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Comment by zigzaggy | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I would call this "American Crap." As I see it, the wealth of the American economy has driven the rest of the world to create a world of low quality goods to sell to us. I have made it a point to collect very little low quality equipment. But as I look around, most of the stuff I have collected says "made in China" or something like that.

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.

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Unfortunately, it's broadly not possible to buy quality anymore unless you have the money to have products custom built.

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.

“ 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.”

I call this the Decontenting of America.

It will be a great day on the Internet when people stop conflating citizens of a country with that country's government.

This is simply not true. You (and perhaps most people) may have a difficult time discerning between high and low quality products, but both are readily available. That difficulty may be part of the problem why lower quality products dominate. Though I think it has more to do with cheaper prices. And while it's certainly true that many higher priced items are of similar quality as lower priced ones, higher quality products do exist.

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).

What YouTube? I watch Ave and project farm.

Discerning products on price is so much easier than on quality. That simple quantitative measure will always drive towards lower quality, to junk.

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.

Since when did "high quality" become impossible? lol. Thats news to me. The fact you think Sears was "high quality" is telling. Maybe you have never bought or been exposed to "quality" in the first place?

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.

I think you'd find it helpful to compare the quality of Sears Craftsman tools from 75, 50, 25 years ago and today. Unless you're either old enough to know first hand, happened to inherit older Craftsman tools, or have ties to people who are deeply interested in hand tools, you wouldn't know that at least that part of the Sears brand wasn't always associated with cheap garbage.

In general I find the degree of belligerent defensiveness in your post inexplicable given the topic at hand.

I'm old enough and Sears was never good and there are a lot more specialized and cheaper tools now from harbor freight. I doubt you had good tools either if you considered them high quality, they were good for the warranties, not for their quality. You'd return the screwdrivers after using it to mix cement.

I'm curious what Sears tools you considered high quality.

There was more labor sunk into the tooling to make those old tools, fancy forging dies and whatnot to forge fancy tools that are thin, light, etc.

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 have a bunch of my grandpa's Craftsman tools from long before I was born, they were sold with lifetime warranties.

>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)

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?

Air travel provides some insight into how market conditions determine quality (of service) in this case. Air travel used to be extremely expensive and out of reach for the majority of Americans until airline deregulation took effect in 1978. My grandfather flew for Pan Am, and air travel was special, with incredible levels of customer service, and a corresponding price tag.[0]

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...

If you want to have the experience of the 1960s/1970s today, buy a first class ticket. It's fairly comparable in price (inflation adjusted) to the 60s/70s main cabin and you get plenty of leg room, plenty of overhead storage, and at least on Delta and Air France, fairly decent food.

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.

The problem lies much deeper. If you buy quality you buy less. Nobody wants you to consume less. You have to spend your earned money as early as possible. Do not accumulate savings, even better live on lends. Thats the force driving us all to junk.

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.

I agree. I don’t know what the author is in about. At least it’s not the way they express it. As you said, crap _is_ found anywhere there are active markets: North America, Asia, South Asia, Africa, etc. you can find crap everywhere due to globalism.

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.

The problem is that it's not enough for you to stop buying the crap. Everyone has to stop buying it to make it go away. Personally, I think Apple products are (now) crap, beautiful to look at, but with a UI/UX that has jumped the shark so badly that they are essentially useless. I haven't bought a new Apple product in many years. And yet they persist.

UPDATE: "Essentially useless" is (obviously, I hope) rhetorical hyperbole. See subsequent discussion for clarification.

Yes, you're probably right. I can only affect change on those around me that will listen. Fortunately since I'm "the computer guy" people do listen. But for most people it's just easier to buy cheap junk and replace it when it craps out.

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

Yes, repair is another significant aspect of the dynamic. One of the things that distinguishes a quality good is the ability to repair it if it does fail, but the economics of repair have very badly misaligned incentives. It can also be very hard for someone to tell if they are being ripped off, especially for complex products like computers. It's a lot easier to tell if a cabinet is well-made than a cell phone. But if the product is cheap then it matters less that it is crap. As long as you get some use out of it before it fails you can still get your money's worth if the price is low enough.

As the Elton John song says, it's a sad, sad situation.

Back in the early days of browser highjackers, we'd regularly charge $90 to re-install Windows 98 or XP. The same people would come back a few weeks later and pay for it again after getting a bunch more bugs.

I repaired computers for free and I doubt that is the reason. Cheap computers are good because they're cheap, in they all reach a point of diminishing returns very quickly for basic browsing, so much that a basic arm phone that is free with prepaid is more than sufficient.

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.

Calling an iPhone "essentially useless" is an absolutely ridiculous thing to say. Literally hundreds of millions of people run their lives on them. They must all be stupid?

OK, "essentially useless" was hyperbole. And when I wrote that I had Macs in mind more than iPhones (and Mac laptops in particular). But I will stand by the substance of my comment: Mac laptops have gotten a lot crappier in just about every way over the last 10 years.

You’re still within the window of time where you can edit your original comment and clarify your position. I’m sure many people would agree on the point about the quality of Macs.

Thanks for reminding me. I've added an update.

I am using a 2013 MacBook Pro as my daily driver, hosting Zoom classes, etc. It works fantastically. And I will sell it on eBay next year for a few hundred bucks and buy a 2021 MacBook. They are fantastic pieces of technology apart from the recent keyboard issue.

Because they're not crap. Opinion aside, we get 5-6 years out of each one we buy. My ipad air2 just got an update to iOS 14 (probably the last one it'll get) it's going on 7 years old.

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.

Once upon a time Apple products were terrific. I was a big fan. They were solidly made. Their UI/UX was the best in the business by a wide margin.

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.

>didn't get really bad until Catalina, which is barely two years old.

Catalina got released in October 2019, less than a year ago.

They've also quit using the butterfly keyboard and replaced it with something arguably better than any keyboard they've ever put in a laptop. Apple has had plenty of missteps over the years, there was never really a Golden Era.

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.

Since when are software updates mandatory?

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.

> Since when are software updates mandatory?

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.)

> Personally, I think Apple products are (now) crap, beautiful to look at, but with a UI/UX that has jumped the shark so badly that they are essentially useless.

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.

> the alternatives are far worse

Yes, I agree. That's why some day someone will have to pry my mid-2013 MBP from my cold dead hands.

I held onto mine until late last year. The keyboard on the late 2019 model is OK again. It ought not be surprising nor noteworthy that a premium-priced laptop would have a fully functional keyboard, but here we are.

> But the alternatives are far worse

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.

> Stop buying the crap and you'll stop seeing the crap.

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...

From the perspective of what you (and I) personally have around us, I agree. But if you think of it from the perspective of e.g. what ends up in landfills, then it's a bigger and more general, more interesting issue.

I think the article should have spoken more about how consumer culture is manufactured along with the goods that it consumes.

The problem is "buying." reduction in build of material/resources to create "crap" means it can enter lower socioeconomic markets because it competes on price and utility.

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.

Progress is an advertisement-subsidized smart TV in the back of a Dodge Grand Caravan

It’s an effect of American imperialism and global hegemony. That’s why calling it American crap isn’t a misnomer.

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