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Discussion (136 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I suppose I now know why.
What this company is doing is taking advantage of, and really creating, adverse selection. They buy a brand for its reputation, destroy everything that made it worthwhile and abuse the information asymmetry of the public still believing they're buying the now non-existent brand. It could be seen very easily as a form of fraud.
BB's main-line stuff has also been declining in quality, so that's no guarantee either, unfortunately. I think Covid ended most or all of their remaining US production, which was already on the way out.
Some sub-labels like 1818 are still OK. On sale. Even Brooks' best stuff hasn't been worth full price since... IDK, the '90s probably.
It’s funny how fast average joe complains when a lack of economic growth slows down their 401k’s though…
Edit: Apparently I’m surrounded by non-standard Joe
I bought a base layer years ago that basically fell apart after 1 month. It was like it was made of tissue paper. I bought a different one that has been AWESOME and has lasted 4 years so far with no signs of wear.
What replaced off the rack suits for men in the US? Or should I give up and buy some Realtree?
At least the Chinese brands don’t try and hide it much like the companies listed here, they’ll just generate a new 5-letter new company to sell low quality crap.
rather, if I know A is a "family brand" of B(rooks bro?), then I'll try to NOT buy from A, and buy from C/D/E/F/G/etc instead
I was shocked that an FAO Schwarz toy sucked so much. I looked at reviews on Amazon to see if anyone else had these problems, and they had. The FAO Schwarz brand had been bought by the ThreeSixty Group in 2016. Now it's just a way to polish the image of cheap toys.
Yes, something you print yourself will likely be lower quality than a bought one from years ago and you'll pay more in material and time than buying a new one will cost, but... it may be no worse quality than a new bought set, possibly better, replacement parts can be reproduced easily or additional parts added to the set cheaply (no buying a full set to get a couple of extra pieces that you want) and things can be customised.
One of the bigger 3D catalogue sites (I think MakerWorld, but without checking I'm not 100% certain) ran a marble-run themed contest some months ago for which there were a lot of interesting entries, some just copies of basic parts/sets (great if that is what you are looking for) but also some that were more innovative than that. If you have a printer, or know someone who has, it might be worth you looking into that if your kid would appreciate a new set, there are a lot of free designs¹ out there you could experiment with.
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[1] and paid ones, some designers try to make a living this way and some of them produce designs that are well worth the cost as they may be free of issues more amateur designs could have
That sounds fascinating... I'd love to read an article about that.
Didn't get the memo? They're an AI infra company now ><
LL Bean sort of has AKAIK. I could also name some less mainstream equipment brands out west. Probably REI too.
Companies like Kroger are buying up their competition while not changing the name to make it look like they still compete.
Personally, I love using Origin for everything I can afford to use them for. I acknowledge not everyone has the privilege to spend $99 on a pair of jeans, but if you find yourself able, I think it's worthy to support American manufacturing.
I feel like I'm in a parallel universe. What year is it? Base Levis are more than that... We're also on a site filled with well off tech workers. $99 jeans aren't exactly a luxury.
https://www.levi.com/US/en_US/clothing/men/501-original-mens...
At Walmart it's common to get jeans (including Levi jeans) for < $20. But how long will they last? I honestly don't know, and even more I don't know how to definitely pay more for better quality.
I also struggle to identify quality brands. Generally just shop at Nordstorm.
I thought the whole trick was arbitrage on the delayed awareness of reduced quality.
No, but nothing's forever. The important piece of information is "is this brand good, right now, when I'm looking to make a purchase."
Right, which is the very thing that makes branding less than useful. You have to research everything before every purchase regardless of the brand precisely because the brand is no longer a good indicator of quality. That means that the brand doesn't mean much. Just because a brand signified high-quality goods yesterday doesn't mean it signifies the same today.
Yeah, I know that would be a lot of work, especially to keep it updated, but a valuable resource in this day an age. Because ownership changes as the article points out. I thought my local grocery store was local (because it looks/feels/acts very local), but it turns out they're now owned by a Korean conglomerate.
A somewhat humorous example is System76, where their US built stuff (cases, keyboards) are made with relatively thick aluminum and are surprisingly sturdy, while their laptops can be flimsy and are less ruggidly build. I think it's easier to say "good enough" when your laptop ships from clevo and you don't have a real choice in the build quality
Perhaps the issue is that MBAs are ruining everything?
Also, don't these people understand that they are destroying everything they was good. Like, surely they understand through all the corporate speak and distended responsibilities that they are directly making everyone's lives worse, for profit. If they do it to toys, to electronics, to websites, apps, then they do it to housing, to Healthcare, to education, to food, to survival itself. These people are literally, intentionally ruining as many people's lives as much as possible in the most effective way they can other than walking down the street shooting random people. Likely, the distributed and multiplied increments of shittifying add up to much more than killing some people, and yet we let them get away with it.
Is there any kind of legal framework that can take into account quality of life? I assume it would be pretty distopian in other ways. But when the "market" exists only to consolidate power into rich peoples hands so they can steal more and more and more from people who aren't rich, isn't that at least a crime of the soul?
Last question. If every hedgefund, private equity group was dissolved overnight, and prevented from ever being recreated. The owners forced to find a way to survive that didn't destroy others hard work, what would we lose? I'm sure they provide some kind of actual service for literally anyone other than making rich people richer right? But what? What is it that these financial frameworks actually do that helps anyone?
To them, theres a never ending line of hungry vultures right behind them, and if they do not do it, someone will take their place and do it and profit from it. So naturally they MUST do it, because it will inevitably be done also.
> What is it that these financial frameworks actually do that helps anyone?
They are supposed to clean out inefficiencies in economies. They theoretically expose weakness and exploit it, so it can be rebuilt stronger.
Its hard to argue against the premise - In a true capitalistic system. The problem is, the good old USA is a crony capitalistic system, and the politicians are for sale. When private equity can simply erode your business structure with policy, and then buy you out. It is not real capitalism.
At the end of the day, capitalism is the best system we have. The problem is the corruption of man, until we patch that bug, its going to keep causing these exploitable buffer overflows. Unfortunately, the code is in our limbic system, which is really old legacy code
I recently had to gift someone some books, so I decided to try B&N online shipping since Amazon sometimes damages books. I ordered 3 books: all 3 came loose in a big box, all 3 were damaged: they looked like used books, unacceptable as a gift. I returned them, they didn't have ship-to-store option (which was what Gemini was telling me to push for), and they sent me new ones: all 3 arrived damaged, again. It turns out, B&N is worse than Amazon: 100% book damage rate on 6 books, worse customer support, worse return policy, worse everything. Enshitification 100%.
For example, Pendleton Ganado Matelassé Blanket | Belk https://share.google/0QaaEXgLnNu0EKClr
Why are you writing this and what's your goal? Are you actually checking every fact in the articles?
I think you'd do well to cite a lot more of your sources, especially given the AI concerns. Cite legal filings, public records, reddit comments, whatever. Verifiability would help.
So far I've done OK assuming anything they make that's not 100% wool is cheap trash they're using to cash in on the name (they sell cotton shirts, and linen-cotton blends, and some synthetic blends—all extremely suspect, I avoid these at any price) but the 100% wool stuff is OK even if the construction's not in the US. That's served me well so far, but I reckon it's only a matter of time before they fully enshittify. Luckily their heavier shirts last years and years with occasional mending of e.g. tears (if you wear them as actual work and outdoors-activities shirts, you're gonna tear them sometimes).
I've also had success with Mountain Hardware, Outdoor Research (jackets and pants).
(I do search and rescue, so a lot of focus on outdoor stuff. It is also really hard on gear so anything cheaply made gets destroyed pretty quickly.)
Look at what it costs to get a work shirt (I mean, for physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s or ordered by the US military in the 1940s, which in neither case could be regarded as super-fancy. You're probably looking at minimum $150.
You want a button-up shirt that isn't total shit? Over $100. On clearance.
You "can" dress in cheaper alternatives, but those are so bad that their equivalent in the 1930s effectively didn't exist as a new product. You'd be looking at second- or third-hand good (by modern standards, not necessarily anything remarkable for the time, see again those work shirts) clothes, or some simply-constructed homemade garment.
On the plus(?) side we now have clothes so cheap that even though they develop holes or split seams within months, they're not worth repairing even for fairly-poor people, which is... something.
Dressing yourself in new clothes is a lot cheaper now. Dressing yourself in the same quality of new clothes? Maybe not.
[EDIT: This goes for plenty of stuff that's not clothes, and with more-recent products to compare them to. I've learned though my wife buying toys for our kids that modern standard-tier Barbies are trash compared to the ones from the '80s, fewer points of articulation, far worse cloth for the clothes, weaker construction, and fewer pieces of clothing or other accessories included. You have to buy from "fancier" Barbie product lines that are way more expensive, or buy non-Barbie dolls that cost a lot more than a modern entry-level Barbie, to get something that's actually similar to a standard Barbie doll in the '80s. So if you look at just "what did a Barbie cost 40 years ago versus today?" you'll get a misleading idea of how those costs have changed, because the actual comp to a modern standard-tier Barbie is some terrible, cheap Barbie knock-off from the Dollar Tree or wherever, in 1986; the cost to get the same-quality product, regardless of brand, has increased a lot more than whatever the cost difference is between a basic 1986 Barbie and a basic 2026 Barbie]
That happens incrementally over years, until the product is a shadow of its former self.
Of course, this is still cheaper than it was in the 1940s. With my disposable income I could afford to buy a few $150 shirts a month. A worker of my social class in the 1940s could not.
I don't need the quality so I buy $5 Gildan shirts instead. I do buy Made in Canada cat toys for my little guy though. Different priorities.
For a supporting example from the Spring and Summer 1929 Sears Catalog at, https://archive.org/details/sears-roebuck-catalog-158-r-1929...
"If it’s a Hercules, it’s the best work shirt on earth! Sales prove it. Deep down in the mine, in the mills and factories, high on the lofty girders of a towering skyscraper, in fact wherever the work is rugged and the going is tough you’ll find Hercules shirts on the backs of hardy men. It is the undisputed choice of a Nation! This shirt is made of heavyweight chambray in closed front style."
87 cents, postpaid. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ says that's $16.80 now. Fabric breaking strength is 62 pounds/inch. The triple stitched seams have a breaking strength of 58 pounds/inch.
The fancy version on that page is $1.00 -- just under $20 now.
Same shirt, Jan. 1935, price now 77 cents, or just under $19 now. https://archive.org/details/CAT31345884/page/140/mode/2up?q=...
"The toughest, ruggedest, man-size shirt we’ve ever sold. Packed full of more strength, stamina and comfort than ever before. Read every feature above! Sanforized Shrunk means perfect fit. All the washings in the world won’t shrink it. WHERE ELSE can you find such a shirt — such a price — such an opportunity?
Where indeed can I buy it now? I ... think I want one.
Dress shirts were about twice to thrice as much, and up to $6 for "radium silk"; 1929 was likely the last year they used that marketing term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_silk
Good fabric has always been and is still very expensive! We have created much cheaper alternatives but if you want the quality your predecessors had you better be prepared to look 15% of your household budget in the face. Homemade isn't even an alternative here. Most of the cost of good clothing is in the fabric and there's just no way around this.
But why? That would imply productivity in the industry hasn't risen at all. Which isn't true.
Look at televisions, for example. 1% of what they cost in 1960 and 1000x better.
(Don't @ me with "smart TVs have ads now". You know what I really mean)
A lot of it is that the production improvements have mostly been in developing processes for synthetic replacements. Natural fibers are agricultural products: wool comes from sheep, that are raised on land, harvested and processed by skilled laborers, with natural variance in the input & output; linen, cotton, silk different variants of the same constraints. Polyester is not like this and it indeed can scale vastly and be very cheap. Rayon can be produced from basically any cellulose input so same.
So a lot of what would be productive gains have just shifted over to these other modes. Cotton is the main natural fiber the industry focuses on and it is mostly a lot cheaper now than it was in the past.
The Duluth Trading Company runs cringe ads in my opinion but I traded my evil twin's old black Carhartt coat for a red Duluth coat that my son got from his last employer with a small monogram for my winter phase foxographer costume and it is 100% great.
I was wondering why these shirts went to hell. This was probably my favorite brand in the 2010s. Super durable and thick cotton shirts. I'd still be wearing them if I hadn't gained weight.
They're iterating AI-written consumer populist blog posts and using us as guinea pigs, until we stop noticing they're AI. Their last one was "Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose", which we did great on. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777209, flagged off main page)
Don't let them get away with this, they're using a topic that we all appreciate specifically to divide our reactions into "if it's AI, it's good! What's the problem?" and god knows what the actual endgame is. But it's certainly not Palantir maintaining a consumer rights blog.
FWIW fact check is great, their RAG stuff works fine. But the unsourced "anonymous anecdotes" are made up, can't find backing for any of them and they're sort of entry-level rage-bait. (ex. DC shoes snowboard boots now designed in Florida by people that never designed snowboard boot)
I'm troubled by your statement because I can't tell if you are saying it is incorrect and AI made it and therefore BAD. Or if you are just saying AI made it and therefore BAD.
Writing is at such a precipice. Every time I compose an email, gmail underlines every single sentence to say there is a better and more concise way of saying it. I feel stupid so I generally accept it. Isn't this AI writing as well? But, the thoughts and intentions are mine.
How is this different here? The author is pointing out really relevant information that I know anecdotally to be true. If that story is 85% written by AI, or 15% written by AI, I still see the human behind it.
I'm troubled by AI writing, don't get me wrong. But, it deserves further thought. (And, I also have strong negative bias towards palantir...)
This would be enough to make me distrust the whole thing.
Editing suggestions are qualitatively different from writing the thing wholesale.
The anecdotes appear fabricated. I couldn't source the DC Shoes / Florida designer claim.
Generally, I'm sympathetic towards this worldview, and it would be disruptive to its impact to have obviously AI-written articles being passed around as authoritative grounding.
Even if 100% correct and verifiable, "obviously AI-written" and "100% correct" is enough for people who aren't as sympathetic as us to the overall point to dismiss it.
I'm sympathetic to their case, the phrase I'm trying to make happen is "AI DDOS'ing" - we can't people new to the material to read and verify endless reams of words, they approach infinity in the limit.
This feels like the new frontier for "journalism": can we easily verify it?
That feels like a step in the right direction, regardless of how it happens.
People like Steve Bannon know this, and have called what you describe "flooding the zone" and it works. Our brains can't process excess information so we search for simple answers. AI will make this exponentially more effective as a tactic for spreading narratives.
This is an illustration of why AI is terrible: it just destroys trust. Is the blog good or bad? It's really hard to tell without putting in more work than it'd take to write a similar article.
At least in the pre-AI days, if you saw polished writing, it meant someone at least put some effort into it.
Consumers have power to affect change with their dollars... providing they have the right information
Obviously we do not "all know it to be true," since this business model works.
> What is their goal here -- to crowdsource information so that we have a public record of note for companies? What are they planning to do with that information etc?
This website? You kinda make it sound like a conspiracy. This seems like basic consumer advocacy: identify a problem, get the information out there so consumers can make better choices and not be fooled, and maybe (a long-shot) get some kind of cultural or legislative change to solve the problem.
Speaking of the latter, it would probably be a good idea to change bankruptcy law so that brands and trademarks cannot be sold in liquidation (at least without the associated business operations). Practices like the article describe undermine the social value of a trademark, and turn them into an opportunity for deception.
Though with these kinds of blogs, if it gets successful and influential, eventually it may just turn to a pay-to-play. IIRC, that's what happened to "mattress review" blogs.
A lot of the newer brands take time to learn from their experience to ramp up quality, from materials to stitching.
Or you just have enough money to buy only from less-widely-known but actually-good brands and don't worry much about price. The ones that haven't started cashing in on their "high class" branding by moving down-market toward the middle class... yet.
Is this because of the Palantir / techbro culture that the author is immersed in, or for some systemic or economic reason?
It seems like that may be partly what this site is trying to build with the ledger, but it looks focused only on the "bad".
It's a living document and has just been released - will be expanded quickly
Just as feedback, the reason I got the feeling that it was largely focused on "the bad" is that the "approved" entries seem much lower signal. For instance, I opened Leatherman to get a sense of why it was approved, but there was essentially no information there other than ownership. Maybe that's your focus, but it's a little difficult to get a sense of why I should be confident in it as a buyer.
Best luck with the project, it seems like meaningful work.
Once in a while I find a $35 shoe at Walmart that is compatible with my feet and looks great and lasts about half as long as $70 shoe but most of the time Walmart doesn't have them in stock which is sad.
If you're fancy, what do you do when mass production and the internet make the markers of fanciness accessible to the very people you're trying to be fancier than? For one, you stigmatize mass production and elevate artisanal handmade goods. Those are inherently impossible to democratize. Another thing you can do is replace the appreciation of quality with the act of discovery as proof of elevated taste. Make taste a moving target, so the dirty unwashed masses are always a step behind.
Brands like Brooks Brothers or Eddie Bauer have no place in this system. The best the masses can do to imitate the elites is buy cheap fast fashion from brands that go viral and don't live long enough for anyone to know their quality before they're gone.
We need a Manhattan Project for curing Cluster B disorders.
Look at the implicit assumptions we're supposed to make in the story you shared, like there was some point in time when people decided to start abusing the policy, necessitating the change. Like people cared about new ll bean so much they'd scour garage sales and do the return fraud. Like they hadn't built this margin into their product to begin with. Like they didn't have a dozen other ways to address these trends, if they were actually happening. (like restricting the policy to original purchasers, requiring you to have a receipt, tracking it themselves, etc)
It really seems like hogwash if you think about it critically. They just wanted to expand their margins, simplify bookkeeping, etc.
It's entirely possible that a hack/fraud like this existed at a relatively small scale that was 'tolerable' to the business, but subsequently became more popular to the extent it became unsustainable to continue to offer the guarantee.
I could easily image that happening a couple of ways -
* a 'life hack' like mentioned gets spread around in forums/online, raising awareness of the 'hack' which sees return volumes increase beyond what they had modelled/expected when pricing the cost of the guarantee into their product
* The above, combined with the growth in peer-to-peer used clothing sales (things like Vinted in the UK, or ThreadUp? in the US) means there's money to be made taking advantage of things like this - people could absolutely earn a living/earn money finding used clothes in thrift stores, cashing in on the manufacturer guarantee and then reselling the subsequent items on via peer-to-peer sales as unused/unwanted clothing where they'd undoubtedly make a sizeable mark-up vs. the cost of buying potentially quite used clothing in a thrift-store.
On that second point - I personally know people who supplement their modest incomes by doing similar things - scouring things like Facebook marketplace/freecycle for items they know they can turn around and resell online for a small profit. Feels like way too much work per £/$ earned for me, but undoubtedly it happens).
Of course...you could be absolute right, it could just be a convenient scapegoat to point to when removing a previously offered service that the business has deemed no longer viable/not worthwhile to offer.
The fact that they are being quite secretive about their outsourcing, or at least not publishing it as a restructuring plan that they lay out to customers, is a little scummy, but makes sense for private equity. Milk as many people as they can while they still trust the brand.
From a shareholder's perspective, it's working as expected. And that's the real issue. If brands took more care of not expanding too fast that they require private equity and give away their ownership of the company slowly, then with patience and customer respect, we see its a good mix. But it seems people just get greedy or something and want it all faster.
The alternative is to shut down. That's how this whole system works: the brand can be sold, because the alternative is to cease existing.
I hate that the brand is worthwhile on its own. But: that's the point! The company invested in making the brand worth something by having it represent a promise. That promise isn't worth anything when the brand can be sold separately from the process of making the thing. The brand continues to be worth something, though.
This mechanism is a core feature of capitalism. Companies can be sold for parts, and those parts can lie to consumers. There's almost certainly a regulatory answer, but the behavior of the roll-up firms isn't unique to any particular firm. It's exactly the kind of value extraction the system is designed to support.
Some people disrespect drug addicts, homeless people or sex workers. To me the people behind such practises are below contempt.
I've had a Billabong orange t-shirt last almost 15 years of sun and salt water from time to time, one of the best clothes-related purchases I've ever made. Sad to see that that's now a thing of the past.
Stop buying so much shit in general.
Eh, I'm not sure that's such good advice. IIRC, I remember stumbling across tacticool "military grade" USB thumb drives, for instance. I doubt those are any better than your typical name-brand drive. "Professional" seems to be an often used marketing keyword to indicate quality or power (e.g. "Mac Pro").
Some keywords that may work better are "industrial" and "commercial," they don't have the same ring to them as "professional" and "military grade."
There can be a much better form of capitalism also in the US - since this whole thread and discussion is pretty US-centric.
1. strong entrepeneurial culture, limited obstacles from government when starting new business ventures and/or products & services
2. a "free" market, meaning that in broad terms government does not control prices nor what can be bought & sold or how much or when it is sold
3. distribution of profit generally goes to capital (stockholders) rather than employees.
None of these require enshittification. I also believe that we could have a thriving and vibrant economy without #3.
It's like saying lack of innovation is communism working as intended.
The reason things are shittier is because the market is shittier. Consumer demands shape what companies make and sell. If companies can get away with selling garbage, because the market is undiscerning, then they will make garbage.
It's the same with politics. Ultimately, the quality of a political culture is determined by its participants.
The real problem isn't capitalism, but consumerism, which, among other defects, prioritizes the maximization of quantity over quality.
Can we catch it quicker this time?