Maybe people end up shunning the companies and goods made by robots. People return to a barter system.
There are exceptions, but the world I see as served by capitalism is one of cheap, frustrating crap that keeps optimizing toward even worse quality, and overpriced (overpriced compared to an imagined world where the magic of market efficiency were brought to bear on it) nice things, and little in between. So much for choice.
So I don't see anyone deciding to pay 10x what the crap costs (no economies of scale kicking in or it'd be 3-4x, in a perfect world, but hey) and 1/3 what luxury goods cost for handmade mid-range. They'll bump up and have real quality plus the public image and ego-boost that goes with it, or have 10x as much crap-tier stuff instead. This is in part because people want more stuff, all other thing being equal, and in part because no-one's got the time to figure out how to evaluate quality in more than a small fraction of what they buy (this is why the mid-range is a no-man's land—your market is budget conscious but discerning, educated consumers, which is to say, you're screwed). The consequence is that without regulation setting a highish floor on how awful products can be, we get the deep bathtub shaped graph of supply on the Y and Price/quality on the X, necessarily. There's no room for semi-affordable goods with a human touch. That's just how it is. :-/
Also, nitpick: per Graeber, barter is where you go forward from money when money is temporarily not working, not something that you return to from money, since it didn't, in any meaningful way, represent a step on the way to money.
Also, the ever-rising high-end of the market gets lifted up partially by easy access to credit. If fewer people had access to credit cards, maybe those high-end products would gravitate more towards the mid-range as well.
The quality bathtub graph falls out of that. Not enough confident mid-range buyers to pay 10x the crap price, so you never get to a scale where you can (and/or are forced to by competition) drop to 4-5x the crap price (multipliers pulled from thin air, obviously, and are just representative of some real values).
[EDIT] in fact, to take your example, you may need to know at least a little about jeans to be sure the $60 jeans will last at least 3x as long as the $20 ones, and with more knowledge and time shopping you might be able to find a $40 pair that'd last even longer than the $60 ones. The fact that the $60 pair might still be crap is the real problem.
Personally, I like Lee these days. They're good quality, not as expensive as Levi's, and not as crappy as the off-brand stuff, and seem to fit pretty well.
Currently, I am also trying out a couple of pairs of tactical pants made by LA Police Gear - they were fairly cheap ($30.00 a pair), but seem to be pretty good quality. I only wear them for hiking, and so far for the past 6 months they've held up well. They aren't exactly "stylish" though.
Machines can make perfectly fine products, and if they fail, you usually see it right after purchase while the warranty is on.
The more annoying issue is of shitty design, sometime to save a few cents(shitty motherboard capacitors, shitty earphone hinge), sometimes intentionally - like toyota seeing some model getting to a 300K-1M miles lifetime - and changing a chain to make it 100K, i think.
>> no-one's got the time to figure out how to evaluate quality in more than a small fraction of what they buy
Why should that be hard ? why can't i go to some e-commerce site, and see a reliable evaluation of the lifetime of a product ? of the quality of the main parameters ? With some option to comparison shop on those ?
If you do find someone serving up quality mid-priced stuff, they'll probably be disproportionally expensive for what they are (if not as high as the luxury market, assuming there is one for that product) for reasons of low scale and the tiny market of informed consumers providing less support for competition.
It's not that no-one ever becomes an informed consumer of any product—it's that so few do that it's hard to sustain oneself selling real quality to bargain-seeking informed consumers, and when a company manages to they have trouble scaling to a point that they can lower prices and capture more market share. There's also less room for competition to survive, so there goes another price-lowering mechanism. And good luck getting distribution when retailers make a better margin selling faux-quality at the same price. It's not that you can't ever possibly succeed doing that, it's that it tends to be much harder, resulting in the observed crap/ripoff/luxury (luxury category not always existing for all products) categories of so many goods in practice.
Incidentally, agreed about good machine-made things being possible. Maybe small scale manufacturing/fabrication will get really cheap and break us out of this mess. As it is, they don't usually design the robots to make good stuff (if you can point me to machine-made knotted wool rugs that'll last 100 years at a substantial discount from the hand-knotted variety, ideally without my having to become a rug expert to verify that they really are similarly durable, please do)
But the question is - how do we change this situation?
Because there must be a way, since there are a lot of tools that can be combined for solution -crowdsourcing, including crowdsourcing engineers analysis, the easiness which one can create a niche retailer, the rich chinese manufacturing ecosystem(where there are even small companies making electric cars), the ability to order customer parts to replace the weak link in a product before breakage or just do preventive strengthening with some glue(I.e. earphone hinges) , etc...
If you want people to shun goods made by robots, you should campaign for visible "MADE BY ROBOTS" markings on relevant products, educate people why this is bad, and maybe also tax such produce extra for a good measure. Of course, it may not work very well, may have an opposite effect (see "Made In Germany" story), and will definitely introduce potential for abuse and gaming of the system.
A Raspi Zero W, plus a 3G (or 4G if you want to spend the money) module, plus a few other sensors and a screen - and a 3D printed case, etc - are virtually all you need.
Again, though - not most people's idea of a smartphone (I've given thought about building such a thing, though).
>and a 3D printed case
That's not allowed. The requirement was for something "hand made". 3D printing is robotic, so you can't do that. You have to make the case by hand from a block of plastic with unpowered hand tools.