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Let's make quality the norm again

forbrukerradet.no

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Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#371

Post by eru »

Saline9515 wrote: post #70
eru wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My local coffee shop makes excellent coffee. They don't need get a third party certification for me to to believe that. Similarly for eg a local carpenter. Or my tailor. The bar exam merely tells you that someone is legally allowed to be a lawyer or some such. They don't tell you, if she's any good. I don't know what USMLE or PE are. > Same goes for products too. It’s not a reasonable solution for the consumers to pe…

I don't know how it is in your country but carpenters are required to be trained and to insure their works for a decade in France, for instance.

Sorry, I was talking about the guys who make cabinets and tables, not the guys who build a wooden house. I suspect carpenter was the wrong term.

I don't think anyone is required to insure a table or a wardrobe for decades, even in France?

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#372

Post by Xirdus »

WalterBright wrote: post #328
Xirdus wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but I will need a second opinion. I just don't believe there was not a single brand of TV that was reliably good the way some brands of clothes, furniture, power tools, phones, spices, perfume, refrigerators, light fixtures, record players, guitars, lawn mowers, and basically all non-perishable goods on the market were. You could get the cheap stuff, or you could get the quality stuff, and you knew which is…

My dad had a Mercedes in the 1960s. It was not a very reliable car. He later bought a Chevy which was much more reliable. I bought a 1963 230SL Mercedes as a young man. It was such a beauty! But it was a terrible car. As an engineer, I could see that it was a patchwork of brilliant design and stupid design. The latter caused lots of problems. Sadly, I gave up on it. Stupidly, I bought a Mercedes wagon some years late…

You are literally calling one car much better engineered than another car. So what exactly are you arguing against? I said that you could pick bad car or good car back in the 60s, and it was easy to tell which one is bad and which one is good by the brand alone (usually). Isn't that so? Unlike nowadays where the brand means absolutely nothing and nearly all reviews are fake, and also most brands are manufactured by the same 2 or 3 companies worldwide so there isn't much to choose from in the first place.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#373

Post by eru »

Paul_Clayton wrote: post #97
eru wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy your list. For example, higher quality doesn't require third part certification. Reputation (and warranties) can work without third parties. I do agree that third party certification is one possible avenue.

I think reputation and warranties are insufficient. While building a reputation may be expensive, destroying a reputation can be profitable (in the short term). Warranties can also be made less effective by making the buyer spend excessive time and effort to enforce the warranty. The company sets the terms and effectively their interpretation, so after two years of waiting, nudging, waiting, complaining, waiting, thr…

You can be free to disregard warranties that are solely policed by the company that offers them. And companies are free to give you warranties guaranteed by third parties.

> The company might also go bankrupt with much of its profits having gone to owners and decision makers who are not bound to honor the warranty.

That's where reputation comes in.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#374

Post by jonasdegendt »

saturn8601 wrote: post #318
Kirby64 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if you wanted a proper BIFL suitcase you needed to spend even more and get a Briggs and Riley suitcase. Also, Travelpro Platinum suitcases aren’t the cheapest… but how much do you think is so expensive? Sales should put them sub $200, maybe less if you bought awhile ago.

Its been 4 years now(purchased 2022). I just looked at my records. My suitcase was a Travelpro Premium and it cost 300$. I've purchased 50$ suitcases back in 2015 that lasted for years (just checked the equivalent is now 100$). 300$ in 2022 seemed like a step up in price given I was anchored at that previous price in my mind. At the very least my expectation was that by paying this much i'd finally be end of the comp…

> and even if you do Apple handles service and warranty

Depends on the product, if I’m not mistaking. iPhones warranties are pretty much honored globally, whereas I exchanged some defective AirPods at an Apple Store recently and was explicitly asked if I’d bought them with them.

Incredible process by the way, no questions asked when I said I’d like to swap them, they simply got a new box out and made me remove the old ones from my iCloud, out the door in five minutes. I don’t see any scenario where you wouldn’t buy your Apple products directly through them besides maybe when you’re buying refurbished.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#375

Post by eru »

jdw64 wrote: post #37
spwa4 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's also why ordinary Chinese young people don't want to go down to the provinces. Recently you're even starting to hear stories I thought ended with the Soviet Union. People who are literally terrified of getting on a train out of the city because they think they might never be allowed to come back.

We're all navigating through hard times.

The world economy has never done better in absolute terms. I'm not sure where all those hard times are that I keep hearing about year after year, virtually independent of how well the economies are actually doing.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#376

Post by eru »

altern8 wrote: post #79
eru wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are happy with our Miele appliances (washing machine, dryer, dish washer.) But we also have plenty of Chinese stuff that works well. I've recently had kids, and I'm actually impressed at how much toys have improved in quality since I was a kid growing up in Germany. And, yes, most of these new toys come from China etc. By and large, they seem to be sturdier and last a lot longer, and are cheaper, too. I'm especial…

Could also be that if you're in Singapore you get better stuff. It's possible that European companies pick crappy, cheaper products that they have a higher margin on to cover importing and transport. I have no idea.

It might be possible, I don't know. Singapore is a fairly small market, so we don't really get any bespoke stuff.

Transport shouldn't really be worse: once you put anything on a container ship, it doesn't really matter much how long the ride is. But imports could be more annoying in other ways.

We do have a lot more people speaking Chinese here (around 3/4 of the population are ethnically Chinese after all) and lots of personal contacts, so we get a lot of people running small import businesses getting in Chinese stuff.

Of course, there's still plenty of low quality stuff you can buy. But I see that as a benefit: it's good to have the choice available, if you want to take it.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#377

Post by eru »

alansaber wrote: post #98
eru wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation doesn't have much to do with quality. For example, there's plenty of regulation to make food safe, but almost nothing about making your food high quality in the sense of taste and texture. 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.

The regulations often change the economics of production to favour improved quality/attempting to sell upmarket.

Have you ever tried Starbucks coffee? I'm sure they are complying with all relevant regulations.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#378

Post by tene80i »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #306
tene80i wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're experiencing market segmentation. You won't pay $8.99 a month, so you don't get an ad-free product like the people who will pay. The service would rather get less than $8.99 from you than nothing, so you get ads.

But the part they seem to miss (or I get lost in the statistics) is that I wont use the service if I get annoyed by the ads. So they turn me into a churn which I wouldnt have been.

Right, you’re just getting lost in the statistics. Overall revenue is a function of revenue per user and number of users. They could go after you by reducing the ads, but they would also be reducing the revenue per user, and they might not gain enough additional people for it to be worth it.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#379

Post by aidenn0 »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #179

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, co…

Consumers care about a lot of things besides that, it's just that (as you mention) those are the two most legible things to consumers.

Your specific example of cars is, IMO, not correct: Honda, for years, could charge a premium on their new cars due to a reputation for reliability increasing resale values.

For less expensive things, how much time should I spend researching quality USB-C to HDMI dongles? It's plausible that the chip in the $5 on amazon WOPEIME (or whatever) branded dongle is the same as the in the $25 Belkin one.

For intermediate things, time-pressure might matter. If my clothes washer were to fail today, I'm doing laundry by hand until I can get a new one in my house, so I'm probably playing quality roulette with several hundred dollars of my money at Best Buy.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#380

Post by VorpalWay »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #317
VorpalWay wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One signal (not fool proof, but often a good signal): what length of warranty do they offer? If some brand has a warranty significantly above the average for the product type, that can be a good sign. And I'm not talking about offering extended warranty programs or such here. Just the basic warranty everyone gets when they buy the product.

Something to be said for places like Costco that has an absurdly generous return policy (are they the only major retailer left that does this? REI used to, but they got rid of it). I believe Costco requires their vendors to eat the return if they want to remain a vendor. Doesn't meant that Costco is immune to bad products, but it severely punishes vendors that sell garbage and protects customers.

I'm not sure that is such a strong signal. The minimum return policy by law in EU is 14 days. IKEA has a one year open box return policy. I would not argue that modern IKEA is high quality.

I'm also sure I have seen other stores with a 1 year return policy, though I can't remember which ones off the top of my head.

(That is "return undamaged working product" return policy, not warranty policy. Exceptions apply to perishables, underwear, etc. At least here in EU they are different. Warranty is, depending on product category, typically 3 months, one year or two year minimum by law.)

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