alt Hacker NewsI see "quality brands" as a potential way to avoid knowing yourself stuff about what you buy. In itself, outsourcing one's expertise about a product might be the root cause of the detrimental effects you mention.
As an example: I was once shopping with someone that had experience in fashion. While I don't remember all the details, with one look/touch the person could tell and explain if something was poor or high quality, while to me it all looked mostly the same. Based on that experience, I now I mostly stick to checking the material, and avoid plastics which seem to show a tendency for low quality across the board.
I do agree that it requires effort to know stuff about things, but when I see people that go like "oh, I need X, will pick the first X that shows up on Amazon", I am less amazed we get crappy quality for lots of products.
Replies
I've heard the ratings on Amazon can make or break you, so I think most people are at least trying to get quality by taking the ratings into account.
clothing is a particularly nasty one. "brand" is sometimes inversely proportional to quality within clothing. Price and quality is just completely random.
Checking stitch length, stitch type, fabric feel, fabric composition, any known supplier information about cotton staple and origin of production, construction complexity.
It's alot of work to keep on top of.
I read an article once about how levi slightly vary the fabric and button quality between cities and countries under the same name (and quality binning); optimising cost to consumer tolerance. And Levi is a brand marketing themselves for quality and legacy pride.