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.
The existence of that desire is an untapped market opportunity.
And yes there are ranges of quality in almost every product you can think of from fishing rods, to furniture, to diapers. And theses brands clearly compete with cheaper options and still have strong businesses.
Only if you can outcompete the giant mega-conglomerate incumbents.
And you can't. If you start trying to sell in an area, they can drop the prices on their competing products in that area to below cost until you run out of money.
Or they can just buy you for more than you'd ever get in profit, then take advantage of your reputation for quality to sell the same crappy quality stuff they were selling before, with your branding on it, for a markup. They'll make enough from suckers who believe it to more than cover the cost of buying you out before the public catch on and stop being willing to pay the extra.
Is this supposed to refer to a specific noun? Or is it just a signifier for “powerful bad things out of my control”?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
How do consumers lack the ability to choose what they want? Of course unless, you think they are dumb because they don't choose what YOU want them to choose.
Free Market Theory can only reveal people's preferences when you have a spherical market in a frictionless vacuum. In the real world, there are numerous confounding factors that make those ideas deeply counterproductive.
I also didn't say they were "dumb", I said they couldn't coordinate. So in addition to not thinking you didn't bother to read my comment.