Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Backpacks got worse on purpose

worseonpurpose.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 396 posts

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#351

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

While I would not disagree with many of the points made in TFA, I think this is a bad example to demonstrate the problem the author is trying to address.

Why? Over the last twenty years, many high end backpack designs have moved towards lighter weight materials and construction, because of trends in the world of backpacking.

This means that even in the high end segment of the market, comparing packs to ones from decades ago can be misleading - they are working with different design goals.

None of this eliminates the points about cheaper materials and construction at the lower end of the market, but it does make things a bit more complex than they need to be if a different example was used to illustrate all this.

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#352

Post by BobbyJo »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #311
BobbyJo wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Median earnings in 1970 were closer to 56k in today's dollars. 1970-1980 was a recessionary period, followed by stagflation in the 80s. I hate when people use that time period as an anchor to show growth. It's like using 2009 as an anchor.

What data are you using? It is hard to get solid numbers pre 1975. I looked at SSA Wage index which has 1970 at $6,186. Adjust using PCE, that is only $42,808 in present dollars.

Census data, it goes back way farther, but conflates things pre-1975 along a lot of variables since that was barely post-segregation.

Not sure how you're getting 42k: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/infl... spits out 51k for that number.

In either case, IMO, +-10% over 60 years should just be considered flat. Calling it flat is probably generous considering how inflation has affected durable goods vs necessities. We can buy more appliances now, but places to put them have never been more expensive relative to income.

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#354

Post by Gud »

MostlyStable wrote: post #55

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 often see this argument but I don’t buy it.

People used to study the items they were buying, not look at the brand.

You (probably) live in a hyper capitalistic society where many corporations promote their brands through lies and deception. That is a very strong filter already - avoid the (mostly American) transnational giant corporations and buy from companies that are mostly local and aren’t hyperscaling.

Sure the mainstream brands are shit but there are dozens, hundreds of brands for a fair price point that aren’t for every shitty corporation.

Don’t buy Levi’s, buy Nudies.

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#355

Post by BobbyJo »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #289
BobbyJo wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real wages were down ~15-20% from 1970 to 1979... so, not a good year to anchor on.

Where are you sourcing that data from? The graph I linked using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't go back that far, so comparing to 1970 would not be possible.

US Census tracks income, its just harder to pull out since they don't provide nice charts like the fed.

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#356

Post by joshstrange »

psadauskas wrote: post #95
MostlyStable wrote: post #55

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…

Its also gotten harder to trust them to maintain that quality, too. A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners, or even start selling a slightly different product with the same model number. Or you find a decent brand that makes good products, they get popular and grow and in come the MBA…

Even for products without CR/WC-levels of traffic being thrown at them do this.

My parents had silverware they liked, 10-ish years later we had lost or chipped a handful of them and they bought replacements. They look identical and feel identical…. Except the new ones clearly used lighter (read: cheaper) materials and then put a weight inside the handle to make them feel the same. The problem is that the weight is not attached well and can become detached and start sliding around making the handle rattle when you turn/invert it.

Just so irritating to know that effectively every product/brand will do this in the end.

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#357

Post by eesmith »

eudamoniac wrote: post #327
eesmith wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since the McDonald's burger is now cheaper (after adjusting for inflation) then is it also worse than it was in 1970?

Because if it's the same or better than it sure sounds an example of why people may have acquired "some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be".

My original comment was to mention that one of your numbers seemed rather high. To keep from it being a you-said-I-said thing, I gave supporting evidence. You didn't like the research I did, so I gave more supporting evidence that you are likely off by a factor of 2-3 for the hamburger prices.

Perhaps that means things weren't as expensive back then as you thought they were?

Like, while I can certainly find dresses in the $47 or higher range (you wrote "typical dress was $350") in this 1974 catalog https://archive.org/details/tog-shop-clothing-1974/page/n105... , that's from the Tog Shop, founded by fashion designer Paula Stafford, and with brands like Lacoste and the more expensive clothes list the designer or design house by name, which hardly seems typical at a time when Sears was selling dresses for less than half those prices and people made their own clothes to save money.

There's some great looking clothes in there, by the way.

And there were some expensive shitty things back then, like American cars which were soon to be trounced by Japanese imports that were both cheaper and better.

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#358

Post by maxglute »

MostlyStable wrote: post #55

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…

How much of it is people lost skill to determine quality. When everyone did some mending, population had baseline ability to discern quality in clothing, and clothing companies less likely to pull shenanigans.

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#359

Post by Ajedi32 »

BobbyJo wrote: post #355
Ajedi32 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you sourcing that data from? The graph I linked using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't go back that far, so comparing to 1970 would not be possible.

US Census tracks income, its just harder to pull out since they don't provide nice charts like the fed.

Well there's this which goes back to 1967: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2025/demo/p60-... I'm having trouble finding the raw data though. In any case I'm not seeing any big drop in the 1970s.

Re: Backpacks got worse on purpose

#360

Post by libartsreader »

dualvariable wrote: post #337
libartsreader wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CPI doesn’t arbitrarily “swap in” items. It changes based on consumer behavior. That’s why it now tracks streaming services but not VCRs. Similarly, if the price of Gala apples triples and everyone switches to Fuji, a fixed index would overstate the actual cost of living. Insofar as gold impacts the cost of things people buy, it’s already included. Adding it directly to the CPI makes no more sense than adding Bit…

But if you used to be able to afford steak and now all you can afford is ground turkey, readjusting the basket of goods for that shift in "preference" is just hiding the fact that nobody can afford steak anymore. And similarly, the hedonic adjustments to smartphones sort of implicitly claim that the $100 cheap smartphone you can buy today is worth $8000 back in 2009 because of how much better processors and memory ha…

The assertion that the CPI simultaneously overlooks downward product substitution and prices in product improvements in order to paint an overly-rosy picture is belied by the fact that most stuff is cheaper than it’s ever been.

Thirty years ago, internet service was $2.95/hour (in 1996 dollars!), long-distance phone calls were 10 cents/minute, and a low-res 28” color TV with 5 channels cost a fortune.

Post reply on HN