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Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

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Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#141

Post by kayodelycaon »

Aeolun wrote: post #102
civilized wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. This is a HN pattern as old as the hills. If the headline invites bikeshedding, most people will bikeshed. If the article is long and complex, almost no one will read the article. This one has both.

To be fair, I read it, but not all the way to the end. This was almost a novel.

Because I’m a writer, I’m going to be a bit pedantic here. Novels start around 50,000 words and usually take several hours to read. ;)

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#142

Post by dlp211 »

asdfaoeu wrote: post #69
chii wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

an aeron chair costs about $2000 dollars (give or take). The construction is sturdy, so i expect it to last at least 10 years, if not 20 (you take care of it etc). So the amortized cost is some 100-200 dollars a year for an excellent chair. If you buy a crappy chair, i bet that the cushion starts failing after a year or so of constant sitting. So you'd probably replace it yearly, or suffer a bad chair for a few years…

An Aeron is nice but plenty of other chairs last way longer than a year and are maybe a fifth of the price of an Aeron. You also have to consider for a lot of people there are other products that will give them a much better pay off.

My Aeron is 10 years old. It literally is as good as the day it was delivered and I use it every day.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#143

Post by mjevans »

makeitdouble wrote: post #114
______-_-______ wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, 90% of everything is crap, both then and now. And thanks to Lindy's Law, you're usually better off buying something old than something new. But that's not how most people think :( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

In personal experience things were more crappy then than now. The explaining factor could be that production techniques have evolved as a whole, and less manual steps harmonizes the quality of cheap goods. To take IKEA as an example, their table were really bad 20 years ago, and the only option was to either buy from another flatpack company, that was often worse (assembly would need like 50 screws for a single table…

IKEA at least was, the last time I shopped there, willing to sell at different levels of build quality. Some products cut every corner possible in the name of cost, but also passed a noticeable portion of that savings to the consumer. Others used some slightly better materials in places where the results mattered with predictably good results. As long as the consumer made an informed choice the result was as desired.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#144

Post by swagasaurus-rex »

roland35 wrote: post #130
analog31 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

House foundations, light switches, and water delivery, along with the professions that install them, are all regulated and licensed. There is somewhat of a trend for the quality of those things to have regional variation, e.g., lower quality in places that have historically had weak code enforcement and weak unions. And yes, the regulation probably did make those things more expensive.

Maybe more expensive up front but probably cheaper in the long run!

If I could buy products that just work and don’t break, even if they cost 3x as much, they would pay for themselves with longer lifespans and less wasted productivity.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#145

Post by Centigonal »

klodolph wrote: post #118
Strilanc wrote: post #88

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacle…

> …he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating. A.k.a. “avoiding weasel words”. I don’t mean to be clever here, it’s just that it’s far more efficient to assume that reader can make their own informed decision, and give them citations & instructions for reproducibility to help them along the way, rather than shovel a bunch of weasel words into…

I don't think what you're calling weasel words are weasel words.

"Up to 50% faster!" is weasel wording. It says "slower or faster, but not more than 50% faster," but it sounds like it's saying faster.

What GP is asking for is calibrating for uncertainty. Phrases like "I've seen this tendency in multiple teams I've been part of," or "study[ref] after study[ref] has confirmed this" help clarify what premises and hypotheses are well-supported by prior work/experience and what is the author's speculation. IMO It serves a useful purpose!

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#146

Post by fomine3 »

throwaway984393 wrote: post #129
Strilanc wrote: post #88

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacle…

Consumer product build quality and outsourcing quality are the exact same problem. Somebody is making a thing and they don't make it well and the customer isn't happy. There is nothing special about the problem, it's simply hard to build things well. When you prioritize "shipping" over quality, you make crap. If you try to avoid the difficulty of quality by hiring somebody else to do it and they also prioritize "ship…

A bit different. End user/who decide to buy/whose money is used/ are often different for B2B products.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#147

Post by NickNameNick »

et-al wrote: post #72
Gigachad wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As usual its just how much money you put in to it. We spend a lot of money making sure building foundations and silicon manufacturing works because failing is expensive and dangerous. I don't want to pay double/triple price for a toaster to slightly reduce its risk of failing because I'm happy to accept that on average it lasts a long time but there is some chance it fails sooner. If I'm in charge of buying a $100M b…

I beg to differ, many of these large household companies are shells of their former selves as they've been bought, bankrupted, and traded around. What's left is just a name with no solid product line backing it anymore. E.g. Sunbeam was a solid household appliance name, and now it's a crap. Same with Braun. The easy industrial design exercise seems to be luxurious looking materials paired with cheap electronics. Amaz…

I imagine that makes the slow Denise of Sears/Craftsman particularly unfortunate then.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#148

Post by DannyBee »

mathieutd wrote: post #125
DannyBee wrote: post #110

The problem here is actually very basic - markets do not enforce efficiency. Period. The efficient market hypothesis is simply wrong. Strong form efficiency was already formally disproven quite a while ago. Weak form efficiency has been show to only true if P=NP. There is not really a strong need to go into why inefficiencies can persist, etc, because at a baseline, it turns out there is no provable theory that marke…

Do you a reference for these statements? I'd be curious to read more about the topic.

Weak form efficiency - https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2284 is one such proof.

For strong form efficiency (which requires markets perfectly reflect all available information) - You would have trouble finding people who still believe in strong form efficiency. The weak form paper above cites several papers that go into why strong form efficiency is impossible. There are formal proof versions around. In practice, even empirical studies of strong form efficiency haven't supported it either - it's just very easy to find practical counterexamples.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#150

Post by Dylan16807 »

civilized wrote: post #99
Strilanc wrote: post #88

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacle…

> It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. This is a HN pattern as old as the hills. If the headline invites bikeshedding, most people will bikeshed. If the article is long and complex, almost no one will read the article. This one has both.

Huh? It's not bikeshedding to focus on a particular subtopic.
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