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Comment by jonawesomegreen | Hacker News Reader

This frustrates me to no end. I don't mind voting with my wallet and paying for more expensive things if they are better and built to last longer. However it seems a lot of things these days are just more expensive to be fashionable, to sell you a lifestyle full of expensive things that break easily and are not actually built better. I would love to be able to buy more simple, well made things.

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> I would love to be able to buy more simple, well made things

Problem is, if we are a minority of folks thinking this way, it won't make sense financially for manufacturers. What's happening with the buy-and-dispose generation is that nobody really cares about quality anymore - which is why the market is going in this way.

I don't think we are in the minority. I think most people would prefer to buy a better-made product that lasts even if it costs a bit more as in the long run it ends up being cheaper. This isn't in the manufacturer's interest though. They would rather sell you 5 or 10 vacuums over your lifetime rather than just 1. This puts more money in the manufacturers pocket and they have zero incentive to keep repair shops in business.

These days it is problematic to even know what products one should be buying because the quality of more brands than not is bad and many of these were well-designed products in the past that come from trusted name companies.

Minority or majority, to me the problem is the impossibility of determining what's quality anymore. "buy the expensive one" gets you plastic crap with more frills. "buy a trusted brand" doesnt' work when all the infinite brands - even formerly reputable ones like GE - are now just stickers for Chinese factories.

Impossibilty is a strong word. Sure, there are no standards bodies rating the quality of a product (those that exist tend to rate it as a "pass/fail" sort of thing.) But there's this thing called the internet where for any item you can think about you can find a tiny group of people obsessed about that item and ask them. It's the modern day "ask a repair shop"!

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

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