I agree with this. It's curious that we always talk about "things used to last forever and weren't only made by corporations chasing infinite growth", when those things are often still available, but are almost invisible because we now discover everything through social media or SEO.

You can find great-quality, long-lasting products at great prices (great price doesn't equal cheap, but great for what you get).

I use capable LLMs on high reasoning to run a prompt like this:

"I want to buy a high-quality [category] that will/has/can [requirements here]. I do not want to pay for a brand name that doesn't improve.

Start by finding manufacturing clusters in [region of the world, e.g. Europe] where [category] is made, then find the businesses making [category] in that cluster that I can buy from.

Normal online stores are okay, but also try non-obvious avenues:

-local business registers -stores that may only be available in the local language -factories that sell samples directly" -cooperatives that sell products from multiple local manufacturers

(I modify this prompt, but it's the skeleton)

To verify a given product/brand/store, a great follow-up prompt has been:

"Now find me big brands offering a product of similar quality (ideally measured by objective characteristics) and show me how much it is vs. [store name here]"

This has showed me incredible finds. It's become how I buy most things that go beyond basic trinkets, and I often pay less for far higher quality.