Did they also buy Deuter and Osprey? What about Decathlon?
Backpacks got worse on purpose
271–280 of 396 posts
Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose
#272> I'll be writing about those next. I doubt it, you didn't write about this! You prompted it and signed your name to it.
Keyana Sapp is the "author" Good to know they hire that kind of incompetence at Palantir. It makes them less effective.
Not really incompetence if he hasn't looked at the article
Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose
#273Whenever I buy something with a zipper I check that it’s YKK first. If it isn’t, I know there’s a good chance they’re cheaping out on other places as well.
The YKK zipper on my North Face hard shell broke. Got it replaced under warranty. Half a year later, it broke again. Anecdotes, sure, but I'm now buying cheap jackets instead.
As far as I can tell, YKK has quality tiers now where not all YKK zippers are created equal. Rather unfortunate.
Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose
#274I hate this so much.
Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose
#275This article is LLM written and unsourced so the entire thing could be a hallucination and there's no reason to trust any claim made in it, don't even read it
Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose
#276I still have shoes I bought decades ago. Those brands are now nothing special, after the companies were bought or taken over by private equity.
Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners I think this is true, but for far less malicious reasons. Favourable reviews lead to popularity, which increases production pressures, which makes it harder to source quality materials and maintain a quality process while satisfying demand. I h…
Maintain quality but raise prices to throttle demand to a sustainable rate? Hard to do instantaneously of course; easier said than done etc
Throttling demand means the sales figures go down which share holders don't like to see.
Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its got this ... cadence: > Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct. > That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is t…
I don’t see why that would be proof of being written by a LLM. It quite well can be (and I think it is) stylistic writing, hammering the message home by repetition of blows.
> It quite well can be (and I think it is) stylistic writing
I wish we could bet money on this. This is an LLM and I'd win that bet.
The ability to recognize the style comes from working with them.
It's quite possible the author wrote an outline or rough draft of the article and then asked the LLM to clean it up. But the final result has LLM tells all over.
Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a worthwhile observation. It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available. It means that people who couldn't in the past afford something at all, are now more likely to have some path to getting it. And even if you could afford the higher quality, you may not need it anyway. I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality…
> I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater. I've been burned too often with this thinking. All too often the cheap tool isn't just light duty so it breaks, it is not go…
The best rule of thumb for tools, at least if you have a decent collection of them for diverse but hobby/homeowner level projects is buy the cheapest to do the immediate job and then replace it with an expensive one if it breaks or you use it often and the better version improves efficiency or quality of life.
Once in a while you get “burned” and immediately end up buying two tools for the same job, but if that happens typically you can return it under retail warranty.
This is definitely the best advice I got way back in the day. I have a small collection of very high end tools I use quite often and abuse at least weekly. Or get use out of having the best quality available to me. But the vast majority of them get used a few times over a decade and sit in storage the rest of the time. I have zero use for a $1500 impact socket set. The $150 one does just fine, and I replace the two commonly used sizes I snap apart with expensive high quality versions while the others I may never use even once.
My power drill and impact driver? Best quality I could find and worth every penny. They bring me value just in the joy I get using them over the cheap stuff.
Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose
#280Talk to any Aussie tech workers you know and chances are they or their friend has a Crumpler backpack. (No affiliation just a big fan). Originally created by a bike courier who sick of bags breaking sewed a bag out of the toughest material he could get, marine canvas. To this day they make somewhat indestructible, well designed, trendy well loved bags. Also they have a lifetime warranty and repair policy that is very…
I bought Crumpler messenger bag about 15 years ago (in San Francisco when they still had a store there). Can confirm it’s indestructible. I’m glad to hear they’ve kept up their standards to this day!