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It’s not true that established brands made cheaper products to compete. Their prices remained the same or got higher, but quality still suffered. It’s just greed, no complex reasoning required. I recently bought a gym bag from Nike. Feels super cheap, like I could have gotten it from Aliexpress. The zippers keep locking into the fabric. Feels completely disposable.

Bought a pair of running shoes from Skechers early last year, had to throw away this year because the soles got worn out and I kept getting injured on one foot because I was stepping unevenly.

I bought Skechers because I had once had a pair of sneakers that lasted me the entire 5y of college. No such luck now.

No reason, just greed.

Running shoes are good for about 600 to 700km fyi. After that, the foam breaks down too much to provide adequate cushioning and the right sproing.

Having the external hard rubber last longer than that is just unnecessary weight.

You may just be in better shape than you were in college. Distance stacks up fast and running faster wears shoes out faster.

sauce: I run marathons and go through about 6 pairs of running shoes per year

Which shoes do you use? I use ASICS GT-2000s and they usually last 350km to 400km, or a year, in my case (a couple 5k to 8k runs per week). I guess different styles of running could also cause different amounts of wear and tear.

Adidas Adios stuff has worked best for me. But I’m also 56kg so they prob last longer than they would for a bigger person.

As a "non-runner" who just needs running shoes for the gym and walking around, I found great luck at Thrift Stores. What I found us a marathoner will buy a pair of Nike's and run that 600-700km until they are "spent" and give them to Goodwill. While they aren't good for running anymore, I found most to have plenty of sole left for 6-7 months of walking and going to the gym, all for around $10.

This is probably not the best for my feet, but when I bust a hole where my big toe goes I feel less bad because I spent $10 and not $100.

There's pressure on both sides (competition to lower prices vs take profits from the reputation), but I agree with your take.

Primarily, there has been an extraction of excess profit on consumer goods rather than investment in more efficient production or better products. I have suspicions that this is because of the relative ease of growing a profitable (but easily copied) manufacturing business out of China over the last 20 years, but it really doesn't matter why.

The other example of this is Oil Majors who have very little incentive to invest in new oil production or refining (even though it may be needed for the next decade), and instead take all excess profits to pay out as stock buybacks or dividends. They are in the profit taking stage of the business not the growth and investment stage.

I see what you are seeing. I recently replaced some major appliances that wore out after 25+ years. Sales people were quite up front about the replacements from the same name brand now being designed to fail after 5 to 7 years: Cheaper motors, flimsier construction, and especially electronics. I could pay 3x for a higher-end brand but there is no assurance that it would buy a more reliable product.

Skechers is building a sprawling set of office buildings in the expensive town of Manhattan Beach, CA. That money has to come from somewhere.

Appliances are a tough comparison. Yes, they will "fail" faster. However, material and energy costs means you are still way ahead in many cases. Older appliances were grossly wasteful in both, by modern standards.

And shoes are an odd one. They have never lasted a long time. Ever. Only shoes that will last, are the ones you don't use often. You can kind of make this work with a rotation of shoes. Having recovery between wearing helps. They are still very much a consumable.

Well-made leather shoes and boots can be repaired though. With regular oil/polish and a new sole on every couple of years you can keep a good pair for decades.

Ish. The new sole will require a surprising amount of glue, for one. For two, I maintain that this is only true for non daily shoes. I have yet to see shoes worn daily that stand up to this standard.

The most important thing with shoe longevity is to not wear the same pair every day. Buy two and switch between them - or better yet, get three pairs - and rotate. Give them some time to rest, air out, dry out, etc. between wearings. They will last longer and your feet will thank you.

I walk, a lot. I've been extremely happy with shoes made by Camper - especially their higher end lines - I have several of their Pelotas (not the lite version) with the oldest nearly 20 years old... and they are still all in great shape. I'd also recommend their Beetle, Peu, Peu Stadium, Bill and Atom lines. They have a wide range of styles and different colors and other options introduced seasonally. Unless you are an investment banker on Wall Street, they have shoes that will work in most office environments and also for casual wear. I do find that their leather lines do last much longer than the other materials, and they are priced accordingly, ranging $120-280+. If that seems like a lot, just wait for their quarterly sales of 30-40% (sometimes as much as 50%) off for the best deals.

I don't follow. If I have to replace a dishwasher, refrigerator, or washer/dryer every five years as opposed to every twenty, that's a lot of stuff going to a landfill. My old appliances didn't break the energy bank. What I'm hearing and reading is that manufacturers don't want things to last and are designing motors, pumps, and circuit boards with cheaper materials and less metal so they will conk out resulting in either expensive service calls or outright new purchases.

Shoes: I can't tell which brands are which anymore and it certainly looks like they're all made in one factory. I can't find a pair of comfortable day-to-day walking shoes. I have to make the best of what's available which means dealing with the discomfort and pain through trial and error.

You don't have to landfill it every five years, so that is a bit of a straw man. Even with it, though, it takes several modern dish washers to be the same raw material as older ones.

For shoes, I don't know what to tell you. They have always been consumable. And often uncomfortable. Such that I honestly think the catch is we get more sensitive as we get older. Certainly moving more weight.

I can't see how a modern dishwasher has multiple factors less material than the older ones. I get the impression that by cutting materials by 10-20%, the makers get 4x lower lifespan which helps them.

Shoes: A month ago I tried on ten pairs of shoes by six or so brands and felt little difference among them. The only difference was price: ~$60 low end, $130 high end. And these were nothing fancy, just shoes intended for daily use by non-athletes. None were good but I had to pick since my current pair were in tatters. I went with the $60 pair and am futzing with different insoles to get something usable. Maybe there is a magic $300 pair that will do the job.

I'd forego the $300 ones. But I'd also recommend 3 pairs of $60ish shoes. Wear a different one each day. And make sure to get at least 4 miles of walking in. Anything less and it likely isn't the shoes making you uncomfortable.

I have to walk a lot at work. Don't know about 4 miles but I am not sitting at a desk. Rockports used to make great shoes that fit without break-in, were suitable for daily use and in the workplace, and that didn't break the bank. Can't find anything in that style anymore so I have to go with so-called athletic shoes that come in a black finish.

I still have some old rockports. I do remember liking them. I don't remember any being particularly good at heavy use. Quite the contrary, last I tried them on, they were rather bad. Reminds me of trying converse shoes. Memory and age conspire to make things way different.

Four miles is clearly me making up a rough number. My assertion is more that many of us do not have great walking posture or ergonomics. Note I am not saying it is our fault, per se. Just that walking and techniques that lead to long term comfort are surprisingly ignored by most of us. And this has far more impact on things than your shoes will.

Related questions, can you still squat with flat feet? Do you keep your back straight when picking up things? Not just lifting heavy things. When picking a dropped pen off the floor, what do you do?

And obviously, it could very well be in your specific case it is the quality of shoe. I've seen a surprising number of folks where it just isn't. :(

> Related questions, can you still squat with flat feet? Do you keep your back straight when picking up things? Not just lifting heavy things. When picking a dropped pen off the floor, what do you do?

The bad experience with shoes has remained constant the past 10+ years through periods of good conditioning and not so good conditioning. I think my ergonomics are pretty good adjusting for age.

Unfortunately I can't go back and remeasure material and construction quality from years gone by. My perception is that the shoe uppers are now all stiffer and less flexible than years gone by and the the sole materials are hard and have no give. I've gone to multiple shoe stores looking but have come up empty.

Adjusting for age is the tough one. And good luck finding something that works for you!

Try merrell. Had a pair for 20 years, happily bought a new pair last year and quality is still good.

Thanks. Didn't know about them. They have some sneakers that look like they could pass in the work environment. Intrigued by the grey soles on some of them. Remind me of the last pair of comfortable shoes I had (circa 1998) which had similar flubbery gray stuff on the sole. Put a spring in my step that I remember fondly.

I’ve had good luck with Adidas shoes for the day to day; other brands don’t last for me.

Skechers was founded in Manhattan Beach. They’ve grown their footprint. MB is a very expensive city for housing but the commercial buildings on PCH aren’t outrageously priced. Sure, more expensive than Lawndale or Gardena, but cheaper than lots of DTLA.

As far as I see, they're knocking down and building afresh. The electric signs on PCH say to expect slowdowns for a few years to come.

Whatever they're not spending on their shoes, they're not spending the money on building design either since the buildings aren't much to look at.

I’ve got a take: I think the current gap in the market for a lot of product areas is “more expensive but high quality.”

I desperately want to spend more money on a product that will stand the test of time but it’s so hard to find them at times.

Sure there will always be a majority of shoppers who want the cheapest thing as fast as they can get it and they won’t mind if they have to buy 3 of them every year, but I think the market is going to start supporting a more artisanal approach for consumer goods as the pendulum swings the other way over the next decade (although current global finance which I won’t pretend to understand might make this a little trickier…)

Sadly this is a very unstable position. No economies of scale. No consumer reach, extreme incentive to sell out once/if your product does get popular, knockoffs, etc...

“ I think the current gap in the market for a lot of product areas is “more expensive but high quality”

Often those products do exist, but you need to become an “expert in X” to find them.

Oh… you want to buy a high quality leather [whatever], better start learning about leather grades, leather tanneries, stitching thread, stitching types… so it doesn’t blow out in a year.

Except we can’t all become experts in all products, and many companies are perfectly happy to build a brand on quality and then slowly erode that quality to increase margins.

> Often those products do exist, but you need to become an “expert in X” to find them.

Or you rely on media and, in countries where that's available, stuff like the government-backed, independent "Stiftung Warentest" in Germany ("foundation for testing products").

Trying to find a quality laptop battery for an older machine is the ultimate exercise in futility.

And there are many companies that _start_ making high quality products until they have a reputation for it, and then later dial it down to improve profit margin. Even experts may have outdated information.

Oh, with leather I consider it great luck that I started learning from someone that have a lot of years of experience. I'm an amateur and sew only for myself and family/friends.

Want really good and consistent quality vegetable tanned leather made in Poland? Then she said that there is basically one place (they produce it from over 110 years, and they are quite low in Google searches). Want chrome tanned leather with a lot of colors that are consistent and ALWAYS the same as on sampler? Also only one place.

I was later learning normal sewing with her mother. When asked about good quality cotton (or other natural) materials in small quantities she basically say: "well, it will be quite hard and when I want really good materials I order them straight from Italy, available only in wholesale quantities from few manufacturers that I veted over last 40 years". She later said that in textile industry you can't really trust anybody, because they can send you few batches of great quality and then suddenly lower quality and will be telling straight to your face that "quality was always like that"...

I definitely agree there is a market for that, but the increasing problem is how consumers discover your product and sort through the trash heap of cheap alternatives. Google is useless these days for finding product reviews, Amazon largely just shows you keyboard-smash Chinese brands unless you already know what brand you're looking for, and legitimate review sites like Wirecutter have a hard time keeping up or covering all the products (also you can't find them unless you already know they exist).

I actually wonder if this will drive at least higher end consumers more towards the pre-Internet shopping word or mouth or personal experience approach to finding good products. For a while there the Internet allowed you to more easily discover and sort through new products and brands with a reasonable level of confidence so your horizons could broaden beyond products your friends and family recommended. Now the zone is so flooded with crap that the Internet seems less useful than it was 10 years ago for that task, which may lead to a reversion to more pre-Internet approaches to products, even if you might still buy it online.

The real untapped market could be a curated version of Amazon, with reviews you could trust and a high proportion of the products being legitimate brands you could rely on.

YouTube used to be a decent place to get product reviews but then the company took away the Dislike count for ideological reasons, making automated scrape-and-publish trash impossible to filter out of search results.

Usually I spend time searching and reading comments on https://www.reddit.com/r/buyitforlife/

Till now it worked really nice for me.

Careful, Reddit is rumored to IPO later this year so they've been turning the enshittification screws. Expect to see less and less legitimate opinions, more and more corporate manipulation and ads, and likely a lot of LLM-generated astroturfing as the profit engine dials up to 11.

When you can find older stuff or well-reasoned opinions on Reddit, it's a goldmine. But sadly that doesn't justify the pricing Reddit's owners surely want to see in the IPO so it'll likely get crowded out by short-term profitable long-term garbage priorities.

Try specialty forums and subreddits for the thing you are looking for. Need a scooter? /r/escooters on reddit would be where I would start hitting the search box. Cabinets? Search for a woodworking forum. You get the idea. There is almost always a group of incredibly experienced and knowledgeable people on the particular thing you need that have found a place to hang out with each other. Find them and ignore the rest of the noise.

> keyboard-smash Chinese brands

I’m stealing that!

Buy from places with a robust service program. You can ask the vendor if they provide this. You don't need to overthink it.

Transparency of Galaxus/Digitec in Switzerland is pretty good with historic price charts, returns rating for suppliers etc. It does look like simple raw transparency is the key to all of that crap.

Some years from now (probably less than more) people will realise and start using cryptographic identities and cryptographic attestations for all internet comms - provable purchase, provable delivery by mailing service, provable single person identity etc. - (zero knowledge!) provable everything.

I mean why nobody wrote a blog post about it yet - it has "AI" and "Blockchain" in the title and for once it actually does make sense.

You can bundle up "fake news solution" into it as well if needed.

> I’ve got a take: I think the current gap in the market for a lot of product areas is “more expensive but high quality.”

Misleading, dishonest marketing and bribed reviewers make it impossible for a consumer to know that a high quality product is indeed high quality without trying it before (which is often impractical)

Whatever you do to differentiate yourself will be copied by 728934712 Chinese brands which will flood the search results of whatever marketplace you're selling on, at all price points (even though they're the same product for the most part).

Faced with no reliable way to find the high quality needle in the haystack people just opt to buy the cheapest one, that way even if you know you're getting trash, at least it's cheap trash.

The only way that used to work to sell quality products was to create a brand and slowly build up trust by consistently selling high quality stuff but in the current "value extraction above anything else" climate, apparently that isn't profitable enough anymore, so pointy haired MBA types will happily destroy that quality for a few bucks.

Depending on what you're buying, I think you can rely on third-party reviews like Consumer Reports in the United States - no one accused them of being bribed.

There’s still quality brands out there. My general approach is to stick with brands until their quality declines and then ask friends and family for a reasonable option. Generally this results in companies that simply don’t advertise much because they don’t need to advertise.

Sure there’s probably a better options out there, but avoiding junk is more important than getting the absolute best product at the absolutely cheapest price.

Fully agree. I'd pay extra for a dumb TV, but nobody is selling them.

You can buy commercial displays.

Most things marketed to businesses are still high quality. But you do lose features or design elements.

'Eventually the big brands themselves had to lower the quality of their products to be able to compete with the generic products...'

I remember some brands lowering the quality of their product long before all of these random Chinese copycats sprung up.

Maybe this is why they were able to get a foothold because people like myself began to think that some cheap copies were actually better than the genuine article.

My pet grievance being branded footwear which has mostly become cheap garbage with a premium price tag.

Nike quality is atrocious materials are garbage grade but shoes still sell for 200+

The brand has some inertia. Eventually word will spread out deeply that nike is trash and the perceived value will go with it or along with the generation that knew them if they’re lucky.

I think it’s the celebrity endorsements. They really live in the Jordan name/brand. Kind of like adidas lives on soccer and for a while yeezy branding.

It does until it doesn’t

Came here to say that. You paid for the brand and the perceived 'status' that brandishing (pun intended) the logo gave you, not the quality. This was long before the Chinese crapstream flowed richly. Maybe there's perceived quality too, as a bias that forms by paying so much for the branded article.

One of the real problems is that essentially all advertising and marketing is a plague that is knowingly inflicting misleading information and insinuation on the public. It is not like they do not know how a ad will be interpreted, the entire game in almost every case is saying something that is technically correct but that the target audience will incorrectly interpret as better.

The standard of false advertising should not be: "There is at least one interpretation that is true." it should be: "Almost every member of the target audience will come to a correct understanding." If a company gets into a lawsuit and their lawyer defends the ad by saying, "Technically speaking, ..." they should lose. If a company can not accurately explain the nuances of the limitations of their product in a short time segment then they can just err on the side of caution instead of implying untrue statements.

This would absolutely devastate the bullshit advertising and branding that is used to prop up garbage products and make it easier to segment high quality products because it would be much harder for low quality competitors to make misleading me too statements without running afoul of false advertising.

There's also the opposite strategy. Making a cheaper product of lower quality at lower costs. The better quality product loses sales and advantages of mass adoption, and often can go out of business. The lower quality product is now the dominant one in the market. The resellers can freely raise prices now, to match the better products price and greatly increase profits. The public is now stuck with a lower quality product being the only thing available at same price.

Eg. I went to look at dishwashers at Costco, and the thinest of the metal used amazed me. You could bend things with two fingers. I shopped around, and bought some Samsung model, looks space age, but its pretty terrible at actually washing dishes. The marked for Dishwashers optimized for profit, and appearance of being functional. But at this point, I'm pretty convinced a GE dishwasher from the 70s was better.

In the case of a dishwasher, I wonder how much environmental regulations factor into that. Modern dishwashers use less water for a cycle, but they also do a poorer job of actually washing dishes. So, what do you do? Prewash? Run multiple times? It's also concerning that the regulations on dishwashers are going to get tighter yet in the US if the certain organizations get their wish.

Likewise with toilets. Low flow toilets are mostly terrible and do a terrible job at flushing. Literally the only thing they're designed to do. If you have to flush 2-3 times with a low flow and maybe even involve a plunger, are we really ahead?

Just to add one more factor, what happens overtime in old toilets is that sediment stone develops on the inside, and causes enough friction for the toilet paper to catch and plug up. So you can probably except even shorter life span from the new toilets as they flush less water, so more likely for that stone to develop. So you're more likely to need to replace the toilet in the future. Also the flushing mechanism is proprietary, so if anything goes bad, more likely to have to replace the toilet. Really debatable if having to replace toilets more often is environmentally friendly. It will make more money for the toilet manufactures.

> what happens overtime in old toilets is that sediment stone develops on the inside

An easy way to get rid of that is to go to the hardware store and get a jug of muriatic acid. Then research the hell out of how to use it safely before you even think of opening it. Then pour a bunch in your toilet.

Bosch dishwashers do a great job cleaning dishes. Only one cycle needed. You usually have to pay for quality if you want it.

> But, I get it, the tech giants are all about quantity-over-quality and Facebook's ad revenue would drop to basically nothing (by their standards) if they started vetting each ad campaign manually, so here we are.

Facebook makes well over 20 billion dollars in net profits annually. They could easily invest a couple billion dollars into moderating better advertising and content, but since "user happiness" and "cost externalized to society" (e.g. people injured by bad products, cost of buying a new gadget because the old one barely lasted a year, costs of viral "challenges") is harder to quantify than "amount of dollars in profit", they all don't.

This is why government regulation is needed: to hold companies accountable for externalized costs.

Ah, Ypknwoj, a brand you can trust.

Fhqwhgads!

The problem with these brands is that they’re unpronounceable, and they’re almost as memorable as serial numbers.

It’s /fə·'hʊ·kwə·gɑdz/: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjjjWJMIGhM

I imagine some kind of marketing for these fabricating a myth that if you can pronounce the brain you get one pair for free, a la tiktok brainless meme without any basis in reality