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Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

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Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#51

Post by xingped »

skeater15 wrote: post #37

I 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.

And what if I do care about quality? As the consumer, I do not even have that choice to make 99% of the time. This is very much a false equivalency and it isn't even close.

Companies get to choose what products or product qualities to make. If I, a consumer, want or need a product, I can only choose between what is made available to me by the companies.

It certainly doesn't help that it's nearly impossible to tell what is or isn't a quality product before or even after you buy it. What am I supposed to do when I buy a new power tool? Rip it apart and inspect all the parts to determine if it's "quality"? How am I supposed to tell if it even is "quality"? I'm not a manufacturing or engineering expert. Even when you think you're buying quality, it's not most of the time. Companies sell shit products at premium prices all the time because almost no one can tell the difference.

Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#52

Post by tekla »

DangitBobby wrote: post #43
skeater15 wrote: post #37

I 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.

It's obvious because no thinking.

How do consumers lack the ability to choose what they want? Of course unless, you think they are dumb because they don't choose what YOU want them to choose.

Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#53

Post by al_borland »

skeater15 wrote: post #37

I 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.

Consumers seeking a deal could be a symptom of affordability problems as wages stagnate while inflation keeps prices going up.

One could also blame corporate greed here as well, choosing to keep those extra profits or distributing them at the executive level, rather than increasing wages for employees to maintain their buying power.

So instead of more money to buy better quality items, we get things like Temu as the answer, selling trash and framing it as “shop like a billionaire.”

Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#54

Post by vee-kay »

comrade1234 wrote: post #3

I read years ago about a drill which was sold at Walmart with the same sku as in higher-end stores but the Walmart version had plastic gears. This was due to pricing pressure by Walmart on the manufacturer. Me, personally, I seek out first Swiss brands then German brands when buying most things. I'm willing to pay extra. In fact I'm a little pissed off this week because I ordered some oxygen absorbers off a Swiss web…

[dead]

Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#55

Post by angiolillo »

skeater15 wrote: post #37

I 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.

That's certainly part of the problem e.g. with airline seats. But there's also the issue that quality attributes can be difficult for casual customers to discern.

Ethical attestations about treatment of workers, animals, and environment are not always honest. Design flaws may not become apparent until the product has been in use for some time and longevity may only become apparent after many years of use, by which point the newer iterations may be qualitatively different.

It used to be that one could invest time in identifying quality brands, but many brands now are simply a temporary asset to be quickly squeezed of value.

Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#56

Post by organsnyder »

horsawlarway wrote: post #46
skeater15 wrote: post #37

I 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 ha…

Exactly. I've lost count of the number of times I've found a brand I liked, only to see quality go downhill after the company tries to scale too quickly, gets bought out, goes public, etc.

Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#57

Post by somenameforme »

skeater15 wrote: post #37

I 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.

It's completely possible to go high quality and low price - it's precisely how China is pretty much taking over every single industry in existence. But in the US you tend to pay low prices for junk, or unreasonably high prices for ostensibly high quality. I think that's largely because of implicit collusion between companies in most industries, particularly those with high barriers to entry.

So for instance see the Phoebus Cartel. [1] It was a cartel in the US (and Europe) including General Electric, Philips, and others that engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to exploit the market for lightbulbs. They intentionally lowered the quality of bulbs, driving planned obsolescence and thus increased sales, and even engaged in spot [un]quality checking of cartel members to ensure that nobody's lightbulbs would last too long.

In modern times I don't think companies would usually be so overt, but there's nothing illegal about unspoken cartels doing the exact same thing. For instance even in the video game domain, up until the PS4 era major players used to subsidize game console hardware to a wide degree. Then with the PS4 Sony stopped stopped doing that, and simultaneously so did Microsoft. In a competitive market that's exactly when you'd go subsidization to the extreme, to clinch the market to yourself. But so long as both companies agree to stop subsidizing hardware, then they both stand to make a whole lot more money. And that's exactly what happened. In the end, the consumer ends up with worse hardware, pay more for it than they would in a competitive market, and companies make way more money. I think that makes it fair to blame corporate greed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#58

Post by inigyou »

fifticon wrote: post #33
inigyou wrote: post #2

I've come to the conclusion this proliferates because it's very hard to start a business. If there was tons of competition the market would decide.

It makes sense to ask WHY this is hard. People can disagree endlessly on why. But a big part is, that antitrust/monopoly legislation has been almost completely dismantled and detoothed within the last 35 years, starting back with Reagan, and accelerating through the 90's when Clinton was at the wheel. The tiny bit that is still left, is only enforced either when parties fail to pay the bribe, or are bribed to enforce…

Anti-monopoly failing is the effect, not the cause - how is there a monopoly to start with?

Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#59

Post by xnx »

brookst wrote: post #49
xnx wrote: post #23

This 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.

True. Maybe the hidden part of the equation is "effort". Modern marketing strategy is to "flood the zone" with misleading information and half-truths so as to make the very act of making a rational selection exhausting.

Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#60

Post by inigyou »

bbqbbqbbq wrote: post #34
inigyou wrote: post #2

I've come to the conclusion this proliferates because it's very hard to start a business. If there was tons of competition the market would decide.

I don't think you can just say the market would decide when it is so easy to hide corner cutting and sell the thing cheaper.

FYI you don't seem to be aware that you are shadowbanned.
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