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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

I disagree that it is what people want. Nobody wants a smaller chocolate bar for the same amount of money, more cramped seats, washing machines that break and need constant replacement, etc.

Massive corporate consolidation means that when you're looking at the rack of chocolate bars there's a good chance that just 2 companies made all of them. You have the illusion of choice.

None of this happened over-night. It's a slow steady financial optimization in all industries all at the same time. It's very hard to vote with your wallet when there's very little difference.

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If there is a sustainable market for higher volume/quality/durability products for a higher price, it is in the interest of companies - new and existing - to capture it, as by definition they would profit from it.

Consolidation alone is insufficient to explain such a gap under the assumption of profitability.

Customers are not perfectly-informed rational actors. The areas that companies are cutting costs on are precisely those that are most likely to escape the customer's notice - slightly smaller size, less durable, etc.

It turns out that it's more profitable to buy up an existing brand and slowly cheap out on the product (basically capitalizing the reputation) than it is to continue to produce a quality product.

Economic theory would work a lot better if humans weren't involved.

It's almost impossible for a new company to join most of these markets; the major players are so large that they have influence over the retailers, the suppliers, and everyone in the middle.

But every so often successful higher volume/quality/durability products do manage exist for a time but are eventually bought out and the brand destroyed. This has played out over and over.

The market optimizes for profit growth, not for customer satisfaction.

There is a spectrum of how good a product is between "doesn't work at all" to "falls apart in a couple uses" to "lasts five generations of your families lives."

Companies tiptoe this fine line between having something so shitty that people immediately reject it and so good that they never buy any more and the company folds. It has to be just shitty enough where they can guarantee future replacement sales but not so shitty to put people off right away.

Most of these durable goods products are therefore found in companies too small to satiate the demand of their entire market share too fast. And even then they fail all the time.

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