Mature markets that reach enormous scale transform into a barbell shape, typically, with all the revenue being at the very top end, and the very bottom end.
Take furniture. In a new market you build a nice couch with decent materials that will last, and you charge a price that a middle-class income could afford. It will last, say, 15-20 years. You sell it, make money. Great.
Now a competitor comes along and makes a couch that will last 12-15 years. It's 20% cheaper, and your sales drop off a cliff. Your option is to lower your quality so you can lower your prices and compete, or go up market and _raise_ your prices, so you can stay in business.
Repeat this cycle many times, and you end up with nothing in the middle, because consumers will not buy (enough) things in the middle.
You can try to address this through quality regulation (ban certain materials, or require others, for example), which will raise the floor of the quality (in theory) while raising the floor price along with it. That will price people out of the market entirely, though.
You can place heavy import tariffs on products that are of lower quality coming from elsewhere in an attempt to create space for more locally produced mid-quality goods, but doing that prices out your poorer citizens from access to those goods entirely (and they won't like that, and will probably stop voting for you, eventually).
The problem is that human beings, on average, do _not_ value quality enough to keep a middle market alive.
Forcing a level of quality would force a higher price point, which would price people out of access to the good. And no, "but the prices are still high" doesn't get you out of this jam. For as high as they are now, they would be even higher with quality guarantees.
So, if you want the "high quality" you're used to, that may mean spending more because you can afford to. And if you can't, then take solace in knowing that the product that's shitty to you is a new luxury to someone else.
Overall I reject the negative attitude towards brands who have seemingly “gotten worse” over time in the same way I accept newcomers to the gym. Goods becoming more available (people using the gym) is a good thing, even if my personal experience gets marginally worse (access to equipment decreases).
The way to fix it is to get rid of the system where idle shareholders extract every drop of value from companies while demanding ever more and move to one where companies have a goal of sustainably producing quality goods/services while treating employees well. Co-ops can be one model of this.
Also change the stock market to a simple way to get capital on a short term basis rather than an all consuming gambling machine. This means also having a way for folks to retire that doesn’t depend on them putting all their savings into a casino.
I would also like to know what policy knobs to fiddle with that could change this situation, but I think the answer is probably something like "mumble mumble global finance capital".
Most people are not subject area experts in regards to infrequent purchases. From informal conversation it seems that a lot of consumers have experienced enshittification from brands and products that they previously held in high regard. This has resulted in them losing trust in the market and they now assume that anything they buy will be of poor quality regardless of other factors. As a result, they have given up on making purchasing decisions based on quality and now only purchase the cheapest product they can find.
This seems to have created a situation where consumers are unable to differentiate between different products based on quality and do not trust marketing because they've been lied to before.
This might happen slowly, though you can count on the promise of high profit margins to make it happen sooner or later.
Of course, there are areas where we do have regulation, particularly when it comes to safety of products. This is a good option in many cases, though in many cases it would also be very difficult to define and enforce standards.
And there can be market problems such as oligopolies or monopolies that prevent robust competition from happening. In those cases, it can be up to antitrust regulators to correct the market.
people are poorer than they realize and are choosing to push their dollars towards more instant gratification. new phones, costco, lifesystle, doordash, living close to entertainment and cities. This is the myth of the middle class. earn good or great money but spend it all.
people worrying about what other people think. buying car, house, clothes
Seriously, this type of short term thinking is a direct result of focusing on quarterly profits reports. Making shitty product that falls apart after a year boosts your sales next year
Airfares are a perfect example. Airlines started offering garbage "Basic Economy" and still offered regular economy for a slightly higher price. What happened? Everyone still chose the cheapest no matter what, so Basic Economy rules the day.
More like consumers are unable to find anything that isn't shitty. The entire article is about people who spent good money on a product, bought from brands with good reputations, and their products still turned out to be trash. This is not a case of people being unwilling to pay for anything but cheapest options and getting shit-tier goods, it's about how an increasing number of companies are demanding high prices but giving nothing but cheap trash dressed up to look like quality in return.
It turns out that it's a lot more profitable to sell people highly priced garbage than to give them quality goods. Every furniture company wants to make more profit, so now they all sell highly priced garbage and there is no one left making quality goods at a reasonable price to take customers away from the people who cheating us.
The problem is not the material per se but using inappropriate fastening methods for the type of material and/or a design that stresses the material in a modality where it is weak rather than where it is strong. An example of an inappropriate fastening method would be a screw into the edge of a laminated panel and the joint not glued.
For an example on the done-right side, if you look at any knockdown speaker cabinet kit from e.g. Parts Express, the MDF parts will have bracing and grooves where the user is meant to use wood glue, and screws mainly just to hold it together until the glue sets.
https://www.parts-express.com/Knock-Down-MDF-4-ft-Subwoofer-...
In furniture an example of using MDF in a way that almost has to be intentionally bad design: I have a tall chest of bedroom drawers where the drawer slides are suspended 2.5" off the internal walls by horizontal rectangular blocks of MDF. The blocks are oriented in a way that gravity and the torque on the block causes the layers of the MDF to de-laminate. (Picture riffle shuffling a deck of cards.) The resulting sag in turn makes the drawer slides no longer align.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffling#/media/File:Riffle_s...
Almost anything else could have been done to make this design better. They could have rotated the grain direction of the MDF blocks 90 degrees. They could have oriented the blocks vertically in the long direction. They could have used 2x3 lumber (vertical or horizontal) instead of MDF. They could have actually made the sides as thick as the facade pretends they are. (The sides are hollow.) They could have brought the sides in to where the drawer slides actually are. Etc. etc.
Some of those things would have cost more or made the (lying) appearance of the furniture less substantial looking. But some of these solutions use the same (MDF) material and same or similar amounts, just different orientation. Either the person who designed it was an absolute dumbass, or it was deliberately made in a way that would fail after more than 90 days but less than 2 years.
Mandating different materials doesn't protect against stupidity or malice.
But the efficacy of such a tax is based on the proportion of MDF that goes to crap, short-lifespan products. I don't have numbers here, but if there's a whole lot more crap furniture than hobby speaker cabinets, I would still be favor of policies discouraging the use of these materials.
Not only are we socially conditioned to prefer new, as you point out, this is further reinforced by the necessity imposed by disposable-quality products.
My first sofa was a turquoise leather 2½ seater bought for €100 from a municipal charity shop. Impossible to resell it turned out, but still in excellent condition we had the municipal charity shop in our new town pick it up (they sold it pretty fast; this is one of those sofas you have to see in a store to say “hey, this could work for me”).
Our present sofa is an ox-blood 2 seater Chesterfield-type one bought for €400 from a piercing shop which had it for waiting customers for only a brief while. Excellent condition and likely to last us another decade at least (if I didn't have a child I would be more sure about it lasting my lifetime).