441–450 of 824 posts
This article is really trying to gaslight us into believing it is only pessimism, when decline in quality is very real. The best example is that ikea no longer sells solid wood tables, they are particle board with wood grain stickers. The exciting part is they are more expensive than the original hardwood versions.
A quick look at IKEA's web pages shows that this is simply untrue.
> Many products are hard to compare due to the enormous price difference Well that explains a lot, doesn't it? The article is right overall but occasionally glances over the importance of the "quality/price" ratio. As the price went down, buying habits changed, and by extension the manufacturing habits. When things are cheap nobody wants to keep them forever, they get exchanged sooner to "keep up with the times". My…
Not that sure. I know Bosch, Liebherr and Samsung fridges bought in the 2000’s that lasted 10+ years, some of them that keeps running even after being used heavily (being moved, used by families of 5…etc). They are repairable and some got repaired. They are 2-3000€+. Which is 2-3x the average monthly salary. An other thing to account for is the price of repairs. If your appliances costs less than one hour of a mid-sk…
3000€+ in the early 2000s is easily 5000€ today accounting for inflation. Even if you mean they are 3000€ today, at that price point the market is needle thin. The best selling fridges on Amazon.de right now are in the 300€ region, maybe 500-600€ if you want to go "premium". So you're saying a fridge that's 10-15 times more expensive than the cheap best sellers is also better.
This is exactly the quality/price trap. People remember the quality from "way back when" but forget the price. We mostly just traded quality/longevity for cheaper and faster replacement. Quality didn't necessarily go down, it's just people target cheaper products today.
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Isn’t this all just Late Stage Calitalsm? I don’t think it’s ‘efficiency’ in the same way spaceX is run. Yeah they cut costs, but they got better quality results. With clothes / appliances etc we have reduced quality at our expense - while the companies doing it make more money than ever.
I'd argue that they both represent a kind of efficiency. If your product or service has an unacceptable quality, demand will decrease and you will lose money that way. On the other hand, if in the pursuit of higher quality your production costs become too high, profit will decrease and you will lose money that way. Somewhere between these is a sweet spot where the level of quality and demand are in balance so as to m…
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I've come to accept that, at least in latam, shirt sizes no longer have any real meaning. Every manufacturer in the world has a different opinion as to what those letters mean.
There is truth to this and it has certainly been true of women’s sizing for many years where everyone wants to be a size 2 (or whatever your number is) but no size 2 is the same across brands. It’s an entirely different problem when I buy two pairs of presumably the same pair of jeans in the same style and size yet one can barely be buttoned up and the other requires a belt at all times.
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…
This might be the key issue. Let's say you bought a Roomba 10 years ago, and now go buy the successor model. Will it be any good ? probably not. At least not as good as the competition who got better than iRobot.
It will be the same for cars. If you bought a Nissan 10 years ago, I wouldn't be surprised if the successor isn't as good. Same for cameras, computers, bikes etc.
More than ever blind brand loyalty isn't paying off and even with brands staying at the top of their game the "successor" or best buying strategy might not be obvious.
Some see the world as having become more complex, I'd argue having stagnating signals was worse.
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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’ve always viewed it as less a discussion about any sort of real defined “quality metric” and more companies asking “what is the least amount of time, money, and effort we can put in before people stop buying it?” Even more simply put: what is the worst version of the product that people are willing to buy?
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> Oh, I didn't realize till the end that you were treating this as a team thing, and capitalism is "your team", so you must attack "the other team". Do you think that attitude affected the rest of your response, too? It’s just empirical. Both Communism and Socialism are failed ideologies. Millions dead. Millions more starved. It’s like when Libertarians want to bring about their ideology and people tell them to move…
I noticed you excluded my entire post except for the parts about communism, which nobody brought up except you. I'm not interested in rehashing the team game of "capitalism vs communism vs whatever" for the millionth time here, and nobody but you brought up the latter, so you might safely conclude nobody else is, either. Do you think you can take off your team hat and have a discussion about what we were talking abou…
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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.) M…
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…
Here's how I see it: in the absence of growth in market share or cost-reducing innovation, the only remaining strategy for profit maximization is the delivering of progressively lower quality products for progressively higher prices. This obviously destroys the brand over time, but brands can be recycled/reinvented. A purely rational and self-interested (i.e. unencumbered by moral sentiment or empathy) economic agent…
Think of the LED bulb. It would make more sense for the government to manage the few resources needed and for them to maximize the lifecycle of a lightbulb.
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When I worked at a big tech company, the life quality of software engineers was undergoing what old timers perceived as a significant decline. The official response of the CFO was that the quality can't be declining that much because people aren't quitting an an accelerating rate. This is the same phenomenon as your suspicion. There's some metric (e.g. people keep buying our widgets) and you stress test demand for it…
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…
(Side note: I was looking at your comment history and it appears that most of your comments are down-voted, somebody has an axe to grind)