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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

> Quality brands are economically incentivized to sell-out [...] because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important

That probably happens a lot, but there's another mechanism by which it could happen, that requires no malice: the brand gets a quality reputation, which increases demand for its products, and they are unable to produce quality products at the rate needed to satisfy that demand. Then it's easy to reason that it'd be a net benefit for everyone to loosen the quality requirements a tiny bit, in order to satisfy the demand of more customers. People used to the quality will barely notice any difference, and then twice as many people can get that experience.

That works once, but when applied again, and again, and again, and again it becomes a problem, even with zero ill intent.

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That sounds implausible. For a premium brand the marginal unit should be comfortably profitable, so they will have the resources to saturate the market at exponential speed purely from their unit economics. The somewhat theatrical lines outside the store aside, Apple has never had a strategic problem meeting the demand for Apple computers.

It seems a lot more likely that you get executives who come in and believe that narratives beat reality, there are a lot of people like that in the world. They are the sort who will abandon the reality of quality because that costs money then get confused when the narrative catches up. Or you get an idiot who is data-driven and detects that there is no immediate change in sales when they compromise on quality so they conclude that quality isn't valued by consumers. No malice, just a lack of strategic thinking.

For many, the most constraining resource is time. And you can't buy that. It takes years to spin up a new factory and production line and then transfer the implicit knowledge from your initial production line that provides the quality in the first place.

> Apple has never had a strategic problem meeting the demand for Apple computers.

The business that had those problems didn't become Apple.

lmao, not everything is quickly scalable. Take quality lace which is still a very manual process, the highest quality brands most people working on these products are well past the age of 50. There's no one learning to make it and it takes many many years to get skilled enough to do it quickly. Also including apple in premium brand? They make cheap computers.

Once they reach the limit of demand, then there's nothing more to be made in that price category, so they get more by selling out and lowering quality and price.

We're going through massive global depopulation in the entire industrialized world. There are no new customers coming and sales will naturally trend down because of human extermination. Once everybody has an electric shaver, then you know that the next generation of customers is half the size or less. Unless you can make people grow their beards and hair faster, then there isn't going to be any demand among people who can afford a quality product. You have to start targeting the very poor, and thus lower production costs.

Or you could just be happy to have a profitable company that makes money consistently. Shavers don't last for ever and new people grow up every day. You could also just launch a new product line that's cheaper without compromising the existing ones.

But nooo we need infinite growth which is impossible so let's run the company into the ground for some more growth before our shit decisions catch up to us and stock price plummets.

iF yOu ArEnT gRoWiNg YoUrE dYiNg

If your customer base is declining, your company isn't making money consistently. Revenues and profits will decline accordingly.

Then you scale back a bit and keep making consistent money, just a bit less. The only way things go completely to shit is when you enshittify your product and nobody wants it any more.

Or you could expand to other markets, lots of options that don't require making your products worse.

Markets outside the industrialized world don't have the purchasing power for quality products from the industrialized world. That's why you have to reduce quality to reduce price if you want to sell consumer goods to them. Or wind down your operations. But who would want to wind down their operations?

That's not what I meant by other markets. I meant other products, though you could also make a cheaper version of the same product which I've already mentioned.

Or the company is grown in an organic way that leads to lower but stable demand.

> Then it's easy to reason that it'd be a net benefit for everyone to loosen the quality requirements a tiny bit, in order to satisfy the demand of more customers.

No, that's not easy to reason. People are buying because of the quality and selling them anything less is malice.

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