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Columbo: How can you tell a good wine from an average wine?

Frenchman: By, uh... the price.

— Columbo S03E02, Any Old Port in a Storm

I heard a winemaker once explain it that _at one time in the past_ there was a larger difference between expensive and cheap wine, but in the years since then the large-scale mass-producers have gotten much better at making better quality wine in bulk and the difference today is much less than it was decades ago.

I think a similar story can be applied to many other luxury goods as well.

> in the years since then the large-scale mass-producers have gotten much better at making better quality wine in bulk and the difference today is much less than it was decades ago.

This has probably worked out well for consumers when it comes to wines, but for products more generally, I suspect this effect has also driven quality down to give us a very wide but mediocre average. As everything became designed to be made inexpensively and mass-produced at greater scale products at the lower end have become better, but mid-higher end products have gotten worse than in previous decades.

This is also true historically to some effect. The bordeaux classification of 1855 (which remains in effect) was in large part done on price.

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