Why There Are More Consumer Goods Than Ever | Hacker News Reader

Why There Are More Consumer Goods Than Ever

wsj.com

26 pointsuptown58 comments

Is anyone else amazed at the absolutely magical era of time in which we live?

I don't know which is more awesome: 1) I can find a product that fits my need more exactly than I could ever have expected ten years ago, 2) that I can get information, recommendations and reviews in order to buy these things with confidence, or 3) that something even more awesome will come out a couple years later.

It gets even better because I can take part in all this: I can make an app that fills a specific need (literally, I made an app to calm a crying baby) and without advertising at all, I can ship it to tens of thousands of people around the world just by reviews and word of mouth.

I get so excited just thinking about this stuff and how much greater the future will get, and at an accelerating pace!

yes consuming things certainly is wonderful, imagine how excited all the people who make them must be

They are probably pretty excited to get paid far more than they could by farming. In China incomes have gone from 2000 yuan a year farming, to 2000 yuan a month or more working in factories. Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage works great in theory and practice, if you are open minded enough to look at all the evidence.

Paul Krugman has a great article on this BTW: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm

Since no one else had chimed in, I will report that yes I too am flabbergasted befuddled stupefied and completely amazed at the magical time we live in, which as you said gets better on a seemingly weekly basis at this point.

And VR hasn't even gone mainstream yet. What a wild ride we're on indeed

Is it? The razor I bought can't cut hair, the laptop I got has a stupidly nosiy fan, the phone I bought has a rapidly diminishing battery life, the headset I bought makes a constant hiss, my OS and TV now spy on me. Do I even own my steam games? I have to rent my music and TV to get it at a reasonable price, but songs and shows disappear without explanation or warning.

It seems to me things are worse than they used to be, it's harder than ever to find quality products, even meticulously researching everything.

And that's before we even get onto forced obselence.

Maybe I'm becoming a grump as I grow older but electronics brands you used to be able to trust are no longer sure bets and everything seems to have a nasty gotcha spyware or horrid EULA.

Edit: although I do admit there's a lot of magical things, I love my Kindle, I love how my phone synchs with my Kindle when I'm in random queue, I love being able to get + give directions from my phone in random places.

I just feel overall quality of goods has gone down as they become (worringly for the environment) disposible and consumers are losing control as their stuff is no longer theirs.

Maybe a case of increasing expectation. Owning your own movie or game was never all that cool - what with losing them, or scratching the CD, or the platform changing so they didn't run any more. Steam beats all that, at a cost of course.

The chaotic state of shows and songs is another story. My outlet (e.g. Netflix) has shifting contracts and terms that are opaque to me. So I miss out by procrastinating. Still its better than broadcast TV ever was! That was somebody else deciding every night what I would watch.

I'm an old grump too. But really, I should just have more patience when my phone won't connect. Its going to space after all!

>Owning your own movie or game was never all that cool - what with losing them, or scratching the CD, or the platform changing so they didn't run any more. Steam beats all that, at a cost of course.

So we replaced a flawed physical medium with a digital medium which, theoretically, should solve all those problems. But dark patterns, bad licensing terms, and loads of other problems (that are often the results of purposeful decisions) make that digital medium just as flawed.

Differently flawed. And actually very useful as it is - I log many more hours now playing (instead of thrashing over problems) because it almost always works. Wherever I am; whatever machine I'm on. There's no denying the benefits.

Yeah, and unfortunately, Netflix is more and more changing not just their contract/terms. Their main interface is breathtakingly annoying to use these days. I'd say that it's along the same spectrum of annoyance that the parent post is talking about. My expectations were increasing because the quality was increasing at the same rate. Now my expectations for them, despite all they've done, has fallen flat and dull. The most redeeming thing out of them these days for me is reading their tech blog, which isn't shoved down my throat unlike their own media content. :)

At the risk of sounding like a hipster, I got rid of my TV and phone, along with a bunch of other personal affects and my happiness has gone through the roof. No need to have my expectations fail on when it's not even relevant. Obviously this can't happen for everyone, but it's something I recommend.

The laptop has that fan because it needs to move all that hot air the CPU, GPU and whatevever-else-U that is doing who knows what inside the chassis.

Similarly with the phone. The old phone did one thing, make and receive calls. Your new phone is in contact with a number of servers constantly, monitors location, gravity (screen rotation), proximity (so your ear do not hang up on people), and a bunch of other stuff.

Also, while improving hardware is about using fewer atoms to do the same job, battery is age old chemistry. End result is that it takes longer to make better batteries. Never mind that more energetic batteries can be lethal if they are anything less than rugged.

But yeah, creeping featuritis is a persistent problem.

You can still buy music. I recently bought a bunch of CDs for like $10 each. I've stored them in Amazon Cloud Drive for now. If that disappears without warning and my hard drive fails at the same time, I can rip them again.

"Electronics brands you used to be able to trust" only had that trust from historical establishment. I would argue that there are still brands that are trustworthy. They're just different brands. In 20 years we'll be talking about the same thing from a different reference point.

For all of your other complaints (which I do agree with, for what it's worth), there has been a trade-off. Razors are smaller and in cartridge form because the market decided it was more important to shave quickly and conveniently than to be able to have the closest shave possible on your neck and your head. The phone you have has rapidly diminishing battery life because it has a display that rivals your computer's monitor in fidelity.

I could go on, but I'm sure you know this already. I've been having my own "grumpy old man" moments lately, so this post hit a little close to home. I've been trying to keep in mind that behind those complaints, there's probably a value proposition somewhere. Find it and exploit it. It can only make the world better.

And that "nasty gotcha spyware?" The horrid EULA? If you're as old as you sound, you know that's been the case for a long, long time. It's as easy to avoid now as it was then. You don't have to go full Stallman. Just be a savvy consumer.

The trust thing has largely been sacrificed to placate the shareholders chasing that 3% annual growth.

This even though said growth only really showed up during the industrial revolution and after WW2.

The first because it was the first ever industrialization, and the second because much of Europe's industrial capacity had been blasted to bits.

In essence, shareholders (and their useful idiots, the economists) expect infinite compound growth while living in a finite environment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem

There are entire cottage industries online of excellent inexpensive razors, laptops with less noisy fans, and good headphones. You have a choice whether to buy the Walmart version of a product or the good version, and both are cheaper relatively compared to 20 years ago.

That said, healthcare, education and real estate and much more expensive now, which are three of the things that matter most...

More products that I don't really need, more time and money wasted to buy those products, more pollution... Not sure we're ultimately more happy with this.

When the only thing you can conceive of is how another product can fulfill a "need", than I guess yes, what an amazing future. But if you consider the fact that a large majority of americans are living lives that are fundamentally as bad as they were 40 years ago, then no, its a pathetic future.

Discrimination of all kinds - racism, sexism, homophobia - are still extremely prevalent. People are killed because of the color of their skin. These are not just problems in "third world" countries, but problems in the biggest cities in America. These are just problems of "intraracial crime", but perpetrated by government officials who are supposed to protect the very innocents they are killing.

So no, I dont think this is an amazing time. But maybe the next consumer product can solve some of those problems.

Life in most places has improved dramatically - literacy, healthcare and life expectancy, human rights, access to food... Nearly nobody is living lives that are "fundamentally as bad as they were 40 years ago".

There are literally millions of people worldwide, who are healthy, or married, or well nourished, or spending more time with their families, for whom it could not have been possible 40 years ago. I don't think that warrants a flippant, self-righteous attitude.

There are more people living in slavery today than ever before in human history.

These things are not binary.

Violence is trending downward, in the US and worldwide.

Racism, sexism and homophobia are also trending downward, at least in the US (we just barely legalized same-sex marriage, a significant step forward).

Concerns about these things have spiked the last few years, but that doesn't mean that these problems have spiked.

And having products that solve my problems isn't just materialism, it does matter - It matters that I have products that save me time and let me focus on more important things. It matters that I have better products. It matters that my child is safer than 40 years ago from better playgrounds. It matters that my son's mom has an app that can send me her location with a tap of a button when she's having a seizure. It matters that I can take cheap online courses to improve my career. It even matters that I have more music in my car, because that makes me happier.

Edit: Adding this because it's awesome: http://www.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly...

>It matters that my child is safer than 40 years ago from better playgrounds.

thats so great. we made the playground equipment safer so your kids can play on it, meanwhile, a black child is gunned down by police on that playground.

All of your points of reference only seem to reveal that you have no perspective into the actual big problems that still plague all our societies, problems that consumer problems dont even attempt to solve and probably cant solve. But im glad you have more music in your car.

Yes, I am too amazed by the consumerist culture that manufactures sense of need that we imagine we are fullfulling the higher levels of maslowian pyramid but instead are just responding to a conditioning.

If I had a timemachine I would take Mr. Maslow, take him to our time, and say: "You had a fantastic room. But behold! We've succeeded in turning the entire planet into a conditioning chamber with 'the internet' and the Facebook. Dogs? We use humans as our subjects. How many? Well, now we are in the low billions but eventually we will have them all.

which product do i consume to get happiness?

Recreational Marijuana, they only actual great new product from the past few years

I believe we live in an extraordinary period in history. By that I mean a unique period that didn't happen before and that won't likely happen again after it has ended. We're able to make so much stuff because we're burning energy at an unsustainable rate to do so, in the form of fossil fuels, much faster than we could manage realistically with renewables alone. This will come to an end eventually, either by collective suicide via destruction of our own ecosystem, or voluntarily once we realize that we need to seriously lower our greenhouse gas emissions to survive.

Just keep in mind that lot of those reviews are in fact fake. With all the native advertising, fake testimonials and reviews I'd be somewhat reserved to believe anything online.

Compounded with things like 3d printing...e.g. Our shed came with 6 plastic hangers and 36-ish slots for them. A few minutes with a CAD package and I'm printing out a bunch more at a unit cost of $.18 a piece...if I upload the model, another person can also print as many as they want for next to nothing.

Then there's Trader Joe's, with a limited selection of reasonably good items at reasonably good prices to make reasonably good profits.

With the paradox of choice, this many products often make us less satisfied and more unhappy.

https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_c...

I have major objections to this talk. The speaker claims that choice itself is the issue. I disagree - choice is not the issue. The issue is an inability to make decisions when presented with hundreds of possibilities & to not be upset over poor outcomes that our choices create, and our ability to make these choices is a recent phenomenon that has finally caused this issue to surface.

Consider his point on salad dressing (paraphrased):

> If you buy one of the 100 available salad dressings & you don't like it,

> it's easy to imagine what things would have been like if you had chosen a

> better one & suddenly you're disappointed.

Well sure, I'll be disappointed. But then I'll just try a different one next time and repeat until I find some dressings that I do like, and now I'm happy. If there wasn't choice here, I would be perpetually unsatisfied.

Regarding paralysis when confronted with too many choices, I think this is just a temporary artifact as we're making the transition to having more options. The first few times I went shopping for shoes at a shoe store, I tried on tens of pairs and debated the pros and cons of various shoes for over an hour under the assumption that of all the shoes in the store, only one would be the best one for me. Now I know that this isn't the case. There are several shoes that I'll be completely satisfied with, and now there are enough of them that the store has specific sections where probably a good 20% of them will meet all the requirements I have. So I find the first one that meets all my goals, and then I buy it. The process takes < 10 minutes.

This is actually less time than it previously would have taken, as the candidate shoes would previously have been spread over different sections and not one of them would match all my requirements, leading me to have to make a conscious decision on what to sacrifice. And now that my decision carries more weight, I would spend more time deliberating and hence the trip to the shoe store would take longer & I'd be disappointed at the time I lost.

No, the author cherry-picks his points & confuses his own limitations as being indicative of a problem with the existence of choice rather than a personal limitation because - guess what? - he doesn't want to blame himself for his own lack of satisfaction.

"the author is just cherry picking but my cherry picked anecdotal story related to me proves he's wrong"

I intended for my shoe story to be a rebuttal against the speaker's pants story, as the scenarios are essentially identical if you substitute "shoes" for "pants". Perhaps the argument would have been more valid had I skipped that and just directly addressed the long-term results of his pants encounter instead.

Yes, but there are fewer merchants than over. 50% of e-commerce goes through 12 merchants. Consolidation is insane in digital commerce. So yes, we can buy many more products but through fewer and fewer merchants giving them huge power. Amaozn alone accounts for 30% of e-commerce

I am ok with this, as a consumer and user of these sites. You know how annoying it would be to have different logins for every dinky little product I want to buy?

Keep in mind that well over 50% of amazon merchandise sales are from 3rd party sellers - basically small businesses. A bunch of other big players have significant 3rd party marketplace models - eBay, Newegg, and more.

Sadly this means that there is a very big caveat emptor factor involved.

Ebay at least is up front about it, as it is basically an auction house for anyone.

But Amazon and Newegg is in a sense lending credibility to any fly by night reseller from who knows where.

When you buy from a big name store front you expect someone working at their supply end has assessed the product as worth the risk of stocking. But with the likes of Amazon, seemingly anyone can start offering products through them.

Consider for example a recent story here on HN about a USB charger that had a damaged transformer. It was giving out straight 240V (European model) to the USB end.

Generally reviews are meant to solve this problem - both internal amazon metrics (which vendors are punished for severely if they are bad) and external customer metrics.

Nope those don't work anymore.

Amazon lends it's credibility by vouching for their third party sellers though. If you have a problem with something, Amazon customer support will make you whole again.

Newegg does what you mentioned though. They're basically putting you into a wild-west type situation where the merchant can do anything they want to you and newegg will just remind you that you have no protection when working with a newegg merchant.

>But Amazon and Newegg is in a sense lending credibility to any fly by night reseller from who knows where.

On the flip side, Amazon and Newegg also handle the transaction processing and anti-fraud, which has a lot of value.

Isn't that just a temporary thing and the end results of Amazon's platform is either manufacturers selling directly to consumers or selling to Amazon ? What value does a 3rd party create in such world ?

At first I think "wow, what a price for those jeans!" Then I watch the documentary 'China blue', and then I think "wow, what a price for those jeans".

I feel like quality has plummeted. The last 4 toy boats I've bought have top sized or sunk. How hard is it to test a toy boat in water before you mass produce?

I think we're relearning how to produce and market quality goods now that all manufacturing has moved to China. Lately I've been preferring to buy from target or Walmart over Amazon since I know they have a purchasing team that vets products before allowing them on their shelves. (Not always though). But they should do more of this since it would be a great differentiator for brick and mortar retailers.

I agree, and I've observed this on multiple products. The most recent was a hair trimmer that I replaced with the same brand and model.

It's unfortunate how there's an ever quickening velocity of consumption. Not sure who exactly is to blame, but I think both consumers and companies play their part.

Are there any reasons why we shouldn't expect there to be more consumer goods than ever?

Yea seriously. "Because the economy is bigger than ever"

Since durable goods[0], by definition, last a multiple of the time it takes to create them, we would have more simply by making more at a set rate over a period of time. As our population grows, if the same percentage of our labor force goes into making durable goods, the quantity of durable goods created would also increase over time. In short, I agree completely.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durable_goods

If the price goes to near-negligible, and people (eventually) reach some saturation level for the amount of easily replaceable stuff they have access to, what will a feeling of infinite supply do to consumer demand? Surely you can only need or use a certain amount of stuff. And what will this do to the value of money if having more money doesn't change your life much. Is money becoming worthless?

other fun facts: modern advertising exists because factories were churning out so many products that they needed to figure out how to sell them all. advertising was created to recruit consumers to buy all this shit.

Henry Ford doubled his workers' wages so they could afford to buy it all, too. Or at least the ones they made.

How do I read this article?

Pay money to the Wall Street Journal.

Google the headline and access it through the search results.

Google the title, then right-click WSJ result and open in incognito window.

That's what I do.

Also to save you from having to google the title, you can click the "web" link below the headline if you are viewing the comments.

Click "Web" below the article title on HackerNews. Then click the first result in the Google search.

I have this bookmarklet for such articles: javascript:window.location=https://www.google.com/search?q=window.location

TLDR: because of Facebook ad microtargeting.

In a related fact, consumer debt normalized to household income has also increased massively[0].

[0] http://www.money-zine.com/financial-planning/debt-consolidat...

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