Comment by jolt42
17 hours ago
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.
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/
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.
Yeah, not sure I would rely on that.. Sure, they have Knipex and Klein on the approved list (which, AFAIK, is true), but then they list Warby Parker (read reddit - has gone WAY downhill), Cutco (by all accounts, a total rip-off and super low-quality knives requiring you to constantly get them sharpened) and Henkels, which also makes some pretty suspect knives, AFAIK.
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It strikes me that I am really turned off by the phoned in Claude Code design on this website. For a website that tracks quality I just expect a bit better. Probably unfairly.
It's fully LLM-written. You can trust it if you want, but there's stuff in there that's clearly wrong or nonsensical.
Is there a food and drink equivalent to this?
Because my experience is that most popular brands in those industries have really gone downhill, and it'd be lovely to track which ones are even remotely edible anymore.
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.
There’s a special place in hell for people who would buy a dog food brand only to make worse dog food…
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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.
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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.
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I wish more brands would follow the Newman’s Own charity model. All profits go to charity, so there isn’t an incentive to hollow out the brand, and the products are a reliable quality at a decent price.
Apparently they set up an organization to help other people do this: https://100forpurpose.org/
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People blame MBAs a lot, but most CEOs are Engineers or Economists by training.
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Worker owned cooperatives could be a reliable indicator however i'm not sure there are many examples of this being scaled upwards, like could an airline do that? Could they even have an option for a worker owned company provide an alternative for everything in the economy? You need capital to make a competitor and all the capital is rapidly being sucked up by the people enshittifying everything.
The answer probably lies in fixing government so that they can go after these players. However to fix government you need massive buy in from both the left and the right and there lies the crux. Our system forces us to cater to the lowest common denominator voter. Until that is fixed we can't go back to the status quo. Maybe its not possible anymore as our currency gets inflated down to nothing.
The alternative could be to just live in this enshittified system, leave the US to a country with a functioning government, or just accept that mass consumerism has run its course and lower your lifestyle needs to only own less items but of higher quality that have been researched(this requires time investment so you are forced to research what is good which limits how much you can cover if you consume too much).
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Yeah, hardly anybody in it for the long-haul. I hear we might be living longer relatively soon, maybe that will change the mindset.
We need more supply-chain visibility. Currently we have none, hence this problem.
Consider all the farm bio-outbreaks. We're told "Americans won't do these [farm] jobs" but they neglect to mention the subpar pay and working conditions. Thus the slaves that take these jobs have no knowledge of their rights, have limited education and literacy, have dubious residence status, and are not inclined to blow the whistle when they witness crops destined for human consumption being fertilized with industrial amounts of human shit (biosolids). Meanwhile, conservatives blame the workers themselves for contaminating the product. This cycle will never end until we have more stakeholders working the fields.
Same goes for Tyson and their chicken farms staffed by Somalis. Not saying anything about them specifically but outsourcing all labor to foreigners denies all visibility and access into our own food production. They could get away with packaging human meat and none of us would know it because none of us can afford to work there and see for ourselves. Our regulatory agencies are all compromised and can't be trusted to do it, so it's a free for all.
If you had like-minded people positioned close enough to supervise production and ensure that the product meets a certain set of high standards (call this "keeping kosher"), you would no longer have to worry about ingredients being replaced with foam, sawdust and heavy metals to satisfy those MBAs.
And yet it's socialism that has a reputation for shoddy products. How many people want to buy a Lada?
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Ran into that with an Oxo coffee grinder recently. Old one died, bought the exact same one again. And that motor sounds just a little more tinny than the old one, and the whole thing seems just a little more...rattly than the old one. I am not exactly sure where they cut the corners, but corners were indeed cut. Oh, and the new one was $10 more, so the savings were most definitely not passed onto me.
i think the only solution to this is to force a company to rebrand when they purchase a brand.
otherwise we end up exactly where we are, private equity buying out a brand, obfuscating that it’s no longer the same company, slowly sucking the life out of the product and screwing the public over.
if we make them always rebrand, we would at least be more aware when purchasing.
it’s kind of funny how certain people will tell us to vote with our wallets on a product, but they intentionally obfuscate everything about the product so we can’t make informed purchases.
could you imagine if we had to “do your own research” on every single thing you purchase? just think of how many items you purchase from the grocery store alone every month. it’s unreal we allow them to get away with hiding what they’re doing.
a great example is the sibling poster who talked about the dogfood being changed and messing up their dogs stomach… just trash behavior by these companies.
I'd be for forcing companies to list the top-level "owning" entity on all product labels
To be fair, mandatory warranty has added a lot to that.
Most larger electronics (washing machines, fridges, dryers, ovens, etc.) have a mandatory 5y warranty in most european countries, and since the profit margins are so low, even the cheapest washing machine (~250eur range) has to survive the daily use of a family with three kids (or even multiple daily uses) for at least five years, since even a single replacement/repair eats away profits of dozens others sold.
"back in the time", you'd skip the cheapest stuff, now i just say "buy the cheapest one, it'll work for at least five years", and in 99.9%, it's actually true.
> 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's a great theory, though it doesn't seem as accurate nowadays. Now, even supposedly 'high-end' brands will be low-quality garbage hollowed out by private equity firms or other corporate acquisitions.
We're not in a world where you can necessarily choose between quality at a high price and disposable junk at a low price, we're in a world where you're often choosing between disposable junk at a low price and rebadged junk sold at a premium one.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If you want one I continue to really trust almost blindly: Genelec (Finnish pro audio). Not even that expensive for what it is.
A current rough rule of thumb I currently use: if private equity buys out a company I'm using, I bail for the next best competitor within a couple years. If it is a US private equity firm, within a year.
There are exceptions. It isn't hard though these days to look up the firms' histories and then look up customer conversations on the Net about those historical portco's. More importantly, it isn't hard to look up the people behind the private equity firms (though I find it harder to link specific partners with specific portco's), and avoid the ones you see with a track record you want to dissociate from. Before the Net, this kind of research took days to assemble in libraries. With the Net and LLM's, it is very fast.
Remember capitalism is a tool that is supposed to cut both ways, both for the producer and for the consumer. Simultaneously.
I love my Weber and I was amused to see the instruction manual specifically saying that when it's time to take your outdoor furniture inside for the winter, leave the Weber, it's built to handle it.
The Weber kettle grill is one of my favorite examples of quality in another way—function. It is built well but it also is such a wonderfully simple design that provides quite a bit of flexibility.
I have the Smokey Mountain which is amazing at holding heat but a total PIA to clean. Have one of their gas grills as well on a built in line, and it is fairly high quality also.
Nothing tops the kettle though.
See also: Sam Vimes Boot Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory