Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

McMaster also has the best ecommerce tech stack I've ever seen. It should be the case study. It is incredibly fast. The checkout flow is different from anything I've ever used before, it's so fast, you don't even feel like you should be done. And, if you type plain text in the search box, it will translate that to a parametric search (for example, try '1/4"-20 screws', and you'll see that it takes you to the "screws" page with 1/4"-20 selected as the thread size).

If there's a such thing as rockstar software engineers, the people that made McMaster's site are it.

It's looks like this is mostly a case of adverse selection. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection

The article is yet another one about supply and demand that ignores first day of microeconomics price theory:

If supply is low, demand is high, the price goes up.

I just moved to the USA from the UK (having lived in Germany before) and the quality of the services I'm experiencing here is appalling.

To get concrete, we submitted an application for an apartment let. After not hearing back for 4 days we reached out and it looks like somehow they misplaced our application. By then the unit we wanted was gone so they asked us to pay a holding fee to ensure they would keep another unit for us. The online system simply didn't work, so we reached out and they informed us it was fix. But the system just marked the unit as rented rather than reserved, so we had to reach out again...

As Dan says defendants of the efficient market hypothesis will say that it isn't possible to provide a better service, or otherwise this letting agency would have been upended by competitors. Only that our experience with other agencies has been similarly poor, and our experience abroad is generally less so.

And is not only renting, most of our interactions here have been similarly shoddy. Which makes me think that either we have been incredibly unlucky or there is some common pattern. Here are some ideas for our particular case:

* Barrier to entry: Businesses like real estate require large capital and tend to be crowded already, so it is difficult for a disruptor to appear.

* Liquidity: While in theory we could *shop around* if we don't like a let agent, in practice there is a very reduced number of units that satisfy our requirements. It's easier to put up with a poor experience that compromise on the property.

* Corner cases: As new immigrants we had to go through some processes that most people don't experience. Probably is not worth for companies to optimize for these situations.

* Cultural normalization?: This is the most intriguing point for me. Maybe this level of shoddy service has been normalized and accepted in America - or at least the area we live in. Maybe people just don't know better and hence don't ask for more, and therefore companies can carry on providing what would be considered a sub-par service elsewhere.