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> nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.

> then they get angry. very angry.

Yes, this has a lot of overlap with how humans differ from "Homo Economicus" [0].

Humans generally can't find out, don't know, care to know, have the time to research, or are expert enough to understand the ramifications of decisions perfectly (or adequately to some definition of adequate).

However, they do understand price!!! So you end up getting cheap stuff that everyone chooses because they don't understand how they lower their future risk or save money over the long run with a more immediately expensive option.

This, also, has been true for a long long time. Humans are far more likely to choose the cheap option if they don't believe or understand the expensive one.

Incidentally, this is somewhat rational given that marketing half-truths are rampant.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus

I've noticed this is leading to less high quality products being produced in general. If the only real axis people understand is price then products can't compete on quality/durability/maintability/etc, and so they're pushed aside to lower the cost.

A recent example: I've bought many articles of clothing from Eddie Bauer over the years because they have been generally high quality and durable, and even so are only a bit more expensive than other brands. However just last week they filed for bankruptcy. Sure, the company could have been mismanaged, but I'm sure competition from fast fashion brands with rock bottom prices didn't help.

There is an interesting counter balance to this consumer tendency: the business.

Businesses/organizations in a lot of ways act much more "rationally" than the individual consumer. So you'll see generally better car/truck maintenance in fleets than by consumers.

Then there is a cool feedback/blowoff valve where more expensive + higher quality "pro" tools get discovered by consumers, drive up demand, the price falls, and then the features become common.

Don't forget the second half of that feedback loop: other manufacturers come out with their poor approximations of those features at lower prices, consumption shifts to that because quality isn't clear from the labels, the quality manufacturers don't move enough volume to hit similar prices, so they end up either killing them or cutting corners.

:( Yes, I think this is definitely the case.

So then it becomes a cycle. It's risky to make a high quality initial product that's expensive because it requires the buyer to understand and trust why they should pay more.

Eventually the market demands the higher quality and the pro series gains adoption, only for the the cheap stuff to come in again.

I've never heard of Eddie Bauer, and if I did see that in a store, there's no way to know the clothing is of higher quality, or how much higher. In a market for lemons, lemons win.

Haven’t followed the recent history of Eddie Bauer, but seems they’ve sullied their brand for a while. Sam’s Club has been selling Eddie Bauer stuff for years. I don’t think a $37 pair of Eddie Bauer hiking boots are going to be quality.

The more or less inevitable trend of "outdoor stores/brands" is to become increasingly sort of "outdoorsy casual" stores of some sort with--maybe--some camping/hiking gear at some level.

It's been a hugely popular PE play - any time a brand has a reputation for being very well made buy it for life level of stuff, that people pay a high price for, you can buy it and start reducing the quality for a few years, selling cheaper lower quality goods for the same price, hoping no one notices.

For the first few years, there aren't enough product issues for most of the hardcore enthusiasts to notice - maybe your tent ripping was just bad luck, or it may take two years for even a mediocre tent to weaken and fail for all but the people taking their tent to Denali or something.

Eventually the people who know move on and stop paying for the poorly made crap, but it's still seen as an exclusive brand by people who care about showing off they can afford something expensive vs. those for whom the quality was worth paying more for.

For boots, at least, there's an easy solution: buy the same stuff that the military gets (there are many options there). It might not be the best, but at least there are known standards other than minimum price that apply.

I have a pair of Belleville "hot weather mountain hybrid boots" (TR550) that I got back in 2014, heavily used, still in one piece.

> However, they do understand price!!! So you end up getting cheap stuff that everyone chooses because they don't understand how they lower their future risk or save money over the long run with a more immediately expensive option.

I think people generally do understand that. What they can't do is tell which of the more expensive options is actually of higher quality and which just has higher margins. That requires expert knowledge and we can't each be an expert in everything.

In other cases it can also actually be better to get the cheaper crap option. E.g. if you are not sure if something will actually work for you the best option is no longer just the one with the lowest cost/lifetime.

It’s the externalized costs that bite society in the end.

The short life boots are great for everyone (boot makers, suppliers) except the end user.

A slightly higher quality boot could reduce their expenditure (monetary and time) and collectively allow society to devote the time and resources saved to higher goals.

However the wants of the few outweigh the needs of the many.

> The short life boots are great for everyone (boot makers, suppliers) except the end user.

And the environment, which now gets polluted with discarded short life boots, and all the waste byproducts required for their production/transportation

And the social fabric inevitably changes for one reflecting the priorities of a world of cheap disposable boots made far away

Also good for the environmental cleanup companies and waste management ones (/s)

>until something goes significantly wrong

Data breaches are so common they don't even register any more, and people share far more personal information now (willingly or not) than they used to. Remember when the common advice was "don't use your real name online"? Now every service demands your phone number to register, and those temporary email services (like 10minutemail) rarely work any more, in my experience. Downtime makes the news if it's bad enough, but Cloudflare, Microsoft and Amazon still control most of the internet. They fuck up badly all the time, and nothing ever happens. Windows 11 is literal adware, and Linux desktop usage is still a rounding error.

Remember that Tea "dating" app that leaked pretty much everything last year? As far as I can tell, it's still in business.

Many such cases.

> Now every service demands your phone number to register

That appeared as a defense against people impersonating you, i.e. two factor authentication.

Weird that those same services don't send a login token to the registered number.

If that was the case then TOTP would be available as an alternative but often enough it isn't even though SMS are less secure and more costly to implement.

Equifax arguably shouldn’t still be in business…

And yet not long ago its stock was nearly triple that of the time of the 2017 breach…

This is essentially the literacy component of a Lennon market (which the parent essentially described). Where the consumer can't differentiate a lemon from a peach, only a tad more abstract. The customer has an implicit assumption that it's all equivalent so it gets removed from the decision process.

Which that's probably why we're in a lemon economy. To figure out the answers to these things is incredibly time consuming, even if one does have expertise in a specific domain. Fatigue leads to the same result, oversimplification of assumptions