alt Hacker NewsConsumers, 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.
> Consumers, fundamentally, care about two things: * Price * Features
Consumers also care about accessibility. It doesn't matter to me if product X is amazing and affordable if I can't find it in any store anywhere near me or if amazon never shows it in search results because all they want to push is amazon basics and products made by FSLHVHSLR
If no company anywhere sells what I want, then I have no choice but to compromise and today there is a whole lot of compromising going on. Companies are more interested in selling what is most profitable to them, not what consumers actually want. Very often consumers are forced to buy what little is offered to them. The consumer "voting with their wallet" will always lose when companies also vote with theirs because theirs is much much bigger.