One word: MBAs
The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
171–180 of 824 posts
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#172Two things:
1. Quality has been dieing mainly because people are addicted to cheap shit. The cheaper things are, the more they can buy. The amount of personal possessions people have nowadays is totally insane and unsurprisingly lots of cheap stuff.
2. Planned obsolescence is not a thing. Maybe it's happened a few times with a few products. But it certainly doesn't deserve a name. I have been on the engineering side of many business and consumer products and swam in waters of the industry for years.
No one has ever used that term. There is no engineering associated with it. No books or talks or specialists.
It's purely a function of point #1. People want the lowest cost above all else, so lower quality parts get used. Warranty durations are pretty standard too, 1 year 2 year 5 year. You never see a 566 day warranty like you would expect from a calculated failure model.
Also, the best way for 25 years now to make a product fail just after warranty is to program it in software. Everything has a microcontroller nowadays. How many devs here have written that code?
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of these philosophies that I hate more then almost any other. The idea that is bad that poor Indian and Chinese people now have access to anything from clean water to planes is absurd. You can sit there in your luxury house and cry about consumer culture but for millions of people its basic stuff that they have access to for the first time. And in Europe, despite increasing quality of live, both total ene…
The reason it's seen as bad is because there are not enough natural resources to sustain such a consumption, and many of these countries (esp India) will practically become unhabitable if global warming continues like it does. There are very few signs that technology will be able to fix this. No one is against clean access to water...
there are of course more than enough "natural resources" to sustain such consumption, the problem is paradoxically the opposite, too much easy to extract shit that we then emit into our own environment
the fix is also not complicated (remove GHG from the air, remove endocrine disruptors from the food cycle, etc.)
the costs are high though, but not that high, compared to - for example - the famines of past
but as population will peak - at least for now - and as we continue to ramp up renewable energy generation these problems are not insurmountable in any sense
...
places affected by storms and extreme heat/cold days need better infrastructure, but since urbanization continues to drive people to cities (as it did for the last few hundreds of years) these places need new and better infrastructure anyway!
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#174"Following his reasoning, it cannot be stated in absolute terms that an iPhone 15 is of “better quality” than a 2003 Nokia." This statement suffers from either viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses or from total cultural relativism in the most pejorative sense. I'm not sure about 2003, but around 2009, I owned a Nokia N900, which was arguably the flagship Nokia phone at the time. I can confidently state that c…
Memory loss and survivor bias. There was mountains of tacky, throwaway crap produced in the 80s. Guess what, we've thrown it all away. Quality lasts. And don't even get me started on the food. A lot of tin cans. Desserts that you reconstituted from powder in a packet. The list goes on.
Food is way better now than it was in the 90s. Every supermarket has refrigerated ready meals which are actually pretty healthy. Here in the UK, the quality of food in cafes (at least in the major cities) is far better than it was when I was a kid.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#175Shame. This is a poorly made case for an important phenomenon.
> “the first thing car ads highlighted was their longevity.“
This is table stakes now for cars so it would be weird for a car company to highlight it. So in the case for cars the baseline quality expectation has significantly increased.
The case is much easier to make for fashionable items like clothes and interiors.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#176Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. However, a common experience for me is that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten worse, being cheaper made. And I have a hard time finding a replacement that matches the quality of the old version. It’s a regularly reoccurring frustration.
My suspicion is that when products are successful and mature but reach market saturation, profit growth pressure leads to cutting some corners on every iteration, and hence to a slow decline in quality over the years.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's kind of what happens to denim when you air dry it. They are fine. Wear them a bit and you won't notice. If it bothers you next time tumble dry them on low.
Having recently compared one tumble dryer to another, “low” covers an exceedingly wide range, from genuinely lukewarm to “damage my clothing please”. Oddly, both machines I compared were LG and were not especially old. “Low” is a relative term.
Then beat them on the clothes line with a stick. Denim always gets stiff when it’s dried like that.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most 2020s cars are completely unaffordable or overpriced and over engineered but maybe by 2040s this will be largely solved. The 2010s was peak car.
Don't forget the planned obsolescence in 2020s cars.
Yup. In the future, you’re probably better off buying a used 2010s model than anything else.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#179Capitalism is the reason for declining quality. The incentive isn't to make quality products and services - the incentive is to monopolize an industry, and then squeeze every last cent from the captured consumers. Line must go up!
And yet almost no industry is actually a monopoly, funny how that works. Even even if it is, most of the time its only in certain region. And even then, often the pricing power of those 'monopolies' is not very strong.
In fact, historically most monopolies were state sanctioned, and that is still mostly true.
Literally non of the things mentioned in the article are monopolies. Cloths, absolutely not even close to a monopoly. AI, nope. Flying, nope. Maybe airplanes is duopoly for certain kinds of planes and that is one of the closest things to a monopoly. And yet despite that, prices for actually flying between places are incredibly low, the expect opposite of what you expect to happen in a typical monopoly.
Food industry, no monopoly. Computer, no monopoly. Hotels, no monopoly. Property, no monopoly.
In fact the largest global industries (just google list):
Global Life & Health Insurance Carriers
Global Car & Automobile Sales
Global Commercial Real Estate
Global Pension Funds
Global Oil & Gas Exploration & Production
Global Car & Automobile Manufacturing
Global Direct General Insurance Carriers
Global Auto Parts & Accessories Manufacturing
Global Engineering Services
Global Wireless Telecommunications Carriers
Not a single monopoly in the list.
So please tell me what you are talking about. Maybe some Health insurance have some limited monopoly in some place.
Please post here, from your monthly budget, how much of that budget goes to what you would call monopolies?
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#180While it's something with a myriad of causes, the main one to me is the decrease of real wages for the middle class, not just consumer culture.
Some products and services managed to decrease in price to match this, and but the culture of craftsmanship had to be sacrificed to match lower purchasing parity.
Product culture ends up being the culture in which the middle class are engaged in.