Worse on Purpose: How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality
Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality – Worse on Purpose
I investigate how trusted brands deteriorate after corporate acquisitions, focusing on Whole Foods. Once a community-focused pioneer in Austin, it was bought by Amazon for $13.7 billion. Since then, buying power shifted to headquarters, and stores are now scored for unionization risk rather than customer satisfaction. This series exposes who gutted these companies and what remains worth buying.
When Amazon paid $13.7 billion, they pulled the buying into headquarters and started scoring all 510 stores for unionization risk.
- comrade1234
I read years ago about a drill which was sold at Walmart with the same sku as in higher-end stores but the Walmart version had plastic gears. This was due to pricing pressure by Walmart on the manufacturer.
Me, personally, I seek out first Swiss brands then German brands when buying most things. I'm willing to pay extra.
In fact I'm a little pissed off this week because I ordered some oxygen absorbers off a Swiss website that listed a Swiss address but they were shipped directly from china. Investigating the site more closely, yeah, it's just a fake website made to look Swiss.
- 1970-01-01
One massive unmentioned counterexample: High quality Chinese tools continue to proliferate and sucker-punch these brands for being so egregious with quality. They are now the high quality standard if you know what brands to look for, and not because their competition got worse as mentioned here, they are simply iterating and improving and making better tools and designs than they did 10 years ago. Sometimes you are getting the exact same tool as the name-brand but with less warranty for a fraction of the price. "Corporate Greed" is self-correcting in a free and fair market! Vote with your wallet.
Example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/harborfreight/comments/1v1ujxe/hmmm...
Which directly contradicts the blog's post about Knipex never selling-out on quality:
https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-power-tools-got-worse-...
>Knipex is family-owned out of Germany. They make what many consider the best pliers on the planet. Part of a larger group (Knipex Group) but not publicly traded, not for sale.
- xnx
This entire site can be boiled down to: products get decrease in quality when customers don't know or don't care what quality is.
Price is a clear and obvious thing to measure, quality is much more difficult. Consumers get little or no formal education in quality, and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly. Any review site that is paid for by ads or affiliate links has the default position of trying to get you to buy something.
- theturtletalks
I call this the cycle of disruption.
A company makes a really good product as first challenging incumbents. They get so big, they eventually become the incumbent. All this time, they’re probably losing money on the product or breaking even. Eventually, investors will want returns on their investment. This will first happen with prices increases to save the quality of the product. Once they can’t raise prices anymore, the quality will be decreased. By this point, the brand is strong enough to get sales even on this worse product.
Then another company will come in and make the same product but better than the incumbent. The cycle continues.
My point is find these new companies that are trying to get market share by making a higher quality product. And if you really like that product, buy 2.
- groundzeros2015
“corporate greed” is a signal to me of low quality commentary. The opening premise of Econ is that consumers want all the goods for free and producers want to give nothing in exchange for as much money as they can.
- inigyou
I've come to the conclusion this proliferates because it's very hard to start a business. If there was tons of competition the market would decide.
- NoboruWataya
Interesting (and very helpful!) that they keep a list of good brands. I wonder how they judge that - do they just look at ownership?
- gorgoiler
Incredibly depressing, but a good and important thing to read!
Not to sound overly cheerful, but shout out to my Makita DHP484 combo drill/driver and 100 piece bit set that, for a low three figure price, is far more powerful and capable than the noisy old corded monster it replaces.