I personally see two effects that are very detrimental here:
1) "Quality brands", where you pay a premium to get high quality/durability products, are economically incentivized to "sell-out" (cash in the brand name by producing as cheaply as possible). This is because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important than anything else.
2) Increasing trend towards no-name products (or ephemeral brands). This means that producers can sell cheap trash with no drawback whatsoever; slightly more expensive quality products become unmarketable because every customer will assume you're just trying to sell them the same cheapest shit for more.
I used to think that brand products were a universal money waste for suckers, but now I think they can be a very valuable mechanism.
What would really help in my view though is to force companies to stick with their brand, to incentivize them to invest into it and to make "cashing out" on good brands a universally bad decision.
> "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 and 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.
> 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.
That sounds implausible. For a premium brand the marginal unit should be comfortably profitable, so they will have the resources to saturate the market at exponential speed purely from their unit economics. The somewhat theatrical lines outside the store aside, Apple has never had a strategic problem meeting the demand for Apple computers.
It seems a lot more likely that you get executives who come in and believe that narratives beat reality, there are a lot of people like that in the world. They are the sort who will abandon the reality of quality because that costs money then get confused when the narrative catches up. Or you get an idiot who is data-driven and detects that there is no immediate change in sales when they compromise on quality so they conclude that quality isn't valued by consumers. No malice, just a lack of strategic thinking.
Once they reach the limit of demand, then there's nothing more to be made in that price category, so they get more by selling out and lowering quality and price.
We're going through massive global depopulation in the entire industrialized world. There are no new customers coming and sales will naturally trend down because of human extermination. Once everybody has an electric shaver, then you know that the next generation of customers is half the size or less. Unless you can make people grow their beards and hair faster, then there isn't going to be any demand among people who can afford a quality product. You have to start targeting the very poor, and thus lower production costs.
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!
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.
While it does relate to price discovery--i.e., some folks just aren't willing to pay for an additional unit of quality at 10x--my theory is that the decline in quality is another hidden form of inflation. Thing continues to cost X even though regulations have increased costs Y, ship production to China and scrimp on the inputs. (Or have market forces do that for you.)
The CE mark is worthless, since it is a self-certificaton.
The UL mark is valuable, as are the other test lab marks. However, while an ethical storefront would require it, Amazon does not. I've bought plenty of things that are not listed, and if I want safe products I generally have to include "UL" or "ETL" in my search. Even that doesn't always work, I've seen products on there claiming a listing in the title but photo shopping the place where the UL logo ought to be off of their product images.
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.
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.
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.
Quality was never the norm: cheap also beat quality with a hand tied behind his back!
Western working class has spent decades complaining about cheap imports from China... while feeding that market with their own money.
Western frequent fliers keep reminiscing about the grandiose pre-deregulation era or air travel, but cry a river when their low-cost carrier of choice actually enforces the limit on cabin baggage.
Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
I agree with this. It's curious that we always talk about "things used to last forever and weren't only made by corporations chasing infinite growth", when those things are often still available, but are almost invisible because we now discover everything through social media or SEO.
You can find great-quality, long-lasting products at great prices (great price doesn't equal cheap, but great for what you get).
I use capable LLMs on high reasoning to run a prompt like this:
"I want to buy a high-quality [category] that will/has/can [requirements here]. I do not want to pay for a brand name that doesn't improve.
Start by finding manufacturing clusters in [region of the world, e.g. Europe] where [category] is made, then find the businesses making [category] in that cluster that I can buy from.
Normal online stores are okay, but also try non-obvious avenues:
-local business registers
-stores that may only be available in the local language
-factories that sell samples directly"
-cooperatives that sell products from multiple local manufacturers
(I modify this prompt, but it's the skeleton)
To verify a given product/brand/store, a great follow-up prompt has been:
"Now find me big brands offering a product of similar quality (ideally measured by objective characteristics) and show me how much it is vs. [store name here]"
This has showed me incredible finds. It's become how I buy most things that go beyond basic trinkets, and I often pay less for far higher quality.
I think what people associate with "quality" is vastly different from each other.
For example I believe there is a deeper quality that cannot be easily found in a more quality product. Quality can be expressed in many ways and felt throughout the life. But people don't care for that.
They mostly care for cheap and good enough. I don't want to attack that way of life its simply one with tradeoffs like a life with more quality.
More quality can mean more expensive, the need to engage with something a bit more, etc.
Leibl famously needed over 3 months to just draw the hands of one model for "Three Women in Church" it certainly has some quality to it.
In the modern world seldom you will find one that wants to pay for such work or even spending 3 months of work on painting hands.
The answer is competition. Quality declines when companies no longer have to meaningful compete in the marketplace. The only other solution is regulation and force quality through punishment for noncompliance. Competition works better.
My experience is competition invokes two races happening at the same time, one for lowest price and one for highest quality. You can get a cheap car or really high quality car. Same goes for clothes, restaurants, basically anything where there is lots of market choices and competition.
1. Higher quality requires better trained technicians. That means fewer people will be able to participate due to any of missing experience, costs of training/education, and opportunity costs.
2. Higher quality generally requires third party certification, such as the CE or FCC identifiers on electronic equipment. Certification costs time and money resulting in a form exclusivity.
3. Higher quality means goods/services with increased durability, which requires fewer updates or repurchases. That is great, for the producer, if everything comes with a warranty but is bad if patching is an extra expense.
Now consider what that means for software, a fully unregulated industry. It means some form of credentials for developers instead of frameworks or tech stacks. It means paying money to third parties to validate every patch release. It also means applying a warranty to all commercially licensed software. These things would raise the price of software and eliminate most people currently employed.
"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.
Existing regulations should cover software in their respective industries. Outside of that what you are asking for is simply onerous and isn't something that can be regulated in a meaningful manner.
We've already had opensource projects threatened by the age-check legality nonsense (which cannot be enforced). If you regulate what features can/can't be in an OS you will end up negatively affecting opensource and/or hobbyists which will give the consumer less choice.
The only reason we have an actual alternative to Windows is because people create their own Linux distros and software around it.
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 think reputation and warranties are insufficient. While building a reputation may be expensive, destroying a reputation can be profitable (in the short term). Warranties can also be made less effective by making the buyer spend excessive time and effort to enforce the warranty. The company sets the terms and effectively their interpretation, so after two years of waiting, nudging, waiting, complaining, waiting, threatening, and waiting one finally gets an "equivalent value" replacement (and the warranty clock was running during that time).
The company might also go bankrupt with much of its profits having gone to owners and decision makers who are not bound to honor the warranty.
My local coffee shop makes excellent coffee. They don't need get a third party certification for me to to believe that.
Similarly for eg a local carpenter. Or my tailor.
The bar exam merely tells you that someone is legally allowed to be a lawyer or some such. They don't tell you, if she's any good. I don't know what USMLE or PE are.
> Same goes for products too. It’s not a reasonable solution for the consumers to perform an exhaustive research to get high quality guarantee.
That's for the consumer to decide, isn't it? And consumer can use third party certification, if they want to, sure. (Or if they are required to do so by regulation.)
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).
One of the greatest challenges for software as an industry is for the developers to consider the role of the user. In my 20 years of doing this rarely have I seen a developer advocate for the users over themselves. Instead the developer imposes themselves as the primary user and the actual users as a secondary class. This is where most tech stacks and design decisions come in at every step.
I can also remember when I worked at Travelocity a million years ago and they actively tried to fight this insanity with exhaustive A/B testing.
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.
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.
There's few things where the drop in quality is astronomical, one of them being clothing.
Clothes used to last a life time till few decades ago.
Right now you buy stuff that after the first wash already looks worn out, terrible or starts falling apart.
Major known brands are guilty of this too, often regardless of price.
So people end up with closets filled of junk that they look terrible in anyway.
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.
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.
The thing is mainly there are no quality options available. It's mostly all cheap shit or slightly more expensive, but still equally shit.
So how can this reveal preference if there are no options?
I would argue the surge in vintage clothing ecosystems is an indication there is an unmet demand.
There’s certainly options above temu junk. Maybe it doesn’t meet your bar but I’ve found the 100% cotton stuff from Uniqlo to be massively higher quality than the average. I’ve got tshirts from them I’d guess I’d worn and washed 80+ times.
You can still go to a tailor and commission jackets, trousers and shirts, made with the same quality of fabrics and manufacturing techniques. With shoes, you can still go and buy hand welted shoes.
It all comes at a price but I don't disagree that we have a barbell problem here (ie cheap fast fashion or bespoke, with nothing in the middle).
That's not actually "revealed consumer preference" for quantity over quality. It's just that it's impossible for the average consumer to assess quality.
> 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.
I love this - super testable experiment. I have this exact desire too.
- I can’t stand most cheaply made tshirts or things with crass branding
- there are a few clothing brands that focus on high quality (and in this case english mfg fabric mills).
- it is not cheap. our whole society is warped around “physical goods are super cheap now [because we can manufacture in cn]”. it’s a race to the bottom and we’ve hit the bottom.
- you can buy a black nylon/cotton tshirt for 10 USD
- these tshirts will set you back 130 USD. it feels amazing, was made in a country with health care, ages well, looks high quality.
> 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.
Yeah its great when you find quality things but you don't always know, price isn't a great indicator of quality. There is also the buyitforlife subreddit, would like something like it but more structured.
I think this reflects how companies are run in US and Europe, they don't seem to believe how different companies can be here, its not only about turbo maxing the owners profit.
That's the trap I described, it's really hard to tell since price is not a good signal.
To me it was trial and error, recommendations, and shopping at physical stores, and like I mentioned as well: it's time-consuming, frustrating, and I wouldn't expect a person not interested in this quest to be able to find good quality items consistently.
Haha, yeah, completely understandable, I have a few linen pieces (shorts, shirts, a couple of t-shirts) for the occasions I go to a hot place during summers but I live in Scandinavia where summers are, to me, the perfect level of warmth. I generally avoid the peak summer in southern Europe (both due to the heat but also overcrowding), and when I visit my family in Brazil it's also usually off-peak summer.
I really cannot handle very hot weather, it's nice for a day or two but a week of constant 30+C is definitely not my happy place.
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.
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.
There’s some amount of gradient between use-once and fully bespoke clothing, and most people’s economic means are positioned somewhere on that gradient. Indeed it’s a U curve of sorts – cheap clothing can be surprisingly expensive (see also the Vimes Boots Theory).
Yes, it can be expensive to be poor, but the rich really do consumer more dollars-of-boot per day, because they can afford it.
> There’s some amount of gradient between use-once and fully bespoke clothing [...]
Bespoke clothing mostly fits you better. It doesn't necessarily last longer. (But you can ask for harder wearing material or longer lasting manufacturing techniques, of course.)
With sufficient competition, the incentives of companies would change if consumers would be willing to rent instead of owning products. Then planned obsolescence is not to their benefit.
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.
It would be nice if quality became a standard, but the problem is that the world has become too complex. On top of that, I think the disappearance of friction is a big part of it.
In the past, if a garment factory was located in a certain country and the quality was poor, it was often directly tied to that country's reputation. But as the world began to lose friction and entered the era of globalization, much of the work was passed down to subcontractors, and the big problem is that consumer complaints don't get passed down to the subcontractors either.
And within this structure, multiple subcontractors can't survive; as subcontractors grow, they begin to centralize into one. In such a structure, it's not that the original contractor controls the brand quality of the subcontractor. Rather, the subcontractor that has grown huge begins to control the quality ceiling of the entire market.
On top of that, for a company to sustain continuous growth, a given product must not last too long, right? Because a product that can be used for 20 or 30 years means people won't have to buy that product line again.
Its funny to watch a bunch of Americans who have the worst possible tastes, standards and expectations commenting negatively on a Norwegian Org's article about why we need higher standards.
Guy's its possible not to live in a world of slop, you know that right? You don't have to turn the world into a glorified Walmart.
The way I see it we all have 30-60 modern slaves working for each one of us. More or less depending on the country and personal consumption.
So I don’t have such determination in complaining about the quality of the goods that I participated in exploited labour of.
It’s all working somehow more or less. Seems like it could stop any moment. The continuous decrease in quality is rather the least of my worries.
What worries me is the fragile state of global affairs and heavy fog of war obscuring the future.
I am AI accelerationist after all not because I believe in utopias but because of how dire the situation is. AGI/ASI might buy us couple of decades or more. The risk/reward calculation heavily favours pedal to the metal.
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.
No. China is a colonial structure of extreme 1-tier cities, 2-tier cities, and the lower cities beneath them. It's called hukou... That's also why ordinary Chinese young people don't want to go down to the provinces.
People in China's first-tier cities live well and are more up to date than almost anywhere, but in the lower cities, they are not free. I usually think that popular literature reflects a country's social conditions, and even in China's xianxia, there are ranks, and people act according to those ranks. To say that all of China has become wealthy would be an overstatement, given that there are many problems starting with the migrant worker issue. Of course, China is a great power, and the wealthy programmers in first-tier cities are extraordinarily talented.
> That's also why ordinary Chinese young people don't want to go down to the provinces.
Recently you're even starting to hear stories I thought ended with the Soviet Union. People who are literally terrified of getting on a train out of the city because they think they might never be allowed to come back.
I think about this a lot because I try to never buy anything Chinese or low quality unless I have to.
Unfortunately, from my experience artisans aren't willing to do the work anymore, even if you pay them premium. For instance, a carpenter here in Poland that decided to be a carpenter would rather cut up pre-made cabinets to your specs than make them from scratch using wood, even if I pay them 10x.
Then, people aren't willing to pay premium for stuff. For some reason, they would rather buy 20 products that last year than 1 product that can last 20 or more.
It's a problem for me because I value quality and would be willing to pay premium, but I just can't ever find anything.
I definitely have to do a lot of work every time I need something, but I can often find products that aren't made in China (normally Germany).
If not, I usually just don't buy it new and just go to the thrift store. I can usually find what I need, made 30 years ago that will probably last me for the rest of my life.
Those things made 30 years are filled with carcinogens. the Chinese make great stuff, your opinion comes off like programmed xenophobia, lay off the twitter.
Most of my "smart" devices are Chinese. Huawei creates superior products than most western/korean/japanese counterparts. I would prefer everything I own is Chinese, the quality is superb.
Regulation doesn't have much to do with quality. For example, there's plenty of regulation to make food safe, but almost nothing about making your food high quality in the sense of taste and texture.
You get quality from competition and customers opening their wallets for quality.
Another example: Apple assembles some nice consumer hardware in China. Their quality doesn't depend on regulation.
It's an old stereotype - between 1990 and 2010 or so, Chinese manufacturing was usually seen as of a lower quality.
This was often unfair and incorrect even then, but it's clearly mad now. Chinese products run the gamut from the lowest to the highest ends in almost every consumer field. But some people hew to old stereotypes.
Where are you going to shop? And how do you know something is the 'Chinese version'? It's not like for example Apple advertises where they assemble their products.
For a concrete example, we get very good rice varieties specifically from certain parts of China. (But here in Singapore people also really care about rice. You generally can't buy good and fresh rice in the middle of the Polish countryside for example.) And, yes, for this product the 'Chinese' variety is superior to eg generic Thai rice.
I put 'Chinese' in scare-quotes, because just like you don't just drink 'French wine' when you know what you are doing, you don't just eat 'Chinese' rice.
For a lot of tea drinking paraphernalia, the most top of the line items also come from China. Even if you are into, say, Japanese tea.
I either look at the label or do research beforehand. I buy from all kind of places.
I wasn't thinking of agricultural products, but rather anything manufactured. As an example, appliances made in Germany will have a cord long enough that you can actually plug into the wall, while the one that's made in China will have a useless 10-centimeter cord that would force me to use an extension.
Your mileage might vary, this is just my experience, but it's been pretty consistent for a few decades, with things going downhill in the past I'd say 5 years or so.
We are happy with our Miele appliances (washing machine, dryer, dish washer.) But we also have plenty of Chinese stuff that works well.
I've recently had kids, and I'm actually impressed at how much toys have improved in quality since I was a kid growing up in Germany. And, yes, most of these new toys come from China etc. By and large, they seem to be sturdier and last a lot longer, and are cheaper, too.
I'm especially impressed by the light-up shoes we bought. I guess you can blame that on general improvements in LEDs and battery technology in that specific case, maybe.
For what it's worth, I now live in Singapore, and we are very open on trade, so as a consumer you benefit from especially brutal competition.
Could also be that if you're in Singapore you get better stuff. It's possible that European companies pick crappy, cheaper products that they have a higher margin on to cover importing and transport. I have no idea.
> 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.
I personally see two effects that are very detrimental here:
1) "Quality brands", where you pay a premium to get high quality/durability products, are economically incentivized to "sell-out" (cash in the brand name by producing as cheaply as possible). This is because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important than anything else.
2) Increasing trend towards no-name products (or ephemeral brands). This means that producers can sell cheap trash with no drawback whatsoever; slightly more expensive quality products become unmarketable because every customer will assume you're just trying to sell them the same cheapest shit for more.
I used to think that brand products were a universal money waste for suckers, but now I think they can be a very valuable mechanism.
What would really help in my view though is to force companies to stick with their brand, to incentivize them to invest into it and to make "cashing out" on good brands a universally bad decision.
> "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 and 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.
> 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.
That sounds implausible. For a premium brand the marginal unit should be comfortably profitable, so they will have the resources to saturate the market at exponential speed purely from their unit economics. The somewhat theatrical lines outside the store aside, Apple has never had a strategic problem meeting the demand for Apple computers.
It seems a lot more likely that you get executives who come in and believe that narratives beat reality, there are a lot of people like that in the world. They are the sort who will abandon the reality of quality because that costs money then get confused when the narrative catches up. Or you get an idiot who is data-driven and detects that there is no immediate change in sales when they compromise on quality so they conclude that quality isn't valued by consumers. No malice, just a lack of strategic thinking.
Once they reach the limit of demand, then there's nothing more to be made in that price category, so they get more by selling out and lowering quality and price.
We're going through massive global depopulation in the entire industrialized world. There are no new customers coming and sales will naturally trend down because of human extermination. Once everybody has an electric shaver, then you know that the next generation of customers is half the size or less. Unless you can make people grow their beards and hair faster, then there isn't going to be any demand among people who can afford a quality product. You have to start targeting the very poor, and thus lower production costs.
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!
> 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.
While it does relate to price discovery--i.e., some folks just aren't willing to pay for an additional unit of quality at 10x--my theory is that the decline in quality is another hidden form of inflation. Thing continues to cost X even though regulations have increased costs Y, ship production to China and scrimp on the inputs. (Or have market forces do that for you.)
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.
The CE mark is worthless, since it is a self-certificaton.
The UL mark is valuable, as are the other test lab marks. However, while an ethical storefront would require it, Amazon does not. I've bought plenty of things that are not listed, and if I want safe products I generally have to include "UL" or "ETL" in my search. Even that doesn't always work, I've seen products on there claiming a listing in the title but photo shopping the place where the UL logo ought to be off of their product images.
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.
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.
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.
Quality was never the norm: cheap also beat quality with a hand tied behind his back!
Western working class has spent decades complaining about cheap imports from China... while feeding that market with their own money.
Western frequent fliers keep reminiscing about the grandiose pre-deregulation era or air travel, but cry a river when their low-cost carrier of choice actually enforces the limit on cabin baggage.
Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
Even this site on mobile has issues with unnecessary horizontal scroll.
I agree with this. It's curious that we always talk about "things used to last forever and weren't only made by corporations chasing infinite growth", when those things are often still available, but are almost invisible because we now discover everything through social media or SEO.
You can find great-quality, long-lasting products at great prices (great price doesn't equal cheap, but great for what you get).
I use capable LLMs on high reasoning to run a prompt like this:
"I want to buy a high-quality [category] that will/has/can [requirements here]. I do not want to pay for a brand name that doesn't improve.
Start by finding manufacturing clusters in [region of the world, e.g. Europe] where [category] is made, then find the businesses making [category] in that cluster that I can buy from.
Normal online stores are okay, but also try non-obvious avenues:
-local business registers -stores that may only be available in the local language -factories that sell samples directly" -cooperatives that sell products from multiple local manufacturers
(I modify this prompt, but it's the skeleton)
To verify a given product/brand/store, a great follow-up prompt has been:
"Now find me big brands offering a product of similar quality (ideally measured by objective characteristics) and show me how much it is vs. [store name here]"
This has showed me incredible finds. It's become how I buy most things that go beyond basic trinkets, and I often pay less for far higher quality.
I think what people associate with "quality" is vastly different from each other.
For example I believe there is a deeper quality that cannot be easily found in a more quality product. Quality can be expressed in many ways and felt throughout the life. But people don't care for that.
They mostly care for cheap and good enough. I don't want to attack that way of life its simply one with tradeoffs like a life with more quality.
More quality can mean more expensive, the need to engage with something a bit more, etc.
Leibl famously needed over 3 months to just draw the hands of one model for "Three Women in Church" it certainly has some quality to it.
In the modern world seldom you will find one that wants to pay for such work or even spending 3 months of work on painting hands.
The answer is competition. Quality declines when companies no longer have to meaningful compete in the marketplace. The only other solution is regulation and force quality through punishment for noncompliance. Competition works better.
Competition partially causes this though. When you have 100 brands selling the same thing it became a race to the lowest price.
My experience is competition invokes two races happening at the same time, one for lowest price and one for highest quality. You can get a cheap car or really high quality car. Same goes for clothes, restaurants, basically anything where there is lots of market choices and competition.
There are economic impacts to raising quality:
1. Higher quality requires better trained technicians. That means fewer people will be able to participate due to any of missing experience, costs of training/education, and opportunity costs.
2. Higher quality generally requires third party certification, such as the CE or FCC identifiers on electronic equipment. Certification costs time and money resulting in a form exclusivity.
3. Higher quality means goods/services with increased durability, which requires fewer updates or repurchases. That is great, for the producer, if everything comes with a warranty but is bad if patching is an extra expense.
Now consider what that means for software, a fully unregulated industry. It means some form of credentials for developers instead of frameworks or tech stacks. It means paying money to third parties to validate every patch release. It also means applying a warranty to all commercially licensed software. These things would raise the price of software and eliminate most people currently employed.
"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.
Existing regulations should cover software in their respective industries. Outside of that what you are asking for is simply onerous and isn't something that can be regulated in a meaningful manner.
We've already had opensource projects threatened by the age-check legality nonsense (which cannot be enforced). If you regulate what features can/can't be in an OS you will end up negatively affecting opensource and/or hobbyists which will give the consumer less choice.
The only reason we have an actual alternative to Windows is because people create their own Linux distros and software around it.
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 think reputation and warranties are insufficient. While building a reputation may be expensive, destroying a reputation can be profitable (in the short term). Warranties can also be made less effective by making the buyer spend excessive time and effort to enforce the warranty. The company sets the terms and effectively their interpretation, so after two years of waiting, nudging, waiting, complaining, waiting, threatening, and waiting one finally gets an "equivalent value" replacement (and the warranty clock was running during that time).
The company might also go bankrupt with much of its profits having gone to owners and decision makers who are not bound to honor the warranty.
How so?
Any sort of profession that warrants high quality service requires certifications (bar exam, USMLE, PE, etc)
Same goes for products too. It’s not a reasonable solution for the consumers to perform an exhaustive research to get high quality guarantee.
I don’t find non official third party all that compelling. See Amazon marketplace as an example.
My local coffee shop makes excellent coffee. They don't need get a third party certification for me to to believe that.
Similarly for eg a local carpenter. Or my tailor.
The bar exam merely tells you that someone is legally allowed to be a lawyer or some such. They don't tell you, if she's any good. I don't know what USMLE or PE are.
> Same goes for products too. It’s not a reasonable solution for the consumers to perform an exhaustive research to get high quality guarantee.
That's for the consumer to decide, isn't it? And consumer can use third party certification, if they want to, sure. (Or if they are required to do so by regulation.)
Actually they do. Local coffee shops fall under the regulation of local food inspectors just like restaurants.
I don't know how it is in your country but carpenters are required to be trained and to insure their works for a decade in France, for instance.
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).
One of the greatest challenges for software as an industry is for the developers to consider the role of the user. In my 20 years of doing this rarely have I seen a developer advocate for the users over themselves. Instead the developer imposes themselves as the primary user and the actual users as a secondary class. This is where most tech stacks and design decisions come in at every step.
I can also remember when I worked at Travelocity a million years ago and they actively tried to fight this insanity with exhaustive A/B testing.
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.
There's few things where the drop in quality is astronomical, one of them being clothing.
Clothes used to last a life time till few decades ago.
Right now you buy stuff that after the first wash already looks worn out, terrible or starts falling apart.
Major known brands are guilty of this too, often regardless of price.
So people end up with closets filled of junk that they look terrible in anyway.
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.
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.
The thing is mainly there are no quality options available. It's mostly all cheap shit or slightly more expensive, but still equally shit. So how can this reveal preference if there are no options?
I would argue the surge in vintage clothing ecosystems is an indication there is an unmet demand.
There’s certainly options above temu junk. Maybe it doesn’t meet your bar but I’ve found the 100% cotton stuff from Uniqlo to be massively higher quality than the average. I’ve got tshirts from them I’d guess I’d worn and washed 80+ times.
You can still go to a tailor and commission jackets, trousers and shirts, made with the same quality of fabrics and manufacturing techniques. With shoes, you can still go and buy hand welted shoes.
It all comes at a price but I don't disagree that we have a barbell problem here (ie cheap fast fashion or bespoke, with nothing in the middle).
That's not actually "revealed consumer preference" for quantity over quality. It's just that it's impossible for the average consumer to assess quality.
> 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.
I love this - super testable experiment. I have this exact desire too. - I can’t stand most cheaply made tshirts or things with crass branding
- there are a few clothing brands that focus on high quality (and in this case english mfg fabric mills).
- it is not cheap. our whole society is warped around “physical goods are super cheap now [because we can manufacture in cn]”. it’s a race to the bottom and we’ve hit the bottom.
- you can buy a black nylon/cotton tshirt for 10 USD
- these tshirts will set you back 130 USD. it feels amazing, was made in a country with health care, ages well, looks high quality.
do you want to pay the price this requires? I do but I think most can’t or won’t https://www.sunspel.com/collections/the-classic-t-shirt
You can look for reviewer that care about the same things you care about?
> Besides, who has time to wade through reviews for every purchase?
Claude does! And most purchases I make are repeat purchases, so I don't have to read the reviews again.
> 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.
Yeah its great when you find quality things but you don't always know, price isn't a great indicator of quality. There is also the buyitforlife subreddit, would like something like it but more structured.
I think this reflects how companies are run in US and Europe, they don't seem to believe how different companies can be here, its not only about turbo maxing the owners profit.
I tried that. Turns out that the expensive clothing I found wasn't high quality. I don't know how tell quality from the online description.
That's the trap I described, it's really hard to tell since price is not a good signal.
To me it was trial and error, recommendations, and shopping at physical stores, and like I mentioned as well: it's time-consuming, frustrating, and I wouldn't expect a person not interested in this quest to be able to find good quality items consistently.
> with heavy premium quality cotton
Just to nitpick, I doubt i could wear a heavy premium quality cotton tshirt in the current summers. I can barely stand a flimsy thin cotton tshirt...
I'm willing to pay extra for quality linen for those summers, except everyone lies and their linen can be up to 100% cotton :)
Haha, yeah, completely understandable, I have a few linen pieces (shorts, shirts, a couple of t-shirts) for the occasions I go to a hot place during summers but I live in Scandinavia where summers are, to me, the perfect level of warmth. I generally avoid the peak summer in southern Europe (both due to the heat but also overcrowding), and when I visit my family in Brazil it's also usually off-peak summer.
I really cannot handle very hot weather, it's nice for a day or two but a week of constant 30+C is definitely not my happy place.
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.
What i wouldn't give for the same socks to be available for 10 years though.
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.
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.
There’s some amount of gradient between use-once and fully bespoke clothing, and most people’s economic means are positioned somewhere on that gradient. Indeed it’s a U curve of sorts – cheap clothing can be surprisingly expensive (see also the Vimes Boots Theory).
I never bought Vimes Boots Theory.
Yes, it can be expensive to be poor, but the rich really do consumer more dollars-of-boot per day, because they can afford it.
> There’s some amount of gradient between use-once and fully bespoke clothing [...]
Bespoke clothing mostly fits you better. It doesn't necessarily last longer. (But you can ask for harder wearing material or longer lasting manufacturing techniques, of course.)
I think the “the rich” in this story is just someone who can afford not garbage boots, and not what we would consider rich today.
It’s also possible the situation has changed enough with modern manufacturing that it’s no longer as relevant.
With sufficient competition, the incentives of companies would change if consumers would be willing to rent instead of owning products. Then planned obsolescence is not to their benefit.
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.
5 years is great, but I'm sure in Norway they advertise "no flip" / "no turn" / "single-sided" mattresses as a feature too ;)
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.
Aren’t newer cars more reliable than older ones? Back in the day it was a feat to get a 200000 km car and these days it’s like not that big a deal.
I wouldn’t really know, I’ve only used car share for the past 10 years shrug
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!
That would apply more to things like a washing machine or microwave - things that don't become obsolete quickly.
...some kind of subscription as a service model? looks up dramatically
There's an interesting paper about expectations of quality:
The LL game: the curious preference for low quality and its norms
https://diegogambetta.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/the_ll_...
It would be nice if quality became a standard, but the problem is that the world has become too complex. On top of that, I think the disappearance of friction is a big part of it.
In the past, if a garment factory was located in a certain country and the quality was poor, it was often directly tied to that country's reputation. But as the world began to lose friction and entered the era of globalization, much of the work was passed down to subcontractors, and the big problem is that consumer complaints don't get passed down to the subcontractors either.
And within this structure, multiple subcontractors can't survive; as subcontractors grow, they begin to centralize into one. In such a structure, it's not that the original contractor controls the brand quality of the subcontractor. Rather, the subcontractor that has grown huge begins to control the quality ceiling of the entire market.
On top of that, for a company to sustain continuous growth, a given product must not last too long, right? Because a product that can be used for 20 or 30 years means people won't have to buy that product line again.
Its funny to watch a bunch of Americans who have the worst possible tastes, standards and expectations commenting negatively on a Norwegian Org's article about why we need higher standards.
Guy's its possible not to live in a world of slop, you know that right? You don't have to turn the world into a glorified Walmart.
"European tries not to repeat hackneyed clichés about Americans for 30 Seconds: Challenge level impossible"
Thank god for the little norwegians living in their utopian bubble
The way I see it we all have 30-60 modern slaves working for each one of us. More or less depending on the country and personal consumption.
So I don’t have such determination in complaining about the quality of the goods that I participated in exploited labour of.
It’s all working somehow more or less. Seems like it could stop any moment. The continuous decrease in quality is rather the least of my worries.
What worries me is the fragile state of global affairs and heavy fog of war obscuring the future.
I am AI accelerationist after all not because I believe in utopias but because of how dire the situation is. AGI/ASI might buy us couple of decades or more. The risk/reward calculation heavily favours pedal to the metal.
So no, T-shirt quality is not my primary concern.
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.
No. China is a colonial structure of extreme 1-tier cities, 2-tier cities, and the lower cities beneath them. It's called hukou... That's also why ordinary Chinese young people don't want to go down to the provinces.
People in China's first-tier cities live well and are more up to date than almost anywhere, but in the lower cities, they are not free. I usually think that popular literature reflects a country's social conditions, and even in China's xianxia, there are ranks, and people act according to those ranks. To say that all of China has become wealthy would be an overstatement, given that there are many problems starting with the migrant worker issue. Of course, China is a great power, and the wealthy programmers in first-tier cities are extraordinarily talented.
> That's also why ordinary Chinese young people don't want to go down to the provinces.
Recently you're even starting to hear stories I thought ended with the Soviet Union. People who are literally terrified of getting on a train out of the city because they think they might never be allowed to come back.
We're all navigating through hard times.
Such is the nature of being part of a global supply chain, whilst living in one of the richest countries in the world.
Then why this supply chain hangs by a thread and progressively produces shittier and shittier results?
Because everyone at every step of the chain is primarily incentivised by money.
That is the opposite of resilience.
I think about this a lot because I try to never buy anything Chinese or low quality unless I have to.
Unfortunately, from my experience artisans aren't willing to do the work anymore, even if you pay them premium. For instance, a carpenter here in Poland that decided to be a carpenter would rather cut up pre-made cabinets to your specs than make them from scratch using wood, even if I pay them 10x.
Then, people aren't willing to pay premium for stuff. For some reason, they would rather buy 20 products that last year than 1 product that can last 20 or more.
It's a problem for me because I value quality and would be willing to pay premium, but I just can't ever find anything.
Curious where your entirely 100% not-made-in-china computer and/or smartphone come from. Taiwan perhaps?
Not sure, it's a Google Pixel. But a smartphone would probably fall into the "unless I have to" category.
What's your point?
Spoiler alert, almost everything is made in China, including the premium stuff.
I definitely have to do a lot of work every time I need something, but I can often find products that aren't made in China (normally Germany).
If not, I usually just don't buy it new and just go to the thrift store. I can usually find what I need, made 30 years ago that will probably last me for the rest of my life.
Those things made 30 years are filled with carcinogens. the Chinese make great stuff, your opinion comes off like programmed xenophobia, lay off the twitter.
That's just my opinion, man. If you think that the Chinese make great stuff, buy it.
I don't have a Twitter account.
Most of my "smart" devices are Chinese. Huawei creates superior products than most western/korean/japanese counterparts. I would prefer everything I own is Chinese, the quality is superb.
Absolutely! Enjoy.
I don't buy anything that has "smart" features, either. For instance, appliances that come with an app I just immediately skip.
That might be why I'm not seeing all this superb quality.
There's lots of high quality Chinese stuff, too. Why do you say it as if quality and Chinese don't go together?
Historically, they're lax on regulation. Hence the association with bad quality.
Regulation doesn't have much to do with quality. For example, there's plenty of regulation to make food safe, but almost nothing about making your food high quality in the sense of taste and texture.
You get quality from competition and customers opening their wallets for quality.
Another example: Apple assembles some nice consumer hardware in China. Their quality doesn't depend on regulation.
The regulations often change the economics of production to favour improved quality/attempting to sell upmarket.
And also have the proverb, “If you can cheat, then cheat”. I guess it's just part of their culture.
It's an old stereotype - between 1990 and 2010 or so, Chinese manufacturing was usually seen as of a lower quality.
This was often unfair and incorrect even then, but it's clearly mad now. Chinese products run the gamut from the lowest to the highest ends in almost every consumer field. But some people hew to old stereotypes.
50 years ago when I was a kid... Japan and Taiwan were known for making cheap junk. They shook the reputation.
Now I feel old - get off my lawn.
When I go to any store, the Chinese version is ALWAYS lower quality. I've yet to see the opposite.
Where are you going to shop? And how do you know something is the 'Chinese version'? It's not like for example Apple advertises where they assemble their products.
For a concrete example, we get very good rice varieties specifically from certain parts of China. (But here in Singapore people also really care about rice. You generally can't buy good and fresh rice in the middle of the Polish countryside for example.) And, yes, for this product the 'Chinese' variety is superior to eg generic Thai rice.
I put 'Chinese' in scare-quotes, because just like you don't just drink 'French wine' when you know what you are doing, you don't just eat 'Chinese' rice.
For a lot of tea drinking paraphernalia, the most top of the line items also come from China. Even if you are into, say, Japanese tea.
I either look at the label or do research beforehand. I buy from all kind of places.
I wasn't thinking of agricultural products, but rather anything manufactured. As an example, appliances made in Germany will have a cord long enough that you can actually plug into the wall, while the one that's made in China will have a useless 10-centimeter cord that would force me to use an extension.
Your mileage might vary, this is just my experience, but it's been pretty consistent for a few decades, with things going downhill in the past I'd say 5 years or so.
We are happy with our Miele appliances (washing machine, dryer, dish washer.) But we also have plenty of Chinese stuff that works well.
I've recently had kids, and I'm actually impressed at how much toys have improved in quality since I was a kid growing up in Germany. And, yes, most of these new toys come from China etc. By and large, they seem to be sturdier and last a lot longer, and are cheaper, too.
I'm especially impressed by the light-up shoes we bought. I guess you can blame that on general improvements in LEDs and battery technology in that specific case, maybe.
For what it's worth, I now live in Singapore, and we are very open on trade, so as a consumer you benefit from especially brutal competition.
Could also be that if you're in Singapore you get better stuff. It's possible that European companies pick crappy, cheaper products that they have a higher margin on to cover importing and transport. I have no idea.
> 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.