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Let's make quality the norm again

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Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#281

Post by techpression »

jolt42 wrote: post #174
xingped wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, recently Rachel Ray sold her dog food brand. I didn't know until my dog started having digestion issues with it. That's how I found out it had been sold and other dogs were also having issues. Apparently buyer cheapened the recipe. At least we have the internet to quickly get the word out that it isn't what it used to be.

There’s a special place in hell for people who would buy a dog food brand only to make worse dog food…

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#282

Post by [deleted] »

tomhow wrote: post #273
tristor wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We've asked you before not to post slurs against groups of people on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. Please stop. We have to ban accounts that do this habitually. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[deleted]

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#284

Post by themaninthedark »

pif wrote: post #88

Quality was never the norm: cheap always beat quality with a hand tied behind his back! Western working class has spent decades complaining about cheap imports from China... while feeding that market with their own money. Western frequent fliers keep reminiscing about the grandiose pre-deregulation era or air travel, but cry a river when their low-cost carrier of choice actually enforces the limit on cabin baggage. E…

Really?!

Yes, let's blame the working class for spending money on Chinese goods after their jobs were offshored and their spending power was decreased.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#285

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

VorpalWay wrote: post #250
jerf wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything has become a lemon market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons 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…

One signal (not fool proof, but often a good signal): what length of warranty do they offer? If some brand has a warranty significantly above the average for the product type, that can be a good sign. And I'm not talking about offering extended warranty programs or such here. Just the basic warranty everyone gets when they buy the product.

A buddy of mine paid a premium to get some fancy umbrella with a lifetime warranty. It had a failure at some point, they replaced it with a worse quality one. Another failure, and he got another step down in quality.

So, the company kinda honored the contract.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#287

Post by WalterBright »

Xirdus wrote: post #237
WalterBright wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it's socialism that has a reputation for shoddy products. How many people want to buy a Lada?

Both historical socialism and current-stage capitalism suffer from the exact same problem - lack of competition and limited access to information. They arrived there in vastly different ways but in both cases it's very hard both to know how to obtain higher quality goods, and to actually obtain them once you know how. Compare to 1960s USA where it was quite easy to know which car/drill/grill/TV/pants/table/etc. is gu…

I lived through the 60s and know what the goods were.

TVs, for example. They had tubes then, and crummy B+W pictures. They were constantly going on the fritz, to the point that drugstores had tube testing stations. You'd bring in the tubes from the TV and test them in this device that looked like an arcade game, and buy replacements.

Cars then required a lot more maintenance then. And I mean a lot. I've owned and repaired them.

I can go on, but the point is made.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#288

Post by pianopatrick »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #145
piker wrote: post #3

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…

That seems like it'll change over the next few years. Lots of people seem to be making video games with AI. Greater supply, same demand, lower prices.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#289

Post by justonceokay »

piker wrote: post #3

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.)

If you watch The Price is Right episodes from the 80s, it is clear that household items have only had mild inflation. Many items are prices a little lower than today but not outrageously so.

On the other hand, the quality of the items is often much nicer. So someone might win a $500 desk, but that desk is hand-made out of hardwood. Today you can still buy a $500 desk but it will be IKEA quality. A product of comparable quality would cost many $k

Airline tickets are a very clear-cut example of this. Tickets are cheaper than they were in the ‘90s (even with inflation) but you get a lot less for that ticket than you did 30 years ago

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#290

Post by Dylan16807 »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #277
Dylan16807 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For product quality and ads, 90% of the time you don't really have options. For the former, it's so hard to figure out which product is 15% more expensive because it reinforces the weak points and lasts 3x as long. For the latter, YouTube premium is great but I can't get anything like it for banner ads. Most sites have mandatory ads and almost all the rest want dollars to turn off pennies worth of ads.

The only time I ever see ads are at the cinema. I see people talking about them but I have been out of the loop for well over a decade. No adverts on Netflix, bbc, Disney, YouTube, paramount, Spotify. I cancelled Amazon because they added adverts.

Sure, streaming services usually don't have ads. But you're paying a lot of money for specific content there. I'm talking about normal web page stuff. And if you're not seeing ads there, then either you go to very few normal web pages or you're using an ad blocker. Ad blocking is useful but it's not a solution.

I want a way to distribute a reasonable amount of money across the sites I visit in exchange for no ads, but that's not an option. Google almost went into that category once, but they implemented it badly and then shut down the entire thing.

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