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Let's make quality the norm again

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Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#171

Post by 27183 »

irishcoffee wrote: post #143
Saline9515 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, it's easier to bake in quality decreases (aka "cost reductions") to keep the price stable than increase the price. Users usually don't see it directly, and since the whole industry does the same there is no real alternative. A good way to see this is in clothing: my wife likes to buy vintage clothes, part because of the style, but also because most of them are actually well made and sturdy. Nowadays it…

I had to switch from levis jeans to carhartt pants because my levis would rip after 5-6 months, almost like clockwork. No, I am not at all overweight. Carhartt just makes more durable pants, and I hate shopping.

I go through a couple pairs of carhartts per year, so like $10/mo for pants basically. Seems like a pretty good deal. I'd probably go through at least twice as many pairs of jeans. It's a good product. Darn Tough socks are another good one.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#172

Post by tombert »

01284a7e wrote: post #147
giancarlostoro wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video games are a good example of an area where the pricing makes no sense. Inflation has risen, and they make like $20 or whatever off a brand new game in 1990s bucks. Video game prices will go up more and more, it also kind of explains to me why prices rarely drop below $59 anymore, used to be on Steam some AAA games could be snagged up for $20 after a year, now you can barely find them on reasonable sales, they ho…

Sidebar: Don't video games have ever growing competition with existing games? I decided not to buy games until I beat the ones I already have. I am now stuck on NES games and will probably be stuck for the rest of my life.

I should do that. I have almost 900 Steam games, the vast majority of which I have never touched. Over the years with sales and Humble Bundles, I've just hoarded the games because I might someday want to play it.

Instead all I seem to do is replay Donkey Kong Country 2 and Streets of Rage 2.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#173

Post by bluGill »

throwaway383839 wrote: post #128
bluGill wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50 years ago when I was a kid... Japan and Taiwan were known for making cheap junk. They shook the reputation. Now I feel old - get off my lawn.

I'm honestly happy for Japan, Taiwan, and China. It's great that they make cool stuff. I just wish we still did too.

I'm not sure where you live, but it is reasonable to bet that "we" still does.

The US manufactures more than it ever did - but the number of people working to manufacture stuff is way down (while population is way up), and so few people have visibility into what is being made. There is a lot of cool stuff made in the US. Whatever country you live in likely has a similar story.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#174

Post by jolt42 »

xingped wrote: post #158
jolt42 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 10x is quite rare. Quality ends up actually curtailing costs to some degree (eg. fewer returns, cheaper marketing - word of mouth). Buy a Weber grill, I had 2 grills before my Weber that lasted 3 seasons between them. I bought the Weber at about 2.2x the cost of the bargain grills and 17 YEARS later it's still going strong, built like a tank. Saved a lot not buying more cheapo grills.

Yes, this is quite common and is usually referred to as "it's expensive to be poor". That said, unfortunately these days it's very difficult to know which brands are still actually quality anymore and which are the ones still coasting on previous good engineering reputation while currently shipping substandard crap to make an extra buck for the bean counters in charge before the ship sinks.

True, recently Rachel Ray sold her dog food brand. I didn't know until my dog started having digestion issues with it. That's how I found out it had been sold and other dogs were also having issues. Apparently buyer cheapened the recipe. At least we have the internet to quickly get the word out that it isn't what it used to be.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#175

Post by svara »

piker wrote: post #3

While it does relate to price discovery--i.e., some folks just aren't willing to pay for an additional unit of quality at 10x--my theory is that the decline in quality is another hidden form of inflation. Thing continues to cost X even though regulations have increased costs Y, ship production to China and scrimp on the inputs. (Or have market forces do that for you.)

Absolutely. It's the most visible in services shrinkflation.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#176

Post by carlosjobim »

sfn42 wrote: post #167
carlosjobim wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your customer base is declining, your company isn't making money consistently. Revenues and profits will decline accordingly.

Then you scale back a bit and keep making consistent money, just a bit less. The only way things go completely to shit is when you enshittify your product and nobody wants it any more. Or you could expand to other markets, lots of options that don't require making your products worse.

Markets outside the industrialized world don't have the purchasing power for quality products from the industrialized world. That's why you have to reduce quality to reduce price if you want to sell consumer goods to them. Or wind down your operations. But who would want to wind down their operations?

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#177

Post by svara »

roenxi wrote: post #101
kqr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quality brands are economically incentivized to sell-out [...] because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important That probably happens a lot, but there's another mechanism by which it could happen, that requires no malice: the brand gets a quality reputation, which increases demand for its products, and they are unable to produce quality products at the rate needed…

That sounds implausible. For a premium brand the marginal unit should be comfortably profitable, so they will have the resources to saturate the market at exponential speed purely from their unit economics. The somewhat theatrical lines outside the store aside, Apple has never had a strategic problem meeting the demand for Apple computers. It seems a lot more likely that you get executives who come in and believe tha…

> Apple has never had a strategic problem meeting the demand for Apple computers.

The business that had those problems didn't become Apple.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#178

Post by jolt42 »

jerf wrote: post #169
xingped wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is quite common and is usually referred to as "it's expensive to be poor". That said, unfortunately these days it's very difficult to know which brands are still actually quality anymore and which are the ones still coasting on previous good engineering reputation while currently shipping substandard crap to make an extra buck for the bean counters in charge before the ship sinks.

Everything has become a lemon market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons Even if a brand stays solid for 100 years, for all I know as I'm standing there in the store deciding whether to buy something, private equity bought them two quarters ago and hollowed them out. Harvard MBAs/private equity sees brand reputation as just another resource to be converted into money. If I were a billionaire my dream…

Yeah, hardly anybody in it for the long-haul. I hear we might be living longer relatively soon, maybe that will change the mindset.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#179

Post by Night_Thastus »

Consumers, fundamentally, care about two things:

* Price

* Features

Those are tangible, obvious things. They are not subtle. They do not take months or years to discover or become obvious. They are (mostly) not vague or ambiguous. Does this car have lane assist? Yes or no. Will this car last me 20 years? ...maybe? That's a very hard question to answer. It's messy and complicated and has a lot of clauses to it.

So, consumers buy whatever is the cheapest available with the features they want, or the most feature-rich they can with their budget.

This demand forces manufacturers to respond. They find a way to cram more functionality in, at a cheaper price. If they don't, they will simply get eaten up by those who do, overseas or otherwise.

You can say you want quality and reliability all you want - it changes nothing. At the end of the day, the vast majority keep voting with their wallet - and they want CHEAP.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#180

Post by testdelacc1 »

xingped wrote: post #158
jolt42 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 10x is quite rare. Quality ends up actually curtailing costs to some degree (eg. fewer returns, cheaper marketing - word of mouth). Buy a Weber grill, I had 2 grills before my Weber that lasted 3 seasons between them. I bought the Weber at about 2.2x the cost of the bargain grills and 17 YEARS later it's still going strong, built like a tank. Saved a lot not buying more cheapo grills.

Yes, this is quite common and is usually referred to as "it's expensive to be poor". That said, unfortunately these days it's very difficult to know which brands are still actually quality anymore and which are the ones still coasting on previous good engineering reputation while currently shipping substandard crap to make an extra buck for the bean counters in charge before the ship sinks.

> it’s expensive to be poor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

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