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Comment by listenallyall | Hacker News Reader

> the rapacious pursuit of shareholder value extraction

It's always the fault of greedy corporatists here on HN -- honestly, that is just lazy thinking. Sure, they want to make money. But also, the average Joe wants stuff cheap. Made in China, lots of plastics replacing metal, lower-density materials, fewer fixable/replaceable parts, limited quality control. You can't really blame companies who build their products like this when it's shown over and over and over that cheap stuff is what sells.

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It’s the same problem…short term thinking. However it’s lopsided - the consumer can’t think long term because they are increasingly squeezed financially, so companies Race to the bottom for penny pinching consumers - driving wages further down or outsourcing altogether.

It’s a vicious cycle

Part of the short-term thinking is because reviews can be gamed. Why would I buy an expensive thing, if I don't have a reliable signal that it is higher quality and worth the extra cost? Price is a clear signal, reputation for quality is not.

If you can handle the object you can also judge quality. I buy hand tools at specific stores and I pick the tool up and examine it for failure modes. I’ve broken cheap sledge hammers and framing hammers before so I try to be careful. It’s really important to look at the grain of the wood in the handle

Americans are increasingly higher income and more able to afford consumer products, not "increasingly squeezed financially".

This explains the growth in the low end but not the lack of decent mid-range options. We no longer have good/better/best. We only have shitty/best and one is 10x the price of the other. Of course Joe Blow isn’t going to spring for the 10x option; he can’t afford it. In the min-maxing of profit margins, we’ve lost the pretty ok. Also I didn’t blame the corporations man; I specifically blamed market consolidation, greedy investors, and the output of HBS.

> We only have shitty/best and one is 10x the price of the other.

Such as? Every product I've considered buying in the past few years has more price points and options than ever before. Yes many of them are ultra-cheap, but plenty of mid-priced options as well. For example a new top of the line GoPro Hero11 is $550. However you can easily find other action cams anywhere from under $99 to $450, some of which are other GoPro products.

gopro is commodity hardware with a lot of marketing and branding to try and command a premium purchase price

I think it's the opposite of Market consolidation. It is Market diversification to the point where most brands mean nothing. When you have a hundred or a thousand brands for a good, being Middle Market means very little.

Either you need the item onceish so you buy the cheap option, or you use it a lot so you buy the expensive option. Those in between can find a used expensive option on marketplace/craigslist/etc. Not a lot of demand left in between after that.

CAD software is also to blame. The proliferation of CAD means we know exactly when a part will fail (subject of course to a statistical distribution). Things are not overbuilt anymore and manufacturers have precise control over an item's lifecycle.

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