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.

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.

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 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

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.

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.)

The "rich" mapped to our world are the middle class (which only barely exists in Ankh-Morpork, just like it only barely existed historically in the real world). We could define "middle class" as the people who can afford to buy boots that last, but can’t afford to buy boots that don’t have to last. Exactly the bottom of the U curve I mentioned.

This is why wear-once ultra-fast fashion is attractive in the first place: not only is it cheap (in a very short-sighted sense) but it allows the less-than-affluent to signal affluence (by never wearing the same outfit twice – we call this "being fashionable" but of course being fashionable has historically been about signaling wealth first and foremost).

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

The CE mark is worthless, since it is a self-certificaton.

Boeing 737 MAX tragedy did happen because of self-certification abuse, still I would not call FAA certification worthless.

Where on earth are you getting that "CE mark" == quality?

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.

I had to switch from levis jeans to carhartt pants because my levis would rip after 5-6 months, almost like clockwork.

No, I am not at all overweight. Carhartt just makes more durable pants, and I hate shopping.

The 5-6 months is in line with other slop brands I’ve tried, e.g. H&M. Sad to see Levis join them in the gutter.

Why would being overweight make your jeans rip? Only if you were buying the wrong size...

Sorry, stranger on the internet, I was simply qualifying a failure case.

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.

The world needs more tariffs until there’s non-chinese ODMs selling top quality

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.

Sidebar: Don't video games have ever growing competition with existing games?

I decided not to buy games until I beat the ones I already have. I am now stuck on NES games and will probably be stuck for the rest of my life.

Skyrim came out in 2011 and is at this moment, the 55th highest player count on Steam. Just playing top tier single player games over the past twenty years could keep you incredibly busy.

Which Skyrim is that? OG Skyrim (Oldrim), Skyrim Legendary edition, Skyrim Special edition, Skyrim VR, Skyrim Anniversary edition, or the Skyrim anniversary upgrade?

Are they even the same base SKUs at this point? I don’t want to pull out my gaming desktop but IIRC it was at least three different entries in the Steam library. I wonder if the stats combine them.

At this point I’ve spent so much money on Skyrim titles I should get TESVI for free with lifetime DLCs.

I should do that. I have almost 900 Steam games, the vast majority of which I have never touched. Over the years with sales and Humble Bundles, I've just hoarded the games because I might someday want to play it.

Instead all I seem to do is replay Donkey Kong Country 2 and Streets of Rage 2.

Just have AI agents play them for you and have Opus write a summary.

AI to the rescue!

Video games are just another example where the pricing is mostly greed. The market is massively larger than it was in the 90s, digital distribution has massively cut the cost of goods sold, new games are sold with tiered pricing, recuring revenue is now a huge part of a games viability. Game sales aren't the primary income anymore, it's all about keeping whales buying in game items, discounts are only offered when there needs to be a new influx of players to keep whales happy.

That's why the industry is thriving, right?

"COGS" for games has absolutely nothing to do with the plastic box on the shelf with a DVD issue. Sony wasted almost the entire PS5 generation chasing GAAS and having almost nothing to show for it.

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

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.

Yes, this is quite common and is usually referred to as "it's expensive to be poor". That said, unfortunately these days it's very difficult to know which brands are still actually quality anymore and which are the ones still coasting on previous good engineering reputation while currently shipping substandard crap to make an extra buck for the bean counters in charge before the ship sinks.

Everything has become a lemon market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Even if a brand stays solid for 100 years, for all I know as I'm standing there in the store deciding whether to buy something, private equity bought them two quarters ago and hollowed them out. Harvard MBAs/private equity sees brand reputation as just another resource to be converted into money.

If I were a billionaire my dream would be to create a logo for the "We Put The Extra 10% In It" program where products could advertise that they put the extra effort in. What is really sad to me is that so often it's not even that much extra effort, which is why I say 10% and not 100% or 10x. So often it's just "used a 5 cent metal part instead of a 1.2 cent plastic part". But without a reliable signal that the effort is there MBAs/private equity turns every market everywhere into a lemon market. Way too much tech is applied in manufacturing to turn everything into a lemon market.

And yet it's socialism that has a reputation for shoddy products. How many people want to buy a Lada?

[flagged]

One signal (not fool proof, but often a good signal): what length of warranty do they offer? If some brand has a warranty significantly above the average for the product type, that can be a good sign.

And I'm not talking about offering extended warranty programs or such here. Just the basic warranty everyone gets when they buy the product.

True, recently Rachel Ray sold her dog food brand. I didn't know until my dog started having digestion issues with it. That's how I found out it had been sold and other dogs were also having issues. Apparently buyer cheapened the recipe. At least we have the internet to quickly get the word out that it isn't what it used to be.

it’s expensive to be poor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

It really pisses me off there are used car lots that obviously prey on the poor. I asked for their cash price and they wouldn't give me one, or it was ridiculously priced. They just want for people to pay off a debt and all the interest that goes with it.

I always felt this was over stated, but I think it’s become less true over time.

First different people treat their stuff harder than others. I basically never break or wear out anything, and I usually start with the cheapest option.

Second the quality of cheap shit made in Asia has gone up a lot over the last couple decades. And it is very difficult to know how to pay more for more quality.

difficult to know which brands are still actually quality anymore

I haven't verified its accuracy, but I had a tab open for this from HN a while back:

The Brand Ledger tracks 397 brands, from the tools in your garage to the pans in your kitchen. Who owns them, what they used to be, whether they're still worth buying.

https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I'm honestly happy for Japan, Taiwan, and China. It's great that they make cool stuff.

I just wish we still did too.

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?

Wow defensive much? I was just curious to see if you’d found a non-Chinese phone and/or computer anywhere. Chill out man.

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.

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.

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.

That doesn't say anything about quality, except for "should not kill you or give you a disease". What shopper would be satisfied with the bare minimum of the minimum, no matter what they are buying?

I think you misunderstand quality versus competition. The purpose of regulation is to impose a minimum baseline of quality.

Software does not have regulation. In many areas of software we force shit quality on the users and just expect them to take it without complaint as a common practice. Then we as developers, like entitled children, completely rage the moment anyone casts light on this insanity.

It's because something is better than nothing when it comes to software. Which people always forget.

Is eating spoiled food which gives you a disease better than not eating anything? No, it's worse, and therefore the minimum quality regulations make sense.

Is having low quality software better than not having any software? Yes, in almost all cases it is better. So a minimum quality regulation doesn't make sense.

When people put quality requirements too high on software, we get situations where for example public transport information and tickets aren't available digitally because the government is taking 15 or more years to make the "perfect" platform. The public is better served by a shitty solution the first years, an OK solution after that, and hopefully a good solution later on.

Delivering fast has a very important value when it comes to software, because you can replace it with improved versions at no physical cost. Delivering a vehicle which will kill you or food which will make you sick is very different. In those cases nothing is better than anything.

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).

"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.

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_...

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"

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.

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!

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.

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

well, if you religiously maintain the car, it was easy even back then. The dirty secret is keeping rust out of the car - in the winter, regularly wash it to avoid salt ingress, and generally store it in a dry (both physical and humidity) garage, to routinely change engine and transmission fluids and to only run good quality fuel.

Oh, and don't subject your car to constant short start-stop cycles (i.e. drives of less than half an hour), warm up the car prior flooring the gas pedal on a highway, and for turbocharged cars, take it easy on the last 5 minutes so the hot side of the turbo can cool down.

Ignoring any of that can kill modern cars just as fast as it could kill old cars. Even electrical cars need their love - don't always go for the HVDC charger, use trickle AC chargers instead whenever you can, and look what needs lubrication and maintain that (e.g. transmissions).

Oh, and don't subject your car to constant short start-stop cycles (i.e. drives of less than half an hour)

So if my commute is only 20 minutes I shouldn’t own a car? :)

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.

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.

Or you could just be happy to have a profitable company that makes money consistently. Shavers don't last for ever and new people grow up every day. You could also just launch a new product line that's cheaper without compromising the existing ones.

But nooo we need infinite growth which is impossible so let's run the company into the ground for some more growth before our shit decisions catch up to us and stock price plummets.

If your customer base is declining, your company isn't making money consistently. Revenues and profits will decline accordingly.

Then you scale back a bit and keep making consistent money, just a bit less. The only way things go completely to shit is when you enshittify your product and nobody wants it any more.

Or you could expand to other markets, lots of options that don't require making your products worse.

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.

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.

I've heard the ratings on Amazon can make or break you, so I think most people are at least trying to get quality by taking the ratings into account.

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.

That doesn't make any sense. The most expensive cars are also the least reliable. Rich people have multiple cars so when the Bentley has an electrical glitch they just drive the Porsche.

Quality means different things to different people. But the fact that Bentleys and Porsche exist support that case that not everything in a competitive markets drives things to the lowest cost product.

Quality was never the norm: cheap always 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 if you don't buy from China directly, you can't prevent local brands outsourcing their production, because all of them do It.

This is entirely untrue. Almost anywhere you live in the U.S. you can find local brands with local production.

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.

One big problem is that prices are easy to compare, while quality is not.

I recently bought a tub that was advertised as stainless steel on Amazon. I was suspicious but decided to take a chance. 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. But the difference matters significantly in terms of performance and quality, especially for certain kinds of products and use cases.

There’s no “sort by quality, best to worst” system like there is for price. No “genuine stainless only” filter. You just have to know certain things.

Shopping in person obviously helps, but you still have to know what to look for. Refrigerators are a good example of this. Most people shop for them in person, yet it’s not at all obvious whether model A or model B will last longer. You can try to use price as a proxy for quality, but the more expensive refrigerators are actually more likely to fail years earlier because of the added component complexity. They’re basically banking on the fact that you don’t know how to read a wiring diagram.

To combat that, lots of people turn to YouTube or reviews to figure out quality. And sure, you can find some good sources that will tell you that top freezers will last longer than a French door model at basically any price, and they might even explain why. But all of those platforms are muddied with perverse incentives, affiliate programs, sponsorships, etc. Again, not always obvious.

We need to make quality obvious. We need to make it comparable, sortable, filtrable, and guaranteed. Poor design needs to be a valid reason to return an item. Manufacturers should be required to label products with an estimated lifespan. Give tax breaks or other incentives to products that include a warranty for its full lifespan.

We have to figure out how to improve the efficiency of making high quality goods, so that everything doesn’t just get more expensive. There should be a public database of the best known designs and techniques for making long lasting items. Patents that relate to longevity could be given extra time to encourage research, but then after, say, 3 years there could be a requirement to license the technology so that it can go mainstream.

This doesn’t solve everything. Some products need more specific approaches. Food quality is a problem. Housing needs to be both more affordable and higher quality. But I think with enough changes to incentives, the culture could shift towards seeing the value in making things well.

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.

Why do you trust Consumer Reports?

I think it's interesting that very often the best rated one is typically not the most expensive (nor the cheapest for that matter).

The more interesting part is to read the full detailed reviews on why they choose that. Often the most expensive or second most expensive has some useful features that they decide are not worth the cost but I do.

I have long thought they place too much emphasis on low cost over other factors, but the fact that I can get a useful review to make informed decisions is important.

This is a false pretense. Quality was never the norm.

What is no longer the norm is getting first-hand experience with a product before you buy it. Everything comes in the mail and it's a surprise to the consumer after they buy it. That's nuts!

Tech workers in the US are probably around 90-99 percentile wage. Take something where the quality is well known and measurable, and can be purchased for extra money. How often do you fly first class, or even pay 10-20% extra to have more legroom, early boarding or a more convenient flight times versus picking the cheapest option that you can make work?

People will demonstrably shop primarily on price no matter what... The producers respond to that.

Ikea compressed wood dresser = $125. Proper oak dresser = $5000 . What consumer is capable and willing to make that trade off.

Much of that cost is because we nuked the American timber industry ?

Appealing to the fabricators (or even consumers) who are 4-8 degrees downstream of this policy will get you nowhere.

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.

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.

"there's no aesthetic difference between this beautiful portrait and the contemporary pile of trash in the corner"

Not sure who you are quoting...

Of course there's an aesthetic difference.

That’s one of the tradeoffs. And an undervalued one.

Consumers, fundamentally, care about two things:

* Price

* Features

Those are tangible, obvious things. They are not subtle. They do not take months or years to discover or become obvious. They are (mostly) not vague or ambiguous. Does this car have lane assist? Yes or no. Will this car last me 20 years? ...maybe? That's a very hard question to answer. It's messy and complicated and has a lot of clauses to it.

So, consumers buy whatever is the cheapest available with the features they want, or the most feature-rich they can with their budget.

This demand forces manufacturers to respond. They find a way to cram more functionality in, at a cheaper price. If they don't, they will simply get eaten up by those who do, overseas or otherwise.

You can say you want quality and reliability all you want - it changes nothing. At the end of the day, the vast majority keep voting with their wallet - and they want CHEAP.

Easy solution if you like tariffs: all imported items over $100 must have a 10 year full warranty.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...

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."

Demand collateral

That's what bonds are for. US customs requires prepaid bonds for other things. Importers who don't have enough assets would have to post a bond to cover repairs for the product. They get it back at 10 years.

HN hivemind is temperamental.

Trump: Tariffs. HN: IMPORT ALL THE THINGS.

HN: Quality sucks. Also HN: TARIFFS!

Alternative hypothesis.. Its not a hive mind and different factions vocalize their different opinions at different times in different places.

Enshittification is definitely real, but let's not look at the past with rose-colored glasses. A lot of things you can buy today are vastly superior to things available 50 years ago.

It used to be remarkable to drive a car 100k miles without major repairs. Volvo dealerships in the 80's and 90's would give you a badge at 100k milestones to advertise how reliable their cars were compared to others.

Anything tech related is just light years ahead of what it used to be, and for far cheaper. 65"+ OLED TVs for less than a couple grand are pretty much science fiction come to life. Gaming consoles are super-computers compared to an NES.

For many appliances, if you pay an inflation-adjusted cost for what a 1980's family would pay you can get something that will last forever. Last year I bought a commercial microwave for about $300 that has a single dial, hardly any features, and likely will last longer than the first microwave my family owned and also paid ~$300 for. Adjusting for inflation my new microwave is vastly better and cheaper than my childhood one.

I play guitar - in 1954 a new Stratocaster sold for $249, which is about $3k in today's dollars. And $249 today will get you a guitar that's easily as good as most 1954 Strats. If you spend the inflation-adjusted equivalent you're in ultra-luxury territory.

Want good furniture? That's ALWAYS been expensive, but you'd typically buy a table for the equivalent of $5k in today's dollars and expect it to last a lifetime. You can spend $5k on real wood furniture today, but nobody does.

Housing materials are much better and cheaper with the possible exception of copper pipes and anything made of real wood. Certainly builders of McMansions are cutting corners at every opportunity, but if you do your own building/finishing these days a lot of materials are available that will outlast their 1980's equivalent, and the cheap options are better.

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 we're asking too much of buyers here. You shouldn't need to learn about fabrics and stitching, then check who owns the brand now, just to buy a shirt that lasts.