211–220 of 396 posts
This is private equity in a nutshell, really. This is what every single PE leveraged buyout ultimately ends up doing. Take a beloved brand, or better yet (in this case) a group of related beloved brands, cut costs, and reap the profit margins until the brand dies.
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> They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price. I argue you must evaluate against median purchasing power; it accounts for inflation and (lack of) wage increases. Comments from your linked video: > The problem with the “adjusted for inflation” argument is that it does not factor in buying power. The increase in wages has risen at out hal…
This isn't true for median purchasing power. You're looking at the federal minimum wage, not the median. Only about 1% of hourly workers earn $7.25 or less. Median earnings were $48,070 in 1975, measured in 2024 dollars, and $51,370 in 2024.
> I'll be writing about those next. I doubt it, you didn't write about this! You prompted it and signed your name to it.
Realized pretty quickly too. Then when I saw the related posts at the bottom being very recent sealed it for me.
I feel like there's another component: that the consumer base has become so detached from making things in general. We are surrounded in ever more stuff, ever more material, but collectively are out of touch with making things, with material, and assemblage there-of.
Our culture's perspective is as critic, as shopper, as buyer. Sure few of us were expect shoemakers or backpack makers, but people around us were industrious, did provide labor to make goods that people around them bought. The cycle of production had been directly apparent.
This is low key one of the things I really had hope for for a while with 3d printers: that they opened up & exposed what is. That they would be a force to spread insight & to regard the little mechanisms and means of the world all around us. I think that's a little bit true, but it's pretty niche, and I expect most prints are for static parts; no movement or dynamic behavior. And it's somewhat the anti-process: crafter in a box. It's still amazing but barring major changes, I have over indexed.
It's also worth noting the role of DMCA anti-cirumvention laws in casting mankind out of ever coming to grasp with what makes up the world. The combined legal and technological destruction of any right to repair is really not just about repair: it's an obstruction to humans understanding the world around them. We cannot become savvy in the world when the government tells us that business's right to keep us from knowing the world outstrips any mankind-the-toolmaker / natural scientist role/title/god-bourne nature, that cutting us off from the universe & living in ignorance is a hard cast legal binding fact. I find this to be as fallen as it comes. How do we stay alive as the race we were when our laws unwind the fantastic graces of inquiry the gods saw fit to give us?
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> They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price This is what so many don't understand, especially among the youth / reddit crowd. They expect their $25 jeans to be equivalent quality to the $25 or even $100 jeans from 60 years ago, for some reason. There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and chea…
"a burger and fries was $17"? That doesn't seem right. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mcdonalds-old-photos/ shows a menu at McDonalds from the early 1970s. A hamburger and fries was $0.63 or (assuming 1970 and adjusting for inflation) $5.36 now. A quarter pounder and fries was $1.27, or $10.81 now. Add $0.15 or $0.20 for a soda ($1.28 or $1.70). That's a lot less than $17. Add $1.28 To double check, in 1983 a hambu…
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Its got this ... cadence: > Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct. > That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is t…
I don’t see why that would be proof of being written by a LLM. It quite well can be (and I think it is) stylistic writing, hammering the message home by repetition of blows.
Let's quit the gaslighting and acknowledge that no human actually writes this way consistently across every paragraph, unless they're intentionally trying to write badly.
Shoulder strap failed on insert to main pack after six 1-hour rucks . Got a replacement. Zipper failed at bottom on another one.
Wanted to increase load to 100 lbs, but gonna have to go with a different brand.
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I watched some comparison videos like that, but the old product was always more expensive than what you'd tend to buy today. Same seems to be true in that video you linked. And when you buy an equivalently-priced product today, it's better than it was 50 years ago. I only skipped through the video though. The problem I have is that there's no easy way to go to an ecommerce marketplace and pick "I want to spend more f…
That is what I miss the most from the old stores. I knew when I went to Sears I'd get a good enough thing. I could often find the exact same thing under a different name for less elsewhere if I looked (Sears made no secret that their house brands were someone else's product with the Sears name on it). I knew I could often find better if I looked. However I could trust that it was a good enough product for my needs an…
Another factor of purchasing in "the old days", particularly for Sears, was that it was usually quite easy to get replacements for faulty products. None of this business of packaging things up, mailing them away and waiting. Walk up to the counter, show that the item was nonfunctional, and a cheery salesperson would go out back and get a new one for you. Sometimes they didn't even ask for a receipt. Sears had products that were "good enough", and they wanted customers to keep coming back. Of course it didn't last, but that wasn't just this particular company.
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> They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price This is what so many don't understand, especially among the youth / reddit crowd. They expect their $25 jeans to be equivalent quality to the $25 or even $100 jeans from 60 years ago, for some reason. There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and chea…
> There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be. But don't we see this everywhere, all the time? Pull up any of the recent Claude Code threads about the product's declining quality and you'll see at least a handful of well-upvoted comments about how text generators are definitely going to get cheaper while simultaneously getting "better" over time.