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No

I buy vintage t shirts because I want a thread count you can’t see through, not because I’m really into Looney Tunes.

someone should fart directly into your face

That elides the time between 'local stores' and Amazon, when large conglomerates moved into the local retail sphere, first offering not just lower prices but bigger selections-- and then started with the "Just in Time" supply model, which deliberately understocked to increase profits.

when people shopped at the mall they were still waiting for sales or looking for deals. nowadays, i could spend less or more on jeans, but they’re both going to be subpar. sometimes it’s even inverted. the big box store jeans were cheaper and looked cheaper but lasted longer than the $100 pair

It goes way further back than the 80s and 90s. Jokes about cheap Japanese and Chinese goods were in pop culture in the 60s. Allan Sherman's "12 Gifts of Christmas" for instance.

My Mom's rule of thumb was Sears second-best.

It's hard to say online shopping eliminated anything when over 80% of total retail sales still occur in brick and mortar stores.

Having worked in manufacturing, the drop in quality was a business decision and we hoped consumers would not notice.

Correct

i prefer - start cheap bc u'll lose/break things & get wrong things by mistake - but get something good enuff that the shittiness of the tool doesn't hinder ur own ability to learn the skill (my biggest fencing regret was an ill-balanced Hanwei starter rapier) - upgrade as u learn what u really need

But the trend accelerated when the Web made comparison shopping easier.

Generally, you see the cheap now; and the low quality shows up later.

A 20 year old touch tone phone will still make and receive calls just fine. A 20 year old palm top touch screen computer/still camera/video camera/flashlight/music player/video player/game machine/telephone, not so much.

There's a bit of lemons problem. If I can't know for sure that some option is indeed high quality, then I will instead choose the lowest price option

Precisely: the problem that's even bigger than the decline in quality is the fact that it is now impossible to know if what you're buying is any good at all, this in my opinion further suppresses the 'lowest acceptable quality' a consumer will accept.

@maxdubler.com but to the extent that’s a problem, it is a problem with our shopping experiences, not PE.

why is slop, basically

They don't cut price, but they will cut corners to maintain a price point in the face of other costs rising. Q.v. shrinkflation in groceries. Same price on the box; less in the box and they hope you won't notice and just appreciate they have not raised the price.

It’s a cycle but I agree it’s driven by the masses who want stuff cheaper. The market is responding to demand. Granted we NEED things to be less expensive because of the rising costs of housing and education….and now groceries and gas. So it’s also not a matter of “don’t buy cheap stuff.” 2/2

Online shopping became more prevelant after multiple external financial crisises which had lingering effects, see every grandparent who lived through the great depression. Is it consumer preference, or is there a massive third factor that you're not accounting for?

For every 50 year old KitchenAid mixer still chugging along there are ten thousand K-Mart mixers that aren't

or at least you need a lot of knowledge. For example taking up sewing to learn what clothing is good quality (a more realistic goal than trying to make all your clothes). And that's not something everyone is just going to do.

Yes, this is the problem. I don't want to buy the bargain-basement thing, I am happy to pay a little more for quality, but the information environment makes that incredibly difficult to do.

This is why I think brand names and reputations are actually going to be more important than ever. For example, I can genuinely trust that an OXO Good Grips product will work well and last.

Tbh this is where I think private equity type shenanigans actually matter because if you fuck with brand quality that’s not as useful of a signal

There's a reason I wirecutter any purchase over $30

Not proclaiming to be an "average" customer, but imo finding "higher quality stuff that lasts a long time" is quite hard. When I can get a cheap item for half the price of a premium brand, and the premium brand no longer has the same bulletproof reputation as before, the decision is made for me.

I'm not sure i totally agree. The thing about online shopping is that you cant appraise quality very well aside from easily gamed star ratings. There are definitely things that have an "Instagram" premium where the photo is way nicer than the object.

Obviously price alone doesn't guarantee qualiti, so who would want to pay more for the sake of it

I think you’re creating a false dichotomy- cheap/crappy vs expensive/quality. What people really want is affordable/quality. The correlation between price & quality doesn’t seem to exist anymore, in appliance purchases for example. They all start to fall apart after 3-4 years now so why pay more?

TBF if you’re shopping online you can pretty reliably judge on price and maybe not so much on those other factors

Honest question: How do you teach value? It took decades for me to learn it once my parents stopped buying my clothes, even with my Dad's voice in my head. My own children were better. But I have students who don't know or get it because their parents don't get it. How to break the cycle?

the arrow was already pointed in that direction though. Zara and H&M predate widespread online shopping

It can be hard to know what quality differences really exist when shopping online, so all else equal just buy the cheap one.

I don’t believe that is true: we see quality and price continue to rise in retail. The actual problem is that it is almost impossible to judge quality online, so online the only competition is price.

For example: online shopping behavior doesn’t necessarily express consumer preferences more directly than brick-and-mortar. B&M stores had to earn customer loyalty. Online shopping is more oligopolistic, so vendors need worry less about customer satisfaction; hence they stock inferior goods.

In my experience, resentment about having to buy garbage is real, and people who have little choice will sometimes choose differently if they get the chance. But after enough years of economic uncertainty, it starts to feel irresponsible to buy anything that isn‘t the very cheapest option.

I think online shopping also made it incredibly hard to shop for quality. The reality of the good you’re going to get is hard to determine from a listing. The rational response is to lower your bet so it it’s trash you lose less. Making the appeal in Amazon or whatever that you’re worth it is hard.

walmart did this to in-person shopping before e-commerce. But also manufacturing costs just got lower than repair costs, and manufacturers realized it’s more profitable to sell a new tv or vacuum than new parts. If you don’t force buyers and sellers to internalize disposal costs, repair loses.

I’m not sure if it’s an express preference for cheap over quality so much as true quality is often hard to determine at point of purchase, whereas price is easy to determine, so people are more likely to choose something based on the latter than the former.

online shoping eliminates what can be compared between 2 products. leaves you only with price and speed of delivery to compare.

the bic cristal is a triumph of industrial design and will last you that decade too, were it not cheap enough to lose. i say this with an unfortunate habit in re pens that cost more than rent.

Ralph Lauren being one of the worst offenders in this category and it completely tanked the quality of their mainline blue label products in the process.

It's not that cheap goods are what we want-cheap is all more than 1/2 the country can afford! And guess what-most people don't think of those goods as disposable-they are the only clothes or things they can afford. And they don't throw them away until they can no longer be worn or used.

There's the argument that the same factories pumping out higher end products are pumping out lower quality products. Sometimes the only difference between the two are the logos.

As disposable income grew, so did disposable purchases. A bit counterintuitive since you'd expect people who can afford quality to always buy it, but human nature is short-sighted and indulgent.

im fortunate enough to be in a position where i can buy quality over quantity, but u have to remember the slavery that goes into making fast fashion is the real problem. thats something you absolutely can blame far-away capitalists on, because they set the low wage average for that kind of labor

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

There's also a nasty congruence between people talking about "enshittification" and people talking about how women *used* to understand their role in a relationship and white men *used* to be able to get any job they wanted and such things.

Right! They're not all that far away lol

private equity is part of the way the supply chains are hidden and costs externalized. folks always want a lower price, but there's less information IN the price then ever before. maybe?

This is reductive, cost is always going to be paramount under capitalism, no money and it’s over

I wonder if there are any societal issues like wage stagnation that might be leading to this end result Probably not worth thinking about, keep blaming consumers for corporate choices

Not really though is it

Who do you think created and operates online marketplaces?

Imagine losing everything you have due to medical issues that leave you disabled for life. Now try living on the pittance you'd get from Social Security Disability. I doubt you'd have this attitude of poor people are so dumb b/c they don't buy better quality items that last longer-

It does demonstrate that the "market" is an incredibly bad way to distribute resources.

People "want" cheap shit because they HAVE NO MONEY

Extremely related point: people don’t want to pay more for quality, they want to be cheap and complain!

You suck

Just out here posting this nonsense as if 2-3 generational cohorts have never been without planned obsolescence

I don’t disagree, but I’ll push back inasmuch as I don’t think this is a revealed preference of rational decision-making, but a revealed preference of laziness and low spending power. Not even to say that people are poor, their money just goes other places more easily (sports betting)

My pushback: if you DO want higher quality, how the heck do you know? Sure, like if it's a vacuum cleaner, there are incredibly solid brands like Miele. But, like, a lamp? A fold-out chair? Pliers? Zip-up hoodie? You kinda have to just pick something cheap and cross your fingers

Online shopping also makes it very difficult to evaluate quality.

i think you’ve conflated multiple phenomenon into one and subscribed so heavily to capitalist realism that you don’t understand what MOST people want is their needs met, that quality and price aren’t as intimately related as we are led to believe, and that corporate conglomerates engineer markets

Interesting - hadn’t thought about this but makes sense. My working theory - expansion of global trade, plus cheap capital led to increased availability of cheaper goods & stagnating wages led to increased demand in a cycle politics was happy to support to boost perceived quality of life increase.

This is just a terrible rothbard brain take.

"How we used market segmentation and value engineering to eliminate the consumer surplus"

Or people buy differently if they actually get to to touch the stuff before buying

It's not Smartwool, but Gold Toe has been reduced to a glorified Amazon storefront. I decided to go looking for alternatives when I discovered I was losing socks to holes at a rate of what seemed like monthly. Paradoxically, they've gotten a lot fluffier even as the quality has disintegrated.

i've heard global warming is messing with cotton crops...

Clothing is declining in quality.

Buyers picks what makes money in stores.

Local physical stores like Primark. 😬 Because professional buyers never put shareholders first.

But! Because of that combination of regulations and new features in lower-end cars as technology matures, we end up seeing these shocking step increases in the price of the cars in general and the compact ones especially.

Yes! But the cheapest 20 yr’old vehicle is both cheaper and more expensive to operate.

In fairness, Instant Pot is one counter example where they made one high quality product and could have been a sustainable if low growth business, and PE owners made the product worse and got them into a bunch of other lines with bad products.

This is more about unbundling and then complaining you only bought part of the bundle or demanding laws be passed to bring back bundled amenities, but not bundled pricing. Mandate transparent pricing and be done with it.

given the damage air travel does to the environment, arguably not

In the golden age of air travel, people like me only ever got inside a plane for the purpose of cleaning it.

Flying being “bad” doesn’t bother me. I want a cheap fare; I can withstand being stuffed in an uncomfortable seat for a few hours. I don’t need food and drink. What’s the big deal? It’s transportation - a CTA bus with wings. In the “Golden Age,” they let people smoke on the planes. 🤮

I would say that this is why flying is GOOD now; I'm not in it for food, and I can hop on a plane to visit friends quickly and relatively cheaply. (The parts of the experience I hate are the result of a different chain of events starting a little under 25 years ago.)

That’d be correct if the cheapest tickets were actually… cheap.

Good news on the front Planes have NEVER been safer!

Something I noticed several years ago is that the vast majority of people who would say they missed the days when people dressed up to fly anywhere (or when mom put on her gloves and hat and took you into the city to shop at Woolworth's) simply WERE NOT OLD ENOUGH to have experienced it themselves

Yes but no but. I'd say this is true to an extent for short haul. For long haul, I consider carrier quality first, then schedule/price. For short haul, i can put up with some discomfort and price is largely king. If a carrier has gouged me - e.g. for printing boarding cards - they're off the list

This exactly. Back in the day, you saved up to go anywhere by plane. Foreign vacations by air were once-in-a-lifetime treats.

This is even more true of driving.

Airports have got worse but flying hasn’t changed in 60 years — apart from seat-back screens

I always choose the cheapest possible ticket. I don’t care AT ALL about the little luxuries so long as the plane arrives on time. Give me a power plug. I’ll listen to a book, play a mindless puzzle game and ignore everything else happening on the flight.

We want the government to ban products that are too shoddy so we can shop by price in peace

Of course people want to spend less money, that’s the hallmark of economic common sense. The choice to take the cheapest option in no way forces service providers to lower the quality of services, they do it because they could shave a few dollars in expenses and boost their stock prices.

I don't hear that one much here in Europe. "You can be in another country quick for €10" is pretty appealing on its own, and the largest airline's marketing is explicitly about how bare bones it is.

Easy solution? Minimum leg room laws We could easily mandate a minimum of 31 inches and prevent a race to the bottom on that feature of flying

True but also once these people get on the plane they absolutely hate it. Spirit is out of business and Southwest is building lounges. I think we’ve reached the limit of how cheap people want their tickets to be.

I think it's really funny when people complain about not living in the golden age of air travel anymore and then go on to post corny goofball meme opinions about how anybody who flies in clothes that aren't sweatpants or pajamas is a serial killer or whatever.

It's not just now. I've flown in each decade between the 1970s and 2010s inclusive, and in each decade there was a measurable decline in airline quality.

Revealed preference only works with full information and availability (which is practically impossible). Consumers do not have the time to find out which clothing companies make the highest quality clothing for the lowest price, and no company is gonna be honest about their low quality clothing.

People tend to go for the lowest price and not think about that, through.

But people tend to not think about that when they buy tickets.