Here's an anecdote:

As a student, I visited one Hermes (French luxury brand) manufacture in Paris. They showed us how crocodile skin was worked with to make hand bags and showed us the finished products. They had two finishes for the bags: - with protective coating (brilliant) - without (mate)

Without coating the crocodile skin was very fragile they told us, and even water droplets would stain the skin. We were quite surprised that anyone would spend a five figures amount of money in a bag that will get stained by anything, but the guy guiding us told us that their customers simply considered their products to be disposable item that would quickly be thrown away anyway.

Seriously though...

Yes, I know, Cheap&Awful. I’m poor.

They were ok for the first wear - but not great to be honest.

Then I washed them and they were unwearable.

Didn't do anything fancy, just a cool wash, dried them on the line.

They turned to cardboard.

Used to be the cheap "three pairs for 10 euro" socks lasted a couple of years. Now I get, maybe, a year out of them before the holes get too obvious.

And price is not a reliable indicator of quality. Buying expensive can be just as much as a gamble as buying the cheap stuff.

For jeans I’ve settled on Duluth Trading for the time being, found a style and size that fits well and is easily cared for. Many washes later and they are just fine!

Levi’s still seems fine to me as well, but you have to get them from their “high end” retail channel - such as their own storefronts. I’ve definitely noticed a wide difference between that channel and the “low end” retail channels like Amazon and mass market retailers. Seems many brands are doing this weird “channel segmentation” thing recently.

That said, you’re not gonna find a decent pair of jeans for less than around $80 today, unless you get rather lucky with a clearance sale. This makes sense to me, despite my formative years price anchoring being 20 years ago and the initial sticker shock.

I’ve found decent clothing for all my needs really - the most annoying thing is a brand discontinuing and item I started to rely on being there.

They may never have been amazing, but that's the point - they were a representative, middle-of-road brand and you could just assume their clothes would last. I've got a >10 year old shirt that's still fine and a new one that's holed after a single wash. It's not a QA fail, the loss of quality is very clearly deliberate.

A quick look at IKEA's web pages shows that this is simply untrue.

It's called "Enshittification": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification. It's just the free market and the corporations giving a big middle finger to its clients. It's the same reason Microsoft can do all of the above:

- "The company reported better-than-expected results, with $25.8 billion in quarterly net income, and an upbeat forecast in late April"

- "Microsoft on Tuesday said that it’s laying off 3% of employees across all levels, teams and geographies, affecting about 6,000 people."

- "These new job cuts are not related to performance, the spokesperson said."

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/13/microsoft-is-cutting-3percen...

If you are thinking this is in any way tied to inflation, it's not. It's just greed and the absence of laws to curb that greed. So you are gonna get less and worse for more money, and like it, because the monopolies are lobbying the governments and can do literally what they want to do in countries susceptible to it.

When Broadcom tried these kinds of stunts in civilized countries, they quickly got shown their place:

- https://www.networkworld.com/article/4015489/dutch-court-for...

- https://licenseware.io/broadcom-faces-eu-scrutiny-over-contr...

Does 800% and 1500% price increase sound to you like related to inflation? Enshittification is not out of our hands if we elect governments that have our interest in mind.

Edit, now that I checked it looks like hedonic price adjustment measurements are performed on only 7.5%[1]of the goods in the CPI basket, and the main goal seems to be to avoid overestimating inflation by tracking quality improvements better.

[1]: https://www.nber.org/digest/20239/correcting-quality-change-...

Whole Foods used to be the place to go for quality throughout the store. It seems to me that now you can still get plenty of quality, but it's not guaranteed if you just go and grab something off the shelf. Instead, you have to know what's worth buying and what's not.

(I can't back this up with examples, because exactly this phenomenon means that I don't shop at Whole Foods as much. I could be wrong.)

I like this wording better than "programmed obsolescence". I don't really believe that "programmed obsolescence" is common. If anyone in a company leaked that the company actively designs the product to stop working after some time, it would make the news.

I call it "premature obsolescence", which sounds more passive to me: the product doesn't last as long as it could because the company doesn't actively work on making it last as long. Because it's cheaper of course. Hence "lowest cost technically acceptable".

"It's not that we make a bad product, but rather that we don't make a good product", in a way. There is no need, consumers buy it even if it's not good.

- Apple's planned obsolescence on batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate

- Window's 10 to 11 garbage hardware requirements: https://www.euroconsumers.org/microsoft-security-windows-10-... If an OS's new version is supposedly...faster and better written, why does it require newer hardware?

- Apple's right to repair fight: https://sustainablebrands.com/read/apple-support-right-to-re... and then, when they saw they can't support this position anymore, suddenly becoming a champion of sustainability

- Apple's refusal to change their idiotic charging cables to a standard one, so they can sell you crap that works on no other device. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66778528

I know Apple are mentioned a lot here, but they are a perfect example of what happens when nobody calls out a monopoly on their shady practices.

> but I can't help but feel that a lot of the ills of society that we're witnessing is simply coming down to the fact that we're living a lot longer as people.

Ah yes blame it on the consumer, who dares to live longer.

> Whereas it's like, if you expected that you would die in your 50s/60s you'd probably be happier spending your money on stuff that you felt served you better, irrespective of the cost, cause you're still working and able to service that lifestyle.

I don't get the logic here. If I knew I would live to 100, would it not make sense to buy stuff that serves me well over the long run (i.e more expensive)?

It is heavily manipulated by ads and other patterns.

You can control your own evaluation if you are actively working on it but market moves based on majority so it doesn’t matter

Affordability has nothing to do in the quality evaluation, it is already taken into account in the quality/cost ratio.

Also, where did you get this idea that particle board furniture were particularly lightweight?

Most of those "good 'ol" goods exist, but probably are pretty/too expensive for what we are used to pay.

Cars are becoming prohibitively expensive. Housing is becoming a luxury.

Even consumer products are becoming increasingly expensive.

Safety largely improved but not craftsmanship.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LqnWuMD6DU8

In theory we can make higher quality things, but in practice we are not doing it.

Quality has gone down.

Go read Zen anf the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for a decent, if not weird, introduction to thinking about quality. Quality is both subjective and objective and therein lies the rub. This author does not understand that.

There was mountains of tacky, throwaway crap produced in the 80s. Guess what, we've thrown it all away. Quality lasts.

And don't even get me started on the food. A lot of tin cans. Desserts that you reconstituted from powder in a packet. The list goes on.

Compared to the iPhone or any modern phone, it did a lot more with a lot less battery. The networking on my iPhones is not great, but it’s hard to compare.

In the end modern smartphones couldn’t win at that game, but the game has changed. Lately, through addiction and almost omnipresent surveillance for the worst.

In that sense, the smartphones of old with some multimedia and internet would be a welcome change.

"Wow, old car was much more solid! The modern car got destroyed!"

Until you realize that the old car utilizes the driver seat as the crumple zone.

New iPhones and Android phones eventually have to be replaced because the software is no longer supported. Flip phones continue to be supported, if we would just use them to call people, which would use up less of our lifespan than smartphones, playing games and using social media. Note: I personally wouldn’t suggest flip phones for everyone, because smartphones are expected for some types of MFA now.

The post also says that a lot more clothing is produced and sold that is cheap quality, resulting in more waste. Fast-fashion is also popular, which results in more low-quality material being thrown away than the previous slower release of new styles.

imo the way to help would be to:

- Save enough money to buy higher quality used appliances, clothing, furniture, etc. and stop funding the companies that do this.

- Don’t use social media or websites/apps that promote (through ads or just photos/video) purchase and consumption of low quality goods. Buy used products instead.

I think there’s an opportunity here for everyone to get involved. You can still purchase high quality products, because the point is to increase product quality for future generations.

Having owned both, no. The N900 was programmable, none of the current crop of phones are.

Until you need to replace the battery.

Battery replacement has been intentionally made not just a pain, but actually dangerous, by using excessive amounts of adhesive to hold in batteries that may spontaneously combust if physically damaged while trying to remove them.

Replaced a battery in a Nintendo Switch not too long ago, and what an absolute fucking pain that was to get the old battery out, IPA, dental floss (to try and get under the battery and cut through the glue), and still needed a worrying amount of levering out.

(It's not as if these batteries have any significant space in which to move around, why do they need adhesive at all, and not just some foam/rubber pads to hold them in place?)

If it wasn't for it no longer being supported by iOS I'd still be using a 2016 SE and the only things I'd seriously miss are an OLED screen (so good for using the phone in dark spaces) and wireless charging (basically for peace of mind if the charging port ever breaks)

There is a fetishistic cult surrounding the N900.

Mainly comprised of people who were too young or broke to own one.

I am an old man who owned an N900.

Simply and concisely: the N900 was a half-baked, poorly thought out, frustrating piece of "exercise in box-ticking" junk.

In fact, historically most monopolies were state sanctioned, and that is still mostly true.

Literally non of the things mentioned in the article are monopolies. Cloths, absolutely not even close to a monopoly. AI, nope. Flying, nope. Maybe airplanes is duopoly for certain kinds of planes and that is one of the closest things to a monopoly. And yet despite that, prices for actually flying between places are incredibly low, the expect opposite of what you expect to happen in a typical monopoly.

Food industry, no monopoly. Computer, no monopoly. Hotels, no monopoly. Property, no monopoly.

In fact the largest global industries (just google list):

Global Life & Health Insurance Carriers

Global Car & Automobile Sales

Global Commercial Real Estate

Global Pension Funds

Global Oil & Gas Exploration & Production

Global Car & Automobile Manufacturing

Global Direct General Insurance Carriers

Global Auto Parts & Accessories Manufacturing

Global Engineering Services

Global Wireless Telecommunications Carriers

Not a single monopoly in the list.

So please tell me what you are talking about. Maybe some Health insurance have some limited monopoly in some place.

Please post here, from your monthly budget, how much of that budget goes to what you would call monopolies?

An other thing to account for is the price of repairs. If your appliances costs less than one hour of a mid-skill technician, it’s hard to justify the spending. Same for doing it yourself if you’re time is worth a lot. The only solution is to by high end, which is always risky and more cash intensive. Most people will prefer buying cheap and change to new if required

Just no. The old reputable brands are enshittifying the same way. I’ve multiple times seen it first hand, with brands like Levi’s and Fjällräven. One year of wear is enough to disform the textile entirely. The fabric from those older clothes are still sturdy and whole, with only discoloration at the folding spots. No holes either from decades of use.

I magically found a sturdy canvas backpack 10 years ago and went back to the store recently to check what they had: same brand, but now all polyester.

The difference in quality is immense. Especially textile: clothes and shoes. I don’t expect the same prices, I’m happy to pay more for quality. But the brand alone often means nothing.

The strategy I’m adopting for this is a total ban on any brand or mark that appears on slop. BMW and JBL were the first on my list.

> The LHC found nothing of note.

That's just wrong.

> Childhood mortality and Polio have been defeated.

Childhood mortality has not been defeated. And while Polio has been, many other things haven't.

> The periodic table is effectively complete.

People in the next 100 years will add more. And even so, there is so much about materials we don't understand its actually insane. There are many things we learn about materials that is just as or more relevant then discovering a new element.

> R&D is having limited returns.

It has always had limited returns. And in some ways it has huge returns. Making an airlplane 1% more efficient today has a much larger overall impact then making a plane 10% more efficient 50 years ago.

> This AI capex spend is just hardware and data catching up to R&D from the 1980s.

That's just dismissive of 30+ years of research and work. You might as well argue that its just 200 years of catching up to the vision of Ada.

> But since about the early 2000s we’ve quietly known the curve was logistic, and not god-given.

From a global perspective there is no slowdown, its only relative to US experience.

> Businesses are still in high gear expecting growth eternal. This puts a chain of pressure down from CEO through every decision maker in the organisation: “at the end of the day, this number has to go up and this number go down”.

This has literally been every business for 5000 years.

> Businesses used to make the lives of their customers a little better through their products or services.

And they still do.

> The only model left, now that all the large pile of low-hanging fruit of innovation are gone, is to aggressively extract money from customers.

That's just not accurate. Go look up how much investment in next generation notes cost TSMC and then tell me all they do is extract money from consumers. Tell me that the restaurant down the street who works hard creating incredibly food is just extracting money from consumers in some kind of aggressive way.

When SpaceX deployed a whole new infrastructure around the globe, was that just extracting money because innovation is impossible, or was it massive innovation and massive infrastructure spending?

This is just a cynical world-view glorifying the past. When in effect, innovation wasn't easy. Go look up how many people died in air accidents, or car accidents. Go look up how many mainframe and minicomputer companies came and went, trying to invent the future. If anything the length companies now-days go to, to prevent a single death is actually kind of crazy.

> Perhaps this is all just stemming from business assumptions of exponential growth being flawed.

There are tons of business that don't expect exponential growth. There are even many that expect to shrink. And tons of business who do expect it don't get it. And yet the world keeps turning for those business too.

Capitalism can work perfectly fine in situation of now growth, plenty of countries have seen little growth for decades. And yet food still gets delivered to stores. Trains and cars keep going around. And so on and so on. But even in those places, companies don't stop trying to grow.

Maybe we will live in a world where no company will ever grow and wont for decades, even in that world, MBA and everybody else will still try to grow companies. Even if the world experienced a 50 year decline, that wouldn't change anything. Teach them about logistic curves all you like.

> But not optimised for me.

The world doesn't evolve around you. Shocking that you had to realize that like this.

Yes, the fact that any family can afford a new shelving unit is great! But the fact that it’ll last them just a few years is not good; they’ll spend more in the long run

You, lower middle class in the 2020s, can afford with the same resources a washing machine that lasts 5 years and is no more effective than your parents' (but has an app).

In the sense of the parent comment, you are fortunate that the magic of capitalism currently produces such cheap washing machines that even people as poor as you can afford them. But from another angle, the purchasing power of the lower middle class has sunk over time, and quality has degraded to match because durable products have now become "outside the grasp of most Americans".

This is pretty normal when I was growing up. You should never put a hot anything on a countertop.

FIVE, POUNDS.

Crazy cheap by any measure; they were extremely thick, to the point where you could stand them up with no person inside them. They lasted me for over 10 years.

New jeans (at any price point) seem to wear out in the inner thigh inside of a year, and I am not as active as I was back then due to age. I also haven’t gained a significant amount of weight to account for this. I thought it could be caused by cycling, but I stopped cycling and the wear outs still happen. I thought it could be the quality of what I was buying so I bought more and more expensive jeans, alas, the same was true.

The best Jeans I ever owned are simultaneously the cheapest.

(side note; I also noticed that nearly all Jeans these days contain “elastane” which is basically plastic, which probably contributes to the degradation - Elastane didn’t exist for jeans in 2005, they were mostly still 100% cotton until the legging jeans fad and then it started making its way into normal jeans).

They used to have taste. Now it's gone.

Shame the shoe brand!

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."

<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.

</ramble>

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.

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.

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.

[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/life/travel/airline-seats-are-t...

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.

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.

The 2010s was peak car.

These days the bigger problem with cars is one piece breaks and it isn't made anymore so you total it when 90% of the rest of the car is still good.

https://youtu.be/e7c2_JMxR0s?si=diMVZ_YBXtW48LOy

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/550

Panel 1 is a depiction of Neanderthals in the Shanidar Cave, in particular the "Shanidar 1" specimen, which showed a large number of old injuries and disabilities in the individual. The fact that they had lived for so long showed that the Neanderthal community cared for their members even when they were no longer "useful" physically to society.

It's kind of hard to imagine going back and showing the Shanidar Neanderthals all the gains we've made as a society to produce enough food for everyone, and yet people still go hungry. Then again, imagine showing him Nintendo Switch. I bet he'd love Nintendo Switch, so it's really a wash.

Anyway, I think nobody in the industry needs to be aware of that term, and it can still be in play. Nobody in media really talks about Chomsky media filters, yet they arguably exist. As you mention, all that is needed for planned obsolence is if engineers only consider parts with expected percentile failure after the warranty, and then go by other criteria, e.g. cheapness. This will easily result in a situation where a product that would otherwise last relies on a cheap part that prematurely failed.

For example, I had a monitor where the "on" button failed after couple years. I replaced the failed plastic hinge with a piece of cardboard and the monitor still works, good 15 years later.

My life is a constant struggle when it comes to finding nice things.

There are tradeoffs towards more complex devices being made, sure, but that’s not exactly what “quality” is, to me. There’s an extensive discussion about the iphone vs a snake-era nokia, which i feel like misses the point entirely

A subtle variant of this is incorrect metrics. In 2000s, full featured audio chipsets started to show up, all in one chip 24bit audio. Soon everything used these, the 24bit resolution wasn't enough to make a good audio interface... (I think it was noisier) But it was too late, most devices used this and old audio cards were priced out.

I don’t think it’s ‘efficiency’ in the same way spaceX is run. Yeah they cut costs, but they got better quality results.

With clothes / appliances etc we have reduced quality at our expense - while the companies doing it make more money than ever.

I sometimes wonder how long it is before open-source manufacturing can fill the gap.

For a long time it’s been the case that it’s prohibitively expensive to do bespoke manufacturing using eg 3D printing and CAD lathes, vs. the cost attainable using mass manufacturing.

But perhaps a “made in America” option that can only compete on quality, not on price, could focus on “bring your own design” and fabricating nice, durable, repairable designs that apparently can’t be found elsewhere.

I guess the problem is that modern products need quite complex integrated electronics which are hard to build in an OSS paradigm.

The official response of the CFO was that the quality can't be declining that much because people aren't quitting an an accelerating rate.

This is the same phenomenon as your suspicion. There's some metric (e.g. people keep buying our widgets) and you stress test demand for it by making it cheaper to produce. If demand holds up there's no problem from the company's perspective.

From the consumer's perspective, every project is doing this and the entire world is declining in quality but prices aren't going down.

I'm also worried it's all survivorship bias. If you acquired 100 items in 2010 and 5 of them lasted until 2025, it's hard to say if the 5 surviving would be the same 5 from another household or if the items you still have were all on the hardier end of that particular items quality distribution. Another house with 100 items from 2010 will have a different 5 remaining in 2025. If that's the case, the chance you'd buy those 5 again and even have 3 with the same 15 year life span is (1/20)^3 (I think. is that math right?)

Today most of my work goes towards making something that already exists cheaper. Not to pass on the savings to the customer of course, but to make the company's books look better and to make investors happier.

Mine is that a Billy bookcase that I bought from Ikea 25 years ago is must stronger and more stable than a Billy bookcase I bought from Ikea 5 years ago.

And, when looking at what Ikea is selling in 2025 as a Billy bookcase, it's worse yet again.

But, with the cost of living increasing, companies have to cut corners to keep pricing down.

I wonder where the inflection point is where used items become more valuable than the new items being made at current quality levels, including degradation due to age.

A purely rational and self-interested (i.e. unencumbered by moral sentiment or empathy) economic agent would, in this case, calculate the longest time period a brand could be sustained at the highest price and the lowest production cost, before the brand is lost. If the ROI during that period justifies the investment, such an agent would execute the strategy.

Yes, many people confuse technological development with quality improvements. Technology can improve quality, but it can also be used in other ways.

My personal view is the west, especially North America, never recovered from the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable, at least compared with today, with the result that all sorts of objects were radically heavier than their newer equivalents. You take away the need for handling such enormous weights for everything everywhere and it becomes possible to replace almost our entire infrastructure with things that are simply much flimsier.

It is that combined with the culture of low expectations that puts up with the results.

Basic human (and capitalist) nature. Not good, but not evil, either. It's just the scorpion and the frog story.

It sucks, trying to actually create things with higher levels of Quality. It's a lot more expensive to add even rather incremental levels of Quality, and companies that try, usually (but not always) get ground into the dirt.

If we deliberately create substandard quality, it can really eat at our souls. I think many folks are able to work out a deal with their conscience, but I was never able to do that, so I worked for most of my career at a company that was all about Quality.

This whole thing brings to mind the Vimes Boots Theory: https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...

Also many of these kinds of activities are illegal, but people do it anyway on the reasonable calculation that they won't be sued and that the government won't investigate them.

Cellphone is the opposite: the new one is way better.

So all in all, it's just capitalism: if quality sells more, people buy quality (whatever quality means). If cheaper sells more, companies cut costs.

I think the answer change from time to time.

They even have succeeded in selling people bean counting solutions as "design". So instead of a satisfying 1.50 € power switch and a 2.50€ rotary switch you get a SMD push button for 0.05 € and have to memorize multiple gestures for that button. Long press means off or something among those lines.

People hate it, but it is cheap.

Yes, absolutely. Quality has gone down across the board in nearly everything. What has gone up is more features. So at a high level comparison it seems like the newer thing does a lot more than the older same thing. Which is true, but that is not a measure of quality. Many of the added features are gimmicks that provide no meaningful value and at the same time the product is far more brittle and built much cheaper, so the overall quality is far lower.

The quality of some things has gone up significantly. This is going to be the things where improvements in technologies have made improved quality easier and cheaper (and that's not just electronics—materials technology, better manufacturing, etc can do this). It's also in products where other technological improvements have made it viable for there to be independent and artisanal (or similarly small-batch high-quality) production of them.

The quality of other things has declined precipitously. These are more likely to be commodities where improving quality still costs more, and the "innovation" they've done is in finding ways to make it cheaper and worse without it just always failing immediately (clothing is a prime example here).

Overall, I think that if you look into any given case of a product's quality getting better or worse over the past couple of decades, you'll almost invariably find that either way it's because that's how the manufacturers can make more money.

I'm sure that's one component. I can also imagine that another component is that in order to broaden the customer base, there is cost pressure as well as the pressure to appeal to more people. The initial market may have consisted of more quality focused nerds who were ok with spending a little more to get a robust thing with more knobs to tune behavior, while the mass market is fine with buying new stuff all the time, given that it's cheaper, and they don't care about fine tuning things, just want it to work out of the box, until they anyway buy a new thing in a year or two.

For example I have bought these bottles https://www.zefal.com/en/bottles/545-magnum.html three times over ten years:

- the first time, the mouthpiece was attached by two plastic prongs. The prongs eventually failed

- The second time I bought them, the mouthpiece was attached by four prongs

- The last time I bought them, the hard plastic mouthpiece was replaced by a more comfortable plastic mouthpiece.

I also bought these pedals three times https://www.lookcycle.com/fr-en/products/pedals/road/race/ke... :

- With the first version, small rocks got stuck between the carbon spring and the body of the pedal, making it impossible to clip in and eventually dislodging the spring

- The second version fixed that by adding a plastic cover over the spring, and also improved the bearing seals (which was also a problem with the first version)

- The third version made the angles on the outside of the pedal less acute, making it harder to damage the pedals in a fall

This might be the key issue. Let's say you bought a Roomba 10 years ago, and now go buy the successor model. Will it be any good ? probably not. At least not as good as the competition who got better than iRobot.

It will be the same for cars. If you bought a Nissan 10 years ago, I wouldn't be surprised if the successor isn't as good. Same for cameras, computers, bikes etc.

More than ever blind brand loyalty isn't paying off and even with brands staying at the top of their game the "successor" or best buying strategy might not be obvious.

Some see the world as having become more complex, I'd argue having stagnating signals was worse.

https://www.gojiberries.io/advertising-without-signal-whe-am...

A major problem with the whole model of production is that if you make a good product and saturate the market you die. It’s not the result of some conspiracy to make shit products. It’s a simple outcome from the fact that purchases are one time while businesses are ongoing, combined with shareholder demands to boost growth. Those demands in turn come from things like pension funds that have promised a return to their customers.

One “solution” is to build subscriptions into everything but there’s already a customer revolt against that for obvious reasons. It’s obnoxious.

I think the best solution is to decouple and unbundle production. Have small design houses (or even individuals) that design products and have low ongoing costs and big manufacturing concerns that make things. Something always needs to be made so they always have business. Design products around commodity parts as much as possible to make retooling affordable.

This kind of already exists in the form of boutiques with kickstarter and Etsy products, or at least those folks have trailblazed this model.

I'm sure that is certainly part of it, especially when multiple players are competing at least partly on price or apparent value. One consideration once price based competition is significant is that absolute quality may drop while measures of quality/price value improve¹.

Another issue is that when something is new, to the company or the buying audience, it is often a flagship product/service so gets a lot more attention. As things become something the company rattles off as a matter of course and we consumers interact with them daily, that level of attention per production unit diminishes considerably.

As well as playing directly into this, possibly leading to an actual drop in quality, mass production has a less obvious effect on the perception of quality. If you are making hundreds or less and a couple fail, they are probably noticed before leaving the factory and if not the consumer gets a relatively personal service with fixing/replacing the item. If you are making hundreds of thousands many more bad units get into circulation (the absolute failure rate increasing even if the failure ratio drops) and processing returns is less logistically easy. That perception problem has become more significant in the last couple of decades as unhappy voices always tended to be louder and social media can act as a megaphone for both happy and unhappy voices.

This is a complex area with many things feeding into actual quality issues, the perception of them, and sometimes the perception of the matter being worse than it really is overall.

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[1] for instance, maybe in a made up example quality goes down by 5% when cuts or mass production bring the price down by more than 10%, so buyers get better for the same money but worse absolutely

Quality has dropped insanely low.

Fast fashion brought down most of the fashion industry up to luxury level.

We have become addicted to cheap. Same phenomenon with airlines: everyone bemoans how awful the experience is, and virtually everyone buys the cheapest possible ticket.

My most recent experience with this was a Fjällräven 30L backpack. I'd had it for years, loved it to death but it was getting a bit ripped up. Went into the store, bought the exact same model, went out to the RV where I had my current one and did a comparison. I was shocked. No padding on the straps, nice padding on the back replaced with hard foam, many of the nicely designed little details gone. I went back in and returned it and just opted to repair my old one a bit (replaced a broken buckle and sewed up some holes).

The simple fact, that will probably get your post downvoted to remove from view, is this reduction of quality is driven by fiat money-printing.

It may be non-reserve issued debt (Basel3), or government subsidy, or contract. There are many sources, laundered, and the economy for the most part today has been silently nationalized, which is why it fails. Bailout is required to overcome the end of the boom/bust cycle and continue forward for a time thereafter, it happens cyclically (a true-up, the difference between actual production and fraud/loss) and it requires exponential amounts each time which are taken from every person holding money. There have been at least 4 instances that I can see where this has happened since the 1970s changeover to fiat (de-peg from gold/petrodollar).

The inflation/debasement in purchasing power causes companies to debase their product, to keep up with the escalator of inflation to continue on moving forward. This is worsened when you have foreign entities using slave labor through controlling their own currency, to destroy domestic business; such as manufacturing over a long period of time.

There is obviously an objective point where eventually that can't continue, because the economics of money-printing fail, but that point is what many leftists knowingly or unknowingly aim for; the ones that know just don't want others to know the emperor has new clothes because knowing and communication of that knowledge allows reaction and adaption, and there are some people who believe if an individual can't express words, or convey meaning, then that negative behavior associated with that conveyance (in their deeply flawed perspective) doesn't exist, and they can make people better that way.

The strategy for doing this is through sieving and concentration of resources into fewer and fewer hands, while retaining control of such resources. The lead market players today based in money-printing can control and continue operating because of their preferential banking ties, while competitors cannot enter or compete in the market because the market no longer meets the conditions of a market. Namely adversarial price discovery which requires visibility, and non-cooperation. Money-printing/banking isn't given for free, it forces many entities to cooperate; and adversarial independent decisionmaking is needed for economic calculation. Mises wrote about this extensively in broad strokes. There are quite a large number of impossible hysteresis problems that mark the system the boomer's pivoted to as unsustainable, hyperbolic, and inevitably fails to impossible to solve hysteresis problems (where knowledge of a state needed to react doesn't provide sufficient time to change course because the effects precede that knowledge).

Artificial distortions, trending towards chaos will grow and self-sustain, eventually causing whipsaws that cause it to fail, but that takes time since the point of failure is stage 3 ponzi, where monetary properties lose all value seemingly overnight. Where objectively, outflows exceed inflows.

This is what also drives enshitiffication, why the business growth curve is an S adoption curve (following ponzi), and the inevitability of consolidation/hostile takeover.

The leftist connection is the strategy of sieving, you have to concentrate wealth in few hands first before you can seize it from those hands, and this is what the Fed has been doing. A gradual fabian-based induction to non-market socialism, while ensuring the political power base remains through bad actors that call out other bad actors decrying the public, and others in the group instigating and inducing bad actions while undermining, subverting, and making the resilient system brittle, at every point. Destroying the rule of law through shock doctrine and demoralization up to just prior to bringing it to crisis for the seizure, and re-normalization where either a socialist/communist takeover occurs, or when that fails; a rise of fascism to power. The same regime-change plan that all governments use (give or take). Also, the same driving dynamics that led to Hitler's rise to power.

Jamming communications so people don't catch on and can't react is part of that plan, which is why you have so many bots running around, and the platforms are complicit with the same people as those who want to enable this. Jamming doesn't work without the plausible deniability of karma systems that allow the platforms to grant moderator powers to a large group of sockpuppet accounts (sybil attacks), controlled by a surreptitious moderator. Who may also utilizes many psychological blindspots we all have to manipulate, and damage readers through structured distortion of reflected appraisal (or narrative control, memetics, or belief contagion to the layman, which includes Le Bon's works as a basis).

People are easily manipulated when they don't know the mechanism behind the how. Cialdini in his book Influence touch on the foundations, except reflected appraisal, but to understand distorted reflected appraisal you have to understand how torture works, and what it is really, and if you knew you would see it in almost everything today.

Torture is the structured imposition of psychological stress in sufficient exposure to cause involuntary hypnosis.

Your stated suspicion is a well crafted induction of a common lie that's been repeated so many times, many believe its truth, but it fails under close objective examination.

If the lie were true, you would have competitors coming into the market, and staying in the market; but its not because of the asymmetrical connection to a money printer; directly or indirectly.

Lowering prices below market value to drive competitor companies out of business has occurred in many places where a leveraged buyout or hostile takeover wasn't possible.

You need to operate on debt to compete, but in so doing you become food for takeover, until the parasitic nature has nothing left to eat. That hasn't happened yet, but its probably going to happen in our lifetime. These dynamics in the historic lifecycle is what is driving the adoption towards BRICS, and the chaos we see everywhere.

Eventually you get to a point where everything breaks, and you've been trapped by decisions your parents or grandparents generation chose through aggregate.

Decisions that result in worsening conditions, and your and your family; and their children's futures, being collapse into violent law of nature, or submission to enslavement and a life of suffering before death.

Either result in a loss of control from the choice upfront, that decreases until a point of no return, after which the dynamics cannot be stopped, but you can get out of the way, it just requires a ruthlessness, education, and knowledge that has been deprived from nearly everyone raised in recent generations today. Lone wolves die because they are weak, the movies promoting this concept are (5GW).

The first one lasted literally 10 years, it was one of the best consumer purchases I ever made.

Ever since then each replacement has crapped out within a year or two, despite same usage pattern. I bought one at Costco on sale and after returning it broken after just six months, a record for a $100+ device, the clerk at the return counter said they have piles of those. Crazy.

I have clothing that I bought shortly after high school, and it's now more than 25 years old and still good. It's tougher and thicker cotton than anything I seem to be able to buy now. Aside from clothing getting worse (made overseas, made cheaply, or from poor materials), the textiles themselves have gotten worse. Cotton crops have yielded fibers of very low quality in recent years, especially post-pandemic. Once-dependable brands no longer make clothing that lasts. Brooks Brothers used to be the last hold out for high quality clothing in the U.S., and they sold their brand and turned to crap even before the pandemic.

Appliances are another thing. Washing machines routinely lasted more than twenty years. Same for refrigerators. The microwave my parents got as a wedding gift didn't have a lot of features, but it kept on heating for 30 years. Now, it's difficult to find machines that don't need replacing in 5 years, and microwaves are almost exclusively made in China. The good stuff that you used to be able to get just isn't made by manufacturers that attempt to make durable items. They're made to shave margins and turn to junk in a few years.

The third thing extends to all manner of consumer goods, and it is actually a materials and chemicals issue. So many of the things that worked really well, were made from materials that turned out to be actively harmful. Harmful plastics, harmful coatings on non-stick pans, and while I can still go out and purchase those things if I wanted, we've had to eliminate or replace them with worse alternatives.

Tea, when brewed from loose leaf in a pot and strained through a metal strainer instead of plasticized tea bags (they're not actually paper) means you need actual high-quality tea instead of the junk that's on grocery store shelves. It turns out that's actually difficult to come by. Porcelain and glass not made in China (China's porcelain and glass all--all--have unsafe lead levels) is also difficult to find. There very few safe sources: France and Turkey for porcelain, and Italy for glass.

There are a whole series of reasons, but consumer goods, are, in fact, worse than they used to be. It's not just fuzzy nostalgia.

What's the point of building for durability if there's no demand for it?

Moreover, if you look at expensive cars or furniture, the markup on them has to be higher than cheap stuff. Honda Fit is like 20% of the price of a BMW, but I bet doesn't cost 20% to manufacture... So if people wanted quality it would be better for companies to produce more of the expensive option. Either companies are dumb or people don't want quality.

I just recently got a coffee grinder that costs 3 times as much as my old one and it's actually better across multiple dimensions, including material e.g. metal vs plastic . But how many units do you think the plastic junk at 0.33x the price sells vs mine?

The author either submitted to the inevitable. Or, decided that they don't want to make change.

Hate the cheap fashion, make a choice, buy proper products they just cost more and require the slightest of effort to care for.

Hate bad writing, move on read something else.

Dislike the quality of product X buy Y.

Frankly if you had told me the quality of product you would be and to buy for example in the MacBook air for <<$1k a few years ago I'd have laughed. There are food brands which are still going that make the same quality products and don't sacrifice, but they now cost more than the competitors because they don't compromise.

And that's just the beginning. The moaning about China, AI, people is just the same "I can't do anything to improve my lot in life" you see too much online.

Stop reacting to things happening to you and start doing things.

Like even if the author is totally wrong, that "actually all our products are actually much better thank you, good thing we don't live 50 years ago!" Is that something we can truly be happy about? Is that winning? You too, im sure, feel that itchy emptiness when you have received all your products, when all the plastics has been peeled off and the software has been updated.

This is not a battle you even want to win! The power you are defending is already second-hand, is just a sedative. You can want more.

We as part of a collective are incredibly powerful beyond imagination. When our concerns and our world start to become bigger than just our individual needs, we find strength in numbers. Only then can our individuality truly shine.

Seeing us as part of a group, a class and building that sense of community and collective action is long and difficult work.

We also still use the same 40 year old Coleman camping stove every summer, while other campers only get a few years out of much newer models.

But recently we found a happy exception, when we replaced our Contigo spill-proof coffee mugs (with a button you press to drink). They were always prone to the mechanism getting gross with milk scum, and were very hard to clean. The new models have an updated design that encloses the mechanism and keeps it much easier to keep clean. The metal seems heavier and high-quality, and the top lip has been folded over so it's not sharp like the old model. They've actually improved them a fair bit, for about the same price as the older ones.

The Phoebus cartel is an example of planned obsolescence, but it's a bad example for your argument because it made lightbulbs much, much better at their intended purpose. Consumer number-gawking incentivized manufacturers to make their product objectively worse, and the cartel solved that problem.

These companies are so fine tuned that they notice a 0.05% drop in revenue. Don't like what they do. Don't buy it and see if they change.

If they change something and you vote with your cash they notice. The biggest lie is that you don't matter because you're statistically insignificant. If you believe that they lose 0.005% vs 0.05%.

For better or worse look at Bud Light. The customer is always the opinion they listen to. 50% loss in profits or 0.5% this gets blamed on someone ultimately and they tend to revert unpopular decisions when they're not related to regulatory changes.