Are things getting shittier for them, too ? Are luxury brands immune to "energy is getting expensive, and corporate needs to buy shares back and increase dividend, so we have to cut costs everywhere" ?

In other words, are growing inequality going to end up having billionaires who functionally live the same quality of life as upper-middle-class from the end of 90s ?

What clothes are these? I don't buy any kind of expensive brands. I don't take any care when washing. I don't own a lot of clothes so I wear each item weekly. And my clothes last me for several years at least. The dyes have gotten noticeably better than when I was a child - when was the last time you had colors run in the wash?

If that's the case, even if it's true that we can say "sure, quality is declining, but it's fine, just fine", it would follow that inflation is actually much higher than reported.

When you buy a fridge today, it buys you the "fridge service" for a much shorter time span, forcing you to invest a lot more money into that service over a given time span. That's a steep inflation of fridge price that isn't counted in official statistics.

This should be taken into account in inflation calculation. If this was, it would give a much fairer view of the decline in purchasing power.

Whats adorable is that the author thinks this has anything to do with AI. Shitty AI is an excuse to get rid of customer service. It's a move that most of tech made a long time ago.

How many times BEFORE AI have you heard the lament from someone that "Thank fully I am internet famous, or blew up on social media. because other wise google/etsy/ebay/Facebook would never have fixed their automated decision to pull the rug out from under me"

> The conclusion is clear: society isn’t adapting to the pace of technological advancement.

Uhhh, the change already happened, in the attention economy the only thing that matters is your social clout (credit?).

> packaged foods with more preservatives than ingredients.

Heirloom tomatoes in the grocery store. Avocado year round, Brussel sprouts that dont taste like ass. Whole Foods, and other more 'local' choices.

> According to the expert, the main factor driving this criticism is that the great promise of capitalism — if you work

The problem is that there are lots of people all over the globe who are willing to do MORE for LESS and we are in a global marketplace. Adapt or die.

> buy a house

Except you can have all this. Plenty of people do: "buying a house" is very literally the same as it ever was: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

> The real problem isn’t buying pants that don’t last or traveling in an uncomfortable plane. The real problem is that, with each purchase, we support two of the most polluting industries on the planet.

The author could have done a far better job in highlighting all the waste that goes into a pair of pants. Oil for synthetics, Waste from fabric making and dying. Scraps from the cutting process only to have them thrown away after a year to make another pair. Instead we got a bunch of "feel good" talking points that you can nod along to even if they are misinformed.

And this does not result in the health service having lower quality for the individual?

This is a very funky way to frame this.

A bigger decline is coming if we let "vibe coding" and what we call AI replace human workers at scale. The technology isn't there yet for full automation but everything is blindly surging ahead due to the allure of it and the same reason as the first paragraph above.

Maybe someone will respond "why should a business care about you?" and that just proves my point. We've created a zero empathy, greed-driven society and then we wonder why quality is declining.

I feel like knowing that we might live well-beyond our working age has caused all sorts of odd/irrational behaviours in the way we approach life. I think for example, having to save for retirement makes us rethink how we spend our money. Which then means people are ultimately spending less on other things i.e. clothing. Then it becomes a kind of vicious cycle of hoarding wealth, but then expecting everything else to be cheap (at any cost).

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.

If you want long lasting products, then maybe the cheaper furniture is of lower quality. If you want something light weight and affordable, then ikea is higher quality.

Assuming there is a uniform product evaluation function seems like lazy journalism. The addition of AI was also odd

I looked at this hotel made from containers recently:

https://www.booking.com/hotel/de/tin-inn-montabaur.html

I thought it is an interesting concept. And it has a rating of 8.5 out of 10 on booking.com, which means "Very good".

But then I read through the details and the reviews (sorted by new) and see:

You can hear your neighbors.

You cannot open the windows.

Staff enters the room before your checkout time.

The rooms and the stuff inside the rooms are dirty.

Lots of broken amenities, including the air condition.

For check-in you have to enter your passport-id (where does it end up?).

And on and on an on ...

How is that "Very good"?

What threshold should one assign to book something on booking.com these days? 9.9/10?

People are going to maximize short term profits.

But what’s often mistaken for a decline in quality is really a shift in priorities: toward affordability, efficiency, and accessibility. And that’s fantastic. Products that were once expensive and exclusive are now available, at good-enough quality, to billions more people around the world.

Yes, that trade-off can mean shorter lifespans or less repairability. But on balance, widening access is a moral win, and one made possible by the very progress the article seems to mourn.

This statement suffers from either viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses or from total cultural relativism in the most pejorative sense.

I'm not sure about 2003, but around 2009, I owned a Nokia N900, which was arguably the flagship Nokia phone at the time. I can confidently state that current iPhones are _way_ better than that phone. On paper, the N900 phone was amazing: it had GPS, Wi-Fi, multitasking, a camera, a touchscreen, and (!) a hardware keyboard, and more. It had a desktop-class browser, on paper. But nothing quite worked well. It was far too bloated for the hardware capabilities of the time. When you came home, it never damn switched properly to WiFi, or it took forever. The same applies to switching off WiFi and switching to cellular when you leave home. The GPS always took minutes to establish a location and easily lost connection due to small obstructions. I recall that I compared it to a friend's iPhone at the time; the N900's GPS was embarrassingly bad and slow.

I can confidently say that today's flagship iPhones (or even Androids) are significantly better quality than the N900, in every way possible.

The upper-middle class in the US is also bigger than ever, and all those upper-middle interests are getting saturated: AMEX lounges, expensive resorts. Air travel is also a lot more affordable for the common person than back in the golden age.

Or maybe just don't buy cheap thrash?

I bought some T-shirts while in Covid from a sports brand and 5 years later they are still as if they were new :shrug:

Of course price =/= quality, but when almost everyone is ordering their new clothes from Shein then what do you really expect?

That's... not capitalism at all? Socialism maybe, but absolutely not capitalism. In average, those that work will have a good life (or at least, in average, better life than those who don't), but there is no guarantee on a single case, or even that this life will be good enough.

Well that explains a lot, doesn't it? The article is right overall but occasionally glances over the importance of the "quality/price" ratio. As the price went down, buying habits changed, and by extension the manufacturing habits. When things are cheap nobody wants to keep them forever, they get exchanged sooner to "keep up with the times".

My anecdote, when I bought my first fridge (a tiny 70-100l I think) it cost 2.5x the average net salary in my country, and it still broke down often, but it could be repaired so it lasted 20+ years. I think today a fridge costing 2.5x the average salary - for the US this would be a ~$10-12k fridge - will be more reliable but unrepairable so when it's done, it's done.

I still use a phone of the generation after Nokia - it must be 20 years old now. The thing is, for everyday use voicemail and SMS are enough for me. I don't need more technology. And certainly not the kind of technology that make people walk like zombies on the street. If you remember the old Youtube video about viewers not noticing a gorilla in the middle of basketball players because viewers were instructed to count something, this is exactly that.

> there’s another, lesser-known but even more effective method: convincing consumers that a product is outdated for aesthetic or symbolic reasons, even if it still works.

Long story short, durability is the greatest enemy for businesses. They have decades of experience of fighting against it. IIRC Europe introduced laws against planned obsolescence, but businesses probably did start to switch to "perceived obsolescence" when consumers proved the existence of planned obsolescence.

It's not even something evil to do for some categories of products. Good household appliances use less energy, even good ICE cars probably are more efficient than they used to be, etc. It seems that it defines a different metric for product quality, total cost of ownership.

> However, Rodríguez argues that, generally speaking, automation does improve customer service. [...] The initial investment in technology is extremely high, and the benefits remain practically the same. We have not detected any job losses in the sector either.

If companies really are investing in order to improve their customer service, that's big news.

You can have a tailored suit/shirt, hardwood furniture, grass-fed beef, vacuum to last decades, etc, but it will cost around the same in real terms and you're used to prices from Zara/Lidl.

Some things have truly declined because the demand collapsed so much that they basically got discontinued in the 1st world (that tailored shirt is coming from Ceylon) but others have improved tremendously by soaking up that drive for quality (check any independent coffee shop).

Not to mention the true pinnacles of modern manufacturing. Because for the price of a decent camera my father could get, I have a 100x zoom camera in my pocket, with a 7" touch screen, and 5g connectivity, also somehow all the books I could have ever read.

I'd just like to comment on this line in particular. The promise of capitalism isn't this, but, rather, if you own capital (i.e. are a capitalist), you explicitly do not have to work. There is no promise made to the workers, except that in some way they are compensated for their work.

There are other systems wherein if you don't work (and aren't retired/disabled), you don't get paid. But capitalism is one of them in which non-workers get paid, and usually with a disgusting disparity between the rate of the two classes.

Moore’s law has ended. The LHC found nothing of note. Childhood mortality and Polio have been defeated. The periodic table is effectively complete. R&D is having limited returns. This AI capex spend is just hardware and data catching up to R&D from the 1980s.

We were born thinking the curve from the 1950s onwards was a god-given eternal exponential. But since about the early 2000s we’ve quietly known the curve was logistic, and not god-given.

Economists and the well-off are in denial about exponential growth. We’ve hit the current carrying capacity for an economy of n-billion silicon-flinging apes on a globe with a limited number of resources.

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”.

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

Perhaps this is all just stemming from business assumptions of exponential growth being flawed. Should we require MBAs to know what a logistic curve is?

I don’t know a lot, but I know that the current business paradigm and the products and services I interact with everyday are very optimised. But not optimised for me. They’re optimised for businesses maligned to my goals, but the only businesses left offering anything.

What naturally happens to such products is that the manufacturers find a way to broaden their customer base. They find ways to bring the price point down so they can sell more.

For most people this is a boon. They can afford a luxury or convenience they otherwise wouldn't be able to. Overall most people are better off when this happens.

For the first group of people however, they are worse off. They cannot get the same product as before. Such is life.

Another counterpoint: hotel quality has arguably improved a great lot in the last 10 year or so. Especially, after Covid. That's rather perplexing, especially since airlines are going in the opposite direction while they two are usually a part of the same purchase by the same people and logically i'd expect their trajectories to be similar.

Family business houses used to invest in long-term success through brand, reputation and durability. Startups or hired CEOs focus on short-term goals and invest in creating superficial perceptions that can help the sale.

Nowadays people just want what aint good for em

https://elpais.com/ideas/2025-07-13/el-asombroso-fenomeno-de...

As far as clothes go - I the cheap junk back in the day didn't last too long, either. Cheap supermarket jeans would last me maybe 1 season, before something ripped. Granted they probably only cost $20 back then - but the quality isn't too different from the H&M you purchase today for $50.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants

>Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that the quality of life is improved by all the products placed on the market.

> One is that attributes like durability -- which used to be a major factor in how people judged a product's quality -- have lost relevance.

> some companies design certain products -- especially household appliances -- stop working after a certain period of time. This isn't a conspiracy theory, but a proven fact.

So, in many cases we no longer factor in durability because we know that consumer products don't offer that quality _by design_.

> healthcare services may not be worse than they were a few years ago. "The big problem is that they haven't adapted to the pace of social change. They haven't evolved enough to serve the entire elderly population, whose demographic size is increasing every year"

But then they are, in fact, of worse quality for a large group of the population.

> five out of 10 consumers openly reject virtual assistants. The conclusion is clear: society isn't adapting to the pace of technological advancement.

No, that's not a clear conclusion. Another conclusion that could be drawn is that the adaptation of AI technology in customer service has lowered the quality to a point customers don't even care to bother with. I.E., the pace of technological advancement, in this case, isn't ready for the demands of society.

> It's difficult to prove that today's products are worse than those of 20 years ago.

No, it's not. Some products and consumption patterns may be harder to compare. In other cases, we have clear examples of engineered decline in quality. One example: soap companies changing not just the size of the soap (shrinkflation) but also altering the ingredients to make the bar of soap last about half as long as before. Ever look under the bed at a hotel? After the pandemic, the quality of cleaning has declined substantially, at least in my country. My previous landlord lowered the indoor temperature and raised the rent, all in the same year. House prices keep going up, but building standards are lowered.

In short: there are very real and measurable declines in quality because economies are tanking and, as the article correctly states, "the promise of capitalism" is no longer being fulfilled.

My working assumption right now is this two phenomena together.

One, a sneakier kind of “shrinkflation”. You can make a can of coke smaller but you can’t do this with shoes. But you can swap out materials or hire more careless manufacturers.

Two, the breakdown of communication caused by AI, earlier fake reviewers and the death of the media at the hands of the web. Taken together, you can get away with a lot more without liquidating your brand simply because word won’t spread.

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.

Of course the reality is between. Whenever something experiences mass adoption, of course quality will decline, e. g. airplane seats with mass adoption of flying.

But so, so many things improved dramatically in quality. I could give you endless examples but just think about cars.

Despite anecdata to the contrary the reliability of cars increased over the decades.

Most 60s cars had rust problems after a couple of years. By the 80s this was largely solved.

Most 70s cars had all kinds of mechanical problems but by the 90s this was largely solved.

Most 80s cars had lots of electronics problems but by the 2000s this was largely solved.

Sure we still have software issues and the whole transition to EV's makes has us deal with new problems, but do I want any of my old cars back? Hell no!

1. Quality has been dieing mainly because people are addicted to cheap shit. The cheaper things are, the more they can buy. The amount of personal possessions people have nowadays is totally insane and unsurprisingly lots of cheap stuff.

2. Planned obsolescence is not a thing. Maybe it's happened a few times with a few products. But it certainly doesn't deserve a name. I have been on the engineering side of many business and consumer products and swam in waters of the industry for years.

No one has ever used that term. There is no engineering associated with it. No books or talks or specialists.

It's purely a function of point #1. People want the lowest cost above all else, so lower quality parts get used. Warranty durations are pretty standard too, 1 year 2 year 5 year. You never see a 566 day warranty like you would expect from a calculated failure model.

Also, the best way for 25 years now to make a product fail just after warranty is to program it in software. Everything has a microcontroller nowadays. How many devs here have written that code?

> “the first thing car ads highlighted was their longevity.“

This is table stakes now for cars so it would be weird for a car company to highlight it. So in the case for cars the baseline quality expectation has significantly increased.

The case is much easier to make for fashionable items like clothes and interiors.

My suspicion is that when products are successful and mature but reach market saturation, profit growth pressure leads to cutting some corners on every iteration, and hence to a slow decline in quality over the years.

Some products and services managed to decrease in price to match this, and but the culture of craftsmanship had to be sacrificed to match lower purchasing parity.

Product culture ends up being the culture in which the middle class are engaged in.

Just like this article I'm afraid.

If it's making a point it's lost by meandering to too long.

If it's point it's simply longevity then it's missed the point about how LLM are simply here to stay, the genie is out of the bottle with regards to that tool.

If the point is some anti hyper-capitalist rant then it's a thinly veiled option piece.

If the point is the breakdown of the social contract/elevator. Then why when you're interviewing experts who study this aren't you asking poignant questions like "when do you think this happened?" or "can this be fixed?". Rather than ranting about the dreams of the nuclear (pub intended) family to China and "AI".

If it that if you're not chasing these answers you're either afraid to admit you know them or are scared of them?

Maybe not the best example. If there’s ever a product where timeliness is a feature, it’s the morning coffee. A $.70 Nespresso pod may not match a freshly ground light roast pour over, but to the dreary eyed wage slave just rising to seize the day, the taste consistency and convenience are distinct features.

> Today, it’s easier to converse with a machine than with a real person. The problem is that no one likes these systems: according to a study by the Cetelem Observatory published last October, five out of 10 consumers openly reject virtual assistants.

People fail to realize the cost of interactions too. With minimum wage at nearly $20/hour, a six (6) minute phone call costs $2 more than the $0 marginal cost of an automated phone system. Would you pay a $2 human-interaction-surcharge to order a pizza?

The result it's finding new way to do more with less, and finding them quickly. Some do works well, some do works a bit, many gives only the illusion to work enough and people buy them anyway because an illusion it's still something more than nothing.

The target issue is the model, capitalism, issue, in the past we have used money as a means to barter things counter something we all accept. Nowadays we use money to makes more money, so goods are just a mean not a target, and the result is that we do not care about quality, being just a mean if we can sell them it's enough to milk money. To solve this we need to makes money public, creating by governments without fractionary reserves and public debt mechanism, taxed to keep the supply limited enough following the availability of any specific resources, so essentially like Swiss we need to tax just VAT with continuously variables rates following nature and tech, while taxing local properties just to assure local consumption does not exceed a sustainable threshold of resources usage.

This one seems to tick all the boxes

Care beat quality as a metric, because care is very inefficient to fake and very powerful when genuine.

How does the company providing the physical product or the service care ?

Most companies right now care about AI. Some integration are impressive. But where's real care about users ? It seems it's not the subject anymore. We may have tricked ourselves into beveling technology will resolve in itself all problems, and it's at its peak with AI. As engineers we can forget sometimes that technology is just a tool and its fine, but as a society it may leads us all in a bad direction.

> There’s one conclusion that comes up repeatedly throughout this report: the perception that everything is of lower quality is more pronounced among older people. The reasons are varied. One is that attributes like durability — which used to be a major factor in how people judged a product’s quality — have lost relevance.

Well, wouldn't older people have more perspective from a greater amount of lived experience? Then, in the next sentence, the article assumes away a reason to throw their conclusions out.

> José Francisco Rodríguez, president of the Spanish Association of Customer Relations Experts, admits that a lack of digital skills can be particularly frustrating for older adults, who perceive that the quality of customer service has deteriorated due to automation. However, Rodríguez argues that, generally speaking, automation does improve customer service.

When the automation on the other end can't understand my problem and I can't talk to a human, then I cannot solve my problem. This is definitively a regression and is occurring more than ever before. I have a problem with getting paid from a large company, and there is no reasonable way outside of hiring a lawyer for me to resolve the problem, and the dollar amount is so low the company knows full well that I will not hire a lawyer to resolve the problem, and it is automation that makes this possible, more than ever. But I'm sure the back-end metrics look great to management and the experts in this article.

> It’s difficult to prove that today’s products are worse than those of 20 years ago.

Why is "20 years ago" the baseline? And that word "prove" establishes an unattainable bar within such a subjective field of study.