Forbrukerrådet: Too Many Products Die Too Soon

Quality was never the norm: cheap always beat quality with a hand tied behind his back!

Western working class has spent decades complaining about cheap imports from China... while feeding that market with their own money.

Western frequent fliers keep reminiscing about the grandiose pre-deregulation era or air travel, but cry a river when their low-cost carrier of choice actually enforces the limit on cabin baggage.

Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.

I personally see two effects that are very detrimental here:

1) "Quality brands", where you pay a premium to get high quality/durability products, are economically incentivized to "sell-out" (cash in the brand name by producing as cheaply as possible). This is because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important than anything else.

2) Increasing trend towards no-name products (or ephemeral brands). This means that producers can sell cheap trash with no drawback whatsoever; slightly more expensive quality products become unmarketable because every customer will assume you're just trying to sell them the same cheapest shit for more.

I used to think that brand products were a universal money waste for suckers, but now I think they can be a very valuable mechanism.

What would really help in my view though is to force companies to stick with their brand, to incentivize them to invest into it and to make "cashing out" on good brands a universally bad decision.

One big problem is that prices are easy to compare, while quality is not.

I recently bought a tub that was advertised as stainless steel on Amazon. I was suspicious but decided to take a chance. Turns out it is galvanized, not stainless. I’m not sure the average person knows the difference. To be charitable, perhaps that’s even why the listing advertised it that way. But the difference matters significantly in terms of performance and quality, especially for certain kinds of products and use cases.

There’s no “sort by quality, best to worst” system like there is for price. No “genuine stainless only” filter. You just have to know certain things.

Shopping in person obviously helps, but you still have to know what to look for. Refrigerators are a good example of this. Most people shop for them in person, yet it’s not at all obvious whether model A or model B will last longer. You can try to use price as a proxy for quality, but the more expensive refrigerators are actually more likely to fail years earlier because of the added component complexity. They’re basically banking on the fact that you don’t know how to read a wiring diagram.

To combat that, lots of people turn to YouTube or reviews to figure out quality. And sure, you can find some good sources that will tell you that top freezers will last longer than a French door model at basically any price, and they might even explain why. But all of those platforms are muddied with perverse incentives, affiliate programs, sponso […]

I think we're asking too much of buyers here. You shouldn't need to learn about fabrics and stitching, then check who owns the brand now, just to buy a shirt that lasts.

This is a false pretense. Quality was never the norm.

What is no longer the norm is getting first-hand experience with a product before you buy it. Everything comes in the mail and it's a surprise to the consumer after they buy it. That's nuts!

I agree with this. It's curious that we always talk about "things used to last forever and weren't only made by corporations chasing infinite growth", when those things are often still available, but are almost invisible because we now discover everything through social media or SEO.

You can find great-quality, long-lasting products at great prices (great price doesn't equal cheap, but great for what you get).

I use capable LLMs on high reasoning to run a prompt like this:

"I want to buy a high-quality [category] that will/has/can [requirements here]. I do not want to pay for a brand name that doesn't improve.

Start by finding manufacturing clusters in [region of the world, e.g. Europe] where [category] is made, then find the businesses making [category] in that cluster that I can buy from.

Normal online stores are okay, but also try non-obvious avenues:

-local business registers

-stores that may only be available in the local language

-factories that sell samples directly"

-cooperatives that sell products from multiple local manufacturers

(I modify this prompt, but it's the skeleton)

To verify a given product/brand/store, a great follow-up prompt has been:

"Now find me big brands offering a product of similar quality (ideally measured by objective characteristics) and show me how much it is vs. [store name here]"

This has showed me incredible finds. It's become how I buy most things that go beyond basic trinkets, and I often pay less for far higher quality.

Easy solution if you like tariffs: all imported items over $100 must have a 10 year full warranty.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...

…are you willing to pay for it though? If yes, is there enough of you? If yes, is there a way to tell low quality from high?

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

In certain personal projects, I have the opposite philosophy where I don't want quality. I got addicted to designing models and 3D-printing them a year ago. Over time, I learned to reduce the amount of safety factor and make items just strong enough for their application - which saves material and printing time. I wouldn't skimp on something like a carrying handle for the printer, where failure would mean damaging the printer. But I would reduce the amount of plastic used in things like art pieces (3DBenchy - who needs structural strength?), end caps for various objects, prototypes for dimensioning. Moreover, sometimes I'm happy to see my parts break because I was thinking of redesigning it or did so already, hence I would be itching to print the new version. Aside from that, just knowing I can reprint a part anytime (without modifications) makes me much less worried about breaking or losing a part.