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Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

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Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#421

Post by ephbit »

Just picking a passage from the top of the article:

> There's a vague plausibility to that kind of statement, which is why it's a debate I've often heard come up in casual conversation, where one person will point out some obvious company inefficiency or product error and someone else will respond that, if it's so obvious, someone at the company would have fixed the issue or another company would've come along and won based on being more efficient or better.

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This sounds like the question whether the market mechanism that ought to remove grave inefficiencies is actually working because there appear to be many examples where it looks like it's not.

My explanation for why the market actually works and we can _still_ see those inefficiencies:

Complexity.

The reason why - even though the mechanism of the market making efficiency a necessity (to not be replaced) is working correctly - we often see inefficiency, is that a complex world enables niches for inefficient unnecessary complexities to exist, where they can consume resources without being easy to remove.

The more complex the environment, the higher the number of possible/existing additional overhead and inefficiencies.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#422

Post by tetsusaiga »

jader201 wrote: post #227
Sniffnoy wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And by “topic”, in the case of HN, I mean the title of an article. The thing is, the topic of the actual article is generally more interesting than the topic suggested by a naive reading of the title (as is the case here). People discussing things based on titles leads to generic discussions that recur again and again and go nowhere. Whereas the actual topic of the article's content is rather more specific and coul…

Possibly, but I would bet that many people are upvoting these articles based off a combination of the title + the discussions of the title, which would suggest enough people find those two things interesting (which is why it’s at #1 and why most of the comments are around the title vs. the subject). Also, if the subject is more interesting than the title, then authors should consider being more thoughtful around a ti…

I absolutely understand where you're coming from here, but in practice and reality, the point of the title really is to make sure people click the article.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#423

Post by Scoundreller »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #407
ownagefool wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the saw breaks, what if the person who knows how to use the saw leaves? There are good answers to these problems, but I find folks who find comfort in outsourcing assume it's easier for the downstream org solve them. Personal experience suggests it's often a false sense of security, and you often have to have your own experts anyway. Saw the same in software. We won't get budget to patch so let's outsource. T…

A lot of outsourcing decisions seem to be made on the premise of "what if it breaks?" It's a terrible fallacy. Your wafer saw (or server) that is utilized 1% of the time is going to need a lot less maintenance than a shared wafer saw that is used 16 hours a day. You will actually experience a lot less downtime by investing in your own wafer saw (or your own servers) rather than outsourcing (to a foundry or a cloud pr…

At work, I wanted to use google sheets for our schedule because it just works: can have view only links, and it handles multiple editors at the same time gracefully. Got asked “well what if google goes down?”, so back to our problematic system of excel sheets it is :(

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#424

Post by moron4hire »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #2

Because we have unreasonable expectations. Making things work well is hard, and thus expensive. Take a chair, for example. Anyone can make a chair: just get a bucket, turn it over, and sit on it. Boom; backless chair. Want a backrest, arms? Get a 2x4, a saw, a drill, and some bolts. An hour later: Boom; chair. You want a chair that works well? How do you even define works well for a chair? Do you need cushioning? Do…

To the featured article's point, it's gotten so hard to be able to judge which products will be any good at all that buying expensive things expecting lasting quality becomes a huge gamble.

There's also the huge mental barrier of getting over the sunk cost fallacy. If you buy an expensive thing and a part of it breaks in such a way that it still remains mostly functional, it's really, really hard to admit that it should be replaced. You end up living with a broken thing for a long time, just because you're mentally depreciating the thing.

I've been through this with a lot of furniture. It doesn't seem to matter whether I pay $100 or $500 for a bookshelf, it's a crapshoot whether or not the listing lied about it being made of solid wood and not particle board, or whether the screw holes will align correctly, or been tapped correctly for the screws to actually engage without crossthreading, or even use proper screws and not those damn "lock"-bolts (that never actually lock, so given enough time they always work themselves loose).

My wife and I built our children's bunk bed. It was an expensive, time-intensive, physically painful endeavor, partly because this was the first time we were building something so large. It's not great. But it easily matches or exceeds the quality of any of the other furniture we've bought. I'm very proud of the work we did, but at the same time, I'm furious that I can't count on just buying things.

It's also gotten hard to trust people's recommendations on things, which goes back to the featured article's comments on cultural expectations. Most of the people I know just live with broken furniture. They think IKEA is great stuff. It's not. It's just that it's so impossible to find anything better that you might as well buy IKEA.

I might switch to only buying antique furniture, i.e. use survivorship bias to my advantage. Find the stuff that has survived taking a beating already.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#427

Post by michaelt »

lozenge wrote: post #321
orzig wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are those people optimizing for having every product available at every time? They have to balance against the very real cost of spoilage, so I don’t think they consider the occasional out–of–stock as the system breaking

Yes they are. Product availability is the most important factor in choosing a grocery store, as unavailability makes people need to visit additional stores or change recipes/plans on the fly. Some spoilage is factored in and is just a minor bit of negative PR. However, the supply chain disruptions since 2020 are too big for any grocery chain to "solve". https://hbr.org/2004/05/stock-outs-cause-walkouts

The answer is actually "It depends"

For some products like pasta and canned tomatoes, you can hold enough stock to deal with a 99th-percentile day without any wastage at all; if it doesn't sell today, it'll sell tomorrow.

But for those little packaged sushi snacks with a one-day shelf life? Any overstock is going in the trash at the end of the day.

And sushi snacks mostly sell to workers on their lunch breaks. You'll see big fluctuations in demand if a nearby office changes their work-from-home policy, or has a big all-hands meeting that gets everyone in. Even the greatest demand modelling can't predict such things, as nearby office meetings aren't available as a model input.

Some products are also easily more easily substitutable than others: If the 1kg pack of mid-priced spaghetti is out of stock, maybe I buy the low-priced brand, the premium brand, the 500g packet, the wholewheat version and so on.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#428

Post by dazc »

renewiltord wrote: post #135
chii wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

an aeron chair costs about $2000 dollars (give or take). The construction is sturdy, so i expect it to last at least 10 years, if not 20 (you take care of it etc). So the amortized cost is some 100-200 dollars a year for an excellent chair. If you buy a crappy chair, i bet that the cushion starts failing after a year or so of constant sitting. So you'd probably replace it yearly, or suffer a bad chair for a few years…

Well, personally, I have a lot of durable chairs, but I love my Aeron because the adjustability got me out of RSI. I don't mind replacing the chair every year if it would help me avoid RSI. I haven't had to, but I wouldn't mind. Durability in chairs seems to be easy.

I've been out of action due to RSI a couple of times in the past 7 or 8 years. I haven't worked out what the cost was but, sure, it was multiple times the price of a premium chair.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#429

Post by snarf21 »

ephbit wrote: post #421

Just picking a passage from the top of the article: > There's a vague plausibility to that kind of statement, which is why it's a debate I've often heard come up in casual conversation, where one person will point out some obvious company inefficiency or product error and someone else will respond that, if it's so obvious, someone at the company would have fixed the issue or another company would've come along and wo…

I think complexity is definitely part of it but it is also mis-aligned incentives. The person running an assembly line has a vested interest in changing nothing. Everyone knows how it works and consistency sometimes is more important than raw efficiency. If they change something and if breaks the machine or they have a month of lower productivity, they don't get a promotion and/or bonus. Why would they risk it? Plus, people generally hate change.

You actually have to have someone whose job it is to look for inefficiencies. Someone who goes and talks to everyone on the line because they are the ones that really know. Someone who also recognizes that a 5% improvement in one area may not be worth the risk but a 1% improvement somewhere else may be. Just like staff scheduling: do you schedule the bare minimum of staff? What happens when 3 people next to each other all get the flu? Now where are you? Are you better off normally over-staffed and constantly cross-training? Most companies make money despite their operations. This is where Amazon has taken over the world, they have that as a core goal and corporate focus.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#430

Post by phkahler »

ownagefool wrote: post #318
kccqzy wrote: post #242

> An example from another industry: when I worked at a small chip startup, we had in-house capability to do end-to-end chip processing (with the exception of having its own fabs), which is unusual for a small chip startup. When the first wafer of a new design came off of a fab, we'd have the wafer flown to us on a commercial flight, at which point someone would use a wafer saw to cut the wafer into individual chips s…

What if the saw breaks, what if the person who knows how to use the saw leaves? There are good answers to these problems, but I find folks who find comfort in outsourcing assume it's easier for the downstream org solve them. Personal experience suggests it's often a false sense of security, and you often have to have your own experts anyway. Saw the same in software. We won't get budget to patch so let's outsource. T…

>> There are good answers to these problems, but I find folks who find comfort in outsourcing assume it's easier for the downstream org solve them.

IMHO a lot of outsourcing decisions are based on the idea that someone else can do it better than we can. This is demoralizing and will eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy as the most competent people get frustrated and leave. I suspect it may also be projection from managers that are in over their head or don't understand what their own people are saying. And then of course there are times when it's true that someone else can do it better.

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