[deleted]
Brands got worse on purpose
81–90 of 179 posts
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
except for the shareholder's wallets. sometimes.
Also Barnes & Noble weirdly
You're trying to say they are good quality!?
I recently had to gift someone some books, so I decided to try B&N online shipping since Amazon sometimes damages books. I ordered 3 books: all 3 came loose in a big box, all 3 were damaged: they looked like used books, unacceptable as a gift. I returned them, they didn't have ship-to-store option (which was what Gemini was telling me to push for), and they sent me new ones: all 3 arrived damaged, again. It turns out, B&N is worse than Amazon: 100% book damage rate on 6 books, worse customer support, worse return policy, worse everything. Enshitification 100%.
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#83Funny baader-meinhof moment for me reading this. My wife recently bought me some Brooks Brothers polo shirts that essentially dissolved the first time they were washed. I had never seen a shirt that was such poor quality. We were both flabbergasted, and the employees apparently gave her a bit of a hard time when she tried to return them. I suppose I now know why. What this company is doing is taking advantage of, and…
Brooks has their "factory outlet" crap that is also what you're likely to see at "overstock" stores like Nordstrom Rack (or TJ Max, though I'm not sure they get Brooks-branded stuff; NR does). That entire market is basically one big decentralized fraud operation, they took a model that used to involve selling brands' real goods that had, for whatever reason, not sold well or had minor quality defects, at steep discou…
> the government is captured by rich crime-loving assholes
It’s funny how fast average joe complains when a lack of economic growth slows down their 401k’s though…
Edit: Apparently I’m surrounded by non-standard Joe
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#84I used to love Brooks Brothers shirt, I would get them used and wear them to rags and they were the best.
The Duluth Trading Company runs cringe ads in my opinion but I traded my evil twin's old black Carhartt coat for a red Duluth coat that my son got from his last employer with a small monogram for my winter phase foxographer costume and it is 100% great.
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#85Private equity destroys everything it touches
Lots of brands are public and also shit now.
Perhaps the issue is that MBAs are ruining everything?
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brooks has their "factory outlet" crap that is also what you're likely to see at "overstock" stores like Nordstrom Rack (or TJ Max, though I'm not sure they get Brooks-branded stuff; NR does). That entire market is basically one big decentralized fraud operation, they took a model that used to involve selling brands' real goods that had, for whatever reason, not sold well or had minor quality defects, at steep discou…
> the government is captured by rich crime-loving assholes It’s funny how fast average joe complains when a lack of economic growth slows down their 401k’s though… Edit: Apparently I’m surrounded by non-standard Joe
Does he? I don't think I've ever heard that complaint.
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#87Earlier 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)
If we go with that 15% of household budget, that would be something like 10k and people used to buy a lot less clothing back then than they do today, probably less than 10 items a year. Now, if you take 1k you can probably find a tailor who makes you well tailored trousers, and another 1k for a jacket. This is not how we shop for clothing today, the productivity gains go into fast fashion, being able to buy trousers each month.
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
except for the shareholder's wallets. sometimes.
We really shouldn't be creating and allowing a society where the rich can get rich off of destroying the quality of life for everyone else. Smells like guaranteed eventual revolution to me. Also, don't these people understand that they are destroying everything they was good. Like, surely they understand through all the corporate speak and distended responsibilities that they are directly making everyone's lives wors…
I think they know what they're doing and have no reason to care. Why would they? They're getting rich.
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#89I think there's a lot of hidden inflation in this. Or, if not outright inflation, something similar to it. Look at what it costs to get a work shirt (I mean, for physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s or ordered by the US military in the 1940s, which in neither case could be regarded as super-fancy . Y…
> Look at what it costs to get a work shirt (I mean, for physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s or ordered by the US military in the 1940s, which in neither case could be regarded as super-fancy. You're probably looking at minimum $150. Of course, this is still cheaper than it was in the 1940s. With my…
Multiple $150 shirts per month? That's vastly out of range for the vast majority of human beings alive in the United States right now. I know i definitely could not afford a $300-$450/month increase in expenditure, it would literally bankrupt me. I've already had to sell all the stocks i had just to stay afloat renting and eating normal home made good food in a not so expensive city as a relatively high paid graduate student. There's like hundreds of thousands of people in this city making less than I am. Certainly some of them are working physical labor, blue collar jobs. There's a certain tendency to assume that we are the average in income, no matter where we are. And since going back to school and living near $0 savings for years I've learned that what i thought before was very very wrong. Assuming every blue collar worker can afford multiple $150 shirts per month is wild. I'm sure lots of them are well paid, but that's just not realistic for the a huge portion of people working in America now
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#90Support 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 rugg…
Wasn't System76 working on a laptop? Whatever happened to that?