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Comment by Eddy_Viscosity2 | Hacker News Reader

My experience is competition invokes two races happening at the same time, one for lowest price and one for highest quality. You can get a cheap car or really high quality car. Same goes for clothes, restaurants, basically anything where there is lots of market choices and competition.

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That doesn't make any sense. The most expensive cars are also the least reliable. Rich people have multiple cars so when the Bentley has an electrical glitch they just drive the Porsche.

Quality means different things to different people. But the fact that Bentleys and Porsche exist support that case that not everything in a competitive markets drives things to the lowest cost product.

Exactly. The whole notion of "quality" is so subjective that it never was and never can be a norm.

At the end of the day, people still end up sucking it up and buying it, so the market can only be so efficient. Every hobby I've had, all sorts of different stuff only anchored in the fact you have to buy gear, the common theme is everyone is constantly pissed off at the companies making the gear. It is very much an abusive relationship.

The upper end of a lot of these product categories is often populated with overpriced junk that's popular for conspicuous consumption reasons. Clothing is the prime example, but a lot of modern fine dining is also trash (who actually enjoys eating flavoured foam?). So there's actually three races: lowest price, highest quality, and highest brand value.

An Audi typically requires more maintenance and repair than a Toyota though. You’re not paying for quality (as in durability/longevity)

Luxury is another dimension than price <-> quality.

> You can get a cheap car or really high quality car.

That’s the problem, I want something in-between.

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