I read years ago about a drill which was sold at Walmart with the same sku as in higher-end stores but the Walmart version had plastic gears. This was due to pricing pressure by Walmart on the manufacturer.
Me, personally, I seek out first Swiss brands then German brands when buying most things. I'm willing to pay extra.
In fact I'm a little pissed off this week because I ordered some oxygen absorbers off a Swiss website that listed a Swiss address but they were shipped directly from china. Investigating the site more closely, yeah, it's just a fake website made to look Swiss.
I did a little research study back in 2003 where I went to various grocers and purchased the same product at these grocers and compared.
Walmart has larger boxes, and less contents, universally, for pretty much everything in a box, and they charge 1/3 more for their 2/3rds of what you get everywhere else. They make nearly 50% more profit from that little slight of hand. And try discussing this with any shoppers and they will say "but the box is bigger", <- actual statement from a CS PhD, demonstrating how it does not matter your education, once outside of that specialization you're an idiot.
I'll admit that I tend to implicitly trust that the larger boxes on the shelves contain more. I haven't checked the price-per-unit in a bit. Granted, my closest grocery is not a WalMart and I'm typically purchasing mass-produced sundries. Basically, the "Family Size" of Cheez-its is the same at any store.
One thing I have noticed is that 5lb bags of flour/sugar haven't been standard in a hot minute.
FWIW in Switzerland (and surely other places too) you have on the price tag also the price per 100g (or ml or whatever) so you can quickly compare without bothering much with basic maths. Same for online shopping.
And a ridiculously high percentage of the time markdown prices on the shelves at Walmart are not reflected at checkout. Happened to me just this weekend. Walmart, one of the largest companies in the USA, whose job is to sell items, can't do the basics of keeping pricing/signage in sync? BS.
There are Chinese machine manufacturers who use fake German brand names because for a long time Germany was selling the manufacturing machinery to China and they have a good national brand image.
Sometimes. My Bosch washing machine died young due to cheap bearings. The AEG dryer had soldering problems and the German dishwasher's time light projector died slowly.
I'm pretty sure that this sort of thing happens for stuff in big box home improvement stores like Home Depot and Lowe's, too. Things like plumbing fixtures that appear to be identical to counterparts in smaller stores will have off-by-one or suffixed product numbers, and are made with cheaper plastic internal parts than when purchased elsewhere.
Yes, I've heard of this effect in marketing. If you make any reference to Switzerland, it's instant sales bump, even if you hold everything else equal. This is also how you got "Häagen-Dazs" ice cream brand. It's fully American, but the name sounds vaguely Scandinavian, so it has to be better, right? Well, customers sure do think so, and are willing to pay the premium.
Not challenging your marketing presumption; I've noticed, and seen pointed out, the same thing.
As a side note, years ago Häagen-Dazs was better (high milk-fat, etc) than the other widely-available brands. It's now owned by Nestlé, so I don't buy it anymore. How much has it been enshittified?
One massive unmentioned counterexample: High quality Chinese tools continue to proliferate and sucker-punch these brands for being so egregious with quality. They are now the high quality standard if you know what brands to look for, and not because their competition got worse as mentioned here, they are simply iterating and improving and making better tools and designs than they did 10 years ago. Sometimes you are getting the exact same tool as the name-brand but with less warranty for a fraction of the price. "Corporate Greed" is self-correcting in a free and fair market! Vote with your wallet.
>Knipex is family-owned out of Germany. They make what many consider the best pliers on the planet. Part of a larger group (Knipex Group) but not publicly traded, not for sale.
I recently bought one of the Yukon tool chest / benches and the experience totally flipped my opinion of HF. I've been a customer for a while, but always considered them lower-quality in the back of my mind. The tool chest came in perfect condition, easy purchase. Whereas the Huskies I had bought previously were a hassle that involved returning multiple damaged-in-box units back to the store, driving an hour to another store with stock, dodgily swapping parts (drawer slides and top) to make a good one, etc.
It's of course never just one thing - I had been waiting for the Husky to show up in stock again (it has a 24 inch depth vs 18), but at this point it seems like HD has discontinued the 24 in favor of enshittifying with 18 inches instead. And of course I've been shying away from HD recently because of the F-word. It's like these companies want to self-immolate (or put more technically, they create short term boosts by arbitraging away their reputation).
In my experience in recent years, Oppo and Vivo phones look better, they are more robust and last longer than iPhones and Samsung premium phones.
When giants like Apple and Samsung fail to innovate enough (and when they price their best products beyond the reach of the middle class of most nations), then upstarts will take their throne.
This may be good for industry so there's healthy competition, but it is unfortunate because China's CCP has a policy that Chinese companies must store and share customer and company data in China. So anyone using Chinese electronic gadgets is saying goodbye to their data security and privacy, even if it is an expensive gadget by a bigshot Chinese company (e.g., Lenovo was caught bundling adware on its premium laptops some years ago - search for "Lenovo Superfish" to know more).
This entire site can be boiled down to: products get decrease in quality when customers don't know or don't care what quality is.
Price is a clear and obvious thing to measure, quality is much more difficult. Consumers get little or no formal education in quality, and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly. Any review site that is paid for by ads or affiliate links has the default position of trying to get you to buy something.
That might be an outdated accusation. There was a time when a touch of research or “caring about quality” was enough to avoid the pitfalls of garbage products, but I don’t believe that to be a fair statement anymore. The website details the history of some examples, but the implication is between the lines: the only reason you used to know a product would last 20 years is because that specific product with those specific parts has already lasted 20 years. Don’t take advice about living to 100 from a 32 year old, don’t trust a warranty that’s longer than the company selling it has existed, and don’t trust that model XB5 is the same as your grandmas XB1.
How can you possibly know if you’re getting a quality product when the reviews you’re reading are for a model that doesn’t exist anymore, or are meaningless generalizations about a mega conglomerate? Saying “Brand X sucks/wins” only has the potential to be meaningful when it’s a single company in a single area and that has made that exact model in the same way for longer than your warranty on it. “Whirlpool sucks/wins” is as meaningless as reading “Water tastes good/bad” from everyone on the planet.
Why do I no longer have any reliable signals for quality? Price, brand, materials, and word of mouth are all you really get, but price and materials are meaningless and brand and word of mouth stop mattering as a company starts to coast on its reputation for higher margin. Genuinely don't know how customers are supposed to choose quality when they want it. I always want it.
Agree, but there’s also an element of consumer irrationality. Lower price + lower quality means you can buy more of what you want now, even if it means that you’ll end up with net less of what you want in the long term.
Most consumers, me included, are not making purely rational decisions based in price and quality, even in domains where they are qualified to judge quality.
True. Maybe the hidden part of the equation is "effort". Modern marketing strategy is to "flood the zone" with misleading information and half-truths so as to make the very act of making a rational selection exhausting.
It's the third or fourth time I see it on HN, I have not read anything other than the first two, which were more of complaints about tiered products. E.g. one was about backpacks and how a $40 backpack from Walmart is not going to last 20 years of summiting Mt. Everest like the $400 backpack of the same brand sold elsewhere...
> and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly
The thing that annoys me the most is when the reviewer opens the box, shakes it gently and says "feels well built" or "plastic build". It is actually harmful. Weight doesn't equal quality (there is some correlation, building well often results in more weight, but it is unreliable and easy to game) and plastic is a huge range of materials and some are absolutely the most robust option for many use cases (think a sturdy plastic water bottle that outlasts and glass or metal equivalent).
The problem is quality is very hard to measure. The only really good test is to use the product for many years. But by that time the existing model hasn't been sold for years, in theory you could correlate the new model's quality with the old one but brands are apparently disposable these days so it is very likely that all costs were cut on the new one once their previous model gained a reputation for quality.
I think the only real measure for quality is a warranty. That is the manufacturer promising a lifespan. However they are usually short, can be unreliable to get (often at manufacturer discretion) and more often than not cover only "manufacturing defects" not reasonable wear and tear.
> The only really good test is to use the product for many years
Agree. However, a good reviewer should be able to transfer knowledge from many years of use about a similar product to a new product and give an insightful evaluation. This type of reviewer is exceedingly rare.
I think a very knowledgeable reviewer can make a decent guess. But to really know you would need to tear it apart and analyze all of the materials used (maybe the metal or plastic has been swapped to a slightly different material which is very hard to identify by just looking or touching). You need a team of engineers. Probably the best you can hope for is noticing a part is changed and make an educated guess why it was changed.
A company makes a really good product as first challenging incumbents. They get so big, they eventually become the incumbent. All this time, they’re probably losing money on the product or breaking even. Eventually, investors will want returns on their investment. This will first happen with prices increases to save the quality of the product. Once they can’t raise prices anymore, the quality will be decreased. By this point, the brand is strong enough to get sales even on this worse product.
Then another company will come in and make the same product but better than the incumbent. The cycle continues.
My point is find these new companies that are trying to get market share by making a higher quality product. And if you really like that product, buy 2.
Chasing eternal profit growth isn’t a fact of life, notwithstanding the mythology of commodification. Neither are all investors motivated purely by profit. Neither is it clear that everything can be improved upon (much less that outsiders can improve on it better than the incumbent). Sometimes “do a thing, do it with excellence, make a modest living from it” is enough.
One thing I like about Mr. Sapp’s work at Worse On Purpose here—he (or perhaps his LLM, or perhaps he’s LLM) gives considerable attention to firms that don’t do it that way. Where:
> Quality, ownership, and stewardship all check out. […] Most of these are family-owned, trust-owned, employee-owned, or publicly traded with a long track record of not selling out.
It’s useful to have actionable alternatives, and I put more stock in his organizing thesis given how well its brand preferences line up with my own.
Once a product becomes so big it cannot increase in market share the only way to increase the total amount of profit it generates it by reducing the cost to produce the product or increasing the price.
It’s a more acute observation about market dynamics than what is usually found in Marx. Marx heavily discusses how humanity interacts with capitalism, and focuses its market analysis on the labor market.
“corporate greed” is a signal to me of low quality commentary. The opening premise of Econ is that consumers want all the goods for free and producers want to give nothing in exchange for as much money as they can.
The problem here is that when the consumers try it they go to actual jail. Meanwhile the producers have been richly rewarded for getting away with their side of it.
So yeah, corporate greed actually has a meaning in this context for people.
It makes sense to ask WHY this is hard. People can disagree endlessly on why.
But a big part is, that antitrust/monopoly legislation has been almost completely dismantled and detoothed within the last 35 years, starting back with Reagan,
and accelerating through the 90's when Clinton was at the wheel.
The tiny bit that is still left, is only enforced either when parties fail to pay the bribe, or are bribed to enforce it, by other actors.
Once you allow markets to consolidate into a single monolith, any new competitors will only be allowed to live, until they become big enough for the established incumbent to notice and then squish, with their unlimited access to resources.
There is little incentive to start a competing business, if you know the trajectory is "IF SUCCESS THEN SQUISH".
You may be poorly educated as to how antitrust is supposed to work.
Breaking up monopolies that already exist is only one of its purposes and tools. It is also there to prevent mergers that will be detrimental to the public.
Past a certain (very low) scale threshold, this should be assumed to be "almost all of them". Rather than the government having to prove that a merger would be detrimental, the companies wanting to merge should be required to prove that the merger would be beneficial to the public in long-term ways that do not require specific (and easily breakable) "commitments" on their part to do things like keep prices low.
I think it's just human nature, people that are ruthless with buisness are more likely to stay afloat compared to the moral alternative that always on the edge of collapsing
And this is why the destruction of antitrust in the US in the latter part of the 20th century has screwed us all. The massive wave of consolidation that followed that (ongoing to this day) makes the barrier to entry for every market much, much higher. The very fact that the most common desired endgame for a startup is "exit"—ie, being bought out by a larger company—should demonstrate this very well.
If we want quality, customer service, decent prices, or anything like them to come back, we need to restore real antitrust, not the morally-and-intellectually-bankrupt Chicago School bullshit that's been pushed on us for decades, benefiting only the already-wealthy.
The legal and regulatory obstacles to starting a business probably don't help but IMO the bigger issue is trying to break into markets that are dominated by massive global players who benefit from economies of scale and access to funding that newer companies don't have.
The other side of this is that consumers don't have the information required to properly differentiate between competitors. If I'm shopping for a new TV I have no idea where or how it is made which is why so many people default to brand names as very rough proxies for quality. That information asymmetry is exactly what websites like this are trying to combat, but it's clearly an uphill struggle.
I'm not only talking about legal and regulatory issues, indeed.
I think one of the big ones is rent. Suuuure you can just take some months to invent a product, but if you start with a $3000 loss per month, that's a high bar to clear.
Another one is lack of pressure. The person who invented the TV was surely thinking about how much money he would make or how much he would change society. But now there are so many TVs for under $500, what would I really add by making a new one that wouldn't have been optimized and battle-hardened and would be otherwise identical to all the others? (From the reverse side too, why would I buy a $1000 TV identical to a $500 one? Market for lemons. Fairphone's in this position.)
This is a question of access to capital. Since we're all on the VC site we should understand how that works; for things like that it's very important to get "angel" investors who are comfortable putting in less-than-six-figures to get a product to the stage where it is proven for bigger investors.
I'm glad that everyone's quoting Market for Lemons now, but it doesn't quite apply to Fairphone. Fairphone aren't trying to cheat you, there's no information asymmetry here; they're just providing a feature ("fairness") which you can't easily get elsewhere and that turns out to be really expensive.
At the other end of the "market entry" problem: this is why RAM is so expensive right now, you can't just spin up a new DRAM line in your garage even if you're Sam Zeeloof.
Why would a capitalist fund something that will obviously not make money, like a random Finnish dude's operating system, when there's already Microsoft Windows?
Looks like that’s one factor. A number of brands I expected to be marked as Avoid based on who owns them were indeed marked as such. Pleased to see a few of my chosen brands were marked as good. Shame that basically no sun glasses company is good.
Incredibly depressing, but a good and important thing to read!
Not to sound overly cheerful, but shout out to my Makita DHP484 combo drill/driver and 100 piece bit set that, for a low three figure price, is far more powerful and capable than the noisy old corded monster it replaces.
What if there was a way to tax things that encouraged people to buy things that would last longer and then let the market correct?
Basically, we've done our experiment of hyper-disposable consumerism. It was great and the world has gotten richer. But not it seems like we should parlay that benefit into transitioning into a new era of quality.
I remember the emphasis on quality - and on safety and security - in the 1990s. A substantial part of company life revolved around Quality Circles, quality meetings, quality inspectors, and the 5S methodology. A ton of money invested in the pursuit of compliance with ISO 9000 standards. It's disconcerting to see how little of that mentality has survived, and it leaves me with a certain personal feeling of defeat.
But one has to recognize that the weakening of regulatory enforcement, reduced labor bargaining power, increased pressure for quarterly earnings, and less aggressive antitrust enforcement - all developments I associate with the broader neoliberal shift and the retreat of social democracy - have greatly contributed to what we now call the enshittification of products and services. My use of the term extends beyond Doctorow's original definition.
I find it odd how corporate greed is always the focal point. But its never consumer greed. The consumer is the one who dictate's a market. So cheap, low quality products are the direct result of consumers paying for a less expensive product. The consumer has proven it doesn't care about quality. So as much as corporations are greedy so are consumers.
And what if I do care about quality? As the consumer, I do not even have that choice to make 99% of the time. This is very much a false equivalency and it isn't even close.
Companies get to choose what products or product qualities to make. If I, a consumer, want or need a product, I can only choose between what is made available to me by the companies.
It certainly doesn't help that it's nearly impossible to tell what is or isn't a quality product before or even after you buy it. What am I supposed to do when I buy a new power tool? Rip it apart and inspect all the parts to determine if it's "quality"? How am I supposed to tell if it even is "quality"? I'm not a manufacturing or engineering expert. Even when you think you're buying quality, it's not most of the time. Companies sell shit products at premium prices all the time because almost no one can tell the difference.
> I can only choose between what is made available to me by the market
The existence of that desire is an untapped market opportunity.
And yes there are ranges of quality in almost every product you can think of from fishing rods, to furniture, to diapers. And theses brands clearly compete with cheaper options and still have strong businesses.
It is until the next brand becomes quality, people trust it, and they start riding on the brand name but skimp on quality for higher margin. There is no reliable signal for quality in any market unless you can get your hands on practically the same product someone else has.
> The existence of that desire is an untapped market opportunity.
Only if you can outcompete the giant mega-conglomerate incumbents.
And you can't. If you start trying to sell in an area, they can drop the prices on their competing products in that area to below cost until you run out of money.
Or they can just buy you for more than you'd ever get in profit, then take advantage of your reputation for quality to sell the same crappy quality stuff they were selling before, with your branding on it, for a markup. They'll make enough from suckers who believe it to more than cover the cost of buying you out before the public catch on and stop being willing to pay the extra.
Exactly. I've lost count of the number of times I've found a brand I liked, only to see quality go downhill after the company tries to scale too quickly, gets bought out, goes public, etc.
Sure, consumers looking for a bargain creates a market for cheap stuff.
But didn't you read the article? It used to be that brand names had meaning, providing a reliable indicator for the quality to expect.
That doesn't hold anymore. As brands are bought & sold by private equity, the relation between brand & what to expect is lost. And in many cases, reputation brands are gutted, $$ extracted, and the sucked-dry corpse discarded. In that environment, how can a consumer tell what's what? Brand X used to be quality, and now it's not. With brand as (often) an unreliable indicator, consumers look at price instead.
What I personally find most amazing, is that quality stuff that used to be household names (and affordable!), are seemingly impossible to produce these days even though technology advanced for 50y+. Example: Arcoroc Sierra (from Arc France, which still exists today). Tableware in tempered, coloured glass, with a nice surface texture. Comes in amber-brown, red & green. Pour in boiling water no problem, lasts a lifetime (and keeps looking like day 1 as long as you keep it out of dishwashers).
Look around in shops today: soup bowls are nice-looking but cheap earthenware, or non-coloured, cheap soda-lime glass. Colour you say? Often it's a thin layer on the glass (sometimes even plastic!). Not a coloured solid material. Scratch it & the non-coloured base material shows underneath.
Something with comparable looks & quality from that 50y old stuff? Not available (at any price), not produced anywhere today. And it's not that people don't want it.
This is just 1 of many examples. Imho the article does a good job of explaining some of the causes.
Someone linked to The Market for Lemons below. This is exactly right. We now live in the World of Lemons. Everything is lemons, because we can only properly judge quality for the tiny number of things we truly care about. For everything else, we just buy the cheapest thing, because by definition we don’t care enough to do otherwise.
The only possible solution is to buy less stuff, to the point where you have the capacity to care more about each thing, and enough money to pay for these things, which will inevitably cost more.
But then that means making peace with the idea that not having a thing can be better than having a crappy thing. It’s a tough sell to the consumption mindset.
That's certainly part of the problem e.g. with airline seats. But there's also the issue that quality attributes can be difficult for casual customers to discern.
Ethical attestations about treatment of workers, animals, and environment are not always honest. Design flaws may not become apparent until the product has been in use for some time and longevity may only become apparent after many years of use, by which point the newer iterations may be qualitatively different.
It used to be that one could invest time in identifying quality brands, but many brands now are simply a temporary asset to be quickly squeezed of value.
Consumers seeking a deal could be a symptom of affordability problems as wages stagnate while inflation keeps prices going up.
One could also blame corporate greed here as well, choosing to keep those extra profits or distributing them at the executive level, rather than increasing wages for employees to maintain their buying power.
So instead of more money to buy better quality items, we get things like Temu as the answer, selling trash and framing it as “shop like a billionaire.”
There is also a demographics angle to this. People who grew up poor and now are middle class tend to favor larger quantities of goods over quality. And this is exacerbated by immigration.
It's completely possible to go high quality and low price - it's precisely how China is pretty much taking over every single industry in existence. But in the US you tend to pay low prices for junk, or unreasonably high prices for ostensibly high quality. I think that's largely because of implicit collusion between companies in most industries, particularly those with high barriers to entry.
So for instance see the Phoebus Cartel. [1] It was a cartel in the US (and Europe) including General Electric, Philips, and others that engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to exploit the market for lightbulbs. They intentionally lowered the quality of bulbs, driving planned obsolescence and thus increased sales, and even engaged in spot [un]quality checking of cartel members to ensure that nobody's lightbulbs would last too long.
In modern times I don't think companies would usually be so overt, but there's nothing illegal about unspoken cartels doing the exact same thing. For instance even in the video game domain, up until the PS4 era major players used to subsidize game console hardware to a wide degree. Then with the PS4 Sony stopped stopped doing that, and simultaneously so did Microsoft. In a competitive market that's exactly when you'd go subsidization to the extreme, to clinch the market to yourself. But so long as both companies agree to stop subsidizing hardware, then they both stand to make a whole lot more money. And that's exactly what happened. In the end, the consumer ends up with worse hardware, pay more for it than they would in a competitive market, and companies make way more money. I think that makes it fair to blame corporate greed.
The problem is that most shopping we do is one-off, as opposed to being a recurring customer. For example, if you're selling bread, your potential customers are 1000 locals and if these 1000 locals decide your bread sucks, your business goes belly up. But if you're selling ice cream in a tourist destination, then you'll never see your customers again even if your ice cream is so good it causes instant involuntary orgasm, so you have zero reason not to scam them.
How do consumers lack the ability to choose what they want? Of course unless, you think they are dumb because they don't choose what YOU want them to choose.
What? I said organize, I didn't say they can't make their own choices. Why are we pretending there's no such thing as the tragedy of the commons or other negative affects for uncoordinated groups at scale?
I also didn't say they were "dumb", I said they couldn't coordinate. So in addition to not thinking you didn't bother to read my comment.
Consumers can't choose what they want because what they want isn't on the market. All they can choose is what companies want to sell them.
Free Market Theory can only reveal people's preferences when you have a spherical market in a frictionless vacuum. In the real world, there are numerous confounding factors that make those ideas deeply counterproductive.
Exactly this. Oh no, these airline seats are cramped and miserable and were backed in like sardines, what’s wrong with these airlines, but I’ll buy whatever ticket is the cheapest.
About 4-5 years ago I bought a Bosch 500 dishwasher. Loved it. Excellent performance. The top silverware rack could be adjusted to fit slightly larger items. There was a very basic clock display to tell you how long the cycle would take. And of course you could delay start by whatever number of hours.
Well, last year I moved, and as it happens, the dishwasher failed and I leapt on the chance to replace it with another Bosch 500. The salesman showed me a new addition to the model (an alleged potscrubber) but didn't tell me what they had taken away.
I should have looked more closely. I assumed I was getting largely the same dishwasher. After purchase I discovered that all those things I listed in the first paragraph were gone. Rack is no longer adjustable. The clock has been replaced with a trio of LEDs indicating >2 hours, 1-2 hrs, and <1 hour. And you cannot delay start at all from the control panel. You have to download their app of course, get a sign in of course, and then you can delay start from the app.
It's absolutely trashy of Bosch to take features away while raising the price several hundred dollars.
You should do clothing brands like PVH brands (CK, Hilfiger, VS, and more) where they have a high end line and use it to build a brand and then sell a totally different cheap line of terrible goods with the same name on it in different stores. Luxury consolidation with LVMH and the enshittification there would be a good one too
Not quite. "Getting worse" is discussing a mechanism where a product first has a good reputation, for good reasons. It's not "minimum viable".
And then the company proceeds to exploit that reputation for all it's worth, by making the product cheaper to make, while keeping the sale price the same, knowing that it takes a long time for the reputation to catch up. But eventually it does and the brand is basically defunct. Used up and discarded, being drained of reputational value.
The "minimum viable product" is part of the development process. If you are already at a certain quality and choose to make it worse, this is something else. Enshittification or just greed come to my mind.
Clearly it's just the start and end state of product development: make an MVP—the very worst thing people will buy, start to gain market share while you improve, reach market saturation, merge with competition, "value engineer" back to MVP—the very worst thing people will still buy.
The “minimum” means minimum price. There is a big market for the lowest price product in case a customer wants the lowest quality product because they only need to use it a couple times or for a trivial task.
Buying a cheap tool at Harbor Freight first and then going for the more expensive tool is a good way to save money.
But "worse on purpose" products typically decrease the quality (and cost to make) without decreasing the sale price to match. It's exploiting the product's reputation for being premium not minimum.
I read years ago about a drill which was sold at Walmart with the same sku as in higher-end stores but the Walmart version had plastic gears. This was due to pricing pressure by Walmart on the manufacturer.
Me, personally, I seek out first Swiss brands then German brands when buying most things. I'm willing to pay extra.
In fact I'm a little pissed off this week because I ordered some oxygen absorbers off a Swiss website that listed a Swiss address but they were shipped directly from china. Investigating the site more closely, yeah, it's just a fake website made to look Swiss.
I did a little research study back in 2003 where I went to various grocers and purchased the same product at these grocers and compared.
Walmart has larger boxes, and less contents, universally, for pretty much everything in a box, and they charge 1/3 more for their 2/3rds of what you get everywhere else. They make nearly 50% more profit from that little slight of hand. And try discussing this with any shoppers and they will say "but the box is bigger", <- actual statement from a CS PhD, demonstrating how it does not matter your education, once outside of that specialization you're an idiot.
>Walmart has larger boxes, and less contents
in EU labels must show prices per kilogram of product, to make this kind of fuckery harder
Isn't this required in US stores now as well? Everywhere I go I see a $/oz next to the price.
Edit: I guess not: https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/national-legal-metrology/us-ret...
Though my state doesn't have this law and I still see it at all stores. I very much rely on it, and it should be law.
I'll admit that I tend to implicitly trust that the larger boxes on the shelves contain more. I haven't checked the price-per-unit in a bit. Granted, my closest grocery is not a WalMart and I'm typically purchasing mass-produced sundries. Basically, the "Family Size" of Cheez-its is the same at any store.
One thing I have noticed is that 5lb bags of flour/sugar haven't been standard in a hot minute.
Actually, the family size Cheez-its is one of the worst offenders, they are not 1/3rd less, more like 50% less product.
Than what? It's 21oz compared to the 7oz regular size and 12.4oz "Pantry Size".
It's like $5-$6 for the box. That's been true at both the local grocery and WalMart.
FWIW in Switzerland (and surely other places too) you have on the price tag also the price per 100g (or ml or whatever) so you can quickly compare without bothering much with basic maths. Same for online shopping.
I've met CS PhD students in AI (a field that almost exclusively uses python) be completely unable to start a python script on their machine.
Well obviously you just ask an LLM.
That was before chatgpt 3 :D
And a ridiculously high percentage of the time markdown prices on the shelves at Walmart are not reflected at checkout. Happened to me just this weekend. Walmart, one of the largest companies in the USA, whose job is to sell items, can't do the basics of keeping pricing/signage in sync? BS.
There are Chinese machine manufacturers who use fake German brand names because for a long time Germany was selling the manufacturing machinery to China and they have a good national brand image.
You don't need a fake brand: use Philips.
Sometimes. My Bosch washing machine died young due to cheap bearings. The AEG dryer had soldering problems and the German dishwasher's time light projector died slowly.
https://www.elektroda.com/rtvforum/topic3652484.html#1966024...
I'm pretty sure that this sort of thing happens for stuff in big box home improvement stores like Home Depot and Lowe's, too. Things like plumbing fixtures that appear to be identical to counterparts in smaller stores will have off-by-one or suffixed product numbers, and are made with cheaper plastic internal parts than when purchased elsewhere.
Yes, I've heard of this effect in marketing. If you make any reference to Switzerland, it's instant sales bump, even if you hold everything else equal. This is also how you got "Häagen-Dazs" ice cream brand. It's fully American, but the name sounds vaguely Scandinavian, so it has to be better, right? Well, customers sure do think so, and are willing to pay the premium.
Not challenging your marketing presumption; I've noticed, and seen pointed out, the same thing.
As a side note, years ago Häagen-Dazs was better (high milk-fat, etc) than the other widely-available brands. It's now owned by Nestlé, so I don't buy it anymore. How much has it been enshittified?
One massive unmentioned counterexample: High quality Chinese tools continue to proliferate and sucker-punch these brands for being so egregious with quality. They are now the high quality standard if you know what brands to look for, and not because their competition got worse as mentioned here, they are simply iterating and improving and making better tools and designs than they did 10 years ago. Sometimes you are getting the exact same tool as the name-brand but with less warranty for a fraction of the price. "Corporate Greed" is self-correcting in a free and fair market! Vote with your wallet.
Example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/harborfreight/comments/1v1ujxe/hmmm...
Which directly contradicts the blog's post about Knipex never selling-out on quality:
https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-power-tools-got-worse-...
>Knipex is family-owned out of Germany. They make what many consider the best pliers on the planet. Part of a larger group (Knipex Group) but not publicly traded, not for sale.
I recently bought one of the Yukon tool chest / benches and the experience totally flipped my opinion of HF. I've been a customer for a while, but always considered them lower-quality in the back of my mind. The tool chest came in perfect condition, easy purchase. Whereas the Huskies I had bought previously were a hassle that involved returning multiple damaged-in-box units back to the store, driving an hour to another store with stock, dodgily swapping parts (drawer slides and top) to make a good one, etc.
It's of course never just one thing - I had been waiting for the Husky to show up in stock again (it has a 24 inch depth vs 18), but at this point it seems like HD has discontinued the 24 in favor of enshittifying with 18 inches instead. And of course I've been shying away from HD recently because of the F-word. It's like these companies want to self-immolate (or put more technically, they create short term boosts by arbitraging away their reputation).
In my experience in recent years, Oppo and Vivo phones look better, they are more robust and last longer than iPhones and Samsung premium phones.
When giants like Apple and Samsung fail to innovate enough (and when they price their best products beyond the reach of the middle class of most nations), then upstarts will take their throne.
This may be good for industry so there's healthy competition, but it is unfortunate because China's CCP has a policy that Chinese companies must store and share customer and company data in China. So anyone using Chinese electronic gadgets is saying goodbye to their data security and privacy, even if it is an expensive gadget by a bigshot Chinese company (e.g., Lenovo was caught bundling adware on its premium laptops some years ago - search for "Lenovo Superfish" to know more).
https://legioncyber.com/lenovos-security-failures-and-hidden...
This entire site can be boiled down to: products get decrease in quality when customers don't know or don't care what quality is.
Price is a clear and obvious thing to measure, quality is much more difficult. Consumers get little or no formal education in quality, and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly. Any review site that is paid for by ads or affiliate links has the default position of trying to get you to buy something.
That might be an outdated accusation. There was a time when a touch of research or “caring about quality” was enough to avoid the pitfalls of garbage products, but I don’t believe that to be a fair statement anymore. The website details the history of some examples, but the implication is between the lines: the only reason you used to know a product would last 20 years is because that specific product with those specific parts has already lasted 20 years. Don’t take advice about living to 100 from a 32 year old, don’t trust a warranty that’s longer than the company selling it has existed, and don’t trust that model XB5 is the same as your grandmas XB1.
How can you possibly know if you’re getting a quality product when the reviews you’re reading are for a model that doesn’t exist anymore, or are meaningless generalizations about a mega conglomerate? Saying “Brand X sucks/wins” only has the potential to be meaningful when it’s a single company in a single area and that has made that exact model in the same way for longer than your warranty on it. “Whirlpool sucks/wins” is as meaningless as reading “Water tastes good/bad” from everyone on the planet.
>reading are for a model that doesn’t exist anymore
It's worse than that, the _same model_ from the same company can be quietly changed.
Why do I no longer have any reliable signals for quality? Price, brand, materials, and word of mouth are all you really get, but price and materials are meaningless and brand and word of mouth stop mattering as a company starts to coast on its reputation for higher margin. Genuinely don't know how customers are supposed to choose quality when they want it. I always want it.
The market for lemons is always bustling, I guess [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Agree, but there’s also an element of consumer irrationality. Lower price + lower quality means you can buy more of what you want now, even if it means that you’ll end up with net less of what you want in the long term.
Most consumers, me included, are not making purely rational decisions based in price and quality, even in domains where they are qualified to judge quality.
True. Maybe the hidden part of the equation is "effort". Modern marketing strategy is to "flood the zone" with misleading information and half-truths so as to make the very act of making a rational selection exhausting.
It's the third or fourth time I see it on HN, I have not read anything other than the first two, which were more of complaints about tiered products. E.g. one was about backpacks and how a $40 backpack from Walmart is not going to last 20 years of summiting Mt. Everest like the $400 backpack of the same brand sold elsewhere...
> and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly
The thing that annoys me the most is when the reviewer opens the box, shakes it gently and says "feels well built" or "plastic build". It is actually harmful. Weight doesn't equal quality (there is some correlation, building well often results in more weight, but it is unreliable and easy to game) and plastic is a huge range of materials and some are absolutely the most robust option for many use cases (think a sturdy plastic water bottle that outlasts and glass or metal equivalent).
The problem is quality is very hard to measure. The only really good test is to use the product for many years. But by that time the existing model hasn't been sold for years, in theory you could correlate the new model's quality with the old one but brands are apparently disposable these days so it is very likely that all costs were cut on the new one once their previous model gained a reputation for quality.
I think the only real measure for quality is a warranty. That is the manufacturer promising a lifespan. However they are usually short, can be unreliable to get (often at manufacturer discretion) and more often than not cover only "manufacturing defects" not reasonable wear and tear.
> The only really good test is to use the product for many years
Agree. However, a good reviewer should be able to transfer knowledge from many years of use about a similar product to a new product and give an insightful evaluation. This type of reviewer is exceedingly rare.
I think a very knowledgeable reviewer can make a decent guess. But to really know you would need to tear it apart and analyze all of the materials used (maybe the metal or plastic has been swapped to a slightly different material which is very hard to identify by just looking or touching). You need a team of engineers. Probably the best you can hope for is noticing a part is changed and make an educated guess why it was changed.
I call this the cycle of disruption.
A company makes a really good product as first challenging incumbents. They get so big, they eventually become the incumbent. All this time, they’re probably losing money on the product or breaking even. Eventually, investors will want returns on their investment. This will first happen with prices increases to save the quality of the product. Once they can’t raise prices anymore, the quality will be decreased. By this point, the brand is strong enough to get sales even on this worse product.
Then another company will come in and make the same product but better than the incumbent. The cycle continues.
My point is find these new companies that are trying to get market share by making a higher quality product. And if you really like that product, buy 2.
Chasing eternal profit growth isn’t a fact of life, notwithstanding the mythology of commodification. Neither are all investors motivated purely by profit. Neither is it clear that everything can be improved upon (much less that outsiders can improve on it better than the incumbent). Sometimes “do a thing, do it with excellence, make a modest living from it” is enough.
One thing I like about Mr. Sapp’s work at Worse On Purpose here—he (or perhaps his LLM, or perhaps he’s LLM) gives considerable attention to firms that don’t do it that way. Where:
> Quality, ownership, and stewardship all check out. […] Most of these are family-owned, trust-owned, employee-owned, or publicly traded with a long track record of not selling out.
It’s useful to have actionable alternatives, and I put more stock in his organizing thesis given how well its brand preferences line up with my own.
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/status/approved
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/methodology
Once a product becomes so big it cannot increase in market share the only way to increase the total amount of profit it generates it by reducing the cost to produce the product or increasing the price.
This seems like what he said but less words
It feels like this observation should be in Marx somewhere (but in way more words badly translated from German)
It’s a more acute observation about market dynamics than what is usually found in Marx. Marx heavily discusses how humanity interacts with capitalism, and focuses its market analysis on the labor market.
“corporate greed” is a signal to me of low quality commentary. The opening premise of Econ is that consumers want all the goods for free and producers want to give nothing in exchange for as much money as they can.
The problem here is that when the consumers try it they go to actual jail. Meanwhile the producers have been richly rewarded for getting away with their side of it.
So yeah, corporate greed actually has a meaning in this context for people.
I've come to the conclusion this proliferates because it's very hard to start a business. If there was tons of competition the market would decide.
It makes sense to ask WHY this is hard. People can disagree endlessly on why. But a big part is, that antitrust/monopoly legislation has been almost completely dismantled and detoothed within the last 35 years, starting back with Reagan, and accelerating through the 90's when Clinton was at the wheel. The tiny bit that is still left, is only enforced either when parties fail to pay the bribe, or are bribed to enforce it, by other actors. Once you allow markets to consolidate into a single monolith, any new competitors will only be allowed to live, until they become big enough for the established incumbent to notice and then squish, with their unlimited access to resources. There is little incentive to start a competing business, if you know the trajectory is "IF SUCCESS THEN SQUISH".
Anti-monopoly failing is the effect, not the cause - how is there a monopoly to start with?
You may be poorly educated as to how antitrust is supposed to work.
Breaking up monopolies that already exist is only one of its purposes and tools. It is also there to prevent mergers that will be detrimental to the public.
Past a certain (very low) scale threshold, this should be assumed to be "almost all of them". Rather than the government having to prove that a merger would be detrimental, the companies wanting to merge should be required to prove that the merger would be beneficial to the public in long-term ways that do not require specific (and easily breakable) "commitments" on their part to do things like keep prices low.
I think it's just human nature, people that are ruthless with buisness are more likely to stay afloat compared to the moral alternative that always on the edge of collapsing
And this is why the destruction of antitrust in the US in the latter part of the 20th century has screwed us all. The massive wave of consolidation that followed that (ongoing to this day) makes the barrier to entry for every market much, much higher. The very fact that the most common desired endgame for a startup is "exit"—ie, being bought out by a larger company—should demonstrate this very well.
If we want quality, customer service, decent prices, or anything like them to come back, we need to restore real antitrust, not the morally-and-intellectually-bankrupt Chicago School bullshit that's been pushed on us for decades, benefiting only the already-wealthy.
The legal and regulatory obstacles to starting a business probably don't help but IMO the bigger issue is trying to break into markets that are dominated by massive global players who benefit from economies of scale and access to funding that newer companies don't have.
The other side of this is that consumers don't have the information required to properly differentiate between competitors. If I'm shopping for a new TV I have no idea where or how it is made which is why so many people default to brand names as very rough proxies for quality. That information asymmetry is exactly what websites like this are trying to combat, but it's clearly an uphill struggle.
I'm not only talking about legal and regulatory issues, indeed.
I think one of the big ones is rent. Suuuure you can just take some months to invent a product, but if you start with a $3000 loss per month, that's a high bar to clear.
Another one is lack of pressure. The person who invented the TV was surely thinking about how much money he would make or how much he would change society. But now there are so many TVs for under $500, what would I really add by making a new one that wouldn't have been optimized and battle-hardened and would be otherwise identical to all the others? (From the reverse side too, why would I buy a $1000 TV identical to a $500 one? Market for lemons. Fairphone's in this position.)
> if you start with a $3000 loss per month
This is a question of access to capital. Since we're all on the VC site we should understand how that works; for things like that it's very important to get "angel" investors who are comfortable putting in less-than-six-figures to get a product to the stage where it is proven for bigger investors.
I'm glad that everyone's quoting Market for Lemons now, but it doesn't quite apply to Fairphone. Fairphone aren't trying to cheat you, there's no information asymmetry here; they're just providing a feature ("fairness") which you can't easily get elsewhere and that turns out to be really expensive.
At the other end of the "market entry" problem: this is why RAM is so expensive right now, you can't just spin up a new DRAM line in your garage even if you're Sam Zeeloof.
Why would a capitalist fund something that will obviously not make money, like a random Finnish dude's operating system, when there's already Microsoft Windows?
I don't think you can just say the market would decide when it is so easy to hide corner cutting and sell the thing cheaper.
FYI you don't seem to be aware that you are shadowbanned.
Interesting (and very helpful!) that they keep a list of good brands. I wonder how they judge that - do they just look at ownership?
Looks like that’s one factor. A number of brands I expected to be marked as Avoid based on who owns them were indeed marked as such. Pleased to see a few of my chosen brands were marked as good. Shame that basically no sun glasses company is good.
Incredibly depressing, but a good and important thing to read!
Not to sound overly cheerful, but shout out to my Makita DHP484 combo drill/driver and 100 piece bit set that, for a low three figure price, is far more powerful and capable than the noisy old corded monster it replaces.
Related: "A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
Thanks, I hate it
What if there was a way to tax things that encouraged people to buy things that would last longer and then let the market correct?
Basically, we've done our experiment of hyper-disposable consumerism. It was great and the world has gotten richer. But not it seems like we should parlay that benefit into transitioning into a new era of quality.
Thats why competition is so important in the market
This is why independent review organizations are so important in the market.
I remember the emphasis on quality - and on safety and security - in the 1990s. A substantial part of company life revolved around Quality Circles, quality meetings, quality inspectors, and the 5S methodology. A ton of money invested in the pursuit of compliance with ISO 9000 standards. It's disconcerting to see how little of that mentality has survived, and it leaves me with a certain personal feeling of defeat.
But one has to recognize that the weakening of regulatory enforcement, reduced labor bargaining power, increased pressure for quarterly earnings, and less aggressive antitrust enforcement - all developments I associate with the broader neoliberal shift and the retreat of social democracy - have greatly contributed to what we now call the enshittification of products and services. My use of the term extends beyond Doctorow's original definition.
I find it odd how corporate greed is always the focal point. But its never consumer greed. The consumer is the one who dictate's a market. So cheap, low quality products are the direct result of consumers paying for a less expensive product. The consumer has proven it doesn't care about quality. So as much as corporations are greedy so are consumers.
And what if I do care about quality? As the consumer, I do not even have that choice to make 99% of the time. This is very much a false equivalency and it isn't even close.
Companies get to choose what products or product qualities to make. If I, a consumer, want or need a product, I can only choose between what is made available to me by the companies.
It certainly doesn't help that it's nearly impossible to tell what is or isn't a quality product before or even after you buy it. What am I supposed to do when I buy a new power tool? Rip it apart and inspect all the parts to determine if it's "quality"? How am I supposed to tell if it even is "quality"? I'm not a manufacturing or engineering expert. Even when you think you're buying quality, it's not most of the time. Companies sell shit products at premium prices all the time because almost no one can tell the difference.
> I can only choose between what is made available to me by the market
The existence of that desire is an untapped market opportunity.
And yes there are ranges of quality in almost every product you can think of from fishing rods, to furniture, to diapers. And theses brands clearly compete with cheaper options and still have strong businesses.
It is until the next brand becomes quality, people trust it, and they start riding on the brand name but skimp on quality for higher margin. There is no reliable signal for quality in any market unless you can get your hands on practically the same product someone else has.
> The existence of that desire is an untapped market opportunity.
Only if you can outcompete the giant mega-conglomerate incumbents.
And you can't. If you start trying to sell in an area, they can drop the prices on their competing products in that area to below cost until you run out of money.
Or they can just buy you for more than you'd ever get in profit, then take advantage of your reputation for quality to sell the same crappy quality stuff they were selling before, with your branding on it, for a markup. They'll make enough from suckers who believe it to more than cover the cost of buying you out before the public catch on and stop being willing to pay the extra.
And you have to keep up with which brands have been private equitied, e.g., Pyrex.
I think this is the wrong take.
If this was really the truth, the brand names wouldn't matter. But instead the brand ends up as the sole desirable target in the corporate sales.
I think the more likely answer is that being an expert judge on a product's quality is just very hard.
More so when you have to buy it before you can use it.
So people tend to trust brands they've had good experiences with, or heard others having good experiences with.
The greed here is in leveraging that trust to sell a shitty updated version of the product.
Exactly. I've lost count of the number of times I've found a brand I liked, only to see quality go downhill after the company tries to scale too quickly, gets bought out, goes public, etc.
Sure, consumers looking for a bargain creates a market for cheap stuff.
But didn't you read the article? It used to be that brand names had meaning, providing a reliable indicator for the quality to expect.
That doesn't hold anymore. As brands are bought & sold by private equity, the relation between brand & what to expect is lost. And in many cases, reputation brands are gutted, $$ extracted, and the sucked-dry corpse discarded. In that environment, how can a consumer tell what's what? Brand X used to be quality, and now it's not. With brand as (often) an unreliable indicator, consumers look at price instead.
What I personally find most amazing, is that quality stuff that used to be household names (and affordable!), are seemingly impossible to produce these days even though technology advanced for 50y+. Example: Arcoroc Sierra (from Arc France, which still exists today). Tableware in tempered, coloured glass, with a nice surface texture. Comes in amber-brown, red & green. Pour in boiling water no problem, lasts a lifetime (and keeps looking like day 1 as long as you keep it out of dishwashers).
Look around in shops today: soup bowls are nice-looking but cheap earthenware, or non-coloured, cheap soda-lime glass. Colour you say? Often it's a thin layer on the glass (sometimes even plastic!). Not a coloured solid material. Scratch it & the non-coloured base material shows underneath.
Something with comparable looks & quality from that 50y old stuff? Not available (at any price), not produced anywhere today. And it's not that people don't want it.
This is just 1 of many examples. Imho the article does a good job of explaining some of the causes.
Yeah. Nobody is innocent here.
Someone linked to The Market for Lemons below. This is exactly right. We now live in the World of Lemons. Everything is lemons, because we can only properly judge quality for the tiny number of things we truly care about. For everything else, we just buy the cheapest thing, because by definition we don’t care enough to do otherwise.
The only possible solution is to buy less stuff, to the point where you have the capacity to care more about each thing, and enough money to pay for these things, which will inevitably cost more.
But then that means making peace with the idea that not having a thing can be better than having a crappy thing. It’s a tough sell to the consumption mindset.
That's certainly part of the problem e.g. with airline seats. But there's also the issue that quality attributes can be difficult for casual customers to discern.
Ethical attestations about treatment of workers, animals, and environment are not always honest. Design flaws may not become apparent until the product has been in use for some time and longevity may only become apparent after many years of use, by which point the newer iterations may be qualitatively different.
It used to be that one could invest time in identifying quality brands, but many brands now are simply a temporary asset to be quickly squeezed of value.
Consumers seeking a deal could be a symptom of affordability problems as wages stagnate while inflation keeps prices going up.
One could also blame corporate greed here as well, choosing to keep those extra profits or distributing them at the executive level, rather than increasing wages for employees to maintain their buying power.
So instead of more money to buy better quality items, we get things like Temu as the answer, selling trash and framing it as “shop like a billionaire.”
There is also a demographics angle to this. People who grew up poor and now are middle class tend to favor larger quantities of goods over quality. And this is exacerbated by immigration.
It's completely possible to go high quality and low price - it's precisely how China is pretty much taking over every single industry in existence. But in the US you tend to pay low prices for junk, or unreasonably high prices for ostensibly high quality. I think that's largely because of implicit collusion between companies in most industries, particularly those with high barriers to entry.
So for instance see the Phoebus Cartel. [1] It was a cartel in the US (and Europe) including General Electric, Philips, and others that engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to exploit the market for lightbulbs. They intentionally lowered the quality of bulbs, driving planned obsolescence and thus increased sales, and even engaged in spot [un]quality checking of cartel members to ensure that nobody's lightbulbs would last too long.
In modern times I don't think companies would usually be so overt, but there's nothing illegal about unspoken cartels doing the exact same thing. For instance even in the video game domain, up until the PS4 era major players used to subsidize game console hardware to a wide degree. Then with the PS4 Sony stopped stopped doing that, and simultaneously so did Microsoft. In a competitive market that's exactly when you'd go subsidization to the extreme, to clinch the market to yourself. But so long as both companies agree to stop subsidizing hardware, then they both stand to make a whole lot more money. And that's exactly what happened. In the end, the consumer ends up with worse hardware, pay more for it than they would in a competitive market, and companies make way more money. I think that makes it fair to blame corporate greed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
The problem is that most shopping we do is one-off, as opposed to being a recurring customer. For example, if you're selling bread, your potential customers are 1000 locals and if these 1000 locals decide your bread sucks, your business goes belly up. But if you're selling ice cream in a tourist destination, then you'll never see your customers again even if your ice cream is so good it causes instant involuntary orgasm, so you have zero reason not to scam them.
Companies organize and consumers can't. Seems pretty obvious.
It's obvious because no thinking.
How do consumers lack the ability to choose what they want? Of course unless, you think they are dumb because they don't choose what YOU want them to choose.
What? I said organize, I didn't say they can't make their own choices. Why are we pretending there's no such thing as the tragedy of the commons or other negative affects for uncoordinated groups at scale?
I also didn't say they were "dumb", I said they couldn't coordinate. So in addition to not thinking you didn't bother to read my comment.
Consumers can't choose what they want because what they want isn't on the market. All they can choose is what companies want to sell them.
Free Market Theory can only reveal people's preferences when you have a spherical market in a frictionless vacuum. In the real world, there are numerous confounding factors that make those ideas deeply counterproductive.
Exactly this. Oh no, these airline seats are cramped and miserable and were backed in like sardines, what’s wrong with these airlines, but I’ll buy whatever ticket is the cheapest.
About 4-5 years ago I bought a Bosch 500 dishwasher. Loved it. Excellent performance. The top silverware rack could be adjusted to fit slightly larger items. There was a very basic clock display to tell you how long the cycle would take. And of course you could delay start by whatever number of hours.
Well, last year I moved, and as it happens, the dishwasher failed and I leapt on the chance to replace it with another Bosch 500. The salesman showed me a new addition to the model (an alleged potscrubber) but didn't tell me what they had taken away.
I should have looked more closely. I assumed I was getting largely the same dishwasher. After purchase I discovered that all those things I listed in the first paragraph were gone. Rack is no longer adjustable. The clock has been replaced with a trio of LEDs indicating >2 hours, 1-2 hrs, and <1 hour. And you cannot delay start at all from the control panel. You have to download their app of course, get a sign in of course, and then you can delay start from the app.
It's absolutely trashy of Bosch to take features away while raising the price several hundred dollars.
Related discussions on articles from this site:
Power Tools Got Worse on Purpose
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147665
Brands got worse on purpose
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849221
Backpacks got worse on purpose
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777209
Additional information: The prompter for these articles works at Palantir.
It is really disappointing how this site’s text appears to be mostly AI generated (60% or so on Pangram).
I guess you could say this site is… worse on purpose.
You should do clothing brands like PVH brands (CK, Hilfiger, VS, and more) where they have a high end line and use it to build a brand and then sell a totally different cheap line of terrible goods with the same name on it in different stores. Luxury consolidation with LVMH and the enshittification there would be a good one too
"Worse on purpose" is just "Minimum viable product"
The definition of “viable” matters
Not quite. "Getting worse" is discussing a mechanism where a product first has a good reputation, for good reasons. It's not "minimum viable".
And then the company proceeds to exploit that reputation for all it's worth, by making the product cheaper to make, while keeping the sale price the same, knowing that it takes a long time for the reputation to catch up. But eventually it does and the brand is basically defunct. Used up and discarded, being drained of reputational value.
The "minimum viable product" is part of the development process. If you are already at a certain quality and choose to make it worse, this is something else. Enshittification or just greed come to my mind.
Clearly it's just the start and end state of product development: make an MVP—the very worst thing people will buy, start to gain market share while you improve, reach market saturation, merge with competition, "value engineer" back to MVP—the very worst thing people will still buy.
The “minimum” means minimum price. There is a big market for the lowest price product in case a customer wants the lowest quality product because they only need to use it a couple times or for a trivial task.
Buying a cheap tool at Harbor Freight first and then going for the more expensive tool is a good way to save money.
> The “minimum” means minimum price.
But "worse on purpose" products typically decrease the quality (and cost to make) without decreasing the sale price to match. It's exploiting the product's reputation for being premium not minimum.
Its because of monopolies
It's just crapitalism - make thing as cheap as possible and charge as much as possible.
What you call crapitalism is actually just capitalism.
Slop on purpose