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

The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

english.elpais.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 824 posts

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#391

Post by JKCalhoun »

nradov wrote: post #294
bamboozled wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, fuck the externalities

What are you proposing as an alternative? Spend a fortune on a high quality tool, and then either have it sitting in my garage unused for years or waste a bunch of time trying to sell it online?

Tool rental is a thing (I don't imagine many people own their own cement mixer for example.)

I recall my grandfather having (decent) tools sitting in his garage. Neighbors/relatives often borrowed tools in those days.

To be a little more nuanced though, some tools don't benefit from "quality" versions. Perhaps an angle grinder is a good example. (The consumable grinding disk is probably the place not to cheap-out.) Maybe the cheap one is fine.

But other tools, like a wood plane, you're going to have a bad time if you cheap out on those and wind up with steel that doesn't hold an edge for example.

(Though I kind of wouldn't want to loan out a nice hand plane of mine to someone that might not worry as much as me about hitting a nail in a board they're planing.)

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#392

Post by atoav »

layer8 wrote: post #176

Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. However, a common experience for me is that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten worse, being cheaper made. And I have a hard time finding a replacement that matches the quality of the old version. It’s a regularly reoccurring frustra…

I design and repair electronics for the past decade and quality has gone down, significantly so. A part of this is increased complexity introducing more failure modes, but the main reason is bean counters trying to reduce the BOM cost as far as they can get away with. This naturally means the perfect product (from a bean-counter-perspective) uses the cheapest components and fails reliably one day after the warranty has run out.

They even have succeeded in selling people bean counting solutions as "design". So instead of a satisfying 1.50 € power switch and a 2.50€ rotary switch you get a SMD push button for 0.05 € and have to memorize multiple gestures for that button. Long press means off or something among those lines.

People hate it, but it is cheap.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#393

Post by walterbell »

nehal3m wrote: post #358
MarkPNeyer wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are pointing directly at the philosophical bedrock of western civilization, something which most white collar elites implicitly believe but don't state outright. It shows up right away in the article: > ... quality is an inherently subjective concept, as it depends on the preferences of each consumer. For most of history, people believed the opposite. For thousands of years, people in every major civilization bel…

I think this is a great insight. Also, from a personal perspective, one of the problems I regularly experience as a consumer of goods is that it is very difficult for me to judge quality, meaning I can explicitly not intuit value. For example, two years ago I bought 3 identical pairs of Levi’s jeans at considerable cost. Granted, they’re all I wear, but given that I follow the washing instructions and don’t put undue…

The search term BIFL (Buy It For Life) helps with some products. With ongoing supply chain, currency and trade variables, it's worth buying spares of proven products, which may later disappear from the market.

As for reputable brands, we may soon need version numbers for both products and companies, based on factors like supply chains, regulation, trade policy, corporate management, leadership or ownership (e.g. PE) changes. 2019 jeans from "Acme Corp v10" may be quite different from 2026 jeans from "Acme Corp v12".

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#394

Post by cung »

pas wrote: post #138
forgotusername6 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I owned a Nokia in 2003. The battery lasted a week and they were virtually indestructible. The phone never crashed or reset, the keys were so reliable and well placed that I could text without looking at the screen. The phone did not get slower with age. None of these things can be said about my current smart phone. Granted it does a lot more, but the quality of the things it does do is much worse.

my nothing phone (1) full of very ugly scratches (and one especially ugly testament on a corner to me dropping it one too many time) was stolen a few months ago while I was in a house of worship (I was introducing my favorite girlfriend to the forbidden pleasure of dipping fries into mcfreeze ice cream with caramel - and while in this trance state...) anyway, the new Nothing phone (3a) is amazing batterywise!

Is this written by AI or why does this make no sense to me?

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#395

Post by steveBK123 »

Gigachad wrote: post #277
steveBK123 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is far more prominent in women’s clothing. My wife always says how buying from the same brands over the years that materials get thinner and thinner, as well as becoming more and more synthetic blend %s until it’s practically disposable.

I have noticed that woman’s clothing seems incredibly poor quality a lot of the time. Incredibly thin, and just looking at stuff on the racks and stores it was extremely common to find minor defects and loose threads.

Part of it may be matching to the use case.

Men will buy a shirt and wear it until its seams break in 2-10 years.

Women will buy blouses or dresses with cuts/colors that only work in certain seasons to be worn for a specific occasion that won’t come to pass again soon.

Now where women have more trouble is just in the utility work wear shopping space because that clothing is utilized frequently and until it fails.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#396

Post by ants_everywhere »

jfengel wrote: post #331
ants_everywhere wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn’t this all just Late Stage Calitalsm? If that were the explanation then you'd need another explanation for declining quality issues in communist countries. A test claim that some problem caused by "capitalism" should always backed up by a proof that the problem doesn't exist in the many other economic systems the world has tried. If only because this forces people to actually think about the economics instead o…

There really isn't anybody with state ownership of the means of production. It's hard to find anything to make a comparison to. Communism would have its own reasons for declining quality: the lack of an individual profit motive. The hope would be that you would no longer be alienated from the products of your work, but that never came close to happening. So if you were referring to China... they are the world's forem…

Communism has been tried many times always with severe quality issues. But my point isn't just about communism. You have to run a different argument for mercantilism, command economies, mixed economies, barter economies, etc.

The fact that people have historically tried devaluing currency for as long as they've had currency suggests that there's a force that favors attempting to sell inferior goods without decreasing price and that this force predates the industrial revolution.

> So if you were referring to China... they are the world's foremost capitalists right now.

This is the same logic by which communists called socialists who believed in democracy "fascists". It's just an attempt to excommunicate people from the church if their interpretation is different from yours.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#397

Post by maxglute »

theptip wrote: post #271
baq wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IKEA has some of the best quality cheap furniture. To get something noticeably better you need to spend at least 2x for any given item; 3-5x is common for not at all fancy stuff.

It’s true, but they used to have some of the best quality cheap-mid priced furniture. They changed their target market segment to lean into the “discards their furniture in less than 5 years” ICP, and they also heavily optimized for shipping (eg their bottom-end Kallax is now actually made of corrugated cardboard instead of plyboard, strength-to-weight is amazing, but still less durable). So both are true, that they…

OP is flat out wrong. Some SKUs got value engineered to be less durable over time to keep up with inflation (or material costs, i.e. solid wood is just more expensive now), i.e. expedite->kallax, billy. But new SKU enabled by new tech/manufacturing processes like their power coated steel / stamped metal pieces are absurd dollar per quality relative to engineered or even solid wood. Of course it's not to everyone's taste, but fundamental reality if ones taste is solid wood, that material is no longer abundant/cheap/affordable, like how we use to feed lobsters to prisoners. A $90 heavy duty BROR shelf is ~$30 IN 1990 DOLLARS, about a cost of a Billy back then, except it's larger and much stronger.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#398

Post by fidotron »

SweetLlamaMyth wrote: post #373
fidotron wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. Yes, many people confuse technological development with quality improvements. Technology can improve quality, but it can also be used in other ways. My personal view is the west, especially North America, never recovered from the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable, at least compared…

It seems strange to me to attribute this to the 70s oil crisis vs factors like expectations of unceasing profit growth leading looking for any and all efficiencies, or globalization making extra translate into increased shipping costs from the other side of world.

What is efficient varies based on changes in the prices of different elements of the process.

Energy, materials, logistics, labor, these all vary over time, with the oil crisis being a huge step change both in costs to businesses and consumer behavior.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#399

Post by randallsquared »

fidotron wrote: post #348
layer8 wrote: post #176

Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. However, a common experience for me is that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten worse, being cheaper made. And I have a hard time finding a replacement that matches the quality of the old version. It’s a regularly reoccurring frustra…

> Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. Yes, many people confuse technological development with quality improvements. Technology can improve quality, but it can also be used in other ways. My personal view is the west, especially North America, never recovered from the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable, at least compared…

The curves largely break about 1971 across a wide set of areas, but the energy connection is interesting. J Storrs Hall argues in "Where is My Flying Car?" that the proximate cause is breaking the increasing availability of energy per person, which could only have been continued with very widespread nuclear, and that the turn from nuclear was a symptom of a culture of increasing regulation and excess caution, such that the only major industry that escaped the trap in the 70s and continued existing growth curves was computing.

Now that computing has advanced sufficiently and is being applied to everything else, we're finally getting sudden, major advances again in other areas (electric and autonomous cars, drones, reusable rockets, pharma...), but computing is in the race against smothering that most industries lost in the 20th, and it remains to be seen whether stagnation or abundance will win.

A side note is the resurgence of nuclear, and supersonic flight, etc, which suggests that maybe the problem was more about post-war culture than a systemic turn away from growth and prosperity... we'll see!

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#400

Post by alamortsubite »

nradov wrote: post #294
bamboozled wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, fuck the externalities

What are you proposing as an alternative? Spend a fortune on a high quality tool, and then either have it sitting in my garage unused for years or waste a bunch of time trying to sell it online?

Borrow, rent, pay someone else to do it, or throw your hands up in the air when you've tried nothing, are all out of ideas, and fuck the externalities.
Post reply on HN