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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The CE mark in Europe and the UL mark in the US is supposed to provide a floor on quality.
That floor can be increased if we as a society decides that this is required.
You might be unwilling to pay for this increased quality, but you don't have a choice.
The 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.
Boeing 737 MAX tragedy did happen because of self-certification abuse, still I would not call FAA certification worthless.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For example I believe there is a deeper quality that cannot be easily found in a more quality product. Quality can be expressed in many ways and felt throughout the life. But people don't care for that.
They mostly care for cheap and good enough. I don't want to attack that way of life its simply one with tradeoffs like a life with more quality.
More quality can mean more expensive, the need to engage with something a bit more, etc.
Leibl famously needed over 3 months to just draw the hands of one model for "Three Women in Church" it certainly has some quality to it.
In the modern world seldom you will find one that wants to pay for such work or even spending 3 months of work on painting hands.
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.
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.
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.
I do agree that third party certification is one possible avenue.
The company might also go bankrupt with much of its profits having gone to owners and decision makers who are not bound to honor the warranty.
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.
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.)
Maybe idea could be maybe applied to the offering of long-term technical support and backwards-compatibility (in terms of durability of the software) and open source (in terms of reusability of the software).
I can also remember when I worked at Travelocity a million years ago and they actively tried to fight this insanity with exhaustive A/B testing.
Most quality defects I see are ultimately down to culture, not training and certainly not certification. Getting to excellent quality simply does not require great training nor rigorous certification, and I'm not even sure it really benefits from either all that much. But what it does require is a culture of chasing down all the avoidable risks, to fix not just the immediate bug, but also the process that allowed it to come to be, to pre-emptively look for whole classes of bugs or misfeatures seriously, and to always look deeper than for underlying causes or interactions (i.e. take the 5-why's game seriously).
It's perhaps almost a trope by this point, but it's still a great reminder and example - sqlite. About a month ago Richard Hipp, one of the primary authors, gave a great presentation "Reliability Lessons From SQLite" (https://youtu.be/V_qzqY1bb7I) - and notably, I'm not seeing even _echos_ of training and certification in their clearly world-class process. I don't think you can even seriously claim it's all that expensive, if you consider how tiny that team is, and yet how much they've achieved.
If larger organizations fail to achieve high quality - well, _why?_ It's not due to lack of training, certifications or smart people. Perhaps its intrinsic about larger for-profit corporations, but I suspect we could do better with better incentives, and a more serious attitude about dealing with mis-aligned incentives throughout our culture. Is it really a flaw for a corporation to prioritize short term cost reduction even over long term self-harm if that's what they're judged by? Is it a flaw for a profit seeking corporation to largely ignore costs their low quality imposes on others? Is it a flaw for a for-profit organization to take huge risks when the upside is unbounded but the downside is mere bankruptcy without any further liability?
I don't know how to solve these problems, and don't want to claim it's even remotely reasonable to throw out the capitalist baby with the corporate bathwater, but surely we can do better than the status quo even without a revolution. Misaligned incentives and tragedies of the commons aren't new issues, nor ones without potential mitigations. We're just choosing to ignore those inefficiencies, and have for decades. And at this point, even small changes in incentives might have truly wrenching consequences; the ingrained and by now deeply embedded carelessness in our huge software and other engineering stack is corroded at every level.
TLDR: I don't have the answer, but I'm pretty positive it's not an issue of cost, training or certification.
Clothes used to last a life time till few decades ago.
Right now you buy stuff that after the first wash already looks worn out, terrible or starts falling apart.
Major known brands are guilty of this too, often regardless of price.
So people end up with closets filled of junk that they look terrible in anyway.
I wish there was a line of brands and even better shops that focused on quality fabrics and sewing processes for clothing that lasts for ages as it used to.
I think this is part of the problem. Everyone wants high-quality (for the most part), but no-one wants to pay more than necessary. If known brand is no longer an indicator of quality, how do you determine that you want to spend say 2-5x the price on something? Reading reviews and such gets you part of the way, but they often focus on new products and performance or style. And it's not always easy to find a review for the thing you are looking to buy. Besides, who has time to wade through reviews for every purchase? So we end up buying the cheaper options because at least then you will only be out a little bit instead of feeling tricked spending more for the same product.
- there are a few clothing brands that focus on high quality (and in this case english mfg fabric mills).
- it is not cheap. our whole society is warped around “physical goods are super cheap now [because we can manufacture in cn]”. it’s a race to the bottom and we’ve hit the bottom.
- you can buy a black nylon/cotton tshirt for 10 USD
- these tshirts will set you back 130 USD. it feels amazing, was made in a country with health care, ages well, looks high quality.
do you want to pay the price this requires? I do but I think most can’t or won’t https://www.sunspel.com/collections/the-classic-t-shirt
> Besides, who has time to wade through reviews for every purchase?
Claude does! And most purchases I make are repeat purchases, so I don't have to read the reviews again.
Why would you assume that to be true? It's definitely not true for me.
The overall revealed consumer preference has been "more and cheaper", not "less and higher quality", which still exists as a niche if you are willing to go down the tailoring route, not off the peg.
I would argue the surge in vintage clothing ecosystems is an indication there is an unmet demand.
It all comes at a price but I don't disagree that we have a barbell problem here (ie cheap fast fashion or bespoke, with nothing in the middle).
They still exist, at least here in Europe.
I quit buying cheap clothing a decade ago, getting quality items is much more expensive but at the same time I've had basic t-shirts that I wear most days last me 5-8 years; trousers that are almost 10 years old and the only blemish is a bit of faded colours; underwear lasting 5+ years, etc.
The issue is very few people have the disposable income and are willing to pay 40-80€ on a good quality t-shirt with heavy premium quality cotton (280-300gsm) sewn in Portugal, Spain, or Italy, or 45€ on a 3-pack of underwear made in Scandinavia, or 20-30€ on a pair of great quality woolen socks.
I do it because I have experienced how much longer they can last, and also had the experience of overpaying on what seemed to be a good quality item and didn't last, it's really hard to find a good signal for what's quality since price alone doesn't do it, you need to buy the stuff and hope it will be good quality and if it's not you learn to not buy it again, it can get expensive if you are unlucky or didn't do proper research.
In the end it can be exhausting for a normal person just looking for good quality to find those items, it took me years to settle on the brands I buy from.
To me it was trial and error, recommendations, and shopping at physical stores, and like I mentioned as well: it's time-consuming, frustrating, and I wouldn't expect a person not interested in this quest to be able to find good quality items consistently.
Just to nitpick, I doubt i could wear a heavy premium quality cotton tshirt in the current summers. I can barely stand a flimsy thin cotton tshirt...
I'm willing to pay extra for quality linen for those summers, except everyone lies and their linen can be up to 100% cotton :)
I really cannot handle very hot weather, it's nice for a day or two but a week of constant 30+C is definitely not my happy place.
I think this reflects how companies are run in US and Europe, they don't seem to believe how different companies can be here, its not only about turbo maxing the owners profit.
Which means I now feel obligated to recommend:
https://youtube.com/@theironsnail
https://youtube.com/@shiftfashiongroup
Both have great videos on garment quality. But with the inevitable caveat that they are in the business themselves. I take it as an insiders perspective and watch out for content marketing (while being tainted!).
It seems to be easier to find better clothes if you are a bit of a hipster type. Those kind of stores still care for quality. My friend has such a shop and tells me that even for them it gets harder to source good vendors as it is a continuous race to the bottom.
This tends to happen more when one is young. Growing older usually means that a good old dusty 15 years great quality coat is seen as it being perfectly ok. I guess that's also what provides that feeling that some people when they approach middle age they "always look the same"... It's not cheap to have a large and varied wardrobe and at the same time filled with high quality garments.
Yes, it can be expensive to be poor, but the rich really do consumer more dollars-of-boot per day, because they can afford it.
> There’s some amount of gradient between use-once and fully bespoke clothing [...]
Bespoke clothing mostly fits you better. It doesn't necessarily last longer. (But you can ask for harder wearing material or longer lasting manufacturing techniques, of course.)
I imagine you're looking at it from the avenue of "if those goods last longer, they can be rented for longer", but having to manage and store more durable goods after consumers have moved on to newer and better things is a considerable cost. A good that has to be returned is often better discarded, from the company's point of view.
Long warranty is better as there is no other incentive who has to pay if the product breaks down. Cars should have a 7 years warranty by default for instance.
I wouldn’t really know, I’ve only used car share for the past 10 years shrug
My goto example for this is Hilti powertools. They can (and have) made some of the best tools in the game, but they now make most of their money from companies going the "fleet" option, where, for a monthly fee, tools can be replaced almost immediately when they fail. The result of this is tools that work brilliantly for a short time but are non-field-repairable, and aren't really designed to last any more.
Economic incentives beat engineering ability.
And this fact nukes most of the arguments made in this thread and in the article. Vehicles have become better because everybody who is going to buy a new or used vehicle will do very diligent research among their contacts to know which brands and models are reliable and which aren't. It's the free market and care of reputation in action.
Oh, and don't subject your car to constant short start-stop cycles (i.e. drives of less than half an hour), warm up the car prior flooring the gas pedal on a highway, and for turbocharged cars, take it easy on the last 5 minutes so the hot side of the turbo can cool down.
Ignoring any of that can kill modern cars just as fast as it could kill old cars. Even electrical cars need their love - don't always go for the HVDC charger, use trickle AC chargers instead whenever you can, and look what needs lubrication and maintain that (e.g. transmissions).
You still renting the old Xbox? Try renting this new Xbox instead, the verification cans come in additional flavors!
The LL game: the curious preference for low quality and its norms
https://diegogambetta.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/the_ll_...
In the past, if a garment factory was located in a certain country and the quality was poor, it was often directly tied to that country's reputation. But as the world began to lose friction and entered the era of globalization, much of the work was passed down to subcontractors, and the big problem is that consumer complaints don't get passed down to the subcontractors either.
And within this structure, multiple subcontractors can't survive; as subcontractors grow, they begin to centralize into one. In such a structure, it's not that the original contractor controls the brand quality of the subcontractor. Rather, the subcontractor that has grown huge begins to control the quality ceiling of the entire market.
On top of that, for a company to sustain continuous growth, a given product must not last too long, right? Because a product that can be used for 20 or 30 years means people won't have to buy that product line again.
Guy's its possible not to live in a world of slop, you know that right? You don't have to turn the world into a glorified Walmart.
So I don’t have such determination in complaining about the quality of the goods that I participated in exploited labour of.
It’s all working somehow more or less. Seems like it could stop any moment. The continuous decrease in quality is rather the least of my worries.
What worries me is the fragile state of global affairs and heavy fog of war obscuring the future.
I am AI accelerationist after all not because I believe in utopias but because of how dire the situation is. AGI/ASI might buy us couple of decades or more. The risk/reward calculation heavily favours pedal to the metal.
So no, T-shirt quality is not my primary concern.
More specifically, people in PR China have gotten massively richer since the late 1970s. How does that square with your slavery thesis?
I might also add that if anything, goods from China have become better value for money since then. Even as their people have moved further and further away from slave status.
People in China's first-tier cities live well and are more up to date than almost anywhere, but in the lower cities, they are not free. I usually think that popular literature reflects a country's social conditions, and even in China's xianxia, there are ranks, and people act according to those ranks. To say that all of China has become wealthy would be an overstatement, given that there are many problems starting with the migrant worker issue. Of course, China is a great power, and the wealthy programmers in first-tier cities are extraordinarily talented.
Recently you're even starting to hear stories I thought ended with the Soviet Union. People who are literally terrified of getting on a train out of the city because they think they might never be allowed to come back.
Unfortunately, from my experience artisans aren't willing to do the work anymore, even if you pay them premium. For instance, a carpenter here in Poland that decided to be a carpenter would rather cut up pre-made cabinets to your specs than make them from scratch using wood, even if I pay them 10x.
Then, people aren't willing to pay premium for stuff. For some reason, they would rather buy 20 products that last year than 1 product that can last 20 or more.
It's a problem for me because I value quality and would be willing to pay premium, but I just can't ever find anything.
If not, I usually just don't buy it new and just go to the thrift store. I can usually find what I need, made 30 years ago that will probably last me for the rest of my life.
You get quality from competition and customers opening their wallets for quality.
Another example: Apple assembles some nice consumer hardware in China. Their quality doesn't depend on regulation.
This was often unfair and incorrect even then, but it's clearly mad now. Chinese products run the gamut from the lowest to the highest ends in almost every consumer field. But some people hew to old stereotypes.
Now I feel old - get off my lawn.
For a concrete example, we get very good rice varieties specifically from certain parts of China. (But here in Singapore people also really care about rice. You generally can't buy good and fresh rice in the middle of the Polish countryside for example.) And, yes, for this product the 'Chinese' variety is superior to eg generic Thai rice.
I put 'Chinese' in scare-quotes, because just like you don't just drink 'French wine' when you know what you are doing, you don't just eat 'Chinese' rice.
For a lot of tea drinking paraphernalia, the most top of the line items also come from China. Even if you are into, say, Japanese tea.
What's your point?
"premium" ? No they've had to lower their prices because otherwise you would never even look at them in the first place (or they don't get a livable amount of work, even if you personally do pay like you say).
And the drop in prices has to come from somewhere. Quality is by far the easiest thing to skimp on.