alt Hacker NewsBackpacks got worse on purpose
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That's deplorable. We probably need to dig one or more levels deeper though.
What changed to enable and popularized these bad business practices?
The irony of composing this article about industrial sameness with an LLM is too much.
This is why brand loyalty or even brand recognition is stupid in the 21st century. Everything is made in the same factories anyway, so buying the Amazon item with a brand name like "FOOTHSYMPYZT" or whatever is the way to get exactly what you want. Just set the price point to whatever Amazon recommends and multiply it by 1.5 or 2.
The melodrama of this article really rubs me the wrong way, especially when some of the brands they mention do still make good backpacks (like The North Face). The author acknowledges that with "it's a deliberate segmentation" strategy... which is just another way of saying that they make stuff at all price points.
As the saying goes, being poor is expensive.
It's a fun thread here.
I feel like there's another component: that the consumer base has become so detached from making things in general. We are surrounded in ever more stuff, ever more material, but collectively are out of touch with making things, with material, and assemblage there-of.
Our culture's perspective is as critic, as shopper, as buyer. Sure few of us were expect shoemakers or backpack makers, but people around us were industrious, did provide labor to make goods that people around them bought. The cycle of production had been directly apparent.
This is low key one of the things I really had hope for for a while with 3d printers: that they opened up & exposed what is. That they would be a force to spread insight & to regard the little mechanisms and means of the world all around us. I think that's a little bit true, but it's pretty niche, and I expect most prints are for static parts; no movement or dynamic behavior. And it's somewhat the anti-process: crafter in a box. It's still amazing but barring major changes, I have over indexed.
It's also worth noting the role of DMCA anti-cirumvention laws in casting mankind out of ever coming to grasp with what makes up the world. The combined legal and technological destruction of any right to repair is really not just about repair: it's an obstruction to humans understanding the world around them. We cannot become savvy in the world when the government tells us that business's right to keep us from knowing the world outstrips any mankind-the-toolmaker / natural scientist role/title/god-bourne nature, that cutting us off from the universe & living in ignorance is a hard cast legal binding fact. I find this to be as fallen as it comes. How do we stay alive as the race we were when our laws unwind the fantastic graces of inquiry the gods saw fit to give us?
I still have shoes I bought decades ago. Those brands are now nothing special, after the companies were bought or taken over by private equity.
I think this is more of a case of the product getting worse incidentally. Contrast with leaders who are actually making things worse on purpose. Apparently, for no other reason than to be ugly and mean about it. I've been on this earth long enough to discover that monsters are real.
Windows 11 comes to mind as an example of something actually being made worse on purpose. Making it impossible to associate the original notepad.exe with text files is certainly not linked with business outcomes in any direct way. This seems to be purely about antagonizing the user base as much as possible. The only theory I can arrive at is that there is a secret cortisol harvesting scheme that results in better financial outcomes for Microsoft.
It helps to differentiate these cases. I don't like capitalism taken to the extreme, but the other thing is significantly worse. Intent makes all the difference. Engineered to suck vs sucks because it wasn't engineered are two completely different levels of evil.
This is some damn irritating writing. This writing irritates me more than a broken backpack seam would.
Osprey backpacks have worked well for me.
These are really good backpacks imo https://www.sporthouse.ie/
AI;Didn't Read (AIDR)
I mean. If the cost per use of use is only slightly worse with these cheaper goods, you could just view that as a slight premium for the ability to switch styles every few years. It's also a smaller upfront investment, so taking account inflation it might not really be a big difference even considering that?
Clearly most people choose to buy cheaper stuff and producing higher quality, more expensive things makes you a niche company
> The brand reputation built by decades of quality products is now being used to move cheap products to buyers who trust the logo.
This is private equity in a nutshell, really. This is what every single PE leveraged buyout ultimately ends up doing. Take a beloved brand, or better yet (in this case) a group of related beloved brands, cut costs, and reap the profit margins until the brand dies.
in the old days the brand name was also the company name. now brand names mean nothing.
AI slop, I'm sure the contents are interesting but after a few paragraphs of the LLM "tone" I gave up.
Anecdotally this rings true with me. I have a 15 year old (at least) Samsonite backpack. It has zero signs of wear and has been on many trips, jammed under my feet in economy or on a dirty train floor. It was relatively expensive at the time at about $120.
It was looking a bit sad and dusty so I upgraded to a fancier looking Bellroy that cost twice as much. When it arrived I instantly knew it was going back. It felt cheap, it looked cheap, and the compartment layout did not feel at all utilitarian.
> From a shareholder's perspective, the bag that falls apart is the better product.
As long as we collectively decide to keep living in a society dictated by shareholders, this shit will just keep getting worse and worse and worse...
Wait until you hear about glasses!
The issue here isn’t quality or market segmentation. The issue here is a de facto monopoly and the illusion of competition. Ok there’s also the issue of well known brand names now being entirely different companies and entirely different manufacturers.
I just bought an Eddie Bauer fleece. I own three, well four. The fourth is going straight back. It is garbage. Eddie Bauer is one of the brands that got bought and now rents out the label.
Is there any way I can see all of the mergers and conglomerations of large companies?
Blue Bell ice cream and Jan-sport backpacks owned by the same company seems crazy to me.
Friendly reminder that antitrust enforcement and deregulation are incompatible
its the normal cycle of sports gear
> The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.
I can't speak for everyone else but this isn't what I'm doing when I compare two backpacks. I'm comparing two different backpacks for their features and design. I don't really consider the brand name attached or care who owns it.
I hate this so much.
> This is the pattern. Acquisition. Cost optimization. Quality decline. Warranty narrowing. Brand equity extraction. And eventually, divestiture.
PE at work.
Just because I don't want them to go out of business. I bought a backpack goruck gr1 26l nearly 10 years ago in Feb of 2017.
I was a consulting and traveling heavily for many years and a digital nomad for others. I've carried that bag everywhere, it is good as new, I can hold a week of clothes in it, I recently got a vacuum pouch for winter thermals so that applies even for ski trips now. Its design lets me fill it up, zip it almost totally shut then compress it down to fit toiletries at the very top.
As much abuse as I've put it through it is still perfect. If moths or something don't get to it it may actually outlive me at this point I see so little wear.
Frankly I wish I could offer companies that make stuff that lasts forever a subscription fee or something to keep them using the same build quality, I mean cheap fast fashion/manf/etc seems to exert massive economic pressure to enshittify everything.
The enshittification of all things. It’s happening in the service industry, too. A lot of contractors like roofing and plumbing are being absorbed into private equity megacorps.
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Its EVERYTHING that has gotten worse, on purpose.
Capitalism ends up being owned by single companies across goods families. Private equity buys, strips, and bankrupts. Materials are engineered to fail near the end of their warranty. Companies lie about details hard to identify or prove. Companies use historical goodwill to loot the current landscape.
Take for example, a citrus squeezer. We needed what I thought was a decent juicer. https://us.josephjoseph.com/products/helix-citrus-juicer-yel...
Well, guess what... since its all just plastic, the 2 posts that provide the downward force when turning get sheared off when you fucking use the thing.
We ended up going to an antique/flea market and found a all-metal juicer. It fucking works. And it likely will for the next 50 years.
Capitalism itself is the scam. It was sold to us of "innovation, innovation, innovation!" And its just "worsening, extraction, destruction".
I am okay with these big American corporations getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded, only to exist as a brand in a private-equity backed holding company.
This is because other companies come along to fill the niche occupied by the established brands. Since they can't cheapen the products any more than the behemoths can, they need to innovate and evolve.
As for the backpack product, I wish the likes of Eastpak and whatnot would just die, since they have not innovated in a very long time.
Private equity, and computers, optimized all the profits which drove profit quality down. We all have lower quality products to enrich a few finance individuals
This feels like the Arcteryx Hoodie situation. I've had a couple of them for going close to 5 or 8 years. I mistreat them - throwing them around, washing them normally in a machine, etc. Absolutely bullet proof with very mild pilling. When I went to buy the exact same thing, the newer models cost the same thing or more, but the reviews all complained that the product has changed, that it pills after a few months, etc.
The same thing happened to me with t shirt and other clothing brands.
Now if I buy something good, I'm rebuying multiple of it even if it's unneeded since apparently we live under the Law of Enshittification of Everything.