“corporate greed” is a signal to me of low quality commentary. The opening premise of Econ is that consumers want all the goods for free and producers want to give nothing in exchange for as much money as they can.
Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality
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Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality
#42I call this the cycle of disruption. A company makes a really good product as first challenging incumbents. They get so big, they eventually become the incumbent. All this time, they’re probably losing money on the product or breaking even. Eventually, investors will want returns on their investment. This will first happen with prices increases to save the quality of the product. Once they can’t raise prices anymore,…
Chasing eternal profit growth isn’t a fact of life, notwithstanding the mythology of commodification. Neither are all investors motivated purely by profit. Neither is it clear that everything can be improved upon (much less that outsiders can improve on it better than the incumbent). Sometimes “do a thing, do it with excellence, make a modest living from it” is enough.
One thing I like about Mr. Sapp’s work at Worse On Purpose here—he (or perhaps his LLM, or perhaps he’s LLM) gives considerable attention to firms that don’t do it that way. Where:
> Quality, ownership, and stewardship all check out. […] Most of these are family-owned, trust-owned, employee-owned, or publicly traded with a long track record of not selling out.
It’s useful to have actionable alternatives, and I put more stock in his organizing thesis given how well its brand preferences line up with my own.
Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality
#43I find it odd how corporate greed is always the focal point. But its never consumer greed. The consumer is the one who dictate's a market. So cheap, low quality products are the direct result of consumers paying for a less expensive product. The consumer has proven it doesn't care about quality. So as much as corporations are greedy so are consumers.
Companies organize and consumers can't. Seems pretty obvious.
Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality
#44I find it odd how corporate greed is always the focal point. But its never consumer greed. The consumer is the one who dictate's a market. So cheap, low quality products are the direct result of consumers paying for a less expensive product. The consumer has proven it doesn't care about quality. So as much as corporations are greedy so are consumers.
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Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality
#45I find it odd how corporate greed is always the focal point. But its never consumer greed. The consumer is the one who dictate's a market. So cheap, low quality products are the direct result of consumers paying for a less expensive product. The consumer has proven it doesn't care about quality. So as much as corporations are greedy so are consumers.
Yeah. Nobody is innocent here.
Someone linked to The Market for Lemons below. This is exactly right. We now live in the World of Lemons. Everything is lemons, because we can only properly judge quality for the tiny number of things we truly care about. For everything else, we just buy the cheapest thing, because by definition we don’t care enough to do otherwise.
The only possible solution is to buy less stuff, to the point where you have the capacity to care more about each thing, and enough money to pay for these things, which will inevitably cost more.
But then that means making peace with the idea that not having a thing can be better than having a crappy thing. It’s a tough sell to the consumption mindset.
Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality
#46I find it odd how corporate greed is always the focal point. But its never consumer greed. The consumer is the one who dictate's a market. So cheap, low quality products are the direct result of consumers paying for a less expensive product. The consumer has proven it doesn't care about quality. So as much as corporations are greedy so are consumers.
I think this is the wrong take.
If this was really the truth, the brand names wouldn't matter. But instead the brand ends up as the sole desirable target in the corporate sales.
I think the more likely answer is that being an expert judge on a product's quality is just very hard.
More so when you have to buy it before you can use it.
So people tend to trust brands they've had good experiences with, or heard others having good experiences with.
The greed here is in leveraging that trust to sell a shitty updated version of the product.
Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality
#47This entire site can be boiled down to: products get decrease in quality when customers don't know or don't care what quality is. Price is a clear and obvious thing to measure, quality is much more difficult. Consumers get little or no formal education in quality, and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly. Any review site that is paid for by ads or affiliate links has the default po…
Why do I no longer have any reliable signals for quality? Price, brand, materials, and word of mouth are all you really get, but price and materials are meaningless and brand and word of mouth stop mattering as a company starts to coast on its reputation for higher margin. Genuinely don't know how customers are supposed to choose quality when they want it. I always want it.
Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality
#48You should do clothing brands like PVH brands (CK, Hilfiger, VS, and more) where they have a high end line and use it to build a brand and then sell a totally different cheap line of terrible goods with the same name on it in different stores. Luxury consolidation with LVMH and the enshittification there would be a good one too
Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality
#49This entire site can be boiled down to: products get decrease in quality when customers don't know or don't care what quality is. Price is a clear and obvious thing to measure, quality is much more difficult. Consumers get little or no formal education in quality, and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly. Any review site that is paid for by ads or affiliate links has the default po…
Agree, but there’s also an element of consumer irrationality. Lower price + lower quality means you can buy more of what you want now, even if it means that you’ll end up with net less of what you want in the long term.
Most consumers, me included, are not making purely rational decisions based in price and quality, even in domains where they are qualified to judge quality.
Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality
#50I call this the cycle of disruption. A company makes a really good product as first challenging incumbents. They get so big, they eventually become the incumbent. All this time, they’re probably losing money on the product or breaking even. Eventually, investors will want returns on their investment. This will first happen with prices increases to save the quality of the product. Once they can’t raise prices anymore,…
Once a product becomes so big it cannot increase in market share the only way to increase the total amount of profit it generates it by reducing the cost to produce the product or increasing the price.
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