Agreed, article is totally wrong. Read any Amazon review for a cheap household product and you'd conclude that people have outrageously high expectations of quality.
The thing is all of these expectations have been casually met with retail goods within living memory. Dude says nobody cares about quality, I'd counter with there are a few generations rattling around that haven't encountered it often enough in life to come to expect it.
It's worse than that, because even for those who are old enough memory can be short and it's hard to viscerally understand that things were different some 10 or 15 years ago. It would be interesting to see a stress-test for a contemporary low end bookshelf from Walmart vs an older one, and to see a "hours of labor required for purchase" breakdown, but I'm pretty sure I know what it would look like.
People are aware that things like planned obsolescence happen, but underestimate how common it is, and are less aware that premium offerings where you pay extra for extra quality are also just a scam. I buy commercial products for everything I can hoping that classic capitalism is still working as intended, because maybe in more B2B transactions which are often high volume, companies are still somewhat afraid of losing a customer while they run their race to the bottom. But the relationship between consumers and corporations has drastically changed to be almost ridiculously adversarial, and increasingly you can't opt out by doing your research, or buying once-trusted brands, or spending extra money.
From coffee-makers to mouse traps, almost everything sucks, even after you give up on Amazon. And since we're here, the old saying "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" also seems hilariously naive and dated. Today you'd start with a marketing department and a few bribes to setup exclusive government and municipal distribution contracts if you were serious, and then make the worst possible trap you could get away with. With 8 billion people and a world-wide market, what kind of idiot would care about customers returning? A startup would invent the perfect thing in a day, then sell it to Big MouseTrap who would squash it, increase ad budgets, and push substandard mouse technology even harder.
While we're all getting used to the treadmill of buy, break, and buy again as if this were just normal, let's take a moment to contemplate the old man yelling at the clouds. It's not always for his benefit only, but sometimes truly an effort to educate the public about something they are missing.
In a lot of contexts, consumers will never be able to trust products/manufacturers again. What can work though is if stores/distributors provide the warranty though, because unlike consumers, they may still have some power.
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/anker/soundcore-sp...
> When storing our unit, we noticed that the yokes didn't allow the ear cups to lay flat on the table. It also seems like pressing them down puts pressure on the yokes, which can mean that this part may get damaged over time if you're constantly folding and unfolding them to store in their carrying case. While our unit hasn't had issues, there are reports (for example, here and here) that the hinges and headband can crack.
You will find countless reports of hinges breaking after a few months of light use about every model that came out in the last 5-10 years, yet nothing has been done to fix it.
That number isn't increasing, it is constantly dropping, which is how we got where we are. Boiled frogs, and Overton Windows, etc.
And once you've kept the quality of something low for about 20 years, you start having people enter the market who have never known the quality to be high.
The perception that the number of dissatisfied people is rising comes from a bunch of people getting old and comparing new stuff to 30 year old stuff, and being loud about it. And when we were young, old people were yelling about the quality of dishes, furniture, books, buildings etc. And we just accepted the crappy stuff because it was all that was available.
We buy the crappy stuff now, too, because the people who make the good stuff mark it up like crazy; the good stuff takes tooling and expertise that is now hard to locate and even recognize if you aren't familiar with it. Good stuff ends up being low competition in small markets of knowledgeable people who probably already own the best stuff that they rarely have to replace, and who are more likely to be brand loyal (although not blindly.) When we have to buy the crappy stuff, we complain about it online.
> Surely there must be a way to run a viable business which is 10-20% more expensive than its competition, but which isn't complete crap and willing to back that up with things like extended warranty?
So I say that there's no reason for those people not to mark it up 100-200%, because they're not going to sell any more than if they only mark it up 10-20%. They're not going to throw money away, at least not forever. Somebody smart is going to get in there and mark it up and/or lower the quality and drain the value of the brand (a brand that they can hedge with smart marketing.)
I think the bottom feeders have driven the cost of garbage down so far that it's no longer a 10-20% price premium to get trustworthy things.
eg grinders. You could (I have a 15+ year old one that has been repaired multiple times as gears have worn out, that withstands 3-6x daily uses) sell a very long-lived coffee grinder (Baratza) for $200. You can buy a piece of crap for $40. Unsurprisingly, that piece of crap is completely unrepairable and doesn't even do a good job of grinding... but it's cheap.
But what can you do about it? It’s not like these things are labeled with a honest assessment of their realistic lifespan. Reviews? That only gives you an early snapshot. That might catch the worst of the trash but it won’t distinguish between a lifespan of 5 years or 50 years. Reputation? Everyone knows how often companies go for short-term thinking and chasing next quarter’s profits. Just because they made stuff to last ten years ago doesn’t mean they don’t make crap today.
So what do you do? Buy the cheapest one and it might be crap? Or spend more and it might still be crap?
And Darn Tough would have a monopoly on socks.
People only care about cost. The #1 irrefutable indicator of this is airline ticket prices: if Airline A charges $117 for a ticket and Airline B charges $110 but will also kick you in the nuts and nickel-and-dime you for everything to the point that it actually costs more in the end than Airline A...
...people will choose Airline B every time.
The vast majority of people will search for a flight, sort by price, and buy the cheapest ticket no matter what.
To prove this, imagine if airline A & B had similar very cheap prices (and the attendant poor service that comes with it), but airline B has slightly (and noticeably) better service than airline A. Most people will choose airline B.
That, what you just wrote, your own words, not my, but your, assertion, literally and explicitly means that people don't care about quality.
>but airline B has slightly (and noticeably) better service than airline A. Most people will choose airline B.
This is demonstrably false and every airline that has tried has either failed or been subsidized by their national government. (Signed, a former Continental Airlines devotee.)
If no one ever cared about airline quality, there would be no first-class or even economy plus class. And yet basically every airline has them.
Yes, airplane travellers are incredibly price conscious--that's the nature of a near-commodity market. But nearly every single flight has a significant fraction of travelers who have paid more for a higher-quality product.
I consider 95% of all people in a population to be the "close enough please shut the fuck up about it and be reasonable for once in your god damned life" threshold where "everybody" becomes an acceptable descriptor.
What percentage of people will ever, in their entire lives, fly first class?
https://robbreport.com/motors/aviation/airlines-increasing-p... Key number "53 premium seats per flight"
https://i0.wp.com/crankyflier.com/wp-content/uploads/image-8...
Start an airline that offers $1 cheaper tickets but they crash once a month, you’ll go out of business before you can say “but FAA regulations make that impossible anyway.”
People care deeply about airline quality on the axis of how good they are at keeping you alive. They don’t care so much about amenities. That’s not “don’t care about quality,” that’s “don’t care about a specific notion of quality that you believe everyone should care about.”