alt Hacker News> Quality brands are economically incentivized to sell-out [...] because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important
That probably happens a lot, but there's another mechanism by which it could happen, that requires no malice: the brand gets a quality reputation, which increases demand for its products, and they are unable to produce quality products at the rate needed to satisfy that demand. Then it's easy to reason that it'd be a net benefit for everyone to loosen the quality requirements a tiny bit, in order to satisfy the demand of more customers. People used to the quality will barely notice any difference, and then twice as many people can get that experience.
That works once, but when applied again, and again, and again, and again it becomes a problem, even with zero ill intent.
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Once they reach the limit of demand, then there's nothing more to be made in that price category, so they get more by selling out and lowering quality and price.
We're going through massive global depopulation in the entire industrialized world. There are no new customers coming and sales will naturally trend down because of human extermination. Once everybody has an electric shaver, then you know that the next generation of customers is half the size or less. Unless you can make people grow their beards and hair faster, then there isn't going to be any demand among people who can afford a quality product. You have to start targeting the very poor, and thus lower production costs.
That sounds implausible. For a premium brand the marginal unit should be comfortably profitable, so they will have the resources to saturate the market at exponential speed purely from their unit economics. The somewhat theatrical lines outside the store aside, Apple has never had a strategic problem meeting the demand for Apple computers.
It seems a lot more likely that you get executives who come in and believe that narratives beat reality, there are a lot of people like that in the world. They are the sort who will abandon the reality of quality because that costs money then get confused when the narrative catches up. Or you get an idiot who is data-driven and detects that there is no immediate change in sales when they compromise on quality so they conclude that quality isn't valued by consumers. No malice, just a lack of strategic thinking.