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Let's make quality the norm again
451–460 of 505 posts
Re: Let's make quality the norm again
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The steelman is that by lowering the cost, more pets can afford better food than what they currently eat. No comment about whether that is reflected in the consumer facing price or in profits. For your steelman to be relevant it would have to be reflected by lowering the price, otherwise they're just making the product worse for no customer benefit whatsoever and hoping customers take a long time to notice. And if…
And that's before you get into whether selling something as food which is low quality enough to make dogs sick is ethical at any price. It's not like only dogs who would otherwise go unfed will end up eating it.
I’m not defending private equity _at all_, they’re brand-sucking vampires, but all it takes to give some dogs digestion issues is to switch ingredients. I have two that are extremely sensitive to chicken, which is in almost all dog foods due to it being really cheap protein. The sensitivity is pretty common in some breeds.
If they added chicken to the food and it didn’t have it before, more dogs with digestion problems is what you’d get for sure.
Re: Let's make quality the norm again
#453Earlier 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.
We should demand a full 10-year warranty as proof of quality. If a manufacturer genuinely believes its product is built to last, it should be willing to stand behind it.
Re: Let's make quality the norm again
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
My point was the brand was not a determinant of quality. People assumed Mercedes was the quality brand, but it was inferior to Ford.
But was Mercedes always inferior to Ford or were only some particular models of Mercedes inferior to Ford? If it's the former than my point still stands.
Re: Let's make quality the norm again
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
I finally subscribed to consumer reports. It is the only independent place we can trust for that information. However they only review a subset of the things I want to buy.
Project Farm on YouTube has never disappointed me. The guy buys everything himself and finds creative & reproducible ways to test things.
I find him annoying to listen to. I also hate the video format in general since it is so hard to skip the "fluff" to find the things I care about.
Re: Let's make quality the norm again
#456[deleted]
Re: Let's make quality the norm again
#457I understand the strong desire to help the environment, but why lead with that? I think it's become apparent that the average person doesn't really care about the environment. People do care about maximum convenience and minimal cost , which usually leads to waste. We should try harder to create a system that aligns the incentive of taking care of the Earth than we try to force people to care about the environment. R…
According to page 116 of the report of this EU survey: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3752, Sweden and Denmark have climare change as their number 1 and number 2 most important topics to be addressed in the European Parliament respectively. It makes sense to extend that to the OP which is norwegian and say that a lot of the target audience probably cares
I do however agree that making the cheapest/best solutions also be good for the environment would be ideal.
Re: Let's make quality the norm again
#458While 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.)
It's part of the growth paradigm - that everything must continue to grow. Let's say your product is mature. Your market is pretty much saturated; everyone who wants to use this product is using either yours or a competitor's. You and your competitors are finely balanced, you could reduce your prices and get more market share, but that wouldn't increase your profits. You have optimised your manufacturing process to th…
How does cutting quality, shrinkflating and enshittifying fit in a paradigm where everything must continue to grow? It is willfully destroying the value of something you know to be valuable. By engaging in such practices you are as guilty as any competitors that are doing the same, and you're as criminally insane as any shareholder that would encourage what will inevitably be the downfall of the company.
You're involved in taking a quality product off the market by collaborative enshittification together with your so-called competitors: the quality product your company used to make will no longer be available to consumers, and shareholders will hold shares in whatever will be left of it, which is bound to be worth less than the quality product it once was. This has nothing to do with growth. This paradigm of constitutes a lose-lose situation, where only you (the one moving on to another role, leaving consequences as something your successor will have to deal with) will experience a temporary 'profit', until you are actually in need of the very product you used to be able to manufacture.
Deliberate destruction of valuable resources, products or services does not equal growth.
Re: Let's make quality the norm again
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good to clarify the definition of seamstress with DiscWorld/Pratchett quotes floating around.
Happy to be corrected. Couldn't remember the word tailor, and seamstress felt very outdated and weird, hence the explanation.
Seamstress is still a thing, and different from a tailor AFAIK (probably a lot of overlap)? I have 2 friends for whom that's their job, and they do refer to themselves as seamstresses
Re: Let's make quality the norm again
#460This is a false pretense. Quality was never the norm. What is no longer the norm is getting first-hand experience with a product before you buy it. Everything comes in the mail and it's a surprise to the consumer after they buy it. That's nuts!
Seriously. Did this person never have to fix relatives' IE6?
IE6 itself rarely broke. It was usually malware abusing all the extension functionality that broke IE6.
The non-standard browser runtime was a massive pain for anyone working in tech, but when it came to the implementation quality of that non-standard browser runtime, IE6 wasn't all that bad for the user.
It was insecure as hell, of course, but so were all browsers at the time. Focusing on quality was a bit easier when complex security considerations weren't really necessary.