Best Idea: companies that inflict unreliable & high-maintenance crap on the market naturally go out of business because people freely choose to no longer purchase their unreliable and high-maintenance crap.
How many times do you see friends buying unreliable rubbish? I was talking with an acquaintance the other day and they were predictably complaining about the high maintenance costs of their VW. Another friend was spending huge amounts every year on their very good looking Jeep.
Modern goods are fractally complex: individuals can't be expected to become experts in all the disciplines required to judge the quality of a good.
Even specialists can't be expected to judge correctly.
Government interference in purchase decisions is a big hammer. It is hard to imagine policies that would actually help.
Plenty of the "solutions" suggested here cause other harms or are gameable or otherwise unworkable.
> Modern goods are fractally complex: individuals can't be expected to become experts in all the disciplines required to judge the quality of a good.
I think the idea that individual consumers can individually exhaustively assess the value of their goods is not really reasonable.
However, I think it's reasonable to believe you can construct a system where a large number of consumers, enthusiasts, and experts pool their knowledge together in order to much more accurately assess product quality.
For instance, if we could conduct wide-scale long-term surveys of the reliability of large appliances, e.g. by requiring that appliance technicians log service visits for an appliance into a database (that could be run by a non-profit), then that would significantly increase pressure on manufacturers to build robust products. After all, if the cheap $2k fridge is listed in the appliance database as having a lifetime one-third of that of the $5k fridge nearby, far more consumers will opt to buy the latter, because now they actually know that there's an advantage to buying that one.
Also, consumer testing labs like Consumer Reports and ConsumerLabs do some expert testing of products, which is better than nothing.
I think that the problem is information asymmetry - companies know how bad the products that they're selling are, and consumers don't. The free market system only works if buyers have "good enough" information to make a rational decision (although that's a necessary, not a sufficient, condition), and we're not in that state right now.
> Government interference in purchase decisions is a big hammer. It is hard to imagine policies that would actually help.
I agree - it's far harder for the government to legislate vague things like "appliances must be built well" then something like "appliance lifetime and service visits must be logged into a registry".
Indiviuals do not have to understand the fractals of complexity inherent in what it took to make a finished product to know if the finished product is good quality or not.
Let's just say for the sake of argument I do not understand 1/10th of what goes into HVAC systems, or what it takes to make them. I don't understand supply chain and part sourcing. I don't understand the engineering schematics that underpin the design of the control board that runs my given HVAC unit, therefore, have no expert knowledge of HVAC systems. But what I do know, as an end user / consumer is, if you sell me a Lennox, its most likely going to be a piece of shit, and therefore I do not want a Lennox HVAC system.
Again, it starts with the customer. If people really are that pissed off McDonalds ice cream machines are seemingly always broken, then they should stop going to McDonalds, and then the feedback loop will start from there. It's not like there isn't ample other options (Wendys, Burger King, etc). That tells me that this "problem" is really overblown, and while McDonalds customers really would prefer to have the option to reliably order ice cream, it does not deter them significantly enough from consuming McDonalds, and doing something like simply purchasing their ice cream from a different location. If McDonalds wants to recoup that income, then they will, again, prioritize that initiative, and work on improving the ice cream machine, but again, that juice does not seem worth the squeeze.
A bad ice cream machine could just mean sub optimal profits / experience.