Airplane tickets used to cost a lot more for economy class, even adjusted for inflation and fees. To get the equivalent service and quality today you simply have to pay more, you just have the choice of paying very little for very low quality because there’s more flights and more planes.
Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes. I’m not saying that a high price label guarantees high quality, just that the spectrum of cost vs quality has broadened, even within big name brands. There’s now cheap and expensive Nike ranges, for example, where there used to be only the quality expensive tier.
But if you look at the cost of, say, quality furniture today and adjust for inflation, it’s going to be around the same as quality furniture 50 years ago. We just have the choice to pay a lot less for much worse now.
> I'm not saying that a high price label guarantees high quality, just that the spectrum of cost vs quality has broadened, even within big name brands.
I think this needs to be repeated. People tend to think more expensive equals higher quality
(I want this to be true!), and I think brands frequently take advantage of that to increase margins without significantly increasing quality.
For example: I've been through three or four pairs of my $180 Sony link buds hitting various issues before giving up on them entirely. Meanwhile, my $5 Auki bluetooth earbuds keep on chugging.
Along that line of thought I've noticed this recently:
I can buy an expensive tool for say $200 that will last me 10 years. Or I can buy a cheap tool that costs $20 but will only last me two years. But if I want to use that tool for the duration of 10 years it then makes more sense to buy five of the cheap tool and save half in costs. Which one is really providing more quality over time?
For some things this doesn't hold at all, the cheap entry level offerings just don't get the job done or break relatively immediately, but for others the premium offer doesn't really improve a whole lot over the cheapest.
Some tools are much easier to use if you spend more money, I’ve compared a Harbor Freight oscillating multi-tool against a Fein and the Fein is so much more usable due to less vibration in the tool body that the Harbor Freight version is almost useless in comparison.
Air compressors are another one where spending money vastly improves usability, the more you spend the quieter the compressor pump motor is.
Makita’s portaband only lasts ~10 cuts before the blade falls off, Milwaukee’s portaband blades don’t fall off ever. I run electrical work and my guys cost $100-130/hr, I’d rather have them spend time cutting conduit and strut with a functional tool than replacing blades on a cheaper version.
I’ll grant that professional tool and homeowner tool usage patterns differ greatly, but sometimes it is worth spending the extra money.
Very good perspective but I think that there is also a cost or loss of value in the inconvenience of a tool of good stopping its function at the wrong time.
The opposite can also be true, that it is sometimes convenient that something breaks down because I actually wanted this new model anyway but could not justify throwing away a perfectly fine good.
That, and the cognitive load. You need to buy the right amount, remember where you stored the $5 replacements, or else spend $100 worth of your time to figure out where you ordered from five years ago. And if they are no longer available you need time to figure out which of the replacements isn't total crap.
Does the tool degrade gradually over time or is it sudden? If the former, you're much better off over the 10 year span with the high quality tool, because the time you spend dealing with its degraded performance is much less. IME it's almost always better to go for a high quality, old, used tool than to buy a low quality new one. Usually the wear parts are replaceable or rebuildable as well.
Your comment is just nit picking. Point was there's a lot of situations where the math hugely favors the cheap tool.
Used tools of the brands that anyone screeching about nice tools would consider to be of repute are going to generally be priced at equivalent to new tools of unknown brand. Specialty tools frequently aren't available on the used market.
Anything that spins or plugs into the wall tends to be finicky after decades of prior owner abuse and if you're not in a commercial setting (and even a lot of times if you are) it makes more sense to just buy new cheap stuff because then using your tools won't be a project by itself.
I've got like three people's worth of used tools from various sources because you can never have too many and I never throw stuff out but they are not the outstanding value the Garage Journal forum or Reddit type "polish my wrenches more than I use them" crowd makes them out to be.
I can't think of a single case where it has actually been true that the cheaper tool was better somehow apart from jackstands. I got some pretty decent 6 ton jackstands from harbor freight. Don't know that i'd actually trust them to hold 6 tons though. Shop press? Not really. Had to put a bunch of time and money into it to make it halfway decent. Should have just gotten a good one. For power hand tools I have all Makita stuff either bought new or remanufactured, wouldn't go near harbor freight for that stuff. My welder is a Miller, wouldn't dream of going with off brand stuff there. Torches however are northern tool (i think?) victor knockoffs which are ok apart from the orings, hoses, and regulators... should have just gone for the quality tool to start would have been cheaper in the long run. My machine tools are all antiques and work outstandingly well. Literally irreplaceable--could not buy something new that does the same job.
I guess all that is to say in my experience the cheap crap breaks and ends up being more expensive either in opportunity cost or cost of replacement/modification.
Even if it simply damages your work that's a considerable downside.
I do not buy cheap tools unless they are for a dedicated, simple purpose. (Such as the sockets that live in the car to permit me to install a battery.)
This is true, and in general people are usually financially better of getting cheap stuff and replacing it. But a lot of us like getting hobbyist stuff just because it's more fun. I have an expensive espresso machine because it's more fun than a standard breville machine or just making a pot of coffee. It's certainly not more economical, even though coffee nerds will try to convince (rather gaslight) themselves into thinking so.
The main problem is that the average person has no way to evaluate quality. The closest most people get is heaver == built better (which is probably a correlation overall, but not that accurate for any two random products). At the extreme end of this you have companies putting little steel plates into things they want to appear higher quality.
How can consumers evaluate how robustly some Bluetooth firmware is written, if the product is actually durable or if some USB charger actually accurately follows the specification? For most cases there is no way to know. The best route for the average consumer is to find a review by and expert, but these are very rare (experts with the required skills can often find better jobs than reviewing) and they are more likely to find paid marketing which just misleads.
So we do end up the case that the only real metrics the user has is price and brand. Many formerly reputable brands have also started rebadging cheep crap so that works less often then you would hope. And while good products often can't be cheep, it is now common to see cheep crap sold at higher prices to seem premium.
So at the end of the day the consumer has really no way to judge product quality. So the market has very little incentive to actually provide quality.
Expensive does mean higher quality if you know the right brands to pick*. Case in point, $180 for Sony Link Buds is pretty bad deal! There are much better options at the same price range like Apple Airpods, Samsung's AKG tuned Galaxy Buds or the higher end Sony XM4s or XM5.
Obviously there are many companies that do rely on branding to jack up prices like Beats or Marshal. But there are also companies that do no to little marketing and instead focus on craftsmanship where the majority of the cost is going into higher quality experience. And in those segments there isn't really some magical way to reduce costs. Akko is getting pretty popular, but their high-end IEMs like the Obsidian are still going to be in the same price-range as Sennheisers or AKG.
>Expensive does mean higher quality if you know the right brands to pick
<laughs in Toyota turbo-4cyl that can't stay together for a laundry list of reasons>
You can't base decision on brand, no matter ho much a bunch of screeching morons on the internet tell you you can. You have to also consider how much the company cares about the product line, how core the product line is to the company, where in the lifecycle it is, etc, etc. The brands that people herald as good are very capable of phoning it in or whoring themselves around. Kitchen-aid slaps their name on all sorts of garbage outside the core products they built their name on, to pick one example of the latter. And the brands that people herald as bad are very capable of producing very good stuff when the incentives align.
Depending on your use case, sound quality may be way down the line in importance. The earbuds I use on the subway don’t need to be high quality. Anything better than AM radio will do the job.
Anything without ANC is basically unusable, and better ANC (which usually correlates with good sound quality) pretty noticeably improves your experience on the subway.
Yeah, probably. At least until the Sony's break down and start sounding like trash.
But, to be honest, I do more audiobooks and podcasts than I do music, so the audio quality was not the top reason I picked them. The link buds have a fairly unique design with a 2~3 mm hole in the middle of the earbuds that lets outside sound in. I like it a lot better than any active transparency mode I've ever tried. They also have much better controls than any other earbuds I've tried.
The problem with the Sony's is that they either get something messed up inside the speaker and start sounding like crap at medium to high volume, or the case's open/closed sensor breaks and they wake up and start discharging in the case, and then they're dead by the time I try to use them.
I occasionally try watching videos on my phone, but the latency that Bluetooth adds throws me off, so I don't really enjoy anything with dialogue because the lips are moving out of sync with the words. I've tried lots of different Bluetooth earbuds - from Sony, Aukey, Jlab, even the "gamer" ones from razr - and all of them seem to have noticeable amounts of latency.
I'm not sure if I'm more sensitive to it than most people or they're just all shit, but the latency is the big reason that I'm annoyed that nearly all the manufacturers removed headphones jacks from flagship phones. (Sony actually deserves some credit here, I think their flagship Xperia phone still include a headphone jack and a MicroSD slot!)
I haven't specifically tested it, but my $50 "Backbay Tempo" earbuds have a low-latency "Movie Mode" that sacrifices range to I think buffer sound for ~0 latency.
> Airplane tickets used to cost a lot more for economy class, even adjusted for inflation and fees. To get the equivalent service and quality today you simply have to pay more, you just have the choice of paying very little for very low quality because there’s more flights and more planes.
I don't think you actually can get the same quality, today. Even if you are paying more. The spacing of seats has changed. [0] You can pay more and get something more than you had by going up classes, but the same experience no longer exists.
I think it might in other countries. JAL is an example where I felt they had a great economy class experience. Excellent food and service. Great legroom. I am average height male and can fully stretch out my legs.
http://jsx.com is a tiny carrier flying out of only a handful of cities in the US, but it's basically a quarter step towards during private. They have their own terminals and all of their planes are smaller but the seats themselves are bigger.
> Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes.
I wish that were my experience as well. However, I've found that most brands simply add a huge markup for their name while investing very little into quality. As a result, you end up paying three times the price for just 20% better quality.
When it comes to electronics, I feel like I can judge that for myself, and my gut feeling about clothing was confirmed after falling down a YouTube rabbit hole of "clothing teardowns."
I don't disagree with your point, but I suppose my wish then is that there were not low-quality (low-cost) everything in the world right now.
<ramble>
I'm not unsympathetic regarding the poor, I grew up poor myself. And my single working mother raising two kids got by on hand-me-down furniture from her mother (probably, as you and the article suggest, of decent quality though).
Having the option for (new) inexpensive everything allows us to accept low-quality; even encourages it (as has been pointed out, there's a Dopamine hit from purchasing a new thing … I don't know if the same rush comes from purchasing a used piece of furniture from a Goodwill — I suspect though it does somewhat). And, as we know, the landfills, oceans, become the destination for all this consumption.
I admit that I am surprised that I am finding myself wishing that we, the Western world, were poorer again. It seems though that manufacturing has caught up to (down to?) the ability to provide new crap for us even if we were poorer.
One wonders what the Great Depression would resemble in the 21st Century. Would we still have the latest, but crappy, gadgets and such? I sure can't imagine new car sales would not be seriously impacted.
> I admit that I am surprised that I am finding myself wishing that we, the Western world, were poorer again.
Luxury belief.
Doesn’t it feel a little suspicious that the only people to ever say “we should become poorer” are people from rich countries where even the poor can afford cars and gadgets? Go to the countries actually manufacturing your goods and ask the average factory worker if he wants to be poor and prepare to get flipped off.
On a gdp scale, basically every country on earth is "poorer" than the united states. As you point out, even the poor in America can own cars and tvs and smartphones.
But if you visit any of these other countries you can often be shocked by how much they accomplish with so little. Vastly better standards of customer service, much higher quality public transportation systems, and they often have cheap quality goods and services which compromise in the right areas instead of being so crappy as to basically be a scam
Poorer than average American != poor in 3rd world country.
These words sound similar but mean vastly different things. Poor people in 3rd world countries need more income, not a larger quantity of cheap T shirts.
It's great having the option for cheap, low-quality stuff. If I need some oddball tool for a home improvement project then I can just buy the crap at Harbor Freight. If it breaks after a few uses then so what, I won't need it again anyway.
Exactly. I needed an angle grinder for one specific use. I bought the cheapest model from HF and then threw it in my garage to sit. 15 years later I needed it again. It did the job. No reason to buy the higher end model.
I did spend the extra to buy better quality wheels though.
I bought a screwdriver at Home Depot, and screw stripped the screwdriver! I returned it and bought the same type of screwdriver at Harbor Freight and it's been great.
The only product in Harbor Freight that I haven't liked so far, was their moving blankets - very thin.
What are you proposing as an alternative? Spend a fortune on a high quality tool, and then either have it sitting in my garage unused for years or waste a bunch of time trying to sell it online?
Tool rental is a thing (I don't imagine many people own their own cement mixer for example.)
I recall my grandfather having (decent) tools sitting in his garage. Neighbors/relatives often borrowed tools in those days.
To be a little more nuanced though, some tools don't benefit from "quality" versions. Perhaps an angle grinder is a good example. (The consumable grinding disk is probably the place not to cheap-out.) Maybe the cheap one is fine.
But other tools, like a wood plane, you're going to have a bad time if you cheap out on those and wind up with steel that doesn't hold an edge for example.
(Though I kind of wouldn't want to loan out a nice hand plane of mine to someone that might not worry as much as me about hitting a nail in a board they're planing.)
Tool rental is barely a thing. And then only for larger tools. I've done that before for larger items like extension ladders and air compressors but for smaller stuff no one actually rents those. If I need to plane one piece of wood then I'll buy the cheap tool. Good enough.
Borrow, rent, pay someone else to do it, or throw your hands up in the air when you've tried nothing, are all out of ideas, and fuck the externalities.
No one rents those oddball little tools and my neighbors don't have them either. Do you have an actual useful suggestion or are you going to stick with the virtue signaling?
I think that if we fully incorporate all the environmental costs of production into the end prices of customer goods, we will become poorer, at least in the short run.
In the long run, that could actually spur some development re cheap and safe energy etc.
Much of the third world lives this way today. Atrocious living conditions but society runs on their personal cell phones. A cell phone can be more important in poorer parts of Asia than it is in the US.
> I’m not saying that a high price label guarantees high quality
I think that hints at part of the real problem: humans have very little ability to judge the quality of products. Marketing departments are very good at cosplaying quality. "Awards" on things like wine only tell you the manufacturer paid the owner of the trademark some money. Reviews are often fake or at least paid for by the manufacturer.
With price also not being a meaningful quality signal you're left with a choice: Buy the expensive product hoping the quality reflects the price, or buy the cheap product knowing the quality is probably not great, but at least you didn't spend a lot of money on something that isn't worth it.
I’ve just learned to discern quality better. For clothes, I learned from a friend who designs them how to tell fabric quality and seam quality. But there’s online resources to learn that as well. For electronics it can be hard but if I can’t tell from first principles and my knowledge of electronics design I’ll research brands via online reviews and tear-downs. Eventually you get a pretty good “instinct” that makes it less tedious.
> Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes. I’m not saying that a high price label guarantees high quality, just that the spectrum of cost vs quality has broadened, even within big name brands.
Electric Kettles - Microwaves. The components that make up the actual boiling of water are now standard and all come from the same chinese manufacturer. You can pay $20 to $1000 for the same thing. The expensive one will look much better. Microwaves are the same - large numbers of manufacturers to all the same guts just different skins.
Retail clothing is the most obvious example. There used to be mid market clothing manufacturers that would produce clothing locally and try to compete on quality. That’s almost gone now. There’s just not enough demand.
My electric kettle may use the same basic heating components as most cheaper ones, but I paid extra to get one where the entire container is one piece metal — practically a tall cooking pot with a heater element built in under it, a water safe connector to a base station that’s connected to power, and a handle and lid.
It’s easier to clean, has no plastic in contact with the water, and has so far lasted me 14 years. It cost 800 NOK instead of the ~400 for a typical plastic one. But due to my experience with those in the past, I’d say absolutely worth it.
Disagree. Panasonic's Inverter technology is definitely superior in my book. Everybody else's units only operate at full power no matter what you select--20% power is really 100% power with a 20% duty cycle. This can produce uneven heat for short runs and means that the load on the circuit is the full draw of the machine--doesn't share a circuit with other power-hungry devices very well. But at low power the Panasonic is much more friendly with other devices.
This is true but flawed. Think about the iPhone. If you wanted the model of today but 5 years ago, it would have cost you millions? If that’s even possible.
What you are saying will be correct if we had no technological advancement whatsoever. But we had significant advancement. Everything should, must, be better if we applied the same cost. But while that’s the case in some things, lots of things have degraded in different ways.
But I don't want the equivalent service. I want the cheapest ticket possible to get me from A to B. And apparently most people agree with me, or that's not what they would be selling. This is the opposite of a problem.
That’s why there’s now a broader quality spectrum of plane tickets.
I travel seldomly, but when I do I tend to buy business class, because I value the comfort of the journey more than the frequency of journeys. But most other people, including you, have other priorities. Which is why at least in this example I think it’s a market working well based on supply and demand.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/even-with-fees-the-miracle-of...
Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes. I’m not saying that a high price label guarantees high quality, just that the spectrum of cost vs quality has broadened, even within big name brands. There’s now cheap and expensive Nike ranges, for example, where there used to be only the quality expensive tier.
But if you look at the cost of, say, quality furniture today and adjust for inflation, it’s going to be around the same as quality furniture 50 years ago. We just have the choice to pay a lot less for much worse now.