431–440 of 506 posts
This is a false pretense. Quality was never the norm. What is no longer the norm is getting first-hand experience with a product before you buy it. Everything comes in the mail and it's a surprise to the consumer after they buy it. That's nuts!
Seriously. Did this person never have to fix relatives' IE6?
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Well there is the option to make Amazon responsible for what they sell...
I think they should be responsible for accurate listings, swift refunds, taking down misleading products, and banning repeat offenders. I somehow think making Amazon "responsible for what they sell" goes far beyond that in ways that are not reasonable. Only those that make products should be responsible for them.
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…
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Sidebar: Don't video games have ever growing competition with existing games? I decided not to buy games until I beat the ones I already have. I am now stuck on NES games and will probably be stuck for the rest of my life.
Games from a couple of years ago are insanely cheap on Steam. You can buy AAA titles regularly for $2-3 each. I don't have a very new GPU, so I stick great games in my wishlist and wait till they are essentially free.
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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…
Sidebar: Don't video games have ever growing competition with existing games? I decided not to buy games until I beat the ones I already have. I am now stuck on NES games and will probably be stuck for the rest of my life.
Digital distribution already pretty much killed the second hand market.
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Claude is subject to the same enshittification market forces. Think of the value Claude could unlock by having trusted commercial partners that just happen to have the best product in a market segment.
Claude was just an example. You can use an open source model or even run it locally.
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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's what paid day one DLC, micro-transactions, and loot boxes are for. Ways of raising the price without raising the headline price.
Tech workers in the US are probably around 90-99 percentile wage. Take something where the quality is well known and measurable, and can be purchased for extra money. How often do you fly first class, or even pay 10-20% extra to have more legroom, early boarding or a more convenient flight times versus picking the cheapest option that you can make work? People will demonstrably shop primarily on price no matter what.…
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Then you scale back a bit and keep making consistent money, just a bit less. The only way things go completely to shit is when you enshittify your product and nobody wants it any more. Or you could expand to other markets, lots of options that don't require making your products worse.
Markets outside the industrialized world don't have the purchasing power for quality products from the industrialized world. That's why you have to reduce quality to reduce price if you want to sell consumer goods to them. Or wind down your operations. But who would want to wind down their operations?