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Backpacks got worse on purpose

worseonpurpose.com

321–330 of 396 posts

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#321
I firmly believe that many goods like this fall into a cycle.

Existing products are cheaply made and poor quality, so a new company emerges producing a higher quality product. Eventually word gets out and their sales blow up. But to keep their profits going up, they begin to coast and cut corners. Fast forward a decade or two, and now they're the ones making low quality gear, leaving the market open for a new high quality brand.

In short, high quality leads to recognition and growth, and then cutting corners leads to profit.

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#322
post #163

Unpopular take here but I'm really ok with this. The sale of the high quality brand allows the original entrepreneurs to exit their business to someone that thinks they can run it more efficiently. The decline in quality allows for innovative upstarts to try new things.

nah, you've described it objectively. maybe should add pollution from over production and consumption of shit gear.

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#323
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dead horse but I find it astonishing that people can still miss AI writing like this. Don't you find it incredibly grating that every paragraph grinds to a halt while 3 sentence fragments are repeated? Same rhetorical devices. Same tone. Same pointless constructions. That's not good writing. It's cheap parlour tricks. The rhythm continues almost as though the writing is in verse—with the effect of hypnotizing the rea…

this comment reeks of AI too, and the fact i can't tell if you're being tongue in cheek means i'm cooked

I think the comment is mimicking the style of the article.

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also gotten harder in many cases. And there's a perverse effect to that difficulty: even if you really want high quality, it can be so hard to be sure you're getting it that you give up and just by the cheapest thing, because at least then you know you're not getting taken advantage of (by buying crappy for premium prices).

My rule is to never buy the cheapest thing, because to a point, you get what you pay for. But my other rule is not to spend extra for brand recognition or supposed higher quality. There's a middle range where you get reasonable value, better-than-crap stuff. Too low and you're buying junk, too high and you're overpaying, perhaps for brand or reputation, for something you can get elsewhere for less.

The problem with that strategy is that, used at scale like it is, it just creates a perverse incentive to raise the prices on your crappy product, without changing anything else.

For example, in the liquor market, there are basically 4 price points for 750ml bottles: $20 and below is generally swill, but it's cheap swill. Companies here are competing on price. $40-60 gets you something worth drinking, but perhaps not prestigious. Companies here are competing on quality. $100 gets you something prestigious, and companies are competing on such, and the $200+ price point gets you something rare.

If I buy a $30 dollar bottle, in a sane world it would be something with a middling tradeoff between price and quality. Instead what you get is something that is as bad, if not worse, than the $20 stuff, because the company is simultaneously failing to compete on price AND on quality. That leaves them in the hail-mary zone of hoping to offload their product on uninformed buyers, who typically would be in $20 range, but think they're splurging on something a little nicer.

Same principle goes for consumer electronics, like headphones. There's the $20-ish range of cheap stuff, there's the >$100 range of good stuff (though less cleanly sorted than liquor, probably because people buy a lot more bottles over time than they do headphones), and no-mans land of $50 which suck and cost twice as much as the $20 pairs.

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally my experience is the opposite. I bought an angle grinder from Harbor Freight for something like $10 on sale. It's not something a pro could use every day but it has absolutely been fine for what I do with it: cutting the occasional piece of metal stock, sharpening the lawn mower blade once a year, etc.

be careful in promoting that strategy. HF is pretty bad, I had a friend go through 3 them in a day because he didn't have one on the job site and HF wasn't too far away. the next step up is about 2x the price and will last a good year with professional use and maybe more if you can be bothered to replace the brushes. so I'm glad that's working out for you, but there is more bottom to be found. I bought an attachment…

HF sells levels that aren't level lol. Squares that aren't square.

I love them for junk like zip ties and bungee cords and moving blankets; they sell the same cheap rack shelves as Menards, and honestly their free gift multimeter has served my guitar bench well for all over a decade. But their $20 jigsaw made like five cuts before it stopped cutting straight lol.

I love HF is what I'm saying, i just don't trust every item in the building

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a worthwhile observation. It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available. It means that people who couldn't in the past afford something at all, are now more likely to have some path to getting it. And even if you could afford the higher quality, you may not need it anyway. I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality…

> I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater. I've been burned too often with this thinking. All too often the cheap tool isn't just light duty so it breaks, it is not go…

I disagree. It's great that you can get a Wen track saw with 100 in of track for $200 with tax and a Makita with 100 in for $800. People who just want to cut a sheet of plywood aren't stuck paying $800, or more likely, using an inferior tool because the cost doesn't match value to them.

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like at a diner, not at the cheapest possible place that existed.

You'll need to give more details. Diners like the one portrayed in The Olympia Restaurant sketches on SNL were cheap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puJePACBoIo Others now are far more than $18. My first >$20 burger dinner was in 1997. That's >$41.15 now. EDIT: Ahh, here - price for a hamburger in the staffed dining car of a passenger train from Houston to Chicago, 1972, was $2, from https://archive.org/details/spac…

I could go back through my history to find the specific source I used, but it has absolutely no bearing on the point of the post, since even your McDonald's prices are higher than the current app+value menu prices, so I'm not going to and I struggle to understand why you wrote all that to not refute the central point.

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#328

While I personally find this kind of thing extremely annoying, to me, the main problem is the _difficulty_ of determining quality. The Donut media guys did a (relatively unscientific) video comparing a whole bunch of products from the 50s to modern day across several price points. What they found was that the things that "looked" the same now were simultaneously worse and also much cheaper. They also found that, if i…

I'd also recommend the Project Farm review of backpacks- https://youtu.be/cSm48oVCaWc?si=AbTyU9mzOJc5vfbR

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#329

While I personally find this kind of thing extremely annoying, to me, the main problem is the _difficulty_ of determining quality. The Donut media guys did a (relatively unscientific) video comparing a whole bunch of products from the 50s to modern day across several price points. What they found was that the things that "looked" the same now were simultaneously worse and also much cheaper. They also found that, if i…

It is difficult and requires time investment.

I often searched BIFL sub-reddit to find things quality things and it did fail me in the past. After years of broken dishware created a weird collection, I followed the BIFL advice and bought Corelle glass dishes. Only three years later of daily heavy use and dishwasher all the dishes have degraded edge, which looks and feels just like chipped glass.

Looking through specialized forums helps sometimes, but then you are looking at Hermès dishware and doubting what are you paying for - quality or art.

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#330
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dead horse but I find it astonishing that people can still miss AI writing like this. Don't you find it incredibly grating that every paragraph grinds to a halt while 3 sentence fragments are repeated? Same rhetorical devices. Same tone. Same pointless constructions. That's not good writing. It's cheap parlour tricks. The rhythm continues almost as though the writing is in verse—with the effect of hypnotizing the rea…

this comment reeks of AI too, and the fact i can't tell if you're being tongue in cheek means i'm cooked

I'm moderately sure it's intentional irony.
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