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Brands got worse on purpose

worseonpurpose.com

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Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#21

Post by guywithahat »

logotype wrote: post #10

Support brands with values and local manufacturing. For example: American Giant, Origin, Crye Precision, Randolph Engineering, American Optical, and many more.

I can confidently say I use and enjoy almost all of those brands. A great litmus test for whether a company makes good products is whether they make them locally enough for the CEO to regularly visit the factory.

A somewhat humorous example is System76, where their US built stuff (cases, keyboards) are made with relatively thick aluminum and are surprisingly sturdy, while their laptops can be flimsy and are less ruggidly build. I think it's easier to say "good enough" when your laptop ships from clevo and you don't have a real choice in the build quality

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#22

Post by boringg »

Super interesting -- outside the premise which we all know to be true. What is their goal here -- to crowdsource information so that we have a public record of note for companies? What are they planning to do with that information etc?

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#23

Post by readitalready »

What a lot of these discussions are missing is that designer labels aren't high-quality either, especially newer brands.

A lot of the newer brands take time to learn from their experience to ramp up quality, from materials to stitching.

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#24

Post by vharuck »

I (or really, my parents) were burned by something like this recently. They bought my kid an FAO Schwarz marble run tower for Christmas. It's made of terrible plastic, with rough seams, and every play session ends when a marble gets stuck somewhere nearly impossible to reach. It requires partial disassembly, bending, and a screwdriver to pry things out.

I was shocked that an FAO Schwarz toy sucked so much. I looked at reviews on Amazon to see if anyone else had these problems, and they had. The FAO Schwarz brand had been bought by the ThreeSixty Group in 2016. Now it's just a way to polish the image of cheap toys.

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#26

Post by giraffe_lady »

triceratops wrote: post #16
giraffe_lady wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the right term is but yeah it's not quite inflation. IIRC households pre-ww2 were spending 15% of their budget on clothing, and the farther back you go the higher that gets even to the point where the concept of "budget" breaks down and the entire family's activities were oriented around procuring food and cloth. Good fabric has always been and is still very expensive! We have created much cheaper a…

> if you want the quality your predecessors had you better be prepared to look 15% of your household budget in the face But why? That would imply productivity in the industry hasn't risen at all. Which isn't true. Look at televisions, for example. 1% of what they cost in 1960 and 1000x better. (Don't @ me with "smart TVs have ads now". You know what I really mean)

I'm not completely sure and I only have the insight of an interested hobbyist here but I don't think it's a single reason.

A lot of it is that the production improvements have mostly been in developing processes for synthetic replacements. Natural fibers are agricultural products: wool comes from sheep, that are raised on land, harvested and processed by skilled laborers, with natural variance in the input & output; linen, cotton, silk different variants of the same constraints. Polyester is not like this and it indeed can scale vastly and be very cheap. Rayon can be produced from basically any cellulose input so same.

So a lot of what would be productive gains have just shifted over to these other modes. Cotton is the main natural fiber the industry focuses on and it is mostly a lot cheaper now than it was in the past.

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#27

Post by refulgentis »

Get this: the byline, Keyana Sapp? A Palantir employee in AI strategy. https://www.linkedin.com/in/keyanasapp/

They're iterating AI-written consumer populist blog posts and using us as guinea pigs, until we stop noticing they're AI. Their last one was "Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose", which we did great on. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777209, flagged off main page)

Don't let them get away with this, they're using a topic that we all appreciate specifically to divide our reactions into "if it's AI, it's good! What's the problem?" and god knows what the actual endgame is. But it's certainly not Palantir maintaining a consumer rights blog.

FWIW fact check is great, their RAG stuff works fine. But the unsourced "anonymous anecdotes" are made up, can't find backing for any of them and they're sort of entry-level rage-bait. (ex. DC shoes snowboard boots now designed in Florida by people that never designed snowboard boot)

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#28

Post by seizethecheese »

The interesting thing here is that this is about brands being bought out of bankruptcy and licensed. The trademark system in the US exists to prevent consumer confusion, one might think that if a company ceases to exist, the trademark shouldn’t survive.

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#30

Post by MaysonL »

logotype wrote: post #10

Support brands with values and local manufacturing. For example: American Giant, Origin, Crye Precision, Randolph Engineering, American Optical, and many more.

And, before major purchases, check to make sure that private equity firm has not bought them.
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