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Comment by azan_ | Hacker News Reader

> This is likely mostly nullified by the consumerism hellscape that's being forced on us i.e. stuff lasts less time and we have to buy more often.

Actually good quality stuff is more affordable than ever. People just don't want to pay for quality and things that last.

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I have a hard time finding quality stuff, even when I want to pony up for it. Do you have a good resource?

It's hard to know whether moving up in pricing just buys unnecessary features in a checklist, higher quality veneer, brand name, or actual quality.

I live in country where shrewd salesmen know that people like me would pay extra for quality so they sell me crappy quality still, just for 3x the price.

So yeah, I started resorting to asking acquaintances with big families and also LLMs to desperately try to separate the wheat from the chaff.

It's not impossible and it's indeed doable, just not very quick.

The assumption is that price is supposed to reflect quality. Unfortunately as you say, too often price is a weak signal. And price often signals current fads/fashions rather than quality.

Non-monetary costs are often a better indicator because good quality does cost you more: more time, more expertise, more judgement, more homework.

Plus we usually have narrow needs, which are hard to match. Price reflects a single average market scale, not how a product/service fits our individual conditions.

Finding the right compromises is hard work.

Yeah, it doesn't seem like people remember how expensive in real terms things were in the 80s.

> Actually good quality stuff is prohibitively expensive for the non-ultra rich, and the rest of the quality stuff is increasingly being hollowed out by private equity and rapidly declining quality. People just can’t afford to pay for quality and things that last due to price gouging, wage stagnation, and increased cost-of-living.

There, fixed that for you.

Look how expensive things were in the 50s then 1) start buying things as expensive in real terms and evaluate their quality; 2) consider whether more or less people can afford that. People have very rosy view of the past because they compare median worker nowadays to top 1% richest households back in time.

>Actually good quality stuff is more affordable than ever. People just don't want to pay for quality and things that last.

You might want to read *A Market for Lemons".

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