alt Hacker NewsLet's make quality the norm again
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While it does relate to price discovery--i.e., some folks just aren't willing to pay for an additional unit of quality at 10x--my theory is that the decline in quality is another hidden form of inflation. Thing continues to cost X even though regulations have increased costs Y, ship production to China and scrimp on the inputs. (Or have market forces do that for you.)
Quality was never the norm: cheap always beat quality with a hand tied behind his back!
Western working class has spent decades complaining about cheap imports from China... while feeding that market with their own money.
Western frequent fliers keep reminiscing about the grandiose pre-deregulation era or air travel, but cry a river when their low-cost carrier of choice actually enforces the limit on cabin baggage.
Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
I personally see two effects that are very detrimental here:
1) "Quality brands", where you pay a premium to get high quality/durability products, are economically incentivized to "sell-out" (cash in the brand name by producing as cheaply as possible). This is because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important than anything else.
2) Increasing trend towards no-name products (or ephemeral brands). This means that producers can sell cheap trash with no drawback whatsoever; slightly more expensive quality products become unmarketable because every customer will assume you're just trying to sell them the same cheapest shit for more.
I used to think that brand products were a universal money waste for suckers, but now I think they can be a very valuable mechanism.
What would really help in my view though is to force companies to stick with their brand, to incentivize them to invest into it and to make "cashing out" on good brands a universally bad decision.
Easy solution if you like tariffs: all imported items over $100 must have a 10 year full warranty.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...
One big problem is that prices are easy to compare, while quality is not.
I recently bought a tub that was advertised as stainless steel on Amazon. I was suspicious but decided to take a chance. Turns out it is galvanized, not stainless. I’m not sure the average person knows the difference. To be charitable, perhaps that’s even why the listing advertised it that way. But the difference matters significantly in terms of performance and quality, especially for certain kinds of products and use cases.
There’s no “sort by quality, best to worst” system like there is for price. No “genuine stainless only” filter. You just have to know certain things.
Shopping in person obviously helps, but you still have to know what to look for. Refrigerators are a good example of this. Most people shop for them in person, yet it’s not at all obvious whether model A or model B will last longer. You can try to use price as a proxy for quality, but the more expensive refrigerators are actually more likely to fail years earlier because of the added component complexity. They’re basically banking on the fact that you don’t know how to read a wiring diagram.
To combat that, lots of people turn to YouTube or reviews to figure out quality. And sure, you can find some good sources that will tell you that top freezers will last longer than a French door model at basically any price, and they might even explain why. But all of those platforms are muddied with perverse incentives, affiliate programs, sponsorships, etc. Again, not always obvious.
We need to make quality obvious. We need to make it comparable, sortable, filtrable, and guaranteed. Poor design needs to be a valid reason to return an item. Manufacturers should be required to label products with an estimated lifespan. Give tax breaks or other incentives to products that include a warranty for its full lifespan.
We have to figure out how to improve the efficiency of making high quality goods, so that everything doesn’t just get more expensive. There should be a public database of the best known designs and techniques for making long lasting items. Patents that relate to longevity could be given extra time to encourage research, but then after, say, 3 years there could be a requirement to license the technology so that it can go mainstream.
This doesn’t solve everything. Some products need more specific approaches. Food quality is a problem. Housing needs to be both more affordable and higher quality. But I think with enough changes to incentives, the culture could shift towards seeing the value in making things well.
This is a false pretense. Quality was never the norm.
What is no longer the norm is getting first-hand experience with a product before you buy it. Everything comes in the mail and it's a surprise to the consumer after they buy it. That's nuts!
I agree with this. It's curious that we always talk about "things used to last forever and weren't only made by corporations chasing infinite growth", when those things are often still available, but are almost invisible because we now discover everything through social media or SEO.
You can find great-quality, long-lasting products at great prices (great price doesn't equal cheap, but great for what you get).
I use capable LLMs on high reasoning to run a prompt like this:
"I want to buy a high-quality [category] that will/has/can [requirements here]. I do not want to pay for a brand name that doesn't improve.
Start by finding manufacturing clusters in [region of the world, e.g. Europe] where [category] is made, then find the businesses making [category] in that cluster that I can buy from.
Normal online stores are okay, but also try non-obvious avenues:
-local business registers -stores that may only be available in the local language -factories that sell samples directly" -cooperatives that sell products from multiple local manufacturers
(I modify this prompt, but it's the skeleton)
To verify a given product/brand/store, a great follow-up prompt has been:
"Now find me big brands offering a product of similar quality (ideally measured by objective characteristics) and show me how much it is vs. [store name here]"
This has showed me incredible finds. It's become how I buy most things that go beyond basic trinkets, and I often pay less for far higher quality.
Easy: Items must work without internet connection so they cannot be updated online.
The answer is competition. Quality declines when companies no longer have to meaningful compete in the marketplace. The only other solution is regulation and force quality through punishment for noncompliance. Competition works better.
There are economic impacts to raising quality:
1. Higher quality requires better trained technicians. That means fewer people will be able to participate due to any of missing experience, costs of training/education, and opportunity costs.
2. Higher quality generally requires third party certification, such as the CE or FCC identifiers on electronic equipment. Certification costs time and money resulting in a form exclusivity.
3. Higher quality means goods/services with increased durability, which requires fewer updates or repurchases. That is great, for the producer, if everything comes with a warranty but is bad if patching is an extra expense.
Now consider what that means for software, a fully unregulated industry. It means some form of credentials for developers instead of frameworks or tech stacks. It means paying money to third parties to validate every patch release. It also means applying a warranty to all commercially licensed software. These things would raise the price of software and eliminate most people currently employed.
Meditations on Moloch[0] explains why this is impossible at scale--too many defectors, asymmetric information, and no way to police defection.
[0] https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
…are you willing to pay for it though? If yes, is there enough of you? If yes, is there a way to tell low quality from high?
Consumers, fundamentally, care about two things:
* Price
* Features
Those are tangible, obvious things. They are not subtle. They do not take months or years to discover or become obvious. They are (mostly) not vague or ambiguous. Does this car have lane assist? Yes or no. Will this car last me 20 years? ...maybe? That's a very hard question to answer. It's messy and complicated and has a lot of clauses to it.
So, consumers buy whatever is the cheapest available with the features they want, or the most feature-rich they can with their budget.
This demand forces manufacturers to respond. They find a way to cram more functionality in, at a cheaper price. If they don't, they will simply get eaten up by those who do, overseas or otherwise.
You can say you want quality and reliability all you want - it changes nothing. At the end of the day, the vast majority keep voting with their wallet - and they want CHEAP.
I think what people associate with "quality" is vastly different from each other.
For example I believe there is a deeper quality that cannot be easily found in a more quality product. Quality can be expressed in many ways and felt throughout the life. But people don't care for that.
They mostly care for cheap and good enough. I don't want to attack that way of life its simply one with tradeoffs like a life with more quality.
More quality can mean more expensive, the need to engage with something a bit more, etc.
Leibl famously needed over 3 months to just draw the hands of one model for "Three Women in Church" it certainly has some quality to it.
In the modern world seldom you will find one that wants to pay for such work or even spending 3 months of work on painting hands.
Quality already is the norm for many products. For example, I own Sennheiser headphones, an iPhone and a MacBook. (Sure maybe not the absolute top of the line, but definitely more expensive than commodity products.)
I find great utility in cheap low cost products for things that I don’t know I’ll use more than once. For example, I’m glad I bought the cheapest roller blades a few years ago because I used them twice. I also buy a lot of cheap toys for my kids, they may use them only a few times and also quantity really has a certain quality (novelty is good for kids).
I find the moralizing and lecturing around quality to be distasteful. These holier than thou types really think they know better than the buyer.
Enshittification is definitely real, but let's not look at the past with rose-colored glasses. A lot of things you can buy today are vastly superior to things available 50 years ago.
It used to be remarkable to drive a car 100k miles without major repairs. Volvo dealerships in the 80's and 90's would give you a badge at 100k milestones to advertise how reliable their cars were compared to others.
Anything tech related is just light years ahead of what it used to be, and for far cheaper. 65"+ OLED TVs for less than a couple grand are pretty much science fiction come to life. Gaming consoles are super-computers compared to an NES.
For many appliances, if you pay an inflation-adjusted cost for what a 1980's family would pay you can get something that will last forever. Last year I bought a commercial microwave for about $300 that has a single dial, hardly any features, and likely will last longer than the first microwave my family owned and also paid ~$300 for. Adjusting for inflation my new microwave is vastly better and cheaper than my childhood one.
I play guitar - in 1954 a new Stratocaster sold for $249, which is about $3k in today's dollars. And $249 today will get you a guitar that's easily as good as most 1954 Strats. If you spend the inflation-adjusted equivalent you're in ultra-luxury territory.
Want good furniture? That's ALWAYS been expensive, but you'd typically buy a table for the equivalent of $5k in today's dollars and expect it to last a lifetime. You can spend $5k on real wood furniture today, but nobody does.
Housing materials are much better and cheaper with the possible exception of copper pipes and anything made of real wood. Certainly builders of McMansions are cutting corners at every opportunity, but if you do your own building/finishing these days a lot of materials are available that will outlast their 1980's equivalent, and the cheap options are better.
I think a lot of this is a lack of perspective - everyone wants better things but nobody actually wants to pay for it.
Was quality ever the norm? IIRC Enshittification predates AI/LLMS by a few years.
Careful, this is going to hurt a lot of feelings.
There's few things where the drop in quality is astronomical, one of them being clothing.
Clothes used to last a life time till few decades ago.
Right now you buy stuff that after the first wash already looks worn out, terrible or starts falling apart.
Major known brands are guilty of this too, often regardless of price.
So people end up with closets filled of junk that they look terrible in anyway.
I wish there was a line of brands and even better shops that focused on quality fabrics and sewing processes for clothing that lasts for ages as it used to.
I think about this a lot because I try to never buy anything Chinese or low quality unless I have to.
Unfortunately, from my experience artisans aren't willing to do the work anymore, even if you pay them premium. For instance, a carpenter here in Poland that decided to be a carpenter would rather cut up pre-made cabinets to your specs than make them from scratch using wood, even if I pay them 10x.
Then, people aren't willing to pay premium for stuff. For some reason, they would rather buy 20 products that last year than 1 product that can last 20 or more.
It's a problem for me because I value quality and would be willing to pay premium, but I just can't ever find anything.
Tech workers in the US are probably around 90-99 percentile wage. Take something where the quality is well known and measurable, and can be purchased for extra money. How often do you fly first class, or even pay 10-20% extra to have more legroom, early boarding or a more convenient flight times versus picking the cheapest option that you can make work?
People will demonstrably shop primarily on price no matter what... The producers respond to that.
The main problem is that most business are run by people who have no believe at all that you could run a successful company without tricking people into buying your product. That means they don't even try. The rare exception are companies where rhe founder is e.g. a principled engineer, or some German family business that does nothing but ball bearings in the 4th generation and their business model is basically to be the best at ball bearings. Something like that.
But so many publicly traded companies appear to basically have become stock gambling dens that accidentally produce some products on the side out of legacy reasons.
Many are of the kind that use quality only as a marketing statement and when it comes to the engineering choice they will not even shell out 10 cents more for stainless screws to hold the thing together.
The reasons why there is little quality products is because the incentives all point in the other direction for most companies. And where they don't it is usually a special niche product or the intrinsic values of one or a few individuals making the choice to put their ideals above their wallet.
If we want this to change we have to change the incentive structure.
There's an interesting paper about expectations of quality:
The LL game: the curious preference for low quality and its norms
https://diegogambetta.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/the_ll_...
Ikea compressed wood dresser = $125. Proper oak dresser = $5000 . What consumer is capable and willing to make that trade off.
Much of that cost is because we nuked the American timber industry ?
Appealing to the fabricators (or even consumers) who are 4-8 degrees downstream of this policy will get you nowhere.
With sufficient competition, the incentives of companies would change if consumers would be willing to rent instead of owning products. Then planned obsolescence is not to their benefit.
It would be nice if quality became a standard, but the problem is that the world has become too complex. On top of that, I think the disappearance of friction is a big part of it.
In the past, if a garment factory was located in a certain country and the quality was poor, it was often directly tied to that country's reputation. But as the world began to lose friction and entered the era of globalization, much of the work was passed down to subcontractors, and the big problem is that consumer complaints don't get passed down to the subcontractors either.
And within this structure, multiple subcontractors can't survive; as subcontractors grow, they begin to centralize into one. In such a structure, it's not that the original contractor controls the brand quality of the subcontractor. Rather, the subcontractor that has grown huge begins to control the quality ceiling of the entire market.
On top of that, for a company to sustain continuous growth, a given product must not last too long, right? Because a product that can be used for 20 or 30 years means people won't have to buy that product line again.
The way I see it we all have 30-60 modern slaves working for each one of us. More or less depending on the country and personal consumption.
So I don’t have such determination in complaining about the quality of the goods that I participated in exploited labour of.
It’s all working somehow more or less. Seems like it could stop any moment. The continuous decrease in quality is rather the least of my worries.
What worries me is the fragile state of global affairs and heavy fog of war obscuring the future.
I am AI accelerationist after all not because I believe in utopias but because of how dire the situation is. AGI/ASI might buy us couple of decades or more. The risk/reward calculation heavily favours pedal to the metal.
So no, T-shirt quality is not my primary concern.
Its funny to watch a bunch of Americans who have the worst possible tastes, standards and expectations commenting negatively on a Norwegian Org's article about why we need higher standards.
Guy's its possible not to live in a world of slop, you know that right? You don't have to turn the world into a glorified Walmart.
[dead]
Thank god for the little norwegians living in their utopian bubble
In certain personal projects, I have the opposite philosophy where I don't want quality. I got addicted to designing models and 3D-printing them a year ago. Over time, I learned to reduce the amount of safety factor and make items just strong enough for their application - which saves material and printing time. I wouldn't skimp on something like a carrying handle for the printer, where failure would mean damaging the printer. But I would reduce the amount of plastic used in things like art pieces (3DBenchy - who needs structural strength?), end caps for various objects, prototypes for dimensioning. Moreover, sometimes I'm happy to see my parts break because I was thinking of redesigning it or did so already, hence I would be itching to print the new version. Aside from that, just knowing I can reprint a part anytime (without modifications) makes me much less worried about breaking or losing a part.