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The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

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Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#21

Post by dmezzetti »

It's called "lowest cost technically acceptable". Publicly traded companies are driven by quarterly earnings and increasing net margins. You do that by selling products at the lowest cost possible where buyers will still buy it.

A bigger decline is coming if we let "vibe coding" and what we call AI replace human workers at scale. The technology isn't there yet for full automation but everything is blindly surging ahead due to the allure of it and the same reason as the first paragraph above.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#22

Post by booleandilemma »

You don't get ahead by focusing on quality and caring about your customers. The guy who cuts corners gets ahead.

Maybe someone will respond "why should a business care about you?" and that just proves my point. We've created a zero empathy, greed-driven society and then we wonder why quality is declining.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#23

Post by ck45 »

phtrivier wrote: post #2

Begs an interesting question : some people can still afford quality items that last (namely, the people that sell throwaway shit to everyone else ; or, more precisely, the people who earn rents from companies that sell throwaway shit etc...) Are things getting shittier for them, too ? Are luxury brands immune to "energy is getting expensive, and corporate needs to buy shares back and increase dividend, so we have to…

I guess it depends. There are items for which there's just no margin for cutting quality. Take for example a Hermes bag. While some buyers would probably settle for less quality, the brand depends on the image of a high quality product, thus the bags have increased in price by 5%+x annually for the past 20 years. That's a rate which is unsustainable for non-luxury items. Another example is Miele washing machines, which most likely deserve to be considered top notch and high quality. The prices have barely increased in the same timespan, which technically means they are 25%-30% less expensive after inflation. It's hard to imagine that the production process was improved by that much.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#24

Post by dottjt »

I'm not sure if this is quite related, but I can't help but feel that a lot of the ills of society that we're witnessing is simply coming down to the fact that we're living a lot longer as people.

I feel like knowing that we might live well-beyond our working age has caused all sorts of odd/irrational behaviours in the way we approach life. I think for example, having to save for retirement makes us rethink how we spend our money. Which then means people are ultimately spending less on other things i.e. clothing. Then it becomes a kind of vicious cycle of hoarding wealth, but then expecting everything else to be cheap (at any cost).

Whereas it's like, if you expected that you would die in your 50s/60s you'd probably be happier spending your money on stuff that you felt served you better, irrespective of the cost, cause you're still working and able to service that lifestyle.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#25

Post by [deleted] »

anarticle wrote: post #5

This article is really trying to gaslight us into believing it is only pessimism, when decline in quality is very real. The best example is that ikea no longer sells solid wood tables, they are particle board with wood grain stickers. The exciting part is they are more expensive than the original hardwood versions.

[deleted]

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#27

Post by bitter_michael »

This article's thesis is all over the place, but the discussion here brings up an interesting topic: the decline in quality is relative to your evaluation function.

If you want long lasting products, then maybe the cheaper furniture is of lower quality. If you want something light weight and affordable, then ikea is higher quality.

Assuming there is a uniform product evaluation function seems like lazy journalism. The addition of AI was also odd

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#28

Post by littlestymaar »

phtrivier wrote: post #2

Begs an interesting question : some people can still afford quality items that last (namely, the people that sell throwaway shit to everyone else ; or, more precisely, the people who earn rents from companies that sell throwaway shit etc...) Are things getting shittier for them, too ? Are luxury brands immune to "energy is getting expensive, and corporate needs to buy shares back and increase dividend, so we have to…

I'm not sure the billionaire ever cared about the durability of things. Pretty sure most of them have people managing their things, who will throw anything to the bin at the first sign of degradation.

Here's an anecdote:

As a student, I visited one Hermes (French luxury brand) manufacture in Paris. They showed us how crocodile skin was worked with to make hand bags and showed us the finished products. They had two finishes for the bags: - with protective coating (brilliant) - without (mate)

Without coating the crocodile skin was very fragile they told us, and even water droplets would stain the skin. We were quite surprised that anyone would spend a five figures amount of money in a bag that will get stained by anything, but the guy guiding us told us that their customers simply considered their products to be disposable item that would quickly be thrown away anyway.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#29

Post by palata »

dmezzetti wrote: post #21

It's called "lowest cost technically acceptable". Publicly traded companies are driven by quarterly earnings and increasing net margins. You do that by selling products at the lowest cost possible where buyers will still buy it. A bigger decline is coming if we let "vibe coding" and what we call AI replace human workers at scale. The technology isn't there yet for full automation but everything is blindly surging ahe…

> It's called "lowest cost technically acceptable".

I like this wording better than "programmed obsolescence". I don't really believe that "programmed obsolescence" is common. If anyone in a company leaked that the company actively designs the product to stop working after some time, it would make the news.

I call it "premature obsolescence", which sounds more passive to me: the product doesn't last as long as it could because the company doesn't actively work on making it last as long. Because it's cheaper of course. Hence "lowest cost technically acceptable".

"It's not that we make a bad product, but rather that we don't make a good product", in a way. There is no need, consumers buy it even if it's not good.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#30

Post by littlestymaar »

vdupras wrote: post #17

In inflation calculation, is quality taken into account? I guess not, given the inherent problem stated in the article. If that's the case, even if it's true that we can say "sure, quality is declining, but it's fine, just fine", it would follow that inflation is actually much higher than reported. When you buy a fridge today, it buys you the "fridge service" for a much shorter time span, forcing you to invest a lot…

It is, in theory (hedonic price adjustment can go both ways), but I don't know how accurate their measurement is.

Edit, now that I checked it looks like hedonic price adjustment measurements are performed on only 7.5%[1]of the goods in the CPI basket, and the main goal seems to be to avoid overestimating inflation by tracking quality improvements better.

[1]: https://www.nber.org/digest/20239/correcting-quality-change-...

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