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The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

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Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#601

Post by _DeadFred_ »

api wrote: post #468
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…

Your suspicion makes total sense. A major problem with the whole model of production is that if you make a good product and saturate the market you die. It’s not the result of some conspiracy to make shit products. It’s a simple outcome from the fact that purchases are one time while businesses are ongoing, combined with shareholder demands to boost growth. Those demands in turn come from things like pension funds th…

'big manufacturing concerns that make things'

Don't we already have this, isn't this called 'China' for most American businesses that no longer make things in the USA/in-house?

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#602

Post by mandmandam »

rizs12 wrote: post #599
mandmandam wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're giving a very poor reading of OP's argument, first of all. Jumping to the conclusion that they don't want Chinese people to have clean water is downright bad faith. Second, "continued growth is good" is a hell of a thing to say on a planet with finite resources. There's a limit! And if you expand your worldview to include other life on this planet and not just society then we've pushed far beyond what's wise a…

China is a developed country! This dialogue about Chinese people and clean water is bizarre

Fair point, I ought have made that clear. There are many ways in which Chinese people have it better than Americans these days, if my eyes are to be believed.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#603

Post by hilux »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #569
Der_Einzige wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol jeans. Just got into selvedge denim, go buy from a company like brave star denim, and don’t buy anything less than 15 oz. I can find a literal 21 oz unrippable insane heavy weight selvedge denim pants for less than 200, and it’ll be made in America of Japanese materials. Most Americans are simply stupid when they buy clothes. They don’t do research and they make extremely suboptimal purchases by trusting big bran…

Jeans at old navy or costco or next are $20 to $30. And I can wash them on “normal” cycle every time I wear them, and dry them on normal and never have to worry about taking care of them. They still last me at least a couple years. And I don’t have to trust that the manufacturer made them well enough to last 7+ years for me to break even.

Check out shopgoodwill.com. I get everything there.

Most clothes are incredible value, and even with a few duds in the mix, it's way better (for my wallet, and the environment) than buying new at retail.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#604

Post by Animats »

Meanwhile, in China, there's a push from the top to improve quality.[1] Government policy previously favored production quantity and increased market share. Mission accomplished. Now there's overcapacity in many areas. So the new policy push is to increase quality to add value. The government is willing to let low-quality companies go out of business.

This is very obvious in China's electric vehicles. There used to be several hundred manufacturers, most producing really crappy cars. Now, there are fewer manufacturers, and the cars are much better. Ford's CEO on the BYD Shark: “It’s a great product. It’s sold well. They’re trying to sell in high volume in Mexico, but it’s also being localized in Thailand. If we want to be a global player in pickups, like we are now, we have to compete.”

Tools from China used to be total crap, and now they are at least OK.

There's a strong trend towards branded products from China, rather than white-label production. Brand reputation starts to matter.

[1] https://qualityinspection.org/cheap-and-crappy-to-excellent-...

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#605

Post by cgannett »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #589
WalterBright wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If worker-owned collectives produce superior products, why aren't they everywhere? It's not illegal to form one.

Well, certainly a “hybrid” form of worker owned collectives are doing well: my company pays over 24 billion in stock to employees annually.

Publix has a model similar to this and it seems to work well for them both as a former employee and a customer. Their stores and products are always nice and they pay above average for their sector. They are on the expensive side but also they have good deals when you look for them especially the BOGOs. I definitely had a better time working for them than I did when I worked for Sprouts which is publicly traded and aiming at a similar market segment. I think if we are going to stick with some capitalism we need to switch to models like Publix and away from models like Sprouts and Walmart.

People on both sides of the capitalism/socialism divide also always conflate "Current Way Stock Markets Work" with capitalism. We do alot of extra damage to the average person's health and well being with the WAY we do capitalism. The plutocrats use the heavily propagandized stick of "SCARY SOCIALISM" to give you a more shriveled carrot year after year and tell you you should be thankful you dont get beat with the "SCARY SOCIALISM" stick while they still hit you with the "NO HOUSE, NO FOOD, NO HEALTHCARE" stick if you can't sell your bodily capital for enough value to please them.

The extra damage is all this profit over anything else no matter the circumstance. Look at United Healthcare getting sued because the new CEO, even if it was purely out of self preservation, decides they are going to actually give people some of the coverage they paid for and not do quite as many dirty tricks to skim as many denials off the top as they possibly can. MANY SUCH CASES

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#606

Post by hedora »

ethbr1 wrote: post #507
SpaceNugget wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image. That's entirely the fault of your crappy smart display with some crappy OS and has entirely nothing to do with HDMI as a standard. I would think as a plug and play standard for A/V stuff, HDMI is one of the farthest along the…

> HDMI is one of the farthest along the "just works" spectrum for the vast majority of people Could I interest you in all the new features you could enable by instead tunneling video over HDMI Ethernet Channel?

Also, why does my 4k display run at 30hz when plugged into my mac?

I ruled out the cable, display and laptop by swapping components one at a time.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#607

Post by kevincox »

nfriedly wrote: post #188
simianparrot wrote: post #149

Airplane tickets used to cost a lot more for economy class, even adjusted for inflation and fees. To get the equivalent service and quality today you simply have to pay more, you just have the choice of paying very little for very low quality because there’s more flights and more planes. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/even-with-fees-the-miracle-of... Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes. I’m not say…

> I'm not saying that a high price label guarantees high quality, just that the spectrum of cost vs quality has broadened, even within big name brands. I think this needs to be repeated. People tend to think more expensive equals higher quality (I want this to be true!), and I think brands frequently take advantage of that to increase margins without significantly increasing quality. For example: I've been through th…

The main problem is that the average person has no way to evaluate quality. The closest most people get is heaver == built better (which is probably a correlation overall, but not that accurate for any two random products). At the extreme end of this you have companies putting little steel plates into things they want to appear higher quality.

How can consumers evaluate how robustly some Bluetooth firmware is written, if the product is actually durable or if some USB charger actually accurately follows the specification? For most cases there is no way to know. The best route for the average consumer is to find a review by and expert, but these are very rare (experts with the required skills can often find better jobs than reviewing) and they are more likely to find paid marketing which just misleads.

So we do end up the case that the only real metrics the user has is price and brand. Many formerly reputable brands have also started rebadging cheep crap so that works less often then you would hope. And while good products often can't be cheep, it is now common to see cheep crap sold at higher prices to seem premium.

So at the end of the day the consumer has really no way to judge product quality. So the market has very little incentive to actually provide quality.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#608

Post by cgannett »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #390
hliyan wrote: post #316

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 pretty much the game plan for every private equity acquisition: exchange brand goodwill (and all other sources of value) for profits, pocket the profits, leave the empty husk behind.

Also almost everyone who works at that company gets laid off and the few remaining have the worst job ever now. LINE GO UP THO!!

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#609

Post by SoftTalker »

fragmede wrote: post #568
WalterBright wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boils down to what people are willing to pay for. How many of us go to buy something on Amazon, and buy the cheapest one? And if your product isn't the cheapest one, what are you going to do about it?

Buy the Dyson version at 4x the price, avoid thinking about the money and concentrate on the fact that it's not crap (yet). We can expect the Dyson brand to go through the same quality arc in twenty years, but for now, I'm happy with the times I have splurged for their products. The problem is naked capitalism doesn't have a meaningful reward function for quality products. If I buy a product and am happy with it in t…

Dyson is shit now though. Maybe it used to be good but like many other established names they are squandering their good name for more profits by cutting quality.

I think GP is right. We buy stuff online now. You can't see, touch, or evaluate anything. Reviews are all fake. Brand names are comingled with counterfeits. The only signal left is price. So knowing it's likely going to be crap, why pay more than you have to.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#610

Post by montjoy »

torginus wrote: post #548
microflash wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been especially pronounced in medical equipments where there’s this unnecessary race to introduce “digital experiences”. An example is hearing aids. A few years ago, it was relatively easy to get an analog model with dedicated volume buttons and off switch. Now, most of the models come without off switch and need Bluetooth pairing with an app installed on your phone. What used to be plug and play is now a cl…

My favourite example of this was the digital pregnancy test - which instead of having a test strip that changes color based on a chemical reaction, had the same test strip surrounded by a photodiode and a LED, which detected the color change and displayed the results on the screen. People still buy it because it's digital so it must be better.

Also, when testing for pregnancy you want to be as “sure” as possible and price is assumed to be an indicator of quality.
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