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Comment by nyjah | Hacker News Reader

The other issue is American quality has gone down the tank. 10-15 years ago I’d look for American quality over Chinese, but nowadays I prefer the Chinese manufacturer almost 100% of the time. Not always the case but anecdotally chinas quality has gotten better while American stuff has gotten worse.

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Yes. People associate Chinese manufacturing with low quality products, but I feel those people misunderstand systems. It's not Chinese manufacturing that is low quality. It's really the sites like Temu and Shein that create low quality products -- because of their aggressive pricing, they create a cascade of systemic cost pressures on manufacturers, who have to cut corners.

AMZN on the other hand probably provides more headroom and reduces cost pressure on manufacturers. If you know how to shop on Amazon (avoiding 3P sellers, and only getting 4 star and above products), you generally get high quality products.

I've only rarely gotten anything bad from Amazon (from Chinese manufacturers).

I've bought Chinese products like Anker batteries, Thermopro thermocouples/sensors, Jigoo (weird name I know) dust mite vacuum, Tapo camera, Levoit humidifier, Cosori air fryer, and little clever tools like toothpaste tube squeezers and the like.

They've all exceeded expectations.

(I recently bought a Insta360 Flow Pro 2 gimbal, also a Chinese product, and it's amazing).

China makes quality things, they just keep it for themselves, and ship their crap to us.

If you are willing to pay (and know where to look), you can get good quality from China just fine.

Most iPhones come from China after all.

That's hilarious. The most popular grocery stores in Shanghai right now are Costco and Sams, with lines everyday out the door, not Chinese grocery stores. Chinese citizens don't want to buy cancerous food products for example.

Comparative advantage in action!

Then why is lead in everything from China?

> Levoit humidifier

Be careful with that. I liked mine too until it burst into flames one evening.

I’ve had it for years running 24/7 and nothing happened. You might have gotten a dud.

Bursting into flames shouldn't be possible, that's a LOT worse than a "dud". (Assuming parent isn't exaggerating)

Not exaggerating. I had it for a little over a year. I used it in my bedroom. As usual I started it going and then went into my bathroom to brush my teeth before bed. Partly through brushing my teeth I smelled something burning. I came out and saw the humidifier in flames.

It does raise the question of certification and product safety in general, there are so many electrical devices that probably don't meet Western safety standards. A humidifier is basically a heating element in a plastic housing, it should be engineered with safety features (overheating protection etc) so it shouldn't be able to just catch fire, someone clearly didn't do their job properly at some stage. I wonder how product recalls work with that sort of thing.

I don’t think I would make that leap about falling short of Western safety standards.

All electrical products sold in the US are legally required to be NRTL certified (according to US standards). Levoit is ETL certified.

Non certified products are seized by customs or recalled from the market.

It’s very unlikely and I agree, not acceptable, but any household appliance with a heating element has a nonzero fire risk. I read that for UL certified humidifiers the incidence rate is 1 in 100k, similar to fans. The seems worryingly high.

We must buy different things.

I will absolutely concur with American products getting far worse. Everything is cost cut to the bone.

With few exceptions.

In general, if I’m going to buy something that’s going to last 2 uses, I might as well just buy the cheapest one.

It's not so much that it is cost cut to the bone, but that the expertise is being lost.

I can tell you with a straight face that american manufacturing is being held up right now by grey beards pushing back retirement because young people have zero interest in manufacturing boiler conduit fittings. You can crash course an IT cert and come out making more money than you would ever make pressing steel couplers.

No, a lot of it really is just obvious cost cutting. Things like replacing metal fasteners with plastic ones that break or strip easily.

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