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“Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get discontinued (2019)

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Re: “Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get discontinued (2019)

#191
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good question and I should look into that but so far they come out like new and I've been doing this for more than a decade now.

I've understood that it's better e.g. for the soles of hiking boots if the boots are used somewhat regularly. Polyurethane degrades due to hydrolysis, and apparently using the shoes regularly (and letting them air and dry properly afterwards) reduces that. The movement and pressure help reduce moisture absorbed into the sole, or something. It probably depends on the material of the sole, though.

I'm currently cycling through 4 pairs of Hoka Rincons. They're stored in their original boxes and placed in a stack on my garage floor. I grab the top box and replace it to the bottom when I'm done for the day. I actually think this is fairly ridiculous but what can you do...

Re: “Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get discontinued (2019)

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for other non-us readers (like me), Grape-Nuts are [1]: > [A breakfast cereal containing] whole grain wheat flour, malted barley flour, sugar (maltose), salt, dried yeast, and the following added vitamins and minerals: iron, vitamin B3, zinc oxide, vitamin B6, vitamin B1, and folic acid. > According to the Grape-Nuts website, Grape-Nuts "actually contains neither grapes nor nuts". The name may have come from the…

And for anyone anywhere who has never eaten Grape Nuts, imagine kitty litter in milk. I kid, but it's rather unlike any other breakfast cereal in its texture.

Agreed. People sometimes even serve it as a porridge by replacing the milk with hot water and a little butter or cream.

Re: “Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get discontinued (2019)

#193
post #113

Lmao from reading the replies here, and from how many the article seems to apply to, I’m glad the average hn user doesn’t get to decide what the market likes >enormous laptops with hot swappable bezels and deprecated ports >small phones >other outdated dead technologies

It would be amusing to create a picture of the "stereotype" which would be a person with an absolutely massive laptop (nearly a luggable) and an itty bitty phone, among other things.

phone-in-hand is starting to die out. nobody in my social circle really takes them off the desk anymore, and nobody installs new apps. a lot of us realized it's so cringe seeing people crawl into their phones at gatherings, after covid people just started making arrangements and then meeting up. the only time i see phones come out is to take a picture for your parents these days.

Re: “Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get discontinued (2019)

#194
post #2

This.Happens.To.Me.All.The.Time. All.The.Time. that Amazing Neutrogena conditioner, which was really good and lasted a year? Gone: if it lasts a year, its too good. that original low-sugar chex? gone. we invented three new flavours. that jam? gone. butter? gone. that cut of meat? gone. those pens? I mean pentel pens. How can pentel can an entire line of really good, fine writer ballpens? Gone. Sorry dude, it was you…

Same here. I like to think that it's because I have good taste and know how to find value for money. But I guess this may be why those products ultimately fail commercially; they're providing too much value for their low price; they can't stay competitive in a monetary system characterized by infinite inflation where there is intense pressure to keep prices down and consumers are forced to buy inferior products (the…

Not sure why you're downvoted, but I'm 100% like you.

Tbh, lots of non-overpriced products that I really like tend to disappear or be hard to find, so I just learned to settle for (a) a healthy enough cheap enough alternative that is never close to being as enjoyable but "whatever, it works", or (b) an X times more expensive quasi-luxury-class equivalent that has similar qualities and is from a common enough quasi-luxury-class producer with big market presence.

But there's a second avenue of though to explore: some people care for the qualities of the product itself, and some might argue that these kinds of people (we?) are a minority, most follow trends, either marketing phabricated or grass-roots word-of-mouth trends, so if a good quality products fails to be trendy, it will have horrible economical performance at least compared to the expectations set for such a product (R&D spent and all), so has higher chances to get pulled off than a bad performing low end products, that will stick around for more, and might by sheer luck "catch a trend" at some point.

Personalized production is what will save us in the end I guess, but when it reaches mainstream will also coincide with most people becoming jobless, so I don't know how the quality of goods and life will look like overall then, can't find my crystal ball :) (I guess the utopian scenario would be that anything mass-produced even decent quality is dirt cheap by then and affordable on UBI, and all the made-to-order-by-robots will be the various degrees of luxury - white sneakers? 0.01$ same model but factory made with dotted texture on violet gradient and printed with the face of your cat? 1000.00$, and hand-customized post-factory might be the new mid-class as human labour could become cheap again?)

Re: “Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get discontinued (2019)

#195
post #20
post #2

This.Happens.To.Me.All.The.Time. All.The.Time. that Amazing Neutrogena conditioner, which was really good and lasted a year? Gone: if it lasts a year, its too good. that original low-sugar chex? gone. we invented three new flavours. that jam? gone. butter? gone. that cut of meat? gone. those pens? I mean pentel pens. How can pentel can an entire line of really good, fine writer ballpens? Gone. Sorry dude, it was you…

Is it possible that you are "laggards" as described in the seminal book "Chrossing the Chasm"? Laggards: Laggards are consumers who avoid change and do not adopt new technologies until all traditional alternatives are no longer available. The group is mostly concerned with reliability, low cost, and easy to use. As I remember the premise, vendors squeeze profit out of the earlier adopters, in particular the early maj…

This is me. A laggard. I stand now on the precipice of obsolescence, clutching my Windows phone prepared to hurl it into the gaping chasm with my Zip drives, my Handspring PDAs, my Palm devices, my old Blackberry, and dozens of other products that I grew to love during their short time on the market.

I need a Laggard t-shirt.

Re: “Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get discontinued (2019)

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't they degrade over time sitting in your closet?

That's a good question and I should look into that but so far they come out like new and I've been doing this for more than a decade now.

Around 10 years out the glue will fail, seemingly all at once. I have boots 20+ years old which are still great (stitched and nailed), but all the old shoes just fall apart wherever they were glued (the sole usually). You can try to reglue, but it can be hard to get it smooth and walking on a lump ruins it.

Re: “Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get discontinued (2019)

#197
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shoes thing is so true. Especially runners, or any kind of athletic shoe really, where they feel the need to update not just the styling but the whole construction of the shoes every year. So when you need a replacement you basically have to start from scratch every time, because there's no guarantee even buying the new shoe in the same line will be a remotely similar experience.

Clarks had an absolute killer product on their hands around 2007 or so. Full leather sports sandals, with strong but easy-to-operate magnetic clasp, and no seams on inner surfaces. Joy to wear. Practically immune to chafing and blisters. Exceptionally good for walking (or cycling!) for even long periods of time. Discontinued since ~2009 or so. While they've brought back some of their other pretty good sandals, the pe…

Do you have a picture of them?

Re: “Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get discontinued (2019)

#199

Found this link to the paper, since OP's SciHub link has rotted: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/130136/The%20... This is an interesting finding no matter what, but I think part of the splash comes from the idea that some people might be harbingers _independent of the rest of their identity_. Since it's not obvious that liking crystal pepsi and watermelon oreos are related, we can speculate that the pe…

> Found this link to the paper

Hurts my eyes. SciHub URL + DOI (10.1177/0022243719867935) works for me.

Re: “Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get discontinued (2019)

#200
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share the same sentiment. With all the replies you're getting, it seems like there could be a market for a solution. Not sure what that would be. Maybe a shoe finder app similar to ammoseek? Maybe a crowdsourced database of which current shoe model is rhe closest replacement to an outgoing one (like a dependency tree but for next closest shoe)?

I always wanted to create a social app for shoes and call it Sole Mate. Put in your specs and rank your own shoes and then find other people who have a similar fit to you and see what they liked.

Ive seen Dr scholls in-store kiosks that do a mapping of feet to (i think) create custom insoles. It would be cool to have a digital file of not just a 3D impression of your feet, but also some data related to pressure distribution related to gait that could (in theory) find an optimal shoe (not objectively optimal -- but aligned with others that have similar characteristics).

And presumably as your weight changes you would need new models.

Heck I'm surprised there aren't more "smart shoes" that track weight changes and mobility.

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