Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

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> You don’t mean ‘foreign made’, you mean ‘cheaply imported’.

The price of them being imported does not have the same meaning to me that I think you want it to have. Why are we pussy footing around this? Shit is just made with less quality than it was "back in the day". Even shit made in the USofA is of lower quality than it used to be, so it's not just something "foreign made". Why? Because consumers did not want to pay for quality. Making it right is expensive. Good quality assurance is expensive. Manufactures trying to get ahead decided to start cutting costs and lowering quality and lowering QA standards, and consumers bought that shit up left, right, and center. People decided they preferred to have cheap things now, and if it breaks and it's still cheap, then just replace cheap with cheap.

This is not any different than companies looking for short term profits to make stockholders happy rather than what's better for long term results for the stockholders or the company itself. So, it's not just a thing evident in manufacturing but in all business.

We (the royal we) have lost long term vision in pretty much all aspects

Okay, generic rant about everything going to hell in a handcart since someone back in the day decided to prioritize profits over quality. Gotcha.

So I think the thing I'm confused about is what this has to do with Sears kit houses.

Were they, like, really good quality? Was Sears not an incredibly profitable company that made its money by volume supply of cheaply sourced parts?

I got the impression Sears houses were basic but functional. The fact that "Remarkably, almost 70% of these Sears DIY houses are still standing today" is reported uncritically in almost every online source about them, including the original piece, but... is that remarkable? How much 1920s suburban housing stock in general is still standing today?

70% of homes not built by contractor professionals are still in use? Regardless of all stock, that still feels fairly impressive outcome this many years later.

Consumers didn't want to pay for quality to the extent demanded by corporations that need to grow YOY. Companies were placed into a cost-cutting race to the bottom. Everything continually gets worse, until we no longer remember how it was better.

Making things worse while hiding that it's gotten worse is just corporate strategy, and corporations have every incentive to attempt to do it all the time.

As do politicians, and their sidekicks, the media. And the three together do a world-class job pushing a narrative that somehow never mentions worse.

Politicians have no incentive to make things worse in a typical government structure.

It is however true that corporations have strong incentives to support politicians and media entities who are aligned with their own interests.

> companies looking for short term profits to make stockholders happy rather than what's better for long term results for the stockholders or the company itself

Oh, that old trope that never dies. Companies that sacrifice the long term for short term profits have their stocks tank and go out of business.

Big investors are not the fools people imagine they are. About 3 milliseconds after they catch wind that a company is eating its seed corn, they dump the stock.

But if you are sure you've identified a company that is doing this, then short their stock and make a bundle.

Very recent example: Instant Brands. Arguably one of the most popular new markets for kitchen appliances in recent memory. Brought electric pressure cookers and countertop convection ovens (ahem air fryers) into the public consciousness in a way no one else has. Purchased by private equity in 2017, now filing for bankruptcy.

You're probably right about big public corporations and institutional investors. But PE firms don't have the the same incentives; their incentive is often to squeeze as much ROI as possible out of the companies they purchase, consequences be damned. You're mostly right though on this part:

> Companies that sacrifice the long term for short term profits have their stocks tank and go out of business.

Or they file for chapter 11 bankruptcy and let someone else pick up the pieces, while destroying a good business and leaving a bunch of people unemployed.

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