> Perhaps it's gotten harder to determine by eye, but Google will still point you towards trustworthy brands in 2 minutes.

One of the main points of the article is you cannot rely on the brand to determine quality. The marketers know how to exploit a reputation for quality and information asymmetries to push crappy goods, for instance:

> Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to.

And this:

> People who do get warranty replacements report receiving bags that are worse than the one they sent in. Thinner fabric. Cheaper hardware. You mailed back a 2016 JanSport and got a 2025 JanSport, and those are fundamentally different products.

When you Google, are you reading a rave review of a 2016 bag, when the 2026 model has been crapified? Is the bag you're looking at on Amazon the Walmart JanSport or the REI JanSport?