I think 10x is quite rare. Quality ends up actually curtailing costs to some degree (eg. fewer returns, cheaper marketing - word of mouth). Buy a Weber grill, I had 2 grills before my Weber that lasted 3 seasons between them. I bought the Weber at about 2.2x the cost of the bargain grills and 17 YEARS later it's still going strong, built like a tank. Saved a lot not buying more cheapo grills.

Problem is, you pay 10x for shirt that is made in the same factory as the cheap shiry, just has a different logo.

Walmart used to be (and maybe still is?) known for doing this. They would get companies to produce lower-quality versions of products under the same name as the standard versions available elsewhere. They could sell them for cheaper and consumers were none the wiser - or so the theory went, anyway. Obviously people caught on.

You are right, it's easier to bake in quality decreases (aka "cost reductions") to keep the price stable than increase the price. Users usually don't see it directly, and since the whole industry does the same there is no real alternative.

A good way to see this is in clothing: my wife likes to buy vintage clothes, part because of the style, but also because most of them are actually well made and sturdy.

Nowadays it's almost impossible to get the same quality and finishes, even with the more expensive brands. Due to the mass-production of low quality clothing, (most) consumers don't even have a clear idea of what "quality" looks like, which further reduces incentives for manufacturers.

For comparison, some niche menswear brands keep the quality stable (as their specific consumer base asks for it). Say Northampton leather shoes for instance (Crockett and Jones et al.), which are still made in the UK (not in an mafia-ran sweatshop in Italia for luxury goods...).

Their products are amazing, and...the price grows 5-10% per year steadily.

If you watch The Price is Right episodes from the 80s, it is clear that household items have only had mild inflation. Many items are prices a little lower than today but not outrageously so.

On the other hand, the quality of the items is often much nicer. So someone might win a $500 desk, but that desk is hand-made out of hardwood. Today you can still buy a $500 desk but it will be IKEA quality. A product of comparable quality would cost many $k

Airline tickets are a very clear-cut example of this. Tickets are cheaper than they were in the ‘90s (even with inflation) but you get a lot less for that ticket than you did 30 years ago

> my theory is that the decline in quality is another hidden form of inflation

That is a well-known phenomenon, usually called "shrinkflation". (After the fact that the easiest way to lower quality while keeping the price consistent is to just give you less stuff for the same price.)

Although all economists are made aware of the phenomenon, they seem to be just as prone to the illusion as anyone else. Here you can see Tyler Cowen weighing in on a Twitter debate about the price of a meal at Chipotle: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/08/us...

A burrito is sold for the same price (well, 4.6% higher) now that it was 15 years ago. Case closed! Stop complaining about Chipotle's pricing.

Is it the same burrito? Deep in the comments "Michael" reports, from current and archived Chipotle menu tools, that a steak burrito bowl in 2015 contained 875 calories and the same exact menu order in 2026 contained 830 calories... with 80 calories out of that 45 calorie difference representing additional steak in the 2015 bowl.

I frame it more of a moral problem. Like, at least 90% a moral problem as a conservative estimate. People need to care in aggregate. There are forces that make people care less. Perhaps US healthcare is a prime example. Medical professionals are burning out, prices are going through the roof, and outcomes are getting worse all at the same time. If there are doctors who are working themselves ragged AND people are still paying through the nose, why is healthcare still getting worse?

The same forces that we can see as plain as day in U.S. healthcare are affecting... everything.

It's part of the growth paradigm - that everything must continue to grow.

Let's say your product is mature. Your market is pretty much saturated; everyone who wants to use this product is using either yours or a competitor's. You and your competitors are finely balanced, you could reduce your prices and get more market share, but that wouldn't increase your profits. You have optimised your manufacturing process to the point where further efficiency would cut into resilience and create more risk than it would be worth.

Your shareholders demand growth. Doing the same numbers as last year is not good enough. So what do you do?

Reduce costs. Cut quality. Shrinkflate. Enshittify. Your customers won't notice immediately. Your competitors are also doing the same.

You only need this strategy to work for a couple of years until you can move on to another role, and consequences are something your successor will deal with. Meanwhile your shareholders are happy and your bonus is secure.

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 hold on to dear life on pricing.

Speed Queen appliances are about 2–2.5x longer-lasting for roughly a 50–75% increase in purchase price.

Well skimpflation, with caveat that a remarkable amount to R&D is spend into value engineering to lowest price points, like you don't get to 50 cent FOB tshirt trivially. And frankly it's revolutionary - enabling developing country wages to buy clothing on a single day wage.

That said, it's 2026... if you want quality and only want to pay marginal increment, there's tons of Chinese ODMs turn direct to consumer, i.e. Quince. They'll sell you functionally top quality (spec for spec inputs if not better) with 1x markup vs 10x brand markup/premium.

Absolutely. It's the most visible in services shrinkflation.

This just isn't true. What has happened is that companies try to cut costs at every point to make more and more profit since that is what capitalism just does.

There are two ways to submit to capitalism when making products either mass producing the cheapest crap possible with hair thin margins, but since you make so much and they last so little you still make bank.

The other is to make ridiculously over priced luxury goods that rich assholes buy because they want lovingly hand crafted quality instead of the cheap crap, but of course you are marking it up 100-1000 times the price just because you can.

What cannot survive in capitalistic world is the good mid ground of lovingly produced products that actually last and are good quality, because those don't sell as often as they last for a life time or three and you can't gauge the price.

Sure there is a sub section of the economy that literally cannot afford but the cheapest thing, but they need to keep buying same thing year after year as it won't last and thus their children are cursed to suffer the same fate as they cannot inherit any good quality furniture or cars or even houses, everything is just cheaply made consumable with no expectation that it will last longer than a year or two

To me, this is why we have regulation.

The CE mark in Europe and the UL mark in the US is supposed to provide a floor on quality.

That floor can be increased if we as a society decides that this is required.

You might be unwilling to pay for this increased quality, but you don't have a choice.

because quality signals are much more misleading these days.

can't trust reviews because theyre spammed with fakes. can't trust brands because private equity buy them out and enshittify.

I'd call it externalized costs of regulation and rising demands on production.

If end consumers were able to see an exact and measurable bump in prices the next day a new stronger regulation made production more expensive, voters would be more informed and the whole cost of doing things "better" would be clearer.

Quality was the norm when people had little or no disposable income and expensive things had to last for a lifetime, and some less expensive things (like shoes) had to last years.

Quality was what you judged products on and the origin of brands.

The overwhelming majority of brands today are meaningless because they have nothing to do with quality. They are either status markers or tools for exploiting our tendency to form habits.

You need go no longer than your local hardware store. Almost all the consumer grade electrical tool brands today are from perhaps 2 manufacturers. But you are likely to have a preference that you tell yourself is grounded in a rational, informed choice. Except, it mostly isn't. You probably buy the same toothpaste every time. Not because you have done an exhaustive study of toothpaste and concluded it is the best one for you. But because it is what you are used to buying.

(Yes, there are still some professional tool brands that make their own electric tools, but the kind of stores consumers shop in don't have those since they cost an arm and a leg)

Yes, quality used to matter. A lot. But most people alive today have not lived in those times. People have a hard time imagining things that are outside their own experience. So much so that they can even conclude "it can't be if I haven't experienced it".

For product quality and ads, 90% of the time you don't really have options. For the former, it's so hard to figure out which product is 15% more expensive because it reinforces the weak points and lasts 3x as long. For the latter, YouTube premium is great but I can't get anything like it for banner ads. Most sites have mandatory ads and almost all the rest want dollars to turn off pennies worth of ads.

> Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.

I wish they would price the service commensurate to what they earn with ads.

My ad watching gives them a few cents, and yet they want $8.99 for a month or some gems.

I don't think it is true, that no one wants to pay a penny for services they use. I know at least one counter example, because I pay for search (Kagi), LLM usage (Kagi assistant), VPN, and support various good causes and content creators.

But I think your point is the vast majority, and that point probably stands, and indeed is a huge problem.

> Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.

My gas pump has ads, despite me paying for the gas. My airplane has ads, despite me paying for the ticket. My phone has ads, despite me paying for the service. My doctor's office has ads, despite me paying for healthcare. My car has ads, despite me paying for the car.

I can pay for a service to watch sports, and I get ads during the event, ads painted on the field, ads superimposed on the field, normal ads embedded in the commentary, obtuse ads shoved into things like "and he's the Lite Beer Co.® Player of Match", ads in the name of the building, ads in the name of the match itself, ads on the player's jerseys. Frankly at this point I wouldn't be surprised if attending the game required receiving a free tattoo of a sponsor's logo.

Corporations have decided "why make ${service_cost}, when we could make ${service_cost} + ${ad_revenue}?"

Even if you don't buy from China directly, you can't prevent local brands outsourcing their production, because all of them do It.

Why such a personal attack? I don't think I even know you!

I'm kidding, but what you say is hitting pretty close to home. I always mean to vote with my wallet, and I usually try, but for every Mikrotik router or Framework laptop I buy, there are so many Aukey Magsafe chargers, or McDodo Lightning to USB hubs. BTW, I'm not specifically calling out Aukey or McDodo, but for me those decisions were based on moments of weakness where I needed something to solve a problem, but I wasn't convinced it was significant enough that it was worth paying for what I thought was the best solution (The Aukey being the most recent purchase, and the McDodo having a memorable name).

As an example, I was recently looking for a replacement for my fraying 2m USB-C to Lightning cable, and Apple's is US$30 and it looks like it's made of the same buttery-soft plastic as all the short-lived cables that came with past phone purchases. Anker is finally a valid option where I now live - so I guess I should be giving them my business. They're a similar price, but look more resilient. I haven't quite reached USB-C on all my devices, so whenever I'm buying some accessory, it may only work with a device or two, and there's a decent chance that I might need to shuffle things around, and need a different length or a different connector on the input end.

That was a lot to write on an unimportant topic, and I didn't even touch on the temptation I sometimes cave into to fly a low-cost spin-off of a good airline.

I also share the feeling with another sibling-poster, that digital subscriptions all seem to be either free, or double digits a month, for just one small aspect of my digital existence. Things that only cost a few dollars a month are easy decisions, like Bitwarden, or leasing a domain name, or iCloud+. For anything that crosses into double digits a month, I never get around to it if there is a free alternative which I don't feel horrible about using. A grand-fathered Google Workspace, the free-tier of Protonmail, etc. However, I do feel guilty for not also paying for Kagi, Protonmail/Fastmail, Mullvad, etc. Should I be giving some money to Firefox in some way?

I wish more of these companies that were doing the right thing would offer a cheap tier that was a no-brainer, and there was a service where I could bundle together a bunch into one subscription. Feeling pretty entitled as I write this :)

But lacking that, I end up just sticking with the free options, and then every now and again donating some small amount to a cause I think is worth supporting - Lichess, Putty, VLC, etc.

It isn't like this behavior is inherent to westerners. Everyone would prefer to save money and have better service.

> Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.

Because paying a penny won't prevent ads or tracking.

Even this site on mobile has issues with unnecessary horizontal scroll.

Really?!

Yes, let's blame the working class for spending money on Chinese goods after their jobs were offshored and their spending power was decreased.

I finally subscribed to consumer reports. It is the only independent place we can trust for that information. However they only review a subset of the things I want to buy.

> Turns out it is galvanized, not stainless. I’m not sure the average person knows the difference. To be charitable, perhaps that’s even why the listing advertised it that way.

The person (or who/whatever) that wrote the ad copy probably doesn't know the difference. "Stainless" (either grouped with the word "steel" or by itself) is maybe a filler word to lend a certain level of gravitas/authority to the description or maybe used in contrast to "painted"; despite that it does actually mean something to people who know, it's not being used in that way, which contributes to the confusion. You'll often see menu items described as having "fresh" ingredients. I saw this the other day while waiting to place an order at a cafe and was thinking "what do they mean by 'fresh', in contrast to what? to distinguish themselves from other cafes' menus? freshly purchased by this venue or freshly harvested?" You can't tell, so much so that "fresh" is now meaningless. Perhaps "stainless" is going that way too.

A simple indicator for quality should be the return rate by brand. You need two things: a law that offers a long enough warranty, and a public registry of returns where customers can check that their return is listed.

> One big problem

This is THE biggest problem for me. I'm happy to pay for quality when I need quality. But there's almost sorcery involved in finding quality.

> Turns out it is galvanized, not stainless.

So the seller committed a fraud. Did you get your money back?

Could your post some example result, so we can judge by ourselves

> Quality brands are economically incentivized to sell-out [...] because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important

That probably happens a lot, but there's another mechanism by which it could happen, that requires no malice: the brand gets a quality reputation, which increases demand for its products, and they are unable to produce quality products at the rate needed to satisfy that demand. Then it's easy to reason that it'd be a net benefit for everyone to loosen the quality requirements a tiny bit, in order to satisfy the demand of more customers. People used to the quality will barely notice any difference, and then twice as many people can get that experience.

That works once, but when applied again, and again, and again, and again it becomes a problem, even with zero ill intent.

> "cashing out" on good brands a universally bad decision.

For the company yes, not for the executive bonuses.

It is quite notable how the long-lasting companies that are household names somehow managed to resist this urge. Most of them are private.

People need to compartmentalize things in order to make sense of the universe, but doing so for companies (and governments) is just counterproductive.

Whenever you think about a company to draw any good conclusions you always need to think about all the people who work there, from the factory worker to the executive.

I see "quality brands" as a potential way to avoid knowing yourself stuff about what you buy. In itself, outsourcing one's expertise about a product might be the root cause of the detrimental effects you mention.

As an example: I was once shopping with someone that had experience in fashion. While I don't remember all the details, with one look/touch the person could tell and explain if something was poor or high quality, while to me it all looked mostly the same. Based on that experience, I now I mostly stick to checking the material, and avoid plastics which seem to show a tendency for low quality across the board.

I do agree that it requires effort to know stuff about things, but when I see people that go like "oh, I need X, will pick the first X that shows up on Amazon", I am less amazed we get crappy quality for lots of products.

Also it doesn't even matter if the rare company making a high quality product long enough to get a positive brand rep is incentivized to sell out (although I don't disagree with you that is a pressure to act in short term interests) thanks to this great thing called: private equity!

Something I've noticed is every maybe 3-4 years there's a new "hot person athleisure" brand that appears, prices at a premium, bombards social media, drapes every single person you see running outside in your city in full sets from it, before getting turned out and replaced by basically the same exact thing with a different name.

So they've gotten quite good at the pump n dump of getting everyone in the spin class on some new $300 polyester outfit every two weeks. It is probably brutally formulaic how refined the playbook is for these sorts of companies.

> is to force companies to stick with their brand

Punishment is never a good long term solution. Because punishment is related to revenge. And revenge reinforces the punishment - but on the other side.

Perhaps questioning the underlying assumptions we make about products, money and capitalism is an alternative approach:

- money is just a means, not an end. Allowing faceless investors to pump money into brands and then have them force companies to turn a profit at any price (i.e. by decreased quality at higher prices - it's a brand after all). The euphemism for this is "increasing shareholder value". The only value being increased is money.

- why does advertising build on our fears of being "different" (not belonging to our assumed peer group) or "not being happy" (if you buy this product, you'll be as happy as the person shown here in the advertising). Or missing out on something. The euphemism here is "increasing brand awareness". They that shout the loudness will remain memorable.

- why has everything and everyone become a product to be sold and repackage to fit into the latest trends. Intelligence is now also become a product in the form of AI with folks outsourcing their intelligence to a machine "oh AI can do this better than I could so I won't even bother".

Unfortunately we make too many assumptions that it has to be this way. Science and nature have yet found the unifying law of capitalism or brandism, let allow law of influencism.

So until the next bubble bursts and much time is spent saving large bloated inefficient corporations from bankruptcy because interested parties have their fingers in the pie, the game will continue.

The whole thing is becoming a giant game of monopoly with no end. At least monopoly eventually ends with the winner gloating over their success and everyone else quietly walking away.

> Major known brands are guilty of this too, often regardless of price.

I think this is part of the problem. Everyone wants high-quality (for the most part), but no-one wants to pay more than necessary. If known brand is no longer an indicator of quality, how do you determine that you want to spend say 2-5x the price on something? Reading reviews and such gets you part of the way, but they often focus on new products and performance or style. And it's not always easy to find a review for the thing you are looking to buy. Besides, who has time to wade through reviews for every purchase? So we end up buying the cheaper options because at least then you will only be out a little bit instead of feeling tricked spending more for the same product.

The share of household spending on clothing has gone from 10%+ to under 5% in Western countries. When you're spending that much, it's not a surprise that clothing was "BIFL" both in quality and upkeep (repair rather than replace).

The overall revealed consumer preference has been "more and cheaper", not "less and higher quality", which still exists as a niche if you are willing to go down the tailoring route, not off the peg.

I thought I "knew" this but this T-Shirt video let me down the rabbit hole: https://youtu.be/CMoZjcpgivM

Which means I now feel obligated to recommend:

https://youtube.com/@theironsnail

https://youtube.com/@shiftfashiongroup

Both have great videos on garment quality. But with the inevitable caveat that they are in the business themselves. I take it as an insiders perspective and watch out for content marketing (while being tainted!).

It seems to be easier to find better clothes if you are a bit of a hipster type. Those kind of stores still care for quality. My friend has such a shop and tells me that even for them it gets harder to source good vendors as it is a continuous race to the bottom.

> I wish there was a line of brands and even better shops that focused on quality fabrics and sewing processes for clothing that lasts for ages as it used to.

They still exist, at least here in Europe.

I quit buying cheap clothing a decade ago, getting quality items is much more expensive but at the same time I've had basic t-shirts that I wear most days last me 5-8 years; trousers that are almost 10 years old and the only blemish is a bit of faded colours; underwear lasting 5+ years, etc.

The issue is very few people have the disposable income and are willing to pay 40-80€ on a good quality t-shirt with heavy premium quality cotton (280-300gsm) sewn in Portugal, Spain, or Italy, or 45€ on a 3-pack of underwear made in Scandinavia, or 20-30€ on a pair of great quality woolen socks.

I do it because I have experienced how much longer they can last, and also had the experience of overpaying on what seemed to be a good quality item and didn't last, it's really hard to find a good signal for what's quality since price alone doesn't do it, you need to buy the stuff and hope it will be good quality and if it's not you learn to not buy it again, it can get expensive if you are unlucky or didn't do proper research.

In the end it can be exhausting for a normal person just looking for good quality to find those items, it took me years to settle on the brands I buy from.

Clothing is also a bit of a special thing. Some people will just get bored or tired of wearing the same trousers or the same old coat every year during 10 years. So it is simply not worth it to spend a mini fortune on a great quality one.

This tends to happen more when one is young. Growing older usually means that a good old dusty 15 years great quality coat is seen as it being perfectly ok. I guess that's also what provides that feeling that some people when they approach middle age they "always look the same"... It's not cheap to have a large and varied wardrobe and at the same time filled with high quality garments.

You can go to a tailor and get custom stuff, if you want to. In fact, thanks to the internet it has never been easier.

Seriously. Did this person never have to fix relatives' IE6?

Is it easy? What if an organization avoids liability through shell companies and financial engineering?

"The company managing your warranty was acquired by Foobar Inc and their sole building burned down destroying all records. We apologize for the inconvenience."

Comment is unrelated to the link, except that both have the word "Warranty".

[flagged]

According to page 116 of the report of this EU survey: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3752, Sweden and Denmark have climare change as their number 1 and number 2 most important topics to be addressed in the European Parliament respectively. It makes sense to extend that to the OP which is norwegian and say that a lot of the target audience probably cares

I do however agree that making the cheapest/best solutions also be good for the environment would be ideal.

Maybe for Americans but certain countries the people there do on average care.

So, given reality, how would you suggest this gets done?

Competition partially causes this though. When you have 100 brands selling the same thing it became a race to the lowest price.

This is a really good point.

Related, Matt Levine has recently been writing about how the AI labs are paying huge amounts of money to tech/math/AI people but these people don't actually know how to spend it. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-09-10/dal... As opposed to the typical finance worker who knows very well how to spend.

Sometimes "quality" really doesn't matter. Flying any higher than premium economy is one of those times. Will it get you to your destination any faster? Will you feel better when you get off the plane? It's like I could pay to sleep in a hotel tonight, and it'll be really nice, but I choose to sleep in my bed at home instead. There won't be any difference tomorrow.

True … I’m the same, but I consider that good engineering. Designing it with the use in mind, factoring in all the stresses adequately but only just. That’s more like how an airplane is made: weight/strength only where it’s truly necessary.

I wouldn’t say that’s low quality though, just something with a lot more care put into it.

"Now consider what that means for software, a fully unregulated industry. It means some form of credentials…"

So what! Until the 20th Century pharmaceuticals/medicines were unregulated (eg: buy laudanum (opium) anywhere without regs and instructions said it was fine to give it to kids). After deaths, disasters and addiction regulations tightened—especially so after birth defects and thalidomide. Now the industry is tightly regulated.

Right, it took over one hundred years for pharma to be regulated. So be it for software. It's time the Wild West came to an end.

There'll always be whingers along the way, especially if they stand to lose profits. The "Good Times" for the software industry ought to be over because consumers are no longer benefiting in the way they should. Want a quintessential example of 'junk' software: Windows 11.

I don't buy your list. For example, higher quality doesn't require third part certification. Reputation (and warranties) can work without third parties.

I do agree that third party certification is one possible avenue.

I don't think the idea of circular economy, where goods are produced with high manufacturing quality standards, applies to software. In the sense that producing high quality physical goods may not be beneficial for the producer. But producing high quality software is rarely not beneficial for the developer, specially in the long term.

Maybe idea could be maybe applied to the offering of long-term technical support and backwards-compatibility (in terms of durability of the software) and open source (in terms of reusability of the software).

Not to mention, it would raise the cost of Software as a Service businesses as the cost of building and maintaining software goes up, as well as the technical expertise to maintain those systems. That would have a flow-on effect of reduced market as low-medium income folks are effectively priced out of the market, no long paying for "cloud services, and so on... It would be a disaster.

As far as I can see the linked report does not mention software at all. It is all about physical products.

I think all three of these points, but especially the first two are rather speculative; I don't personally believe they hold, though I can't be sure.

Most quality defects I see are ultimately down to culture, not training and certainly not certification. Getting to excellent quality simply does not require great training nor rigorous certification, and I'm not even sure it really benefits from either all that much. But what it does require is a culture of chasing down all the avoidable risks, to fix not just the immediate bug, but also the process that allowed it to come to be, to pre-emptively look for whole classes of bugs or misfeatures seriously, and to always look deeper than for underlying causes or interactions (i.e. take the 5-why's game seriously).

It's perhaps almost a trope by this point, but it's still a great reminder and example - sqlite. About a month ago Richard Hipp, one of the primary authors, gave a great presentation "Reliability Lessons From SQLite" (https://youtu.be/V_qzqY1bb7I) - and notably, I'm not seeing even _echos_ of training and certification in their clearly world-class process. I don't think you can even seriously claim it's all that expensive, if you consider how tiny that team is, and yet how much they've achieved.

If larger organizations fail to achieve high quality - well, _why?_ It's not due to lack of training, certifications or smart people. Perhaps its intrinsic about larger for-profit corporations, but I suspect we could do better with better incentives, and a more serious attitude about dealing with mis-aligned incentives throughout our culture. Is it really a flaw for a corporation to prioritize short term cost reduction even over long term self-harm if that's what they're judged by? Is it a flaw for a profit seeking corporation to largely ignore costs their low quality imposes on others? Is it a flaw for a for-profit organization to take huge risks when the upside is unbounded but the downside is mere bankruptcy without any further liability?

I don't know how to solve these problems, and don't want to claim it's even remotely reasonable to throw out the capitalist baby with the corporate bathwater, but surely we can do better than the status quo even without a revolution. Misaligned incentives and tragedies of the commons aren't new issues, nor ones without potential mitigations. We're just choosing to ignore those inefficiencies, and have for decades. And at this point, even small changes in incentives might have truly wrenching consequences; the ingrained and by now deeply embedded carelessness in our huge software and other engineering stack is corroded at every level.

TLDR: I don't have the answer, but I'm pretty positive it's not an issue of cost, training or certification.

This looks quite interesting; thanks for sharing.

A related concept is Jugaad - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad Often interpreted as "good enough" with no connection to Quality at all. Even when the context/environment changes to afford better quality (both manufacturing and cost) quality is never pursued unless mandated by National/ISO standards etc.

One way to maybe understand this is through Robert Axelrod's books; The Evolution of Cooperation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation and The Complexity of Cooperation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Cooperation

But the actors are never fully rational, there is always a clique which manipulates/influences and therefore there is never a "fair" market. Human motivations and behaviour are always the key and so you need Behavioral Game Theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_game_theory (see book of the same name by Colin Camerer)

Finally, Nassim Taleb's ideas are also very relevant here. Markets work on "Trial and Error" and "Chance", there is no "fair/efficient invisible guiding hand" but only a guiding hand by cliques which have no "skin in the game" when it comes to downsides and "asymmetric risk" benefiting corporate capitalism. But the system as a whole functions because it is somewhat "Antifragile" i.e. the chaotic interactions and successes/failures within the system somehow strengthens the whole.

> Consumers, fundamentally, care about two things: * Price * Features

Consumers also care about accessibility. It doesn't matter to me if product X is amazing and affordable if I can't find it in any store anywhere near me or if amazon never shows it in search results because all they want to push is amazon basics and products made by FSLHVHSLR

If no company anywhere sells what I want, then I have no choice but to compromise and today there is a whole lot of compromising going on. Companies are more interested in selling what is most profitable to them, not what consumers actually want. Very often consumers are forced to buy what little is offered to them. The consumer "voting with their wallet" will always lose when companies also vote with theirs because theirs is much much bigger.

Consumers care about a lot of things besides that, it's just that (as you mention) those are the two most legible things to consumers.

Your specific example of cars is, IMO, not correct: Honda, for years, could charge a premium on their new cars due to a reputation for reliability increasing resale values.

For less expensive things, how much time should I spend researching quality USB-C to HDMI dongles? It's plausible that the chip in the $5 on amazon WOPEIME (or whatever) branded dongle is the same as the in the $25 Belkin one.

For intermediate things, time-pressure might matter. If my clothes washer were to fail today, I'm doing laundry by hand until I can get a new one in my house, so I'm probably playing quality roulette with several hundred dollars of my money at Best Buy.

There might not be any trade-off in your example. You're assuming that a solid wood piece of furniture is superior to the flatpack alternative and you can't really say that without knowing what the consumer needs.

I have a little Ikea Lack table that holds my printer. I paid less than $10 for the table and I don't even think it's wood (cardboard maybe?). It's getting close to 20 years old and is in great shape.

Was there a time when an oak dresser was much cheaper in inflation adjusted dollars?

Furniture that lasts forever is an anti-feature for some. They want to change their furnishings about as often as cheap furniture lasts anyway. I mostly buy quality furniture, but sometimes I don't know what I really want and Ikea and Wayfair are great for that. Cheap enough to donate after I decide what quality piece I really want.

> I think a lot of this is a lack of perspective - everyone wants better things but nobody actually wants to pay for it.

I think that's part of it, but I also think it's largely an issue of information asymmetry. Brands used to be a proxy for quality, and price could also be a proxy for quality, but that is no longer the case. That means it takes significantly more effort to research a product category to find a good product and people don't want to expend that effort. I am one of those weird people that enjoys that research, so I'm often the one people in my friend group ask for product recommendations because they are more than happy to spend the money, just not the time.

It's a discovery problem at the end of the day. When all the existing indicators become unreliable and advertising is inundated with scams and frauds, there's no way for good products to connect to good customers, so /everyone/ suffers.

People in poor countries have gotten massively richer over the last few decades. Especially those that participate in global trade, ie those that you could even call 'your slaves'. After all, some poor soul in North Korea who doesn't trade with you can hardly slave away to your benefit.

More specifically, people in PR China have gotten massively richer since the late 1970s. How does that square with your slavery thesis?

I might also add that if anything, goods from China have become better value for money since then. Even as their people have moved further and further away from slave status.

Such is the nature of being part of a global supply chain, whilst living in one of the richest countries in the world.

There's lots of high quality Chinese stuff, too. Why do you say it as if quality and Chinese don't go together?

Spoiler alert, almost everything is made in China, including the premium stuff.

> Unfortunately, from my experience artisans aren't willing to do the work anymore, even if you pay them premium.

"premium" ? No they've had to lower their prices because otherwise you would never even look at them in the first place (or they don't get a livable amount of work, even if you personally do pay like you say).

And the drop in prices has to come from somewhere. Quality is by far the easiest thing to skimp on.

Its not the 90s anymore. China can make stuff, and they make most of your stuff.

Curious where your entirely 100% not-made-in-china computer and/or smartphone come from. Taiwan perhaps?

> For example, I own Sennheiser headphones, an iPhone and a MacBook. (Sure maybe not the absolute top of the line, but definitely more expensive than commodity products.)

If anything, all of these are probably in the sweetspot for value. I have a hard time calling them the norm, at least not unless you're in the know and are knowingly looking for good value. I had to go through 3 sets of headphones before I got a Sennheiser set I was happy with and lasted 10 years. There are countless shitty Android phones and Windows laptops out there, and people do buy them.

I do think our consumer rights in Norway help a bit on this (the article is a page to the consumer agency here). We have 5 years mandated "warranty" on almost all purchases. Which means selling a cheap blender that breaks after two years, you as a shop/producer/importer have to eat the cost to provide a new one if it happens. Which means that the chance of something breaking becomes priced in, so you can't really get away with selling something flimsy a bit cheaper to trick the consumer.

Planned obsolescence is absolutely to the benefit of corporations if those goods are being rented. Non-durable goods are inherently profitable to rent out at above the cost of outright ownership, because then the companies involved can double dip on the consumers paying the costs of producing the good as well as claiming depreciation on the good the company still technically owns. It's a similar concept to why owning durable goods and renting them out to consumers is so viable.

I imagine you're looking at it from the avenue of "if those goods last longer, they can be rented for longer", but having to manage and store more durable goods after consumers have moved on to newer and better things is a considerable cost. A good that has to be returned is often better discarded, from the company's point of view.

Most cars are rented nowadays and they are less durable than ever. It's better for the manufacturer to lease and then get you to upgrade periodically to keep you as a novelty-seeking consumer.

Long warranty is better as there is no other incentive who has to pay if the product breaks down. Cars should have a 7 years warranty by default for instance.

Why would planned obsolescence not be to their benefit in a world where things are rented?

You still renting the old Xbox? Try renting this new Xbox instead, the verification cans come in additional flavors!

...some kind of subscription as a service model? looks up dramatically

Where do you live? Somewhere with "taste", I imagine? Please tell us.

"European tries not to repeat hackneyed clichés about Americans for 30 Seconds: Challenge level impossible"