Selling Lemons

There's an art to sifting through the "random letter" products on Amazon. While there is a lot of bottom-of-the-barrel garbage that gets churned out by grey market factories, bought in bulk on Alibaba and silkscreened with a random throwaway trademark, there are also smaller Chinese brands that have their own injection molds, engineers, etc. and are actually making quality products, but the easiest way to reach yet another global market is to slap together a random brand on Amazon. Even a Chinese company that's making good quality stuff isn't going to go through all the hassle of setting up a US office, hiring a US marketing team, etc, just to sell their coffee maker.

As many have noted, this happened in the 1960s-1980s with Japan. My specific experience is with guitars: all kinds of random companies would buy mass-produced Japanese guitars, slap their own label on them, and sell them in their tiny music shops. Despite the disparate labels, the guitars were mostly coming out of the same handful of factories (Matsumoku et. al.). Of course there were exceptions like Yamaha. Some of the early examples were mediocre at best, but as the product landscape improved, many of the later examples from the 1970s and 80s are competitive with much more expensive guitars today. The only difference with today's landscape is that the Chinese manufacturers are starting to realize they can cut out the middleman. Imagine you were in the 1960s, pre-internet, trying to decide whether you should get a guitar from a brand name you recognized, like Decca, a record company, or some random Japanese company called "Yamaha".

Also, after a while you learn to spot the "Alibaba bulk" listings and can then decide whether you want to optimize for price and just buy the cheapest one that is exactly the same as all the others.

I haven't tried Manta, though it's hard to imagine anything that could be improved on MZOO. Probably my only complaint is after a year or two of use they tend to lose some of the elasticity, but at $10 you could get at least 4+ years of use for the same price as a single Manta :)

> real life pick up is unwanted and creepy

The act of "pickup" is creepy because it's based on a false pretense - establishing a human connection and trust quickly. Succes is guaranteed only for the sociopaths. Talking to people in real-life, without the help of technology is not creepy and doing it casually just for the sake of human contact is what all of us should be doing more. We would be able to filter out the "creeps" much easier if most people you get in contact with are normal human beings that are being nice to other human beings.

Call me crazy, but it is possible to distinguish good from bad in most of these "lemon markets" the author lists.

When buying physical products, there are tons of high-quality review sites like Wirecutter, with journalists who spend months testing out products and reviewing them to find the best ones. Not to mention the reviews on sites like Amazon itself. And of course, just doing internet searches, researching the domain, learning what makes products good, seeing what others on various forums have liked. It takes some time, effort, learning, and taste to do all this searching and to weed out the fake reviews, of course, but I think many millions of people are capable of doing the above.

Social media is similar. It's not that hard to discern whether you're following a low-quality spam account vs an authentic high-quality person. And you can curate and build up your list over time, to have more signal and less noise. Will most people filter effectively? No. Again, it requires time, effort, learning, and taste. But still, it's possible.

Etc.

But I don't think it's accurate to say we're in a lemon market. We're in a taste market, and the reality is that most people just have exceptionally bad taste.

Yep. And no entity or group seems really interested in moving the needle on this. Instead it just devolves into stupid meta-gaming like the article discusses.