The long golden age of our glorified junk
lithub.com
lithub.com
"The encrappification of America dates back centuries. While there were, undoubtedly, once village blacksmiths who forged brittle nails, farm women who adulterated their butter, and tailors who cut corners, these were the exceptions. Most things were made by skilled and reputable hands working with good intentions, supplying the needs of people within local communities. "
That's a tremendous assertion to make, and it's more about the author's particular view of an ideal past than anything. Golden Age thinking tends to assume people were better in the past in some way, as opposed to being like us but just with different challenges to face. It's not really responsible to keep that premise unexamined.
Crappy copper ingots circa 1750 BC.
It's classic confirmation bias.
For another example, I own a 1972 Dodge. I love that car, but having taken it apart and put it back together, I know that by almost every metric it is a vastly inferior car from modern cars. But frankly, I love it for its brute force and ignorance approach to performance. I like the crudely made parts, the factory paint drips, the uneven pillar joins, the cheap plastic fake woodgrain dash, the lousy factory paint job, the unapologetically crude method of achieving performance, the utter lack of electronics, etc.
We never talk about it like this, but almost the entire food supply of most places was "organic" until very recently.
https://bookshop.org/books/crap-a-history-of-cheap-stuff-in-...
Arguably an actual example of its own subject matter.
Author: Useless, American Crap ... materialism with a certain shoddy complexion
Someone: Not to me, not when I bought it. And if you don't like my style, I can live with that. Also, if you can afford classy, high quality stuff, congrats on your privilege. But there are good reasons for me to be a ruthless value shopper.
The point is that if you look at middle-class Americans, they do have an astounding amount of crap in their homes, even when compared to equivalently wealthy people in other nations.
Having been around the world a bunch, the material excess of the American middle class is real and true. Precisely _because_ people don't give much thought to the creap stuff they're buying and, frankly, because the suburban middle class lifestyle isn't exactly rich in the aesthetic appreciation for high-quality goods when 90% of the stuff you buy comes from department stores that have appeared in the last 50 years.
Not to say that there _aren't_ enormous benefits to having access to a gigantic market of every material object you could ever possibly need.
But as I look at most boomer's houses, the vast majority are drowning in a sea of totally useless objects, half-broken, that have never found great use and are just sitting there taking up space. Most of my friends in their 30s share a similar opinion about that generation's attitude towards consumption.
I do think the Internet has made for better consumers when it comes to niche objects, and after material overflow was no longer a status indicator, we decided to drill into higher quality, "nice" things. But consumerist culture lives on.
Of course, organizing things so that they are ergonomic to access instead of piled in a sea of boxes is a significant expense. I started small, with binders and bins to start managing small items, manuals, reciepts and warranty cards. This immediately cleared out over a cubic meter of gadget boxes.
Then I got book bins, over-door hooks and spice rack shelves, cable ties, and other miscellaneous things which have had similar small, incremental effects. I made a big leap forward in rediscovering the cafeteria tray - for a cost of about $2.70 each depending on size and brand, it's possible to quickly restructure most piles of small objects as a slide-to-access open drawer, and then further divide it with pencil bins. This has tamed most of the immediate stuff around me, but still leaves the piles of boxes. I realized that part of the problem of working on boxes is that you can stack them, and to access any one you have to unstack, which creates a friction to persistent ongoing effort: to actually organize instead of "shove around the pile" means paying attention to the ergonomics. So the next big leap will be in structuring the piles with additional shelving. The goal of these shelves is assistive - to eventually not need them because I have cleared out so much redundancy.
And spending on all this does come with the irony that I am a consumer who buys even more to ameliorate the effects of overconsuming. But it does so in a narratively palatable way, one which develops a new respect for each object as I create the place for it. And I think that's really the way forward for me - to extend the KonMari idea of "brings joy" and thanking the item towards some kind of mutual support where you improve access and therefore usage. In contrast my parents' generation mostly focused on presenting a clean uniformity for socializing while shoving any excess crap in the closet, holding out hope that it would one day find its use - a uniformity that was in fact quite specific to their generation.
My brother has a slightly different perspective on this since he has family and kids, and I have been there for the Christmas present unwrappings. They end up with far too many toys, but the relatives are all too eager to be seen doing something for the kids. It's a battle to overcome that and select a few favorite toys, and I can see my own difficulty as a "too many toys" kind of thing, too.
Used SnapOn tools can be a pretty decent deal (especially for a lifetime tool) and I honestly wish that I'd known the difference and started buying SnapOn rather than Craftsman for some of mechanics hand tools I bought when I was younger. They really are notably better, especially the 72-tooth 1/4" and Dual-80 3/8" ratchets. (I see they've got some newer 100-tooth 3/8" ratchets.)
If you work on cars or machinery and haven't tried any SnapOn tools, I'd give one of their ratchets a try. There's a reason they're popular among working mechanics. It's not just status.
If you want to buy new easily or spend some time browsing around, use the web shop: https://shop.snapon.com/ When I need a specialty tool or service kit, I'll buy it from the webshop.
I buy most of mine from Ebay, from classified ads on garagejournal.com, and from craigslist. There are people who want 75+% of new price, but if you look around and have patience, you can find some sales in the 35-50% of new pricing, which I find acceptable.
In terms of alternatives, I would put Matco and Mac tools slightly below SnapOn. Note also that SnapOn has a Bluepoint brand as well that is not "real SnapOn quality" in my experience (but is also cheaper).
Edit to add: They also have (or had) a program for trade school educational discounts, so if you have a trade school nearby, you might see if a student is running a side hustle there. That will get you the newest tools but the discount isn't as deep as buying third-hand from someone who scoured flea markets, estate sales, and bankruptcy sales and then repackaged/remarketed the tools to you in a more convenient way.
Dollars are America's chief export, and our country is geared around this, from absurd household finances, to imports buying dollars with the shittiest stuff they can get away with.
This comment actually gets at my own curiosity about manufacturing.
I start with my experienced in the Restaurant industry. You have some people who open grab and go, and hope only to franchise. You have some young chef who opens in a vacant/former kitchen hoping to make his organic vegan dreams a reality. And a serial entrepreneur of hot spots. All other things being equal, they are competing on location, product quality, and marketing.
Near my home is Walmart, Target, Marshalls (second market clothes), Nordstrom Rack (second market for Nordstrom). You can shop at each and, when the fashion stars align, you can find the "same item" (IE. summer cotton beige unlined sport coat) at each location with nearly identical materials & finish, yet each is set at increasingly higher prices (competing on marketing).
What's the difference between "Eames" molded fiberglass wire base side chair ($400) and knockoff molded plastic ($80)? Quality of materials. Fit and finish. Quality control (competing on cost of goods, skilled labor, and capital asset/investments)
The capital investments increase as you go from restaurant to clothing to furniture (and beyond, ie. auto manufacturing or space rockets).
If you look at the cost and investment at the high-end, it stands to reason it would take generations to move a company from creating 'low quality' products to high quality, or you're just happy right were you are (Making Crap since 1929). Or, you step in s#!t, make zillions processing online transactions in finance, then jump into electric auto-manufacturing. haha. It seems so interesting. If you add environmental impact, jobs created, impact on the economy, and even the most boring 4th generation crap manufacturer is dramatic story.
On the book, seems the author is talking about another thing entirely--'useless' low quality items--novelty items, souvenirs. I recall reading somewhere about religious pilgrimage circuits in Europe (for hundreds of years) where pilgrims could 'buy' 'souvenirs'.
I wonder if you don't necessarily need a wealthy economy. Rather, you need disposable income, and in modern times, low-cost plastics industry, international shipping, and cultures of collecting, plus cultural 'stories' (sports teams, super heroes, music industry, arts, crafts) which give rise to creative expressions of the culture.
And why all this 'crap'? Money money money. Jobs jobs jobs. (ie. Halmark created holidays to sell more cards; not wealth, per se, but disposable income).
There was no way to replace a high-quality fabric (cloth) or material (for example of a chair) by some synthetic matter. Assembly and finish quality were easy to assess (out of rare high-end objects which were pieces of art). A restaurant couldn't sell a meal which is in fact some industrially-produced sh*t.
We are more and more professionally specialized, and therefore less and less able to really understand what stands before our eyes if it isn't at least related to our discipline of choice.
Marketing exploits this by infusing vague conceptions, mainly 'if it comes from brand X, it has to be of high quality'.
I'm doing my best here to make my point without flaming other cultures. We as Americans get blamed a whole lot when things go bad. I think this writer is engaging in lazy projection. Stop buying the crap and you'll stop seeing the crap. (I don't like this piece, if you can't tell.)
I'm a big believer in buying quality stuff and repairing it when it breaks. I try to do my part to NOT buy the junk. But this fake history lesson in how all this garbage is the fault of American's is just low-rate in my opinion.
It used to be possible to pay somewhat more to buy good quality products that would last for years or decades (obviously not for electronics) but today the manufacturers of these goods charge the same prices but their products are no better than Amazon/Walmart-grade junk available for half the price.
The contemporary marketplace is littered with companies that used to produce high quality goods but are now selling away their former reputation to move overpriced garbage. See everything from Cole Haan (shoes) to Sears.
And frankly, I do blame Americans for this. American refusal to enforce anti-monopoly laws, combined with the American legal concept of management fiduciary duty belonging exclusively to shareholders, provides no market incentive for manufacturers to produce quality goods and indeed obligates companies to rip off their customers by selling low-quality goods at inflated prices.
As an example, I'll use flash memory devices (USB thumb drives). I used to consult for a firm that assembled these things as part of their business for use by corporate customers. They would buy flash memory chips from various chip vendors. You can, if you wish, purchase flash memory chips that have passed stringent tests. Or chips that have been rejected by other OEM's. Guess which ones cost more? Some of my client's customers demanded the absolute cheapest possible chips. So my client provided them (with warnings). The failure rates for the cheapest of the cheap could reach as high as 20% in a batch in our testing. The clients didn't care. Sadly, ALL the clients that didn't care were American companies. Not even mainland Chinese companies would use them.
There's a few interesting channels on youtube that deconstruct various products (from shoes to toasters) to see how high quality they are. It's quite instructive at how much different price points can differ (sometimes from the same company).
Buying quality is a tedious task and requires to invest your time. Buying expensive is by no means a guarantee for quality, think of the many re-labelers.
Deregulation was great because it opened up the market to more competition, and that led to lower prices. A true race to the bottom. Turns out, most people don't want to pay for more leg room, better service, more on time flights. They want the cheapest flight they can get (unless their company is footing the bill).
So whenever I hear someone complain about leg room on a flight, or not enough overhead stowage, or crappy food, I think about the choices ticket buyers have made over the last 40 years.
Price is almost always the first and most influential factor in a sale. Quality (whether actual quality or the illusion of quality) is usually way down the list of factors.
[0]https://gizmodo.com/traveling-in-a-boeing-747-in-the-1970s-w...
Right now, I can book BOS->SAN->BOS for $945 in first class. Granted, COVID is happening, but I've bought that ticket in the past, pre-COVID for that same $1000 +/- a small margin.
I call this the Decontenting of America.
I totally disagree with your assessment. 20 years ago it was harder to find quality products than it is today. I am a person that buys "quality", I support local & US companies whenever I can. There are so many excellent boutique companies for just about everything outside of shitty mass produced electronics. I just do not see your world at all, but then again, I don't mistake garbage retailers and company branding for quality.
In general I find the degree of belligerent defensiveness in your post inexplicable given the topic at hand.
Modern metallurgy is soooo much more consistent for equivalent or better outputs though. Thanks to modern electronic process control the dumbest dolts on 3rd shift in some factory in China can hit the spec they were told to hit and they can hit it for pennies.
Plastics, electronics, mechanical assemblies, hydraulics, everything, same story. Modern automation and process control has made the "high quality" of decades past something attainable on a budget.
So your Harbor Freight junk will generally hold its own against grandpa's Craftsman and Snap-On but it won't look good or feel good doing it and you white box wheel bearing will roll your tractor along just as well as the one it replaces.
I'm curious what Sears tools you considered high quality.
My computer's from 2000s still work as does various 20+ year old CRTs. What products are you talking about? The nylon clothes that last forever, the food that doesn't go bad and has higher nutrition, the cheap micro USB that came with the thing that broke but the cable still works 9 years later?
What are these same price low quality goods you are plagued with?
A poster said we should buy quality and another answered its no longer possible unless custom-manufactured. I fear thats true: to few bought quality to be a sustainable living for the producers.
But... as you point out, it doesn’t have to be. You can buy quality items that are 2 to four times the cost of crappy ones, they last longer, are usually made with better materials and are designed and constructed better —be they designed locally or abroad and manufactured locally or abroad. You have a choice. Many people choose the cheapest crap that make used car salesman’s leisure suits look like they are of unequaled quality.
But not everyone buys the crap option.
If you buy too much crap it’s because people aren’t discriminating and aren’t in control of their discretionary spending.
UPDATE: "Essentially useless" is (obviously, I hope) rhetorical hyperbole. See subsequent discussion for clarification.
You’re right in criticizing Apple on certain things. But the alternatives are far worse, and to use the topic appropriate term here, “crappier”. For all its faults, I still prefer some Apple products and wouldn’t touch the competition even if they paid me to.
Yes, I agree. That's why some day someone will have to pry my mid-2013 MBP from my cold dead hands.
Strongly disagree, and I think this is part of the problem: Apple positioned itself as "The Good UI Company" so strongly that people cannot imagine a good UI which doesn't come from Apple. Therefore, they compare all UIs to what Apple's doing now and take points off for not being Apple, as opposed to evaluating based on usability and fitness for purpose. The ultimate expression of this is people deriding UIs like Window Maker, essentially the NeXT UI, because it isn't Apple, when it's from the same mind as the "Wonderful Apple UIs" everyone seems to love.
Sometimes I blame greedy computer repair people of the 90's and early 2000's for this mess. I remember my friend opened up a repair shop (I helped weekends as a side gig). There were companies in our town charging OUTRAGEOUS prices for very easy repairs, and doing a really bad job. Then we would end up fixing the "repair" and then the original problem, which of course was always more than the original problem. It was really sad.
Now I live in a town with NO computer repair shops, and the closest thing is the Best Buy which is the KING of overcharging for repairs and doing a crappy job.
It's no wonder people just started buying cheap computers after being ripped off.
/rant
As the Elton John song says, it's a sad, sad situation.
Desktops are luxury items that aren't needed anymore, laptops are quickly becoming those too. People don't need computers, their computing needs change too and the iPad is better at mobility so many people just get a tablet rather than a computer anyway. Even I question my need of using a full gnu Linux phone once I was able to get chrome desktop extensions in a browser on Android.
Is Apple overpriced? I dunno, the rest of the market is priced similarly. But the hardware is no better or worse than the competitors, and it can be argued Apple supports it a whole lot longer than the competitors.
Then Apple made a conscious decision to emphasize form over function. The result was products that fail often (e.g. the butterfly keyboard), cannot be easily repaired (if they can be repaired at all), and have a terrible UI/UX. Discoverability, configurability, and reliability are things of the past. Every software update (which are no longer optional, BTW) is a crap shoot (no pun intended) with regards to whether it will introduce more problems than it fixes.
> we get 5-6 years out of each one we buy
Then you're talking about products that were built before this trend really took hold. The butterfly keyboard was only introduced 5 years ago. The UI/UX horribleness began with Yosemite, which only came out 6 years ago, and didn't get really bad until Catalina, which is barely two years old.
I also think you're being too nostalgic about the Apple of yore. Apple has always had quality issues, both in hardware and software. Apple Cube cracked. Macbooks had screen delimitation. Titanium laptops discolored (as did the plastic iBooks). Video cards failed due to bad drivers. I had a 1st Gen Intel Mac Pro that burned through video cards every 3 months while I was on a World of Warcraft binge. Apple ended up replacing 3 for me while it was under warranty. Apple released OSX before it was ready for primetime, and the result was an OS that was markedly slower than OS9.
As for OSX/macOS UI/UX, people griped about bugs and poor design decisions from day one. Whether it was monochrome stripes in window elements, or too much candy colored buttons, to bugs so annoying that Apple released an OS that was basically just a hard reset of bug fixes.
I don't know, but my iPad updated itself without my approval a few days ago. That had never happened before, so I assumed it was a change that came in with the last update that I did approve.
As far as nostaligia, I have two mid-2013 MBPs that I use on a daily basis. One runs Mavericks, the other runs Catalina. The Mavericks machine does everything I need it to do. It is stable. It runs flawlessly for literally months at a time. The Catalina machine is buggy, has to be rebooted on a regular basis, and once needed the entire OS reinstalled from scratch because the disk filled up with crap and no one could figure out how to get rid of it. (The only reason I use it at all is that one of my clients requires me to use it for security reasons.)
And right now, there aren't really any better alternatives. I use MacOS, I use Windows, I use Linux. I have Android devices, and iPads. Apple's devices are every bit as good as any of the competition. They are ahead in a couple key areas like privacy and long-term support.
Catalina got released in October 2019, less than a year ago.
basically i agree with this sentiment, but if you take into account modern marketing and sales tactics, its a lot easier said than done... marketers really know how peoples brains work and the "buttons" to push to get more sales of "crap"
the other side is, when a vast majority of people are squeezed for money, they usually go for "cheap"... so especially i notice in the us, people are very price-sensitive; many times, but not always cheap == crap...
I think the article should have spoken more about how consumer culture is manufactured along with the goods that it consumes.
In essence, it helps build up a society because it allows everyone to participate in consuming, as long as they have some money to spend.