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Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

worseonpurpose.com

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

#81

Post by fallinghawks »

About 4-5 years ago I bought a Bosch 500 dishwasher. Loved it. Excellent performance. The top silverware rack could be adjusted to fit slightly larger items. There was a very basic clock display to tell you how long the cycle would take. And of course you could delay start by whatever number of hours.

Well, last year I moved, and as it happens, the dishwasher failed and I leapt on the chance to replace it with another Bosch 500. The salesman showed me a new addition to the model (an alleged potscrubber) but didn't tell me what they had taken away.

I should have looked more closely. I assumed I was getting largely the same dishwasher. After purchase I discovered that all those things I listed in the first paragraph were gone. Rack is no longer adjustable. The clock has been replaced with a trio of LEDs indicating >2 hours, 1-2 hrs, and It's absolutely trashy of Bosch to take features away while raising the price several hundred dollars.

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

#82

Post by soco »

bena wrote: post #69
bsenftner wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a little research study back in 2003 where I went to various grocers and purchased the same product at these grocers and compared. Walmart has larger boxes, and less contents, universally, for pretty much everything in a box, and they charge 1/3 more for their 2/3rds of what you get everywhere else. They make nearly 50% more profit from that little slight of hand. And try discussing this with any shoppers and t…

I'll admit that I tend to implicitly trust that the larger boxes on the shelves contain more. I haven't checked the price-per-unit in a bit. Granted, my closest grocery is not a WalMart and I'm typically purchasing mass-produced sundries. Basically, the "Family Size" of Cheez-its is the same at any store. One thing I have noticed is that 5lb bags of flour/sugar haven't been standard in a hot minute.

FWIW in Switzerland (and surely other places too) you have on the price tag also the price per 100g (or ml or whatever) so you can quickly compare without bothering much with basic maths. Same for online shopping.

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

#83

Post by RetroTechie »

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.

Sure, consumers looking for a bargain creates a market for cheap stuff.

But didn't you read the article? It used to be that brand names had meaning, providing a reliable indicator for the quality to expect.

That doesn't hold anymore. As brands are bought & sold by private equity, the relation between brand & what to expect is lost. And in many cases, reputation brands are gutted, $$ extracted, and the sucked-dry corpse discarded. In that environment, how can a consumer tell what's what? Brand X used to be quality, and now it's not. With brand as (often) an unreliable indicator, consumers look at price instead.

What I personally find most amazing, is that quality stuff that used to be household names (and affordable!), are seemingly impossible to produce these days even though technology advanced for 50y+. Example: Arcoroc Sierra (from Arc France, which still exists today). Tableware in tempered, coloured glass, with a nice surface texture. Comes in amber-brown, red & green. Pour in boiling water no problem, lasts a lifetime (and keeps looking like day 1 as long as you keep it out of dishwashers).

Look around in shops today: soup bowls are nice-looking but cheap earthenware, or non-coloured, cheap soda-lime glass. Colour you say? Often it's a thin layer on the glass (sometimes even plastic!). Not a coloured solid material. Scratch it & the non-coloured base material shows underneath.

Something with comparable looks & quality from that 50y old stuff? Not available (at any price), not produced anywhere today. And it's not that people don't want it.

This is just 1 of many examples. Imho the article does a good job of explaining some of the causes.

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

#85

Post by interloxia »

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…

Sometimes. My Bosch washing machine died young due to cheap bearings. The AEG dryer had soldering problems and the German dishwasher's time light projector died slowly.

https://www.elektroda.com/rtvforum/topic3652484.html#1966024...

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

#86

Post by danaris »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #65
xingped wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> I can only choose between what is made available to me by the market The existence of that desire is an untapped market opportunity. And yes there are ranges of quality in almost every product you can think of from fishing rods, to furniture, to diapers. And theses brands clearly compete with cheaper options and still have strong businesses.

> The existence of that desire is an untapped market opportunity.

Only if you can outcompete the giant mega-conglomerate incumbents.

And you can't. If you start trying to sell in an area, they can drop the prices on their competing products in that area to below cost until you run out of money.

Or they can just buy you for more than you'd ever get in profit, then take advantage of your reputation for quality to sell the same crappy quality stuff they were selling before, with your branding on it, for a markup. They'll make enough from suckers who believe it to more than cover the cost of buying you out before the public catch on and stop being willing to pay the extra.

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

#87

Post by danaris »

tekla wrote: post #52
DangitBobby wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Consumers can't choose what they want because what they want isn't on the market. All they can choose is what companies want to sell them.

Free Market Theory can only reveal people's preferences when you have a spherical market in a frictionless vacuum. In the real world, there are numerous confounding factors that make those ideas deeply counterproductive.

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

#88

Post by danaris »

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.

And this is why the destruction of antitrust in the US in the latter part of the 20th century has screwed us all. The massive wave of consolidation that followed that (ongoing to this day) makes the barrier to entry for every market much, much higher. The very fact that the most common desired endgame for a startup is "exit"—ie, being bought out by a larger company—should demonstrate this very well.

If we want quality, customer service, decent prices, or anything like them to come back, we need to restore real antitrust, not the morally-and-intellectually-bankrupt Chicago School bullshit that's been pushed on us for decades, benefiting only the already-wealthy.

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

#89

Post by danaris »

inigyou wrote: post #58
fifticon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You may be poorly educated as to how antitrust is supposed to work.

Breaking up monopolies that already exist is only one of its purposes and tools. It is also there to prevent mergers that will be detrimental to the public.

Past a certain (very low) scale threshold, this should be assumed to be "almost all of them". Rather than the government having to prove that a merger would be detrimental, the companies wanting to merge should be required to prove that the merger would be beneficial to the public in long-term ways that do not require specific (and easily breakable) "commitments" on their part to do things like keep prices low.

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

#90

Post by inigyou »

pjc50 wrote: post #71
inigyou wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not only talking about legal and regulatory issues, indeed. I think one of the big ones is rent. Suuuure you can just take some months to invent a product, but if you start with a $3000 loss per month, that's a high bar to clear. Another one is lack of pressure. The person who invented the TV was surely thinking about how much money he would make or how much he would change society. But now there are so many TVs…

> if you start with a $3000 loss per month This is a question of access to capital. Since we're all on the VC site we should understand how that works; for things like that it's very important to get "angel" investors who are comfortable putting in less-than-six-figures to get a product to the stage where it is proven for bigger investors. I'm glad that everyone's quoting Market for Lemons now, but it doesn't quite a…

Why would a capitalist fund something that will obviously not make money, like a random Finnish dude's operating system, when there's already Microsoft Windows?
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