Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

I did a little research study back in 2003 where I went to various grocers and purchased the same product at these grocers and compared.

Walmart has larger boxes, and less contents, universally, for pretty much everything in a box, and they charge 1/3 more for their 2/3rds of what you get everywhere else. They make nearly 50% more profit from that little slight of hand. And try discussing this with any shoppers and they will say "but the box is bigger", <- actual statement from a CS PhD, demonstrating how it does not matter your education, once outside of that specialization you're an idiot.

There are Chinese machine manufacturers who use fake German brand names because for a long time Germany was selling the manufacturing machinery to China and they have a good national brand image.

Yes, I've heard of this effect in marketing. If you make any reference to Switzerland, it's instant sales bump, even if you hold everything else equal. This is also how you got "Häagen-Dazs" ice cream brand. It's fully American, but the name sounds vaguely Scandinavian, so it has to be better, right? Well, customers sure do think so, and are willing to pay the premium.

I'm pretty sure that this sort of thing happens for stuff in big box home improvement stores like Home Depot and Lowe's, too. Things like plumbing fixtures that appear to be identical to counterparts in smaller stores will have off-by-one or suffixed product numbers, and are made with cheaper plastic internal parts than when purchased elsewhere.

Sometimes. My Bosch washing machine died young due to cheap bearings. The AEG dryer had soldering problems and the German dishwasher's time light projector died slowly.

https://www.elektroda.com/rtvforum/topic3652484.html#1966024...

You cannot vote with your wallet unless you have perfect knowledge and infinite time to do all of the comparative tests.

I recently bought one of the Yukon tool chest / benches and the experience totally flipped my opinion of HF. I've been a customer for a while, but always considered them lower-quality in the back of my mind. The tool chest came in perfect condition, easy purchase. Whereas the Huskies I had bought previously were a hassle that involved returning multiple damaged-in-box units back to the store, driving an hour to another store with stock, dodgily swapping parts (drawer slides and top) to make a good one, etc.

It's of course never just one thing - I had been waiting for the Husky to show up in stock again (it has a 24 inch depth vs 18), but at this point it seems like HD has discontinued the 24 in favor of enshittifying with 18 inches instead. And of course I've been shying away from HD recently because of the F-word. It's like these companies want to self-immolate (or put more technically, they create short term boosts by arbitraging away their reputation).

Your example is nonsense.

So someone cloned the market quality leader and you are suggesting that means the design, engineering and QA in the original isn’t valuable?

Show me those tools in 10 years.

The process of working out how to make them great is what you pay for.

In my experience in recent years, Oppo and Vivo phones look better, they are more robust and last longer than iPhones and Samsung premium phones.

When giants like Apple and Samsung fail to innovate enough (and when they price their best products beyond the reach of the middle class of most nations), then upstarts will take their throne.

This may be good for industry so there's healthy competition, but it is unfortunate because China's CCP has a policy that Chinese companies must store and share customer and company data in China. So anyone using Chinese electronic gadgets is saying goodbye to their data security and privacy, even if it is an expensive gadget by a bigshot Chinese company (e.g., Lenovo was caught bundling adware on its premium laptops some years ago - search for "Lenovo Superfish" to know more).

https://legioncyber.com/lenovos-security-failures-and-hidden...

That might be an outdated accusation. There was a time when a touch of research or “caring about quality” was enough to avoid the pitfalls of garbage products, but I don’t believe that to be a fair statement anymore. The website details the history of some examples, but the implication is between the lines: the only reason you used to know a product would last 20 years is because that specific product with those specific parts has already lasted 20 years. Don’t take advice about living to 100 from a 32 year old, don’t trust a warranty that’s longer than the company selling it has existed, and don’t trust that model XB5 is the same as your grandmas XB1.

How can you possibly know if you’re getting a quality product when the reviews you’re reading are for a model that doesn’t exist anymore, or are meaningless generalizations about a mega conglomerate? Saying “Brand X sucks/wins” only has the potential to be meaningful when it’s a single company in a single area and that has made that exact model in the same way for longer than your warranty on it. “Whirlpool sucks/wins” is as meaningless as reading “Water tastes good/bad” from everyone on the planet.

Why do I no longer have any reliable signals for quality? Price, brand, materials, and word of mouth are all you really get, but price and materials are meaningless and brand and word of mouth stop mattering as a company starts to coast on its reputation for higher margin. Genuinely don't know how customers are supposed to choose quality when they want it. I always want it.

The market for lemons is always bustling, I guess [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Agree, but there’s also an element of consumer irrationality. Lower price + lower quality means you can buy more of what you want now, even if it means that you’ll end up with net less of what you want in the long term.

Most consumers, me included, are not making purely rational decisions based in price and quality, even in domains where they are qualified to judge quality.

It's not just customers, many (most?) established reviewers have no idea what quality is. I don't know how many YT review videos I've seen... well, seen the first 30s of, where the reviewer lines up a dozen products and measures some pointless feature of each one of them purely because that's the only thing they can think of to measure and it then allows them to rank them on a scale, rather than saying anything about ease of use, build quality, availability of spare parts, accuracy/repeatability/clean finish of whatever it is the tool does, etc. Project Farm is a prime example of this.

It's the third or fourth time I see it on HN, I have not read anything other than the first two, which were more of complaints about tiered products. E.g. one was about backpacks and how a $40 backpack from Walmart is not going to last 20 years of summiting Mt. Everest like the $400 backpack of the same brand sold elsewhere...

> and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly

The thing that annoys me the most is when the reviewer opens the box, shakes it gently and says "feels well built" or "plastic build". It is actually harmful. Weight doesn't equal quality (there is some correlation, building well often results in more weight, but it is unreliable and easy to game) and plastic is a huge range of materials and some are absolutely the most robust option for many use cases (think a sturdy plastic water bottle that outlasts and glass or metal equivalent).

The problem is quality is very hard to measure. The only really good test is to use the product for many years. But by that time the existing model hasn't been sold for years, in theory you could correlate the new model's quality with the old one but brands are apparently disposable these days so it is very likely that all costs were cut on the new one once their previous model gained a reputation for quality.

I think the only real measure for quality is a warranty. That is the manufacturer promising a lifespan. However they are usually short, can be unreliable to get (often at manufacturer discretion) and more often than not cover only "manufacturing defects" not reasonable wear and tear.

Chasing eternal profit growth isn’t a fact of life, notwithstanding the mythology of commodification. Neither are all investors motivated purely by profit. Neither is it clear that everything can be improved upon (much less that outsiders can improve on it better than the incumbent). Sometimes “do a thing, do it with excellence, make a modest living from it” is enough.

One thing I like about Mr. Sapp’s work at Worse On Purpose here—he (or perhaps his LLM, or perhaps he’s LLM) gives considerable attention to firms that don’t do it that way. Where:

> Quality, ownership, and stewardship all check out. […] Most of these are family-owned, trust-owned, employee-owned, or publicly traded with a long track record of not selling out.

It’s useful to have actionable alternatives, and I put more stock in his organizing thesis given how well its brand preferences line up with my own.

https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/status/approved

https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/methodology

Once a product becomes so big it cannot increase in market share the only way to increase the total amount of profit it generates it by reducing the cost to produce the product or increasing the price.

It makes sense to ask WHY this is hard. People can disagree endlessly on why. But a big part is, that antitrust/monopoly legislation has been almost completely dismantled and detoothed within the last 35 years, starting back with Reagan, and accelerating through the 90's when Clinton was at the wheel. The tiny bit that is still left, is only enforced either when parties fail to pay the bribe, or are bribed to enforce it, by other actors. Once you allow markets to consolidate into a single monolith, any new competitors will only be allowed to live, until they become big enough for the established incumbent to notice and then squish, with their unlimited access to resources. There is little incentive to start a competing business, if you know the trajectory is "IF SUCCESS THEN SQUISH".

I think it's just human nature, people that are ruthless with buisness are more likely to stay afloat compared to the moral alternative that always on the edge of collapsing

And this is why the destruction of antitrust in the US in the latter part of the 20th century has screwed us all. The massive wave of consolidation that followed that (ongoing to this day) makes the barrier to entry for every market much, much higher. The very fact that the most common desired endgame for a startup is "exit"—ie, being bought out by a larger company—should demonstrate this very well.

If we want quality, customer service, decent prices, or anything like them to come back, we need to restore real antitrust, not the morally-and-intellectually-bankrupt Chicago School bullshit that's been pushed on us for decades, benefiting only the already-wealthy.

The legal and regulatory obstacles to starting a business probably don't help but IMO the bigger issue is trying to break into markets that are dominated by massive global players who benefit from economies of scale and access to funding that newer companies don't have.

The other side of this is that consumers don't have the information required to properly differentiate between competitors. If I'm shopping for a new TV I have no idea where or how it is made which is why so many people default to brand names as very rough proxies for quality. That information asymmetry is exactly what websites like this are trying to combat, but it's clearly an uphill struggle.

I don't think you can just say the market would decide when it is so easy to hide corner cutting and sell the thing cheaper.

The problem here is that when the consumers try it they go to actual jail. Meanwhile the producers have been richly rewarded for getting away with their side of it.

So yeah, corporate greed actually has a meaning in this context for people.

Additional information: The prompter for these articles works at Palantir.

Looks like that’s one factor. A number of brands I expected to be marked as Avoid based on who owns them were indeed marked as such. Pleased to see a few of my chosen brands were marked as good. Shame that basically no sun glasses company is good.

This is why independent review organizations are so important in the market.

Thanks, I hate it

you can say shit here

And what if I do care about quality? As the consumer, I do not even have that choice to make 99% of the time. This is very much a false equivalency and it isn't even close.

Companies get to choose what products or product qualities to make. If I, a consumer, want or need a product, I can only choose between what is made available to me by the companies.

It certainly doesn't help that it's nearly impossible to tell what is or isn't a quality product before or even after you buy it. What am I supposed to do when I buy a new power tool? Rip it apart and inspect all the parts to determine if it's "quality"? How am I supposed to tell if it even is "quality"? I'm not a manufacturing or engineering expert. Even when you think you're buying quality, it's not most of the time. Companies sell shit products at premium prices all the time because almost no one can tell the difference.

I think this is the wrong take.

If this was really the truth, the brand names wouldn't matter. But instead the brand ends up as the sole desirable target in the corporate sales.

I think the more likely answer is that being an expert judge on a product's quality is just very hard.

More so when you have to buy it before you can use it.

So people tend to trust brands they've had good experiences with, or heard others having good experiences with.

The greed here is in leveraging that trust to sell a shitty updated version of the product.

Sure, consumers looking for a bargain creates a market for cheap stuff.

But didn't you read the article? It used to be that brand names had meaning, providing a reliable indicator for the quality to expect.

That doesn't hold anymore. As brands are bought & sold by private equity, the relation between brand & what to expect is lost. And in many cases, reputation brands are gutted, $$ extracted, and the sucked-dry corpse discarded. In that environment, how can a consumer tell what's what? Brand X used to be quality, and now it's not. With brand as (often) an unreliable indicator, consumers look at price instead.

What I personally find most amazing, is that quality stuff that used to be household names (and affordable!), are seemingly impossible to produce these days even though technology advanced for 50y+. Example: Arcoroc Sierra (from Arc France, which still exists today). Tableware in tempered, coloured glass, with a nice surface texture. Comes in amber-brown, red & green. Pour in boiling water no problem, lasts a lifetime (and keeps looking like day 1 as long as you keep it out of dishwashers).

Look around in shops today: soup bowls are nice-looking but cheap earthenware, or non-coloured, cheap soda-lime glass. Colour you say? Often it's a thin layer on the glass (sometimes even plastic!). Not a coloured solid material. Scratch it & the non-coloured base material shows underneath.

Something with comparable looks & quality from that 50y old stuff? Not available (at any price), not produced anywhere today. And it's not that people don't want it.

This is just 1 of many examples. Imho the article does a good job of explaining some of the causes.

Yeah. Nobody is innocent here.

Someone linked to The Market for Lemons below. This is exactly right. We now live in the World of Lemons. Everything is lemons, because we can only properly judge quality for the tiny number of things we truly care about. For everything else, we just buy the cheapest thing, because by definition we don’t care enough to do otherwise.

The only possible solution is to buy less stuff, to the point where you have the capacity to care more about each thing, and enough money to pay for these things, which will inevitably cost more.

But then that means making peace with the idea that not having a thing can be better than having a crappy thing. It’s a tough sell to the consumption mindset.

That's certainly part of the problem e.g. with airline seats. But there's also the issue that quality attributes can be difficult for casual customers to discern.

Ethical attestations about treatment of workers, animals, and environment are not always honest. Design flaws may not become apparent until the product has been in use for some time and longevity may only become apparent after many years of use, by which point the newer iterations may be qualitatively different.

It used to be that one could invest time in identifying quality brands, but many brands now are simply a temporary asset to be quickly squeezed of value.

The problem is that most shopping we do is one-off, as opposed to being a recurring customer. For example, if you're selling bread, your potential customers are 1000 locals and if these 1000 locals decide your bread sucks, your business goes belly up. But if you're selling ice cream in a tourist destination, then you'll never see your customers again even if your ice cream is so good it causes instant involuntary orgasm, so you have zero reason not to scam them.

Consumers seeking a deal could be a symptom of affordability problems as wages stagnate while inflation keeps prices going up.

One could also blame corporate greed here as well, choosing to keep those extra profits or distributing them at the executive level, rather than increasing wages for employees to maintain their buying power.

So instead of more money to buy better quality items, we get things like Temu as the answer, selling trash and framing it as “shop like a billionaire.”

Consumer behavior is absolutely the problem, but it's not just greed, it's also factors like blind brand or retailer loyalty. I have friends that own pick up trucks, tools, sporting goods and clothing that express a personal brand but barely get used.

There is also a demographics angle to this. People who grew up poor and now are middle class tend to favor larger quantities of goods over quality. And this is exacerbated by immigration.

It's completely possible to go high quality and low price - it's precisely how China is pretty much taking over every single industry in existence. But in the US you tend to pay low prices for junk, or unreasonably high prices for ostensibly high quality. I think that's largely because of implicit collusion between companies in most industries, particularly those with high barriers to entry.

So for instance see the Phoebus Cartel. [1] It was a cartel in the US (and Europe) including General Electric, Philips, and others that engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to exploit the market for lightbulbs. They intentionally lowered the quality of bulbs, driving planned obsolescence and thus increased sales, and even engaged in spot [un]quality checking of cartel members to ensure that nobody's lightbulbs would last too long.

In modern times I don't think companies would usually be so overt, but there's nothing illegal about unspoken cartels doing the exact same thing. For instance even in the video game domain, up until the PS4 era major players used to subsidize game console hardware to a wide degree. Then with the PS4 Sony stopped stopped doing that, and simultaneously so did Microsoft. In a competitive market that's exactly when you'd go subsidization to the extreme, to clinch the market to yourself. But so long as both companies agree to stop subsidizing hardware, then they both stand to make a whole lot more money. And that's exactly what happened. In the end, the consumer ends up with worse hardware, pay more for it than they would in a competitive market, and companies make way more money. I think that makes it fair to blame corporate greed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

Companies organize and consumers can't. Seems pretty obvious.

Exactly this. Oh no, these airline seats are cramped and miserable and were backed in like sardines, what’s wrong with these airlines, but I’ll buy whatever ticket is the cheapest.

Not quite. "Getting worse" is discussing a mechanism where a product first has a good reputation, for good reasons. It's not "minimum viable".

And then the company proceeds to exploit that reputation for all it's worth, by making the product cheaper to make, while keeping the sale price the same, knowing that it takes a long time for the reputation to catch up. But eventually it does and the brand is basically defunct. Used up and discarded, being drained of reputational value.

The definition of “viable” matters

The "minimum viable product" is part of the development process. If you are already at a certain quality and choose to make it worse, this is something else. Enshittification or just greed come to my mind.

Its because of monopolies

It's just crapitalism - make thing as cheap as possible and charge as much as possible.