Let's make quality the norm again
forbrukerradet.no236 points by ingve 11 hours ago
236 points by ingve 11 hours ago
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.)
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.
> 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.
It doesn't seem they address the quality of the final products, just how the companies are run. Anecdotally, I know tons of nurses wear Hoka shoes and act like they are to die for, but yet Hoka is on the avoid list. It would be more interesting rather than some vague articles about the brand to actually compare reviews before / after or how they match up against Consumer Reports --- a much more valuable resource in my mind.
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.
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.
Yeah. On various "Buy it for life" forums it's a daily occurence that someone mentions a brand they bought 5 years ago and then someone chimes in that they were sold or restructured last year and now it's no longer "buy it for life".
Some brands kind of split up so products sold in one market is cheap knockoffs while products sold in the home market is still high quality manufactured at the old factory with 100 years old machinery and experienced workers. If you want to buy quality you've got to do deep research first.
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.
Yeah, hardly anybody in it for the long-haul. I hear we might be living longer relatively soon, maybe that will change the mindset.
And yet it's socialism that has a reputation for shoddy products. How many people want to buy a Lada?
Both historical socialism and current-stage capitalism suffer from the exact same problem - lack of competition and limited access to information. They arrived there in vastly different ways but in both cases it's very hard both to know how to obtain higher quality goods, and to actually obtain them once you know how. Compare to 1960s USA where it was quite easy to know which car/drill/grill/TV/pants/table/etc. is guaranteed to last you years.
> 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.
There are two kinds of lots. 'normal' lots will sell a car, and the financing comes from a finance company. could be a bank, could be a credit union, could be a business that provides money to car purchasers. the normal lot has markup on the price, and also gets a kickback from the finance company. the car buyer does not pay, the finance company has a problem.
'buy here, pay here' lots sell a car, and do the financing. They buy cars at auction, fix them if they have to, then sell them. The down payment money usually covers the auction cost of the car. Then every 2 weeks, the buyers drops by with a payment. The buyer stops paying, the car is repossessed. And then it is sold again. The dealer wins in both directions; the buyer pays a lot of money in finance charges, and if it is repossessed then you don't have to buy new inventory at the auction.
Poor people with bad credit way over pay for cars both ways. One a little worse than the other.
A car dealership makes most of their money off of the financing.
> I asked for their cash price and they wouldn't give me one
When I bought a car from a dealer, the dealer told me that what I wanted was impossible. So I walked out and got in my car, and started to back out. The salesman came running out and agreed to my terms.
The trick to making a good deal is a willingness to walk away.
P.S. My accounting teacher used to work at a used car lot. He explained to me that poor people tended to screw themselves by not understanding how financing works. He'd try to explain it to them, and they'd accuse him of trying to screw them, and they'd go for the more expensive option.
I tell this story to people who say that learning math in school is irrelevant.
I also remember a Frontline episode years ago on 401k plans. One company had an identical plan for all employees. The reporters discovered that the higher paid employees had better returns on the 401k plans. Why was it that the lower paid ones did poorly with them? It was they did not understand how to manage investments.
Even worse: they want people to fail to pay it off, so they get half the debt amount and then get the car back to do it again.
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.
ive experimented with paying more for a few things and sometimes it's the cheap stuff which lasts forever.
i have a pair of cheap Chinese earbuds that way outlasted all of the expensive ones I ever bought.
I'll admit sometimes I like there is a cheap-o version as I'm not sure how much I'll end up using it.
I don't know why people keep posting that silly quote. Outside of fantasy novels, in the real world the most expensive footwear is often the least durable, and you can get decent boots at Walmart for <$50 on clearance sales.
Speed Queen appliances are about 2–2.5x longer-lasting for roughly a 50–75% increase in purchase price.
Problem is, you pay 10x for shirt that is made in the same factory as the cheap shiry, just has a different logo.
This has become a sort of unintentional skill in the ecommerce era. Everyone is using china, either the actual "first party" brand that is really just ordering bulk from china and reselling it stateside, or the various clones of that brand. The skill then becomes feeling out which of these various products and clones are coming from the better option of the couple chinese manufacturing companies everyone is using, then buying whichever of these is going for cheapest and least shipping headaches. Usually also if a product has been out for a couple years, there's an initial version widely available then an actual 2.0 version that solves a lot of the issues in the first, more sturdy at now known failure points, etc. That 2.0 version actually usually circulates in the no name brands for a little while before the "first party" brand eventually picks it up for their own line.
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.
It's Skyrim Special edition that's on that spot. The OG version hasn't been sold in years on Steam and is tracked separately. The VR edition is sold and tracked separately. The Anniversary edition is sold as DLC for the Special edition, and not as a separate game. I think the Legendary edition was sold as a bundle for the OG version after all the DLCs came out. Either way, it too cannot be bought on Steam any more.
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!
That's what paid day one DLC, micro-transactions, and loot boxes are for. Ways of raising the price without raising the headline price.
For videogames I don’t think it really makes sense to try and compare against 90’s prices. It’s gotten so much easier to just make “a game” (in the sense that computers are enormously more powerful, third-party engines and assets exist, generally all tooling is much better, and so on). Expectations in terms of polish and graphics quality are much higher. Distribution is much easier. Videogames are a massive cultural thing these days, so the market is huge, and so is the pool of potential enthusiastic employees.
I mean the arrows are pointing in every direction, I have no idea if prices should have gone up or down or even how to make a comparison. Like we could get into details and talk about comparing a modern AAA game cost to a 90’s AAA games cost… except, even if you adjust for graphics quality generally improving, just the scope of modern AAA games is massive in a way that there doesn’t exist a 90’s equivalent.
What’s important is total profits. Video game prices fell because distribution costs tanked and there’s vastly more people playing video games so cutting 20% on the price upfront means far more than 20% extra profit.
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.
The industry as a whole is growing, it's way more than just Sony, and way more than just consoles.
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
The world needs better economic policy and regulation so non Chinese ODMs can compete on price/quality.
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.
In the US, marks from Nationally Recognized Testing Labs (UL, ETK, CSA, and TUV are some big hitters here) do have positive value in terms of safety.
But they're not marks of operational quality. A UL mark on a microwave oven doesn't tell me that it's a high-quality item that will cook my food better than an unmarked item, or that it is something that is easy to use or will stand up to the test of time.
It just means that it's safe to use, according to whatever tests were performed on it. The UL (or other NRTL) mark means that it's extremely unlikely to give anyone an electrical shock or burn a house down, even as the device fails.
As another example: A power supply brick for some manner of widget. The UL mark doesn't mean that it will last for years and years, or that it will power whatever in-spec widget it is thrown at.
The mark does mean that when I short the output terminals together that it won't catch on fire. That's good! But it does not mean that the power supply will ever work again.
An item can fail both absolutely and permanently, and as long as it fails safely then that failure isn't held against it. It can still carry the mark.
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.
This is also solvable through regulation though.
For example, NYC now requires all sold e bikes to be UL certified because of too many apartment lithium battery fires.
> 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.
Boeing is a company worth billions of dollars. "UKCSR" is not, there is absolutely no consequence to them getting shut down due to unsafe products. They'll just come back tomorrow as "JUSGB."
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.
Why would being overweight make your jeans rip? Only if you were buying the wrong size...
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.
I go through a couple pairs of carhartts per year, so like $10/mo for pants basically. Seems like a pretty good deal. I'd probably go through at least twice as many pairs of jeans. It's a good product. Darn Tough socks are another good one.
because quality signals are much more misleading these days.
can't trust reviews because theyre spammed with fakes. can't trust brands because private equity buy them out and enshittify.
I'd call it externalized costs of regulation and rising demands on production.
If end consumers were able to see an exact and measurable bump in prices the next day a new stronger regulation made production more expensive, voters would be more informed and the whole cost of doing things "better" would be clearer.
In certain personal projects, I have the opposite philosophy where I don't want quality. I got addicted to designing models and 3D-printing them a year ago. Over time, I learned to reduce the amount of safety factor and make items just strong enough for their application - which saves material and printing time. I wouldn't skimp on something like a carrying handle for the printer, where failure would mean damaging the printer. But I would reduce the amount of plastic used in things like art pieces (3DBenchy - who needs structural strength?), end caps for various objects, prototypes for dimensioning. Moreover, sometimes I'm happy to see my parts break because I was thinking of redesigning it or did so already, hence I would be itching to print the new version. Aside from that, just knowing I can reprint a part anytime (without modifications) makes me much less worried about breaking or losing a part.
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.
I don't think it is true, that no one wants to pay a penny for services they use. I know at least one counter example, because I pay for search (Kagi), LLM usage (Kagi assistant), VPN, and support various good causes and content creators.
But I think your point is the vast majority, and that point probably stands, and indeed is a huge problem.
It isn't like this behavior is inherent to westerners. Everyone would prefer to save money and have better service.
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.
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.
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.
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.
clothing is a particularly nasty one. "brand" is sometimes inversely proportional to quality within clothing. Price and quality is just completely random.
Checking stitch length, stitch type, fabric feel, fabric composition, any known supplier information about cotton staple and origin of production, construction complexity.
It's alot of work to keep on top of.
I read an article once about how levi slightly vary the fabric and button quality between cities and countries under the same name (and quality binning); optimising cost to consumer tolerance. And Levi is a brand marketing themselves for quality and legacy pride.
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 ratings are hilariously gamed. Vendors will use coupons and discounts to get you to leave a positive review, while negative reviews are often reported off the site or the submitter is hounded by the vendor.
I do know that people use these ratings when making decisions, but the correlation to quality is fuzzy, at best. I can't imagine people will continue trusting these ratings forever.
> 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.
For many, the most constraining resource is time. And you can't buy that. It takes years to spin up a new factory and production line and then transfer the implicit knowledge from your initial production line that provides the quality in the first place.
> Apple has never had a strategic problem meeting the demand for Apple computers.
The business that had those problems didn't become Apple.
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.
Markets outside the industrialized world don't have the purchasing power for quality products from the industrialized world. That's why you have to reduce quality to reduce price if you want to sell consumer goods to them. Or wind down your operations. But who would want to wind down their operations?
> "cashing out" on good brands a universally bad decision.
For the company yes, not for the executive bonuses.
It is quite notable how the long-lasting companies that are household names somehow managed to resist this urge. Most of them are private.
People need to compartmentalize things in order to make sense of the universe, but doing so for companies (and governments) is just counterproductive.
Whenever you think about a company to draw any good conclusions you always need to think about all the people who work there, from the factory worker to the executive.
Something I've noticed is every maybe 3-4 years there's a new "hot person athleisure" brand that appears, prices at a premium, bombards social media, drapes every single person you see running outside in your city in full sets from it, before getting turned out and replaced by basically the same exact thing with a different name.
So they've gotten quite good at the pump n dump of getting everyone in the spin class on some new $300 polyester outfit every two weeks. It is probably brutally formulaic how refined the playbook is for these sorts of companies.
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.
And to add a layer to the AI example that almost circles back to the original issue: there is a financial/time incentive to rationalize “it will do it better,” because it means you don’t have to do it at all yet you theoretically profit
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."
When most fortune 500 companies burned brand-goodwill to sell disposable versions of products, it is credulous to believe all problems are external. =3
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.
A way to get the right to repair for the rest of the world.
Apple/MS/Google would have to keep their products working for 10 years.
HN hivemind is temperamental.
Trump: Tariffs. HN: IMPORT ALL THE THINGS.
HN: Quality sucks. Also HN: TARIFFS!
You know, it's possible to be of the opinion that tariffs might be good in some cases, but bad in others?
That's not even something the average person would call a tariff. I don't know why they used the word.
Alternative hypothesis.. Its not a hive mind and different factions vocalize their different opinions at different times in different places.
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.
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.
Pretty sure they have a "best" (top of the list) and a "best value" IIRC. So you are interested in the best, but even it is often not the most expensive. OK, i didn't do any statistics, but that seemed to be typical.
There's also rtings[1]. They test consumer products and seem to try to keep their methodology transparent and consistent.
A lot of the data they produce is paywalled, but that's alright. They don't have advertising and they buy the products that they review. Someone has to keep the lights on and put food on their tables.
[1]: https://rtings.com
Why do you trust Consumer Reports?
Independent, non-profit, probably just two of the factors. They don't allow ads or ranking either. I don't think they've steered me wrong.
More like who else can I trust at all? By default I trust them the most because everybody else I can find is too obviously a sell out and so the bar is low.
Note that everybody else I can find is very different from everybody else. Someone else linked rtings - I'd never heard of them before they were not in the running. There are probably many many others that are trust worthy - but all search engines will find is obvious sell outs.
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!
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.
Easy: Items must work without internet connection so they cannot be updated online.
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.
At the end of the day, people still end up sucking it up and buying it, so the market can only be so efficient. Every hobby I've had, all sorts of different stuff only anchored in the fact you have to buy gear, the common theme is everyone is constantly pissed off at the companies making the gear. It is very much an abusive relationship.
Exactly. The whole notion of "quality" is so subjective that it never was and never can be a norm.
The upper end of a lot of these product categories is often populated with overpriced junk that's popular for conspicuous consumption reasons. Clothing is the prime example, but a lot of modern fine dining is also trash (who actually enjoys eating flavoured foam?). So there's actually three races: lowest price, highest quality, and highest brand value.
An Audi typically requires more maintenance and repair than a Toyota though. You’re not paying for quality (as in durability/longevity)
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.
That's fine; as I've often repeated, we don't necessarily need tight(er) regulations but sophisticated and intelligent ones.
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.
> When people put quality requirements too high on software, we get situations where
This is a common trope of the unregulated: We can’t raise quality because we can barely deliver as it is. The real message there is that the user should suffer so that you won’t.