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I'm not a fan of overly complex consumer protection laws, but I would support a law that you can't falsely pass off your product as a different product that used to exist. If you substantially change the design and manufacture of the product, you have to give it new branding.

(i'm reminded of an old natgeo article about sweatshops in eastern europe where the correspondent watched women put Gap and Old Navy labels on identical garments, noting how one would sell for more than twice the other)

not everyone is like this, mr opinion-haver

There are many goods for which prices have fallen dramatically: tvs are a great example. But for most household goods, they haven't, but quality has.

We have multiple low-budget airlines with no first class seats, but AFAIK no first-class-only airlines on the public market. Not even an "economy plus" line with half the seats (2x2, 42 inch seat pitch) and twice the price and no other perks.

And the low cost / high quality goods should be made in the USA by union labor. Again, trade offs are a communist plot and not a real thing we need to engage with.

i wouldn’t talk like a Manchester factory owner while being wrong on the merits of what you’re talking about but that’s just me

No YOU want that.

(I think the private equity thing is in play but "cheap people make bad choices" is largely underrated as a factor. My impression is lots of folks don't even see "this will break soon and I'll have to replace it" as a downside because they get a little thrill when the next Amazon box appears)

The consumer also grasps variable pricing and the benefit it can provide despite what Senator Warren believes.

My crank take on this is that buying durable goods feels bad for people who have a consumerism addiction. They both miss the hit of buying replacement stuff and feel bad about buying multiple non-disposable items they won't use up.

It's like Gresham's Law, but for shopping

This shows that incomes have risen significantly at every level since 1980.

I'd argue that complaining about how cheaply things are made is part of the whole deal.

The effects will vary by market. I have seen consumer products sell a premium version for a nontrivial price increase, the sum of the differences were that the product was red, and washers were added so it felt heavier. When you have the market to do price discrimination, it’s good.

which is why Le Creuset and Staub are still in business...there's just not much in the middle zone anymore.

My personal theory is that boomers reach a certain age and have RMDs from 401ks now that make premium economy very attractive It’s demographics I’m not a marketer so don’t take my word for it

I always check Costco first for anything I want to buy. But if they don't have it, I find it really hard to research what's actually high quality. It's not always "you get what you pay for", because I've absolutely paid higher prices for stuff that turned out to be crap. :(

Costco isn’t perfect but the number of times we’ve been burned following my wife’s strategy of trusting Costco for this reason is like less than five, as opposed to all the times, everywhere else, for every conceivable item.

for a dollar? I'll buy three, use them for two years each, and throw them away when they break

I don't know for certain, but I'd expect Amazon has a significantly higher market share for most products than Costco

Costco is popular but limited. Amazon has a much broader footprint and reach.

They do deliver for a small fee. Might be worth at least looking into.

Too bad they're so far. I can't bike to them so they might as well be on the moon.

others that I think have done well in smaller silos are businesses like Dick’s Sporting Goods or Scheels, they have reliable and competitive athletic gear, and you don’t have to sweat some weird knock-off

I've always been joking that Amazon is merely American AliExpress

People are really missing that the outcome of this is people just buy the cheapest option.

of which versions were fake in the reviews. Exact same issue with Smooche Korean foundation. Then there are the ads on Youtube and in my games for things that cannot possibly exist and if they did would be society changing. Just scam after scam... its exhausting!

Every market is the Market for Lemons to some extent.

America’s Test Kitchen? I still think Reddit offers a lot of useful product knowledge if you know where to look for it but there’s definitely more marketing litter than there used to be.

I have definitely highlighted shoddy construction or even a safety issue when making the videos. For personal purchases, I have learned a neat trick: Sort videos by "recent". Brands usually get a bunch of fakes at once and then stop paying for them. Also, it helps to see if there's a recent defect

Thus would seem to fly in the face of your claim no? That people are desperate for stuff that doesn’t suck and often spend a lot of time and energy trying to get that stuff.

It’s excellent but doesn’t cover everything. A lot, but not everything. I always use it for big purchases and rarely buy the cheapest.

I was an Amazon reviewer for years, never received cash (in fact paid taxes on the items I reviewed). I tested everything thoroughly & wrote long, detailed reviews. Then 3rd party sellers realized it was easier to flood the zone with bots that wrote 5⭐ reviews like "good"

I'm a fan of the three star review. Five stars can give some good context/background. Occasionally one-star will give a genuine vibe for shite. But three star folks tend to be real. * also, if the low stars are all about packaging, the product is probably solid.

I'd go with the second just because I'm not convinced comparison is all that hard. E.g. if you look up flights they immediately divide into two or three tiers by cost and everyone knows what those tiers mean. Amazon is full of lies, but returns are easy.

I got a card in a product ftom Amazon making this exact proposition & reported tye seller to Amazon. Their response was "c'mon buddy you don't like gift certificates?"

Do you not see how this is possibly inconsistent with it being the revealed preference that people just want cheap, poorly made goods?

NY Mag and NYT to triangulate on basically any purchase over $30 that I can't get at Costco

So do you plan to address how this directly contradicts your view at the start of the thread?

Amazon reviews are a source but look at the one star reviews first. And use other sources

I actually find 3- or 4-star reviews pretty useful. There's often discussion of flaws in the product, and whether it's worth the tradeoff.

I find that reddit is good at filtering out garbage, but reddit [product category]-enthusiasts seem to regularly hyperfocus on features that normies don't care about. I don't want a speedqueen topload washer will (/may) last ~forever... while causing 2x the wear to my clothes.

My partner says one of my greatest assets is my ability to research internet purchases.

i want to note as someone who lives in asia that i *regularly* get spam texts/messages trying to recruit me to review-bot on the regional shopping websites

Yep, a friend received random, quite expensive stuff from Amazon over a few months. presumably hoping for 5* reviews

This somewhat undermines the revealed preference case. Being hard to tell the junk apart from quality pushes price to be the determining factor.

Vimes’ boots theory except it’s both rich and poor would rather throw out their boots every year than resole them because labor cost of resoling and opportunity cost of going to a cobbler and back to pick them up are higher than ordering a new pair to your door. Vimes-Baumol-Amazon prime theory.

But as a consumer you don't know if a higher price also equals higher quality. You can spend much more money on shoes and they come out of the same factory than cheaper shows.

They've been made by NPS in Northamptonshire for years and their Solovair range is functionally identical and much cheaper, fyi.

How can someone say finding quality is not *possible*? What a weird and false thing to say.

Absolutely insane take to argue it’s not possible to buy good long lasting clothes. At this moment I’m wearing $35 pants that I bought 4 years ago and wear all the time and they’re fine. What is this obsessive need to insist the world is 100% horrible and there is no escape?

The same issue arises where a lot of fashion houses have their "diffusion" line, a la Armani Exchange or Canali Proposta

And you can consult an inflation calculator and see that the English doc martens cost twice as much as they did the 80s, accounting for inflation!!

This is a good example to both sides this. (Not just PE but brands generally are) Bringing out lower price point items playing off their premium name and people are disappointed. But those are people who would never have afforded the item before and many don't realise this.

When I was in the Lodge store, I was told by the staff that the Lodge products sold in Target and other big retailers are what are sold in the Lodge Store as factory seconds - still made by Lodge in the US, but not quite the quality that qualifies for the regular full Lodge price.

Yes, you can buy high quality denim, made on american machines that were sold to Japanese companies when private equity gutted their American owners. I think you should investigate these dynamics a bit further in general.

But how can I know that those Docs and Levis are the same as they were?

I just wish these fit my feet (and have been wishing for 35 years).

"Popular" or "affordable"? This being boots is just very fitting. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_t...

Do they sell these at regular shoe stores? or do I have to know about this from digging online? because if it's the latter, that's a really wack thing to assume that people should do this

I buy almost exclusively vintage clothes of (except underwear and socks), which are often well made with nice materials - silk, linen, cotton, wool; the new stuff I get, even sold at Costco, doesn’t seem well made anymore (I’m going to email them and let them know)

ehhhhh.... this isn't completely accurate. As someone who was in the market for new Docs a few years ago the Solovairs are better than the current stuff sold as docs but worse than the original Docs. Better, and worse! And there's tons of stuff like that. Overall enshittification but there's tiers.

Onitsuka Tiger also sells higher quality, made in Japan shoes that showcase craftsmanship. Of course, their cheaper mass produced shoes are more popular.

Fair enough, but at the same time, the whole point of the cheaper option is that they look exactly like the real deal until it's too late. By appearances, they're offering two functionally identical footwear options but one of them is $100 cheaper than the other.

This is a great illustration of the problem that the person you quoted has: you thought your superior knowledge of market conditions was enough to avoid degraded products, only to find that you actually needed to know about a third shoe brand that you can pay $60 extra for them to not fall apart

”high quality Japanese-made Levi’s 501s ” If I dont know that they make those in Japan (I did not), I am not able to purchase them, even if I wanted to. PS Desigual t-shirts last ages and bc of their design, even when they start having holes, thise holes look like they are meant to be there!

But you just said we can't tell without hours of research!

Well this certainly was unpopular.

Are they less popular due to more limited availability? Or is this just Sam Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness in action?

You can get good (not the Japanese stuff) 501s for about $90. I have seven pair. I love them! So much better than the base, cheap versions. That's not even mentioning all the niche brands. You can just go to the Levi's website and order them with free shipping.

Any idea if the english ones have a steel shank?

Hard to take serious the socio-economical takes of someone who falls for marketing like this.

Eh the British made Docs are still inferior to vintage Docs and were a bit of marketing after the whole China fiasco. Solovair are the way to go for OG "Docs"

Price is a number but quality is nearly unquantifiable. If you know little or nothing about a product or industry, and most consumers do especially online when you can’t even hold it, it just makes sense to buy cheapest. Because too often things are expensive crap.

I honestly just don't trust a lot of semi-consumable stuff like clothes and shoes to last long enough to justify the premium price.

You can’t trust Reddit any more. There are plenty of bots & shills. There are even companies that explicitly offer this as a service

This completely contradicts your original point!

ButIt is not hard to found which stuff is genuine shitty quality and buy those. It’s like everything in Temu.

Quitting Amazon and Target in 2025 was the best thing I've done to reduce my consumption in general and crap specifically. I still buy things but I'm way more intentional about it.

I wonder how much of it is that the retailer’s liability for marketplace sales were, until very recently, non existent compared to brick and mortar stores. Even now, it seems like Amazon’s requirement is limited to removing the seller

Forgive me for not knowing the correct term. What I mean was not $$ after taxes but $$ after essential bills are paid. Considering inflation, real unemployment, and the number of people kicked off Medicaid and ACA, people have less to spend on stuff and upgrading airfare.

I think people are poor, actually.