Selling Lemons
frankchimero.com
frankchimero.com
I find this ironic. I swear by MZOO eye masks. They are so much better than anything you can buy in a pharmacy. They are vastly more comfortable, and they do a significantly better job at blocking out light. I've recommended them to all my friends, and many of them now swear by them as well. And don’t just take my word on it - Consumer Reports also says they’re the top rated sleep mask brand.
There is a certain irony (or not?) to talking about how the good is indistinguishable from the bad, and then accidentally mentioning the best. The Internet did bring me a lot of bad knock-off brands, but it also brought me MZOO, so I'm not sure if I should be complaining.
do you know how they compare to manta btw
Hopefully, MZOO will establish word-of-mouth reputation much like Anker did.
I don't think there is any stickiness here, and it's a cutthroat market. These things are all at a price point where there will never be a winner-takes-all.
Maybe they last for us because we're not heavy users? We only use them on vacations.
As many have noted, this happened in the 1960s-1980s with Japan. My specific experience is with guitars: all kinds of random companies would buy mass-produced Japanese guitars, slap their own label on them, and sell them in their tiny music shops. Despite the disparate labels, the guitars were mostly coming out of the same handful of factories (Matsumoku et. al.). Of course there were exceptions like Yamaha. Some of the early examples were mediocre at best, but as the product landscape improved, many of the later examples from the 1970s and 80s are competitive with much more expensive guitars today. The only difference with today's landscape is that the Chinese manufacturers are starting to realize they can cut out the middleman. Imagine you were in the 1960s, pre-internet, trying to decide whether you should get a guitar from a brand name you recognized, like Decca, a record company, or some random Japanese company called "Yamaha".
Also, after a while you learn to spot the "Alibaba bulk" listings and can then decide whether you want to optimize for price and just buy the cheapest one that is exactly the same as all the others.
The ultimate problem here is that MZOO's incentive to maintain their level of quality isn't very strong. There is little preventing them from slowly make their product cheaper and cheaper until they are delivering the same quality of those other brands. That would be the same process as enshittification. The primary difference is that enshittification can happen for other reasons such as a monopoly while a Market for Lemons is specifically because information asymmetry.
MZOO might be good now, but the economic incentives suggest they are just in the first stage of this process. It would take an owner committed to quality to not succumb to those incentives and it's impossible for us to know if MZOO has that type of owner.
20 years ago, existing as a brand required an effort and resources threshold. Even to have a logo took some level of commitment and skill. Minimum production runs on trivial things like the box insert meant there were stakes to bringing a product to market.
With those barriers gone, we have more brands than ever, and they mean relatively little.
The ability for anyone to learn Photoshop or learn how to create a website, create a game, create anything, content or otherwise, and sell it on the marketplace for a quick cash grab has never been easier. I think most people set out to try with their best intentions and run into motivation issues and it just slips downhill from there - eventually being released because they have no choice. Maybe they think some of those downhill slides are good things. The issue still remains. Quality products get drowned out by inferior ones due to letting everyone participate.
There should be some sort of quality control / gate / barrier of entry to some of these things. The ultimate issue is "quality" is subjective.
So for a developer perspective all you need to achieve is that critical mass of early positive reviews, and that's not especially difficult if you have something half decent.
It also varies heavily by genre. People love making platformers and action type games, probably inspired by the extreme simplicity of some hyper-successful games. But those are some of the worst selling games and the saturation of the market there cannot be overstated. By contrast colony sims, 4x, city builders, and so on have median revenue (with no filtering of the chaff) in the $4k-$8k range. Filter out the chaff and it'd probably be in the $30k range.
And again in those numbers I'm not appealing to the $$$ values, but the corresponding number of reviews. Because the goal is to get some traction in their algorithm, and legitimate reviews play a major part there.
That's kind of insane really, and I think basically puts to rest the claim that mid-range games aren't being reached. Because there's obviously nowhere remotely near 3.5 big titles, or even remotely well known titles for that matter, being released each day.
It's fairly safe to say that very near 100% of the chaff is going to qualify as a hobby project, but the great thing about development today is that hobby projects can also see basically unlimited success as well. For the obvious example - Minecraft was a hobby project by every possible definition of the term - no marketing, no publisher, single dev in his spare time after work - and it's one of the best selling games of all time. Lots of really great looking games today would also qualify as hobby projects. Advances in development tools/engines (and marketplaces) have really made some wild things possible.
Term used by _whom_? Because nobody at DICE or GDC talks like that -- just peanut gallery blogs.
"And it turns out that it's the overwhelming majority of games."
Overwhelming majority... _of the way games are marketed_, not the reality of production. It's called "print the legend."
While gaming is indeed a concern, I think a bigger one is that the power behind reviews is derived from just that, the reviewers.
Human beings, playing the part of reviewers, are from my perspective becoming rapidly dumber due to a number of factors that are discussed ad nauseam here on HN. Or they are at least desensitized to the things that would prompt a negative review due to the sheer amount of shitty things they are exposed to that would prompt said review. If you shovel enough shit, the smell begins to not bother you any more.
Not OP, but if you wanna get an idea for how much of a barrier there was 30 years ago... Just look through a few shareware CDs. So much crap was hastily thrown together by someone who read a beginner book on Hypercard or Visual Basic - and you'd have to mail $10 to an address, hope they hadn't moved, and that your floppy wouldn't get lost in the mail.
The general shittiness of most software back in the 90s is still a bit nostalgic IMO. It felt like software that was written by actual people instead of a faceless corporation
the Amazon mixing of products from separately sourced vendor inventories or luxury goods with counterfeiting competitors, or buying jewelry from a jeweler creates lemon markets for those products.
used markets do have the nature of lemon markets, and once you discovered that you have been ripped off on a purchase, you have an incentive to unload what you bought, and you could call that a lifecycle stage of a product, but "descending into lemonhood" is not a progression of markets.
also, the term lemon refers to the slang "lemon cars", cars with defects, and has nothing to do with a market for lemons where people seek the sour taste.
This feels like a potential massive shift, seems fated to raise prices significantly & flood users with way way way more results.
Like, when I purchased an Apple laptop charger "ships from and sold by Amazon.ca" but what arrived was an obvious counterfeit, that was... bad.
No questions asked and they took my return, but man, I was sweating that I'd get accused of something.
It takes time for the participants to respond to the lemon market conditions, eg buyers to make purchases that are bad, so that they come to distrust the sellers, and then sellers with quality goods taking them elsewhere because the buyers are now pricing everything as if it's going to be a lemon.
The transition from healthy market to lemon market once the preconditions have been in place for enough time could reasonably be described as a "descent".
lemon markets never stop descending till all honesty is gone
i see a point in maintaining the distinctions.
There's a very real phenomena where markets often start out functional and then descend into a market for lemons, and it has to do with game theory again. When the market is small and still growing, firms in it can count on repeat interactions. Even if your customers don't buy from you again, there are new customers, who often ask the existing customers what they should buy, and so you have an incentive to produce a good product. The information asymmetry that Akerlof describes doesn't exist, because actual experiences with the products quickly get conveyed to other market participants and incorporated into their purchase decisions.
But when the market matures, those repeat interactions (and prospect of future sales) decline. People who have repeated needs and vendors they can trust often exit the market and deal directly with their vendors. What's left are buyers who are not particularly well-connected and don't have a whole lot of information on past experiences with the product, but who trust the market as a whole. This is the kind of information asymmetry that breeds a market for lemons. Eventually all products start becoming crap, everyone who knows how to find non-crap exits the marketplace, and the market collapses.
I've found the emergence of these anti-brands to be fascinating, if also annoying. They are not really brands at all. The purpose of a brand is to signal something about who made the product, but these brands deliberately signal nothing.
What's interesting, though, is that these brands typically sell things for which we, in the pre-internet days, would not really have cared much about the brand. If you were looking for a sleep mask, you would likely go to a department store or a store at the mall. That store would have at most one or two different brands of sleep mask to choose from. What would you, the shopper know about these brands? Probably nothing. It was the store's brand that you would trust. The store would do the curation, and if customers got a lot of lemons from the store, they would choose to shop somewhere else.
With Amazon's "everything store", this entire pattern has been distrupted. For a while, their ratings could be trusted, but they eventually eroded. Then you could trust "Amazon's Choice" for a while, but I've started seeing "Amazon's Choice" on brands like "MIEWWO" now. So what to do?
The answer is to go back to shopping at stores you can trust to curate what they sell, or for specialty products, buy direct from some known brand's website. (e.g. something like Leatherman tools or Spyderco knives)
Last summer I had to prep for an outdoors trip, and needed to buy a bunch of gear and clothing. Almost everything I bought I could have gotten from Amazon or a similar marketplace online, but instead I bought from REI and local sporting/camping shops, either buying online and picking up in store, or just going to the store and shopping, and it really felt worth it to get the quality I wanted.
Solution: make millions of brand names and write them on the product.
It's slightly more annoying and expensive for everyone involved, but it circumvents Amazon's policy.
But yeah I call the site Scamazon. Even if you think you buy legit, theres a good chance of counterfeit due to SKU mixing.
And weirdly enough, in quite a few areas, Scamazon is like 20% more expensive than other retailers.
These days, I ask in discord groups who they recommend. At least I can avoid the AI shitfest and get real humans' expertise.
This could be resolved by having a human person with decent judgment evaluate and approve all products before they can be listed. That's how normal retail outfits operate. Everything you find on a Safeway shelf has been authorized by someone at Safeway corporate. That doesn't mean it's good, but it at least means they consciously intend to sell it.
But that scales poorly. This person has to have some sort of skin in the game, so you can't just contract it out or automate it. Amazon leadership is making a conscious decision to allow their store to be flooded with shit in order to reduce their costs of curating it. Given how successful they are, I have a hard time arguing they made the wrong choice, but I certainly don't like it.
It's the same reason it's hard to impossible to reach customer service at many of these places. Google would much rather lose you as a "customer" than spend the money it takes to have a person available who can get your gmail account unfucked.
It also means that people have no brand recognition, and junk brands just blend in, or if you have to discharge your brand for some reason, nothing is lost.
Gemini just gave me these as novel brand names for a sleep mask - some are not bad, all are better than random capital letters.
Umbra, Somnia, Driftdown, Ocula, Night Plume, Hushcover, Stillpoint, Aetheria
I was told that this was what happened to Etsy.
When it first came out, people with real skills, sold real, handmade goods, at fairly high prices.
Then, the mass-produced knockoffs flooded the site, priced way-lo.
The legit stuff couldn't keep up; in price or in scale.
I see this happening everywhere.
Three years later there are 18 guys selling the same glass bongs from Temu.
Curation is the answer.
Now I just find a fridge magnet and not care where it's made.
(I mostly try to get something handmade or locally made if possible, in the rare instances, I buy trinkets, which is pretty much just that I buy a refrigerator magnet from every city I take my RV to. But every now and then yeah there was nothing but the Alibaba stuff.)
It sucks that it drains the soul out of things, and that mass produced cheap variants can crush anyone trying to make quality things by hand.
On the upside I can get shitty custom art (If I need a victorian painting of my dog or something) for like $20. That would have been hundreds a few years ago, and maybe thousands 20+ years ago.
Capitalism needs brakes and regulations; Not a popular stance, with this crowd.
I'm not sure this is a good system.
Wirecutter recommends it and Reddit seems to agree.
Doesn't negate the article, but just clarifying for anyone in the market who thinks it's a lemon.
Both are satisfied to have found good products, and somewhat surprised, at least tacitly acknowledging by even finding it worth commenting, that the productscape overall is basically a sea of lemons.
Cool
I can click on the profiles, and see "created 2009 or 2014", and think "OK this is probably a real person"
Whereas if this were Reddit or Instagram, and the account was created recently, I might think "that's AI spam".
So yeah someone has to do real work to create spaces that are not lemon markets. I guess people who have experienced that have coined "Dead Internet Theory"
(Although ironically, I would trust HN more on non-tech stuff like sleep masks, than I do on tech stuff. The tech stuff does have a bias towards what CEOs/investors think, although plenty of opposing opinions get voiced as well)
Unclear if this is actually a good heuristic.
One of our recommended products is made by a brand called DIWANGUS, which always gets a giggle. But they're good!
Has anyone bought the third brand to round out the discussion?
I have a different take thought and it’s not so bleak, and believe a few different topics are conflated in the post.
- Everything in life trends towards the lowest common denominator. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it just means companys optimize for mass appeal (e.g. they want Walmart volume, not low boutique sales).
- Information asymmetry is actually not as bad as the post would make you believe. 5-star rated system for seller & products (and buyer comments) exist preciously to prevent information asymmetry. This helps buyers make informed purchasing decisions. You see this from: Amazon, Yelp, Uber, Airbnb, etc.
What I think is getting conflated is:
- Launching a new physical good (not just software) has never been easier. In tech, we got accustomed to how easily it became to launch a 1-person SaaS over the last decade (i.e. “indie hacker” movement). The same is now happening with physical goods.
- Curation matters. Nordstrom has the legendary return policy where they will take back any good sold. This is in part able to be done because Nordstrom is hand selecting any good they sell. Which means they are vetting it coming from a reputable supplier and has a certain degree of quality. In an economy where it’s just one big open marketplace (which is directionally where we are going), customers lose the relationship they once had with a merchant who performed the trusted curation of product selection for them.
I dont understand how this overcomes the problem. How do you then stand out as a candidate in a saturated lemon market of candidates for instance?
How you then stand out as an authoritiative website if the search results are lemon?
It doesn't scale, but that's the point. Direct competition is a loser's game.
So now I want to spend several hundred dollars on a magnetic-resistance stationary bike. This is a whole new level of exposure vs. my "small-dollar, small-risk" previous purchases. Main brands (Peleton etc.) are just way out of my price range. So I have spent several days now researching these products. Am confident I am going to make a good purchase... Why you say ??
I was looking at a very niche "vote your favorite mansion" competition on a football fan forum (chiefsplanet) thread. Some very expensive mansion had a photo of the exercise room, and there was my current contender for first choice. What a strange way to get positive feedback.
When buying physical products, there are tons of high-quality review sites like Wirecutter, with journalists who spend months testing out products and reviewing them to find the best ones. Not to mention the reviews on sites like Amazon itself. And of course, just doing internet searches, researching the domain, learning what makes products good, seeing what others on various forums have liked. It takes some time, effort, learning, and taste to do all this searching and to weed out the fake reviews, of course, but I think many millions of people are capable of doing the above.
Social media is similar. It's not that hard to discern whether you're following a low-quality spam account vs an authentic high-quality person. And you can curate and build up your list over time, to have more signal and less noise. Will most people filter effectively? No. Again, it requires time, effort, learning, and taste. But still, it's possible.
Etc.
But I don't think it's accurate to say we're in a lemon market. We're in a taste market, and the reality is that most people just have exceptionally bad taste.
It does though, since the entire premise of the "lemon market" idea is that buyers can't differentiate between good and bad products. What matters is where the bar is to be a good differentiator, and how many people can cross it.
It also doesn't necessarily matter how many lemons are for sale, if the good ones are easy to find. Imagine that there are 1 million trashy sleep masks on Amazon and only 3 good ones, but the 3 good ones are right at the top, with superior ratings and reviews.
The better question is: what % of buyers are buying lemons?
https://qz.com/apples-12-worst-product-failures-of-all-time-...
Not listed but I would absolutely list the screen nub a usability failure and I consider my work laptop and work phone a lemon because of it.
I’d also consider large phones a usability failure. My work phone is a Iphone 13 Mini.
Brand capture is powerful but maybe only if you’re willing to eat the propaganda.
Correct. The brand stays solid. The keyboard, the ribbon, there were a few citrus aspects to that generation but they rolled it back in the next generation. Crucially, it only affected a small (but vocal!) niche market so the brand remained solid.
To be clear. I’m not making the case that Apple haven’t made mistakes or lemons, but that they have not entered the “lemon market” and continue to demand, and receive a premium for their goods.
> To be clear. I’m not making the case that Apple haven’t made mistakes or lemons, but
I think the rest of what you’re saying is just more if the propaganda.
If you get something more business-oriented, most of them are reasonable. They're not as good or as cheap as if you assembled it by hand, but they offer good discounts and benefits for businesses buying in bulk. They're often plenty powerful and well-specc'd for what you pay.
Gaming is different. 90% of the gaming pre-builts are complete garbage, because their buyers only buy one at a time and aren't well-informed, nor do they tend to have a lawyer on hand. They're poor value for money, sometimes use sub-standard parts or proprietary non-standard formats, are poorly configured, not well tested, etc.
HP: nicely designed lemons Dell: citrusy with a note of quality but you need to know which ones to get. Sometimes you need a few but they get there in the end
> gaming-oriented ones
Generally nicely powered but garishly designed and flimsy
> just parts
No. That should have been clear.
> they offer good discounts and benefits for businesses buying in bulk
Also outside the market. You need to know who to talk to.
Another brand that do good laptops are Lenovo but, they also have their lemon lines which you can end up buying from again if you don’t know what you’re doing.
basically - products spy on you, create a detailed dossier, and then sell or share your information.
And this information is basically unavailable, for many reasons.
So you cannot find out if a product is not only bad, but evil.
You only hear about stuff like this
1) tangentially
2) long after the fact
Like how the pentagon says DJI is basically the chinese military.
or how XYZ corp was compromised and leaked lots of people's data (and the people don't know who they are, where the data came from, and how long it has been happening)
In many fields of human endeavor, there’s the passionate or early adopters who seek out the best, most innovative, high quality producers and pride themselves on that.
But even the most sophisticated/snobbish of connoisseurs doesn’t have time to be that way about more than a few things. Very few wine snobs spend the time to investigate the cost/quality ratio on their toilet paper in a similar way.
Most people don’t actually care that much about the thread count on their sheets and the production value on their TikTok clips.
They care more about spending time with their kids or, heck, even their community. Simply clicking buy on the algorithmic Chinese slop in the featured slot gets the job done well enough, most of the time.
I don’t see how digital algorithmic scarcity is any different than the battle to appear on scarce shelf-space when everything was still in the real world.
The fundamental issue in both cases is still scarcity of human attention. The market is pretty damn efficient at giving customers exactly what they want, and the hard truth is most people want “as cheap and low effort as possible.” I think the author just wishes other people were more passionate like him in the areas he cares about.
It's kind of a real world ACME equivalent now. I'm surprised that I don't make that duped coyote face more often after ordering from them.
The other part of the story is that a lot of formerly respectable quality brands now sell much poorer quality goods. I'm not sure whether this is adaptation to a lemon market, but it does reinforce the information asymmetry. Infindnlywlf thinking, "this used to be a good brand once, but can I still rely on them?"
Some of the bad incentives have always been there because they are fundamental to capitalism. But I feel that the Internet and global trade together have turbocharged a particularly nasty race to the bottom.
I'd rather rely on online reviews. I'm pretty good at buying quality products sight unseen at this point. And with free returns, the risk is even lower.
I've felt this. A few years ago I bought Eddie Bauer sheets online and they pilled up so badly after one washing that I couldn't use them anymore.
I can see how they'd be willing to ship off cheap crap to Amazon whereas they'd be more protective of what they sell in their stores.
Amazon didn't even let me leave a negative review, some AI model must have decided I'm fraudulent. That would be especially ironic if the reason for my bad experience had been counterfeit products commingled with real ones.
What's actually happening is that China's manufacturing revolution has given us incredible access to cheap manufactured goods. So for instance, in the 1991 Sear's catalog an electric toothbrush costs $80 ( https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1991%20S... ). There are only brand name options. In terms of prevailing wages, that is about $200 in today's dollar. Now on Amazon you can get that same brand name toothbrush for $50, one quarter the price, or a nonsense-brand-name one for $10, 1/20th the price! One man's race-to-the-bottom is another's man paradise of inexpensive and abundant goods...
When China started making stuff so cheap, nobody wanted to buy a much more expensive brand-name Japanese or American or European made product. So even the brand names decided to move their production to China. But then gradually people learn there is no longer any brand name quality boost, and the Chinese manufacturers learn to sell direct to consumers, and so then you get the all the weird brand names, and consumers just buy those for cheaper since the brand names don't mean anything anymore anyways. And even if you wanted to introduce a higher quality version, there simply is no way to reliably educate the consumer and credibly prove to the consumer that your product is four times the durability at twice the price.
Thus the equilibrium is that for most products less than $100 its all going to be Chinese made, the product will be good enough that the consumer won't immediately return it, but other than that the quality is going to be mediocre, because there is no incentive to develop a brand name that stands for high quality products in that price range.
With more expensive goods, there are still are brands that pride themselves on high quality, durable products, eg, Toyota for cars, Bosch for appliances, Milwaukee for tools, Redwing for boots. But you have to do your research to know which brands are working to keep their reputation, and which brands are selling out.
I've observed this too.
Somewhere, some marketing genius realized that brand reception is sticky, but changes to manufacturing processes can be rapid. There is thus an arbitrage opportunity. You start with a high-quality product with a beloved brand. You quickly change the factory to cheaply produce garbage instead. For some window of time, you can get people to buy these shitty products at a price commensurate with their brand perception and take a huge profit.
Of course, brand perception is sticky but not infinitely so and eventually information catches up with reality. Then you've permanently destroyed a brand's reputation. But for a brief moment in time, you can create a lot of shareholder value at the minor expense of making crappy products and disappointing people.
The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting. An item is listed in the CATALOG if it is deemed: (1) Useful as a tool, (2) Relevant to independent education, (3) High quality or low cost, (4) Not already common knowledge, (5) Easily available by mail.
Save that last, the current iteration of the Internet, the actual whole-Earth catalogue, is itself an anti WEC. Rather than "access to tools", it is overwhelmingly "access to shit".
(I could also have listed the Sears Catalog, somewhat less-credible offerings such as Sharper Image or Brookstone, or any number of others. Costco is a current exemplar of this strategy, in that it selects quality merchandise, as does (or did) Marks & Spencer. Not necessarily cheap, but high value.
> The safest, smartest path is also the most mundane: keep the main thing the main thing.
But the thing is that it's not, now. I think it's harder to succeed doing that than it is to succeed by diving into the cesspool of grift, deception and meta-gaming that the article laments. We're not going to fix that by exhorting the good people to stay out; they're the ones who don't want to jump in anyway. The problem is the bad people who will gleefully jump in and contribute to that disaster, and it won't be fixed without action directed at making that jump more painful (or at least less pleasurable) for them.
Obligatory Ryan George video: https://youtu.be/nQpxAvjD_30?t=4
Missing a close paren here. My mental Lisp parser gave me a syntax error here and I panicked hahah :)
(truth be told I got stuck for an instant in there)
no lemonade
Honestly tinder shows me profiles of all potential partners with comparable wealth, age, and status within my area which I recognize from closer and wider circle of acquaintances. Even short appearances or breakdowns the apparently have by installing and setting up the app for a day or two. Sometimes even have moments like "wow, this match would be a romantic comedy plot with reunion after a decade". Then... they just swipe me left and continue complaining that there's nothing there.
The act of "pickup" is creepy because it's based on a false pretense - establishing a human connection and trust quickly. Succes is guaranteed only for the sociopaths. Talking to people in real-life, without the help of technology is not creepy and doing it casually just for the sake of human contact is what all of us should be doing more. We would be able to filter out the "creeps" much easier if most people you get in contact with are normal human beings that are being nice to other human beings.