161–170 of 505 posts
Much of that cost is because we nuked the American timber industry ?
Appealing to the fabricators (or even consumers) who are 4-8 degrees downstream of this policy will get you nowhere.
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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.
Why do you trust Consumer Reports?
Note that everybody else I can find is very different from everybody else. Someone else linked rtings - I'd never heard of them before they were not in the running. There are probably many many others that are trust worthy - but all search engines will find is obvious sell outs.
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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.
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.)
Well skimpflation, with caveat that a remarkable amount to R&D is spend into value engineering to lowest price points, like you don't get to 50 cent FOB tshirt trivially. And frankly it's revolutionary - enabling developing country wages to buy clothing on a single day wage. That said, it's 2026... if you want quality and only want to pay marginal increment, there's tons of Chinese ODMs turn direct to consumer, i.e.…
Tech workers in the US are probably around 90-99 percentile wage. Take something where the quality is well known and measurable, and can be purchased for extra money. How often do you fly first class, or even pay 10-20% extra to have more legroom, early boarding or a more convenient flight times versus picking the cheapest option that you can make work? People will demonstrably shop primarily on price no matter what.…
Related, Matt Levine has recently been writing about how the AI labs are paying huge amounts of money to tech/math/AI people but these people don't actually know how to spend it. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-09-10/dal... As opposed to the typical finance worker who knows very well how to spend.
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My experience is competition invokes two races happening at the same time, one for lowest price and one for highest quality. You can get a cheap car or really high quality car. Same goes for clothes, restaurants, basically anything where there is lots of market choices and competition.
That doesn't make any sense. The most expensive cars are also the least reliable. Rich people have multiple cars so when the Bentley has an electrical glitch they just drive the Porsche.
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Or you could just be happy to have a profitable company that makes money consistently. Shavers don't last for ever and new people grow up every day. You could also just launch a new product line that's cheaper without compromising the existing ones. But nooo we need infinite growth which is impossible so let's run the company into the ground for some more growth before our shit decisions catch up to us and stock pric…
If your customer base is declining, your company isn't making money consistently. Revenues and profits will decline accordingly.
Or you could expand to other markets, lots of options that don't require making your products worse.
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.)
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…
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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.
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 would be to create a logo for the "We Put The Extra 10% In It" program where products could advertise that they put the extra effort in. What is really sad to me is that so often it's not even that much extra effort, which is why I say 10% and not 100% or 10x. So often it's just "used a 5 cent metal part instead of a 1.2 cent plastic part". But without a reliable signal that the effort is there MBAs/private equity turns every market everywhere into a lemon market. Way too much tech is applied in manufacturing to turn everything into a lemon market.
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I think it's interesting that very often the best rated one is typically not the most expensive (nor the cheapest for that matter).
The more interesting part is to read the full detailed reviews on why they choose that. Often the most expensive or second most expensive has some useful features that they decide are not worth the cost but I do. I have long thought they place too much emphasis on low cost over other factors, but the fact that I can get a useful review to make informed decisions is important.