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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

As much as the result for consumers sucks, is this just a result of the quality backpack business not being a very profitable business to be in anymore?

The reason they were able to buy all those backpack brands is because each of those brands were not making much money running a backpack company selling quality at a reasonable price. The purchaser makes some money leeching value out of the brand reputation, but then that brand value falls because of the crappy product, and they sell the brand because they leeched all the value out of it.

This is only possible because you can’t make much money selling quality for a good price. Consumers will pick lower quality for the cheapest price every time.

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It's much more likely to be a result of the modern drive for companies to keep growing. This leads to a need to maximize profit endlessly, which in turn leads to cutting corners as much as you think you can get away with, or just ballooning prices. And this problem goes up and down the supply chain, of course - even if you want to run a non-growth business manufacturing quality backpacks, if your suppliers want to run growth businesses, they will eat up your margins and force your hand.

This obsession with ever increasing revenue is a major source of our worse and worse consumer economy.

The onslaught of far east imports is also a factor. They weren't very relevant 30 years ago outside of discount merchants. Now you pop on to Amazon and choose something that looks appealing from dozens of mystery meat brands.

That's not going to change though. Cheap asian manufacturing and wall st efficiency maximizing changed industry in America. Maybe there could be changes to how public markets are regulated to change BigCo incentives, but it will be hard to change consumer behaviour if they like buying cheap disposable crap for the lowest price.

There is still plenty of competition in the backpack market if you just visit an outdoors store instead of walmart. That's a higher end market though, which is where most high quality small/medium businesses flourish.

Is this just the same kind of optimization? Consumers trying to optimize their margin while producers are trying to optimize theirs?

It leads to enshitification due to short term thinking but in the short term seems like a good decision.

One silver lining is that backpack industry doesn't have a huge moat. New companies can get started relatively easily as the older ones sell out and decay.

The bags I bought 15 years ago were made locally in San Francisco - Timbuk2 and Chrome - and had a reputation for quality. Now both brands are mainly produced overseas, but have been replaced by two other local brands with ties to the originals - Rickshaw and Mission Workshop.

In theory, competition is what prevents this. If these small companies can sell products that provide more value then consumers buy the alternative.

I think the problem today is that it's extremely difficult to tell when you're buying quality or a brand. If there's a 40$ and a 100$ backpack, often the 100$ version does not actually have meaningfully improved quality - just better marketing.

The same goes for tons of products - brands nowadays are something companies build while they're young and relentlessly smash into the ground as they age because the value you're destroying isn't obvious. Shareholders get good results, and objectively it's probably the correct financial decisions for the company - doesn't make it any less shit.

I don't think it's actually that hard - 5 minutes of skimming on Reddit will do a lot. You can also usually see Wirecutter's recommendations (even if they paywall the full article). People just don't care upfront but complain later.

Absolutely this. I am sure there are recorded cases where companies have gone out of their way to make things break early but I think it’s more times than not simply that cost matters and consumers are the voters and for the majority cheap wins. The average consumer is not very thoughtful and will opt to buy the cheaper good. For sure there are many economic constraints and not everyone has the luxury of buying quality but that’s not always the issues.

This comes up a lot with washing machines and I sympathize with parts of it, why not standardize control boards more or other components in the machine but one of the biggest issues is simply the cost of labor in places like the US is high enough that it’s hard to make it cost effective to repair.

The high cost of labor has nothing to do with reusable parts of the washing machine. If it was all standardized, you could do a lot of repairs yourself.

It actually plays a pretty large role in the problem. This is like when people complain about not having enough small cars in America, they simply don’t sell well. Similarly, the average consumer does not want to be doing their own repairs. A lot of appliance repairs are already pretty darn easy.

When the base labor charge is already 10% or more of the total replacement cost it becomes hard to justify the repair.

Was revisiting the thought and it’s like the Framework laptop. There is absolutely a market for it but it’s far from the dominant market. Consumers on average simply don’t care.

As easy as it is to blame customers, I don’t think it is irrational to just buy the cheapest. So many times the more expensive one isn’t any better and you are paying for branding and marketing, and just wasting your money.

At least if you buy the cheapest one you know you are at least saving money up front.

It also doesn't help that for school backpacks, the buyer and the user are different people. There is less incentive to take care of stuff, and when it breaks, parents are more likely to blame a bad backpack than to blame their children.

Agreed. You can also say that they are better engineered for most use, nowadays. With the adage that anyone can build a bridge that doesn't fall over, an engineering team is needed to build one that has the minimum resources to stay up.

In particular, how durable do people think backpacks need to be? If you are going through them particularly quickly, maybe you are over loading compared to what they were designed for?

That's the end result of capitalism squeezing all disposable income from the people. Wage suppression, rent-seeking subscriptions, shrinkflation. When people barely have enough money to survive, they can't afford to buy things!

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