531–540 of 824 posts
Is this describing aliens? Because of all the people in my social circle, maybe one is like this.
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…
We have become addicted to cheap. Same phenomenon with airlines: everyone bemoans how awful the experience is, and virtually everyone buys the cheapest possible ticket.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> If your product or service has an unacceptable quality, demand will decrease and you will lose money I challenge that assumption. If whole markets are dominated by companies who have downgraded quality to the minimum, then customers have no choice but to keep buying from you or someone else doing the same thing. If they don’t buy from you because of their most recent bad experience, someone else (who bought their j…
A market without perfect information and where consumption isn't necessarily driven by rational needs is ripe for exploitation. Why should a business create higher quality clothes if they can instead manipulate consumers into thinking they're losers for not replacing their wardrobes every year, flood the market with thousands of labels to create brand uncertainty and pay people to "review" them favorably to further make it hard to be an informed consumre? They can can condition consumers into believing that poor quality is acceptable, so why shouldn't they if it ultimately results in higher profits?
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…
The entire American version of capitalism is built around growth as the primary goal, which did great things, but now (unequally, some sectors are still innovating) is creating more and more shitty things.
It's so hard for anyone to acknowledge this because everyone wants to take a "side", pro- or anti-capitalism, without being realistic that there are different implementations of capitalism and there is no system that universally works, it really depends on the situation. Right now we need to make "lifestyle company" not a bad word in investment circles, focus on dividends/revenue sharing over stock growth, create incentives around steady, well run companies, and not companies that outspend and destroy competition and then make their product shittier and/or more expensive.
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…
Perhaps something to that, but there is also consumer pressure to not raise prices. Think of those things you bought 5 / 10 / 15 years ago and adjust pricing for inflation… would you pay that much now? We have become addicted to cheap. Same phenomenon with airlines: everyone bemoans how awful the experience is, and virtually everyone buys the cheapest possible ticket.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So many people of HN need to google the terms “raw denim” and “selvedge denim”. Companies like naked and famous make high quality BIFL tier work wear clothes aimed at women. Normies just don’t know about it cus denim heads are autistic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That’s not the only one it’s just the easier one. When people tear down new models of gaming systems they find fewer chips on the boards because they’ve found some chip that does two things for less than the price of both - below a certain point it’s financially infeasible to make simple parts because the capacity they consume makes a chip that does half as much only 15% cheaper. See also when people started putting…
I think this point is the key and kind of subtle point - "growth at any cost" does actually rise the tide and bring up all boats when there is a lot of room for innovation. It just starts harming when a sector has diminishing returns on innovation. So you'll be able to come up with plenty of counter examples where growth mindset is really beneficial because it's very context sensitive.
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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…
Your former CFO needs to read about the Trust Thermocline. https://therightstuff.medium.com/the-trust-thermocline-expla...
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…
Good analysis... (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)
Parent's comments are months apart. What sort of somebody did you have in mind?
Of note, parent's tag is "ask me anything and i will probably give you something new to think about." This is a bold promise.
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…