alt Hacker NewsIt's much more likely to be a result of the modern drive for companies to keep growing. This leads to a need to maximize profit endlessly, which in turn leads to cutting corners as much as you think you can get away with, or just ballooning prices. And this problem goes up and down the supply chain, of course - even if you want to run a non-growth business manufacturing quality backpacks, if your suppliers want to run growth businesses, they will eat up your margins and force your hand.
This obsession with ever increasing revenue is a major source of our worse and worse consumer economy.
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The onslaught of far east imports is also a factor. They weren't very relevant 30 years ago outside of discount merchants. Now you pop on to Amazon and choose something that looks appealing from dozens of mystery meat brands.
That's not going to change though. Cheap asian manufacturing and wall st efficiency maximizing changed industry in America. Maybe there could be changes to how public markets are regulated to change BigCo incentives, but it will be hard to change consumer behaviour if they like buying cheap disposable crap for the lowest price.
There is still plenty of competition in the backpack market if you just visit an outdoors store instead of walmart. That's a higher end market though, which is where most high quality small/medium businesses flourish.
Is this just the same kind of optimization? Consumers trying to optimize their margin while producers are trying to optimize theirs?
It leads to enshitification due to short term thinking but in the short term seems like a good decision.
One silver lining is that backpack industry doesn't have a huge moat. New companies can get started relatively easily as the older ones sell out and decay.
The bags I bought 15 years ago were made locally in San Francisco - Timbuk2 and Chrome - and had a reputation for quality. Now both brands are mainly produced overseas, but have been replaced by two other local brands with ties to the originals - Rickshaw and Mission Workshop.