Comment by xingped
18 hours ago
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.
The problem here is an information imbalance between seller and buyer.
This could be solved via regulation (unlikely to happen in the US).
Another solution would be independent testing labs / publications. To stay independent, they can't finance themselves using ads. Would people be ok to pay for information, on the internet? For $1000 lawn mower maybe, what about for a $50 kitchen appliance?
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…
Let me introduce you to a little thing called Private Equity.
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> There’s a special place in hell for people who would buy a dog food brand only to make worse dog food…
And yet countless millions of people basically say nothing about how the food they eat is produced.
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The steelman is that by lowering the cost, more pets can afford better food than what they currently eat. No comment about whether that is reflected in the consumer facing price or in profits.
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> 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.
There's two Henckels listed:
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/henckels-internatio...
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/zwilling
The first one is on their watchlist and probably the brand you're thinking of?
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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.
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.
Perhaps selling a company should mean the trademarks are lost. After all, the entire point of trade marks is to protect consumers.
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.
A buddy of mine paid a premium to get some fancy umbrella with a lifetime warranty. It had a failure at some point, they replaced it with a worse quality one. Another failure, and he got another step down in quality.
So, the company kinda honored the contract.
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Something to be said for places like Costco that has an absurdly generous return policy (are they the only major retailer left that does this? REI used to, but they got rid of it).
I believe Costco requires their vendors to eat the return if they want to remain a vendor. Doesn't meant that Costco is immune to bad products, but it severely punishes vendors that sell garbage and protects customers.
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I got 3x Bose QuietComfort 35 2 by buying 1. They did honor their warranty, but my impression was that they plan for people not going through the effort of actually requesting a replacement item, even though the warranty says they can.
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/
The general problem with this is that starting a business generally requires money, which for-profit companies get from investors. For a non-profit to do it they need to get it from donors, and then your actual complaint isn't that nobody is willing to start a company that works that way, it's that people (e.g. you and your friends) haven't donated enough money to make it happen.
But something that might be interesting is to start a non-profit whose mission is to create value for customers (i.e. produce non-garbage products), and then all profits go not to a separate charity but to increasing the number of product lines the company produces. Then spin the new product lines off into independent non-profits with the same charter so the organization doesn't become large and bureaucratic or suffer permanent collapse as a result of a single period of poorly chosen upper management.
People blame MBAs a lot, but most CEOs are Engineers or Economists by training.
It's the MBA mindset. I think about it in simplified way that in the past a lot of businesses weren't run mainly for profit. So a plumber focused on plumbing first and set prices to have enough profit to live. Once the MBA/PE mindset comes in, they think about maximum profit first and plumbing is just a secondary thing. I have seen that with dentists, vets and many contractors.
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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).
Would Publix count as a co-op?
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?
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.
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Everyday I am reminded about these brain dead arguments in my local town by people who can't think one step ahead.
You made this generalized statement probably from some propaganda you've read or some trauma you've experienced growing up. Yet, if you look at the current state of the situation its in clear decline. The only ways forward are to accelerate the decline and live with the consequences (ie. doing nothing) or to consider moving in the other direction(ie. leftist things).
In the US I think there are two sources of this mentality: 50% of the population don't have a passport so they have never seen how people in say Europe/Canada deal with this, EU/Canada/AUS/UK have higher standards and don't tolerate this kind of crap as much
Example: Hyundai removed immobilizers in their cars...but only in the US because Canada/EU had regulations requiring an immobilizer.
End result: Someone on TikTok discovered that you could steal cars with a screwdriver and a USB cable. This resulted in insurance costs shooting up, people stuck without cars due to lengthy repair times and overall lower quality of lives.
The braindead response that comes from people with OP's mentality would be "you should have researched the car better beforehand its all your fault".
Yea ok people with limited budgets and time looked at which cars had good reviews and Kia/Hyundai were winning many of those (likely BS ) awards like "North American Car of the year".
People are already stressed for time trying to survive in this jungle and now the "free market" played games with them and anyone suffering from this might be having a worse life now because of this mess. Why are they having to spend all their miniscule free time just to not be screwed?
Wouldn't it have been better if we had European style regulations that would have established a minimum standard that all cars in this era should have?
NO! We can't have things like that because people like OP (and a lot of conservatives) have these imprinted beliefs from a lifetime of fear mongering, or trauma if they immigrated from some garbage country with poor institutions(ex. Cuban immigrants opposed to Universal healthcare or eastern european immigrants opposed to anything with the word [commun/social]ist)
I've volunteered in the past for Progressive candidates that have a #1 criteria for not taking any corporate money. It is so much of a time sacrifice to get an AOC or Bernie type candidate only to have that progress stymied by endless amount of money pouring in on the other side. Why are we even doing it when day after day people like OP crop up with this nonsense? Whats the point of constantly fighting to enlighten person after person who starts off their beliefs with these 1-dimensional arguments? Its makes me want to just watch it all burn down just as long as people with your mentality go down with the ship. I get why a lot of wealthier people are just leaving the country. The fix requires decades of effort and will just break many people that try to go down that path. If you are wealthy and you have this one and only life, is it really worth it to have to deal with people like OP? Or is it better to just leave and let them wallow in their ignorance. I guess it depends on how important the country is to you. Even that concept of loyalty to a country seems to be eroding in this era of passport wealth.
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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.
That's just the middle class disappearing. I'm sure you can still pay experts to get you actual quality with enough money.
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.
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.
Up in my neck of the woods, it depends.
I paid cash for the last two used cars I bought. As used cars go they weren't particularly expensive and it wasn't a big deal. Both purchases came from dealerships that also sold and serviced things like brand new Hondas or Chevrolets.
For one of those cars, the paperwork was completely finished and I drove off in that new-to-me car without me even giving them a dime. (I did promise in writing that they'd have a check in a few days, and I did make good on that promise.)
There's also used car lots that work with real financing companies. They broker the financing deal and get paid for it. That works, too. (I've financed cars at these places, too; this also went smoothly.)
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But then, too: There are buy-here, pay-here used car lots. These are traps for the poor, and they love their particular financing game.
At these places: The loans are designed to be very upside down and they therefore hold all of the cards. They'll sell a used car for years of weekly payments of $120, and if/when the payments stop then they just turn the car off remotely and have someone go pick it up.
After that, it's cleaned up and sold to the next guy for $120 a week.
It's a very profitable way to conduct business and nobody of any substantial means and sane mind would ever buy anything there at all.
But they don't check credit, and they don't report credit. So as ugly and expensive as it is, for some folks that's the only way they can get the car they need to try to survive in the society that they were born into.
I heard the advice was to not mention the payment method until the very end when you're about to pay, because they won't cancel a sale they've invested into just because you're paying them with actual money. I don't know whether that still works or if they now will cancel the sale.
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.
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.
In the US, a lot of car dealerships make a good portion of the profits from a car sale from the loan. E.g. the lender gives the dealer a kickback on the loan and that is a good portion of the total profit. It's somewhat analogous to how US airlines make their profits from credit card deals and selling miles.
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.
my local-Walmart-equivalent <$50 shoes never lasted longer than a few months.
The theory might've used to be true when prices were related to costs. In current year they'll sell you the $10 slop for $50, and sell you the exact same $10 slop for $300. Someone else will sell you the $200 amazing product for $300, but they won't sell the $200 amazing product for $50. Paying a lot of money is (usually) necessary, but not sufficient, for getting a quality product.
The boots are metaphorical, obviously
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.