people (e.g. you and your friends) haven't donated enough money to make it happen. But something that might be interesting is to start a non-profit whose mission is to create value for customers (i.e. produce non-garbage products), and then all profits go not to a separate charity but to increasing the number of product lines the company produces. Then spin the new product lines off into independent non-profits with the same charter so the organization doesn't become large and bureaucratic or suffer permanent collapse as a result of a single period of poorly chosen upper management.
    - iamnothere 10d ago
      Yes, it’s difficult to start companies like this for the reason you mentioned. Most companies that follow this model come from a singular founder/donor who is interested in charity. I do like the suggestion of building a charity that spins off nonprofit companies.
  - jolt42 10d ago
    When Newman and his friend A.E. Hotchner launched the company in 1982, it started entirely as a joke. They were mixing salad dressing in a barn using a canoe paddle, bottling it in old wine jars to give to friends for Christmas. Once they decided to sell it, Newman felt it would be "tacky" to profit off his own face and celebrity status. Instead, he decided to lean into what he called "shameless exploitation for the common good"
- saturn8601 11d ago
  Worker owned cooperatives could be a reliable indicator however i'm not sure there are many examples of this being scaled upwards, like could an airline do that? Could they even have an option for a worker owned company provide an alternative for everything in the economy? You need capital to make a competitor and all the capital is rapidly being sucked up by the people enshittifying everything. The answer probably lies in fixing government so that they can go after these players. However to fix government you need massive buy in from both the left and the right and there lies the crux. Our system forces us to cater to the lowest common denominator voter. Until that is fixed we can't go back to the status quo. Maybe its not possible anymore as our currency gets inflated down to nothing. The alternative could be to just live in this enshittified system, leave the US to a country with a functioning government, or just accept that mass consumerism has run its course and lower your lifestyle needs to only own less items but of higher quality that have been researched(this requires time investment so you are forced to research what is good which limits how much you can cover if you consume too much).
  - slumberlust 10d ago
    Would Publix count as a co-op?
    - anjel 10d ago
      Win-Co, a US western states supermkt chain is employee-owned
- suburban_strike 11d ago
  We need more supply-chain visibility. Currently we have none, hence this problem. Consider all the farm bio-outbreaks. We're told "Americans won't do these [farm] jobs" but they neglect to mention the subpar pay and working conditions. Thus the slaves that take these jobs have no knowledge of their rights, have limited education and literacy, have dubious residence status, and are not inclined to blow the whistle when they witness crops destined for human consumption being fertilized with industrial amounts of human shit (biosolids). Meanwhile, conservatives blame the workers themselves for contaminating the product. This cycle will never end until we have more stakeholders working the fields. Same goes for Tyson and their chicken farms staffed by Somalis. Not saying anything about them specifically but outsourcing all labor to foreigners denies all visibility and access into our own food production. They could get away with packaging human meat and none of us would know it because none of us can afford to work there and see for ourselves. Our regulatory agencies are all compromised and can't be trusted to do it, so it's a free for all. If you had like-minded people positioned close enough to supervise production and ensure that the product meets a certain set of high standards (call this "keeping kosher"), you would no longer have to worry about ingredients being replaced with foam, sawdust and heavy metals to satisfy those MBAs.
- huurtehoog 10d ago
  People blame MBAs a lot, but most CEOs are Engineers or Economists by training.
  - vjvjvjvjghv 10d ago
    It's the MBA mindset. I think about it in simplified way that in the past a lot of businesses weren't run mainly for profit. So a plumber focused on plumbing first and set prices to have enough profit to live. Once the MBA/PE mindset comes in, they think about maximum profit first and plumbing is just a secondary thing. I have seen that with dentists, vets and many contractors.
    - huurtehoog 10d ago
      It's a common trope but I think it is a 2020 The Atlantic article being half remembered https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/how-mckinsey-destroyed-middle-class/605878/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/how-mckins... History shows profit maximizing behavior in letters dating to 1900 BCE Egypt and 1800 BCE Anatolia by Assyrian merchant houses. I appreciate the analysis you're making, again, but it is low resolution. There's a lot more nuance to what you're saying and it definitely doesn't come down to MBA graduates in the past few decades. The consultancy-private equity complex for example is a big part of the shift in American culture after "Greed is Good" was said out loud in the 1980s. Why this cultural shift happened? "Because MBAs" is not as much of an answer as it is bar talk simplistic hand waving to end a conversation and change subject.
      - cestith 10d ago
        The cultural shift happened largely because investment banking, venture capital, and leveraged buyout raiders didn't really exist before in any meaningful way compared to today. People should be careful by the way, especially here, trashing "private equity" altogether when they mean the leveraged buyout folks. Venture capital is a type of private equity, too. The Chicago school hadn't yet convinced everyone that fiduciary responsibility to shareholders was the prime concern of the C-suite and the board either. Those were economists, not MBAs. Deregulating the market also played a part. Leveraged buyouts used to boom when another industry went bust. Companies would save some assets of a company that might otherwise be liquidated altogether, and sometimes rebuilt the company into a healthy one. Think junk bonds, the S&L crisis, the dotcom bust, and such. PE also used to take over lots of family-run businesses with succession issues so the companies could continue. With relaxation of laws and regulations and more examples set by financiers, more of the acquisitions landscape shifted toward the corporate raider type of LBO.
jolt42 11d ago
True, recently Rachel Ray sold her dog food brand. I didn't know until my dog started having digestion issues with it. That's how I found out it had been sold and other dogs were also having issues. Apparently buyer cheapened the recipe. At least we have the internet to quickly get the word out that it isn't what it used to be.
- techpression 11d ago
  There’s a special place in hell for people who would buy a dog food brand only to make worse dog food…
  - ElProlactin 11d ago
    > There’s a special place in hell for people who would buy a dog food brand only to make worse dog food… And yet countless millions of people basically say nothing about how the food they eat is produced.
    - techpression 10d ago
      As someone who works very close to this I’m well aware, it’s also very visible when you look at trends over decades in most populations. It has significant impact on a lot of people.
    - account42 10d ago
      I agree that we shouldn't treat humans worse than animals but one important factor here is that humans are much better at expressing themselves when their body badly reacts to some food. Animals often lack the ability to tell you that something is wrong and some may even be genetically inclined to actively hide any issues from you as showing weakness would have gotten their ancestors killed in the wild.
  - edmundsauto 10d ago
    The steelman is that by lowering the cost, more pets can afford better food than what they currently eat. No comment about whether that is reflected in the consumer facing price or in profits.
testdelacc1 11d ago
> it’s expensive to be poor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory “The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
- jolt42 11d ago
  It really pisses me off there are used car lots that obviously prey on the poor. I asked for their cash price and they wouldn't give me one, or it was ridiculously priced. They just want for people to pay off a debt and all the interest that goes with it.
  - lazyasciiart 11d ago
    Even worse: they want people to fail to pay it off, so they get half the debt amount and then get the car back to do it again.
  - WalterBright 11d ago
    A car dealership makes most of their money off of the financing. > I asked for their cash price and they wouldn't give me one When I bought a car from a dealer, the dealer told me that what I wanted was impossible. So I walked out and got in my car, and started to back out. The salesman came running out and agreed to my terms. The trick to making a good deal is a willingness to walk away. P.S. My accounting teacher used to work at a used car lot. He explained to me that poor people tended to screw themselves by not understanding how financing works. He'd try to explain it to them, and they'd accuse him of trying to screw them, and they'd go for the more expensive option. I tell this story to people who say that learning math in school is irrelevant. I also remember a Frontline episode years ago on 401k plans. One company had an identical plan for all employees. The reporters discovered that the higher paid employees had better returns on the 401k plans. Why was it that the lower paid ones did poorly with them? It was they did not understand how to manage investments.
Terr_ 11d ago
> difficult to know which brands are still actually quality anymore I haven't verified its accuracy, but I had a tab open for this from HN a while back: > The Brand Ledger tracks 397 brands, from the tools in your garage to the pans in your kitchen. Who owns them, what they used to be, whether they're still worth buying. https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/ https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/
- jolt42 11d ago
  It doesn't seem they address the quality of the final products, just how the companies are run. Anecdotally, I know tons of nurses wear Hoka shoes and act like they are to die for, but yet Hoka is on the avoid list. It would be more interesting rather than some vague articles about the brand to actually compare reviews before / after or how they match up against Consumer Reports --- a much more valuable resource in my mind.
- hn_acc1 11d ago
  Yeah, not sure I would rely on that.. Sure, they have Knipex and Klein on the approved list (which, AFAIK, is true), but then they list Warby Parker (read reddit - has gone WAY downhill), Cutco (by all accounts, a total rip-off and super low-quality knives requiring you to constantly get them sharpened) and Henkels, which also makes some pretty suspect knives, AFAIK.
  - teh_klev 11d ago
    There's two Henckels listed: https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/henckels-international https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/henckels-internatio... https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/zwilling https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/zwilling The first one is on their watchlist and probably the brand you're thinking of?
    - fxtentacle 10d ago
      The first one, "Henckels", openly says that their stuff is from China. But the second link, "Zwilling" says "Approved". But boy was I disappointed that their "Zwilling Peak" branded ceramic hybrid frying pan for $100 says "Made in China".
BoingBoomTschak 11d ago
If you want one I continue to really trust almost blindly: Genelec (Finnish pro audio). Not even that expensive for what it is.
yourapostasy 10d ago
A current rough rule of thumb I currently use: if private equity buys out a company I'm using, I bail for the next best competitor within a couple years. If it is a US private equity firm, within a year. There are exceptions. It isn't hard though these days to look up the firms' histories and then look up customer conversations on the Net about those historical portco's. More importantly, it isn't hard to look up the people behind the private equity firms (though I find it harder to link specific partners with specific portco's), and avoid the ones you see with a track record you want to dissociate from. Before the Net, this kind of research took days to assemble in libraries. With the Net and LLM's, it is very fast. Remember capitalism is a tool that is supposed to cut both ways, both for the producer and for the consumer. Simultaneously.
toofy 10d ago
i think the only solution to this is to force a company to rebrand when they purchase a brand. otherwise we end up exactly where we are, private equity buying out a brand, obfuscating that it’s no longer the same company, slowly sucking the life out of the product and screwing the public over. if we make them always rebrand, we would at least be more aware when purchasing. it’s kind of funny how certain people will tell us to vote with our wallets on a product, but they intentionally obfuscate everything about the product so we can’t make informed purchases. could you imagine if we had to “do your own research” on every single thing you purchase? just think of how many items you purchase from the grocery store alone every month. it’s unreal we allow them to get away with hiding what they’re doing. a great example is the sibling poster who talked about the dogfood being changed and messing up their dogs stomach… just trash behavior by these companies.
- Jaygles 10d ago
  I'd be for forcing companies to list the top-level "owning" entity on all product labels
ajsnigrutin 10d ago
To be fair, mandatory warranty has added a lot to that. Most larger electronics (washing machines, fridges, dryers, ovens, etc.) have a mandatory 5y warranty in most european countries, and since the profit margins are so low, even the cheapest washing machine (~250eur range) has to survive the daily use of a family with three kids (or even multiple daily uses) for at least five years, since even a single replacement/repair eats away profits of dozens others sold. "back in the time", you'd skip the cheapest stuff, now i just say "buy the cheapest one, it'll work for at least five years", and in 99.9%, it's actually true.
mikestew 10d ago
Ran into that with an Oxo coffee grinder recently. Old one died, bought the exact same one again. And that motor sounds just a little more tinny than the old one, and the whole thing seems just a little more...rattly than the old one. I am not exactly sure where they cut the corners, but corners were indeed cut. Oh, and the new one was $10 more, so the savings were most definitely not passed onto me.
Coeur 10d ago
The problem here is an information imbalance between seller and buyer. This could be solved via regulation (unlikely to happen in the US). Another solution would be independent testing labs / publications. To stay independent, they can't finance themselves using ads. Would people be ok to pay for information, on the internet? For $1000 lawn mower maybe, what about for a $50 kitchen appliance?
merth 10d ago
We should demand a full 10-year warranty as proof of quality. If a manufacturer genuinely believes its product is built to last, it should be willing to stand behind it.

wj 10d ago

The Weber kettle grill is one of my favorite examples of quality in another way—function. It is built well but it also is such a wonderfully simple design that provides quite a bit of flexibility. I have the Smokey Mountain which is amazing at holding heat but a total PIA to clean. Have one of their gas grills as well on a built in line, and it is fairly high quality also. Nothing tops the kettle though.

montagg 10d ago

See also: Sam Vimes Boot Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

Agentlien 10d ago

I love my Weber and I was amused to see the instruction manual specifically saying that when it's time to take your outdoor furniture inside for the winter, leave the Weber, it's built to handle it.