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There's lots of high quality Chinese stuff, too. Why do you say it as if quality and Chinese don't go together?
Historically, they're lax on regulation. Hence the association with bad quality.
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That's just my opinion, man. If you think that the Chinese make great stuff, buy it. I don't have a Twitter account.
There's few things where the drop in quality is astronomical, one of them being clothing. Clothes used to last a life time till few decades ago. Right now you buy stuff that after the first wash already looks worn out, terrible or starts falling apart. Major known brands are guilty of this too, often regardless of price. So people end up with closets filled of junk that they look terrible in anyway. I wish there was…
> I wish there was a line of brands and even better shops that focused on quality fabrics and sewing processes for clothing that lasts for ages as it used to. They still exist, at least here in Europe. I quit buying cheap clothing a decade ago, getting quality items is much more expensive but at the same time I've had basic t-shirts that I wear most days last me 5-8 years; trousers that are almost 10 years old and th…
Just to nitpick, I doubt i could wear a heavy premium quality cotton tshirt in the current summers. I can barely stand a flimsy thin cotton tshirt...
I'm willing to pay extra for quality linen for those summers, except everyone lies and their linen can be up to 100% cotton :)
There are economic impacts to raising quality: 1. Higher quality requires better trained technicians. That means fewer people will be able to participate due to any of missing experience, costs of training/education, and opportunity costs. 2. Higher quality generally requires third party certification, such as the CE or FCC identifiers on electronic equipment. Certification costs time and money resulting in a form ex…
Most quality defects I see are ultimately down to culture, not training and certainly not certification. Getting to excellent quality simply does not require great training nor rigorous certification, and I'm not even sure it really benefits from either all that much. But what it does require is a culture of chasing down all the avoidable risks, to fix not just the immediate bug, but also the process that allowed it to come to be, to pre-emptively look for whole classes of bugs or misfeatures seriously, and to always look deeper than for underlying causes or interactions (i.e. take the 5-why's game seriously).
It's perhaps almost a trope by this point, but it's still a great reminder and example - sqlite. About a month ago Richard Hipp, one of the primary authors, gave a great presentation "Reliability Lessons From SQLite" (https://youtu.be/V_qzqY1bb7I) - and notably, I'm not seeing even _echos_ of training and certification in their clearly world-class process. I don't think you can even seriously claim it's all that expensive, if you consider how tiny that team is, and yet how much they've achieved.
If larger organizations fail to achieve high quality - well, _why?_ It's not due to lack of training, certifications or smart people. Perhaps its intrinsic about larger for-profit corporations, but I suspect we could do better with better incentives, and a more serious attitude about dealing with mis-aligned incentives throughout our culture. Is it really a flaw for a corporation to prioritize short term cost reduction even over long term self-harm if that's what they're judged by? Is it a flaw for a profit seeking corporation to largely ignore costs their low quality imposes on others? Is it a flaw for a for-profit organization to take huge risks when the upside is unbounded but the downside is mere bankruptcy without any further liability?
I don't know how to solve these problems, and don't want to claim it's even remotely reasonable to throw out the capitalist baby with the corporate bathwater, but surely we can do better than the status quo even without a revolution. Misaligned incentives and tragedies of the commons aren't new issues, nor ones without potential mitigations. We're just choosing to ignore those inefficiencies, and have for decades. And at this point, even small changes in incentives might have truly wrenching consequences; the ingrained and by now deeply embedded carelessness in our huge software and other engineering stack is corroded at every level.
TLDR: I don't have the answer, but I'm pretty positive it's not an issue of cost, training or certification.
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You can go to a tailor and get custom stuff, if you want to. In fact, thanks to the internet it has never been easier.
There’s some amount of gradient between use-once and fully bespoke clothing, and most people’s economic means are positioned somewhere on that gradient. Indeed it’s a U curve of sorts – cheap clothing can be surprisingly expensive (see also the Vimes Boots Theory).
Yes, it can be expensive to be poor, but the rich really do consumer more dollars-of-boot per day, because they can afford it.
> There’s some amount of gradient between use-once and fully bespoke clothing [...]
Bespoke clothing mostly fits you better. It doesn't necessarily last longer. (But you can ask for harder wearing material or longer lasting manufacturing techniques, of course.)
With sufficient competition, the incentives of companies would change if consumers would be willing to rent instead of owning products. Then planned obsolescence is not to their benefit.
You can find great-quality, long-lasting products at great prices (great price doesn't equal cheap, but great for what you get).
I use capable LLMs on high reasoning to run a prompt like this:
"I want to buy a high-quality [category] that will/has/can [requirements here]. I do not want to pay for a brand name that doesn't improve.
Start by finding manufacturing clusters in [region of the world, e.g. Europe] where [category] is made, then find the businesses making [category] in that cluster that I can buy from.
Normal online stores are okay, but also try non-obvious avenues:
-local business registers -stores that may only be available in the local language -factories that sell samples directly" -cooperatives that sell products from multiple local manufacturers
(I modify this prompt, but it's the skeleton)
To verify a given product/brand/store, a great follow-up prompt has been:
"Now find me big brands offering a product of similar quality (ideally measured by objective characteristics) and show me how much it is vs. [store name here]"
This has showed me incredible finds. It's become how I buy most things that go beyond basic trinkets, and I often pay less for far higher quality.
With sufficient competition, the incentives of companies would change if consumers would be willing to rent instead of owning products. Then planned obsolescence is not to their benefit.
Why would planned obsolescence not be to their benefit in a world where things are rented? You still renting the old Xbox? Try renting this new Xbox instead, the verification cans come in additional flavors!
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There's lots of high quality Chinese stuff, too. Why do you say it as if quality and Chinese don't go together?
Historically, they're lax on regulation. Hence the association with bad quality.
You get quality from competition and customers opening their wallets for quality.
Another example: Apple assembles some nice consumer hardware in China. Their quality doesn't depend on regulation.
I personally see two effects that are very detrimental here: 1) "Quality brands", where you pay a premium to get high quality/durability products, are economically incentivized to "sell-out" (cash in the brand name by producing as cheaply as possible). This is because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important than anything else. 2) Increasing trend towards no-name pr…