While I personally find this kind of thing extremely annoying, to me, the main problem is the _difficulty_ of determining quality. The Donut media guys did a (relatively unscientific) video comparing a whole bunch of products from the 50s to modern day across several price points. What they found was that the things that "looked" the same now were simultaneously worse and also much cheaper. They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price. It was just that the brands and names that used to be quality were now usually not as much.
So it is often the case that today, you can get something for cheaper than you ever could in the past (albeit not at a great quality), and if you are willing to pay higher prices (but often about the same as you would have paid in the past), you can still get good or even better quality.
The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also gotten harder in many cases.
> They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price.
I argue you must evaluate against median purchasing power; it accounts for inflation and (lack of) wage increases.
Comments from your linked video:
> The problem with the “adjusted for inflation” argument is that it does not factor in buying power. The increase in wages has risen at out half the rate of inflation, so sure; $20 in 1975 would be $124 today, but the minimum wage in 1975 was $2.10 an hour as opposed to $7.25 today, giving you half the buying power you had 50 years ago.
> healthcare, housing, and education ... have increased by an insane margin leaving people with less money once that has been paid for (if at all).
> It's even worse when you consider that people are paying 45-55% of their monthly income on a house that cost 20x more than it would have in 1975. Your buying power is fucked from all sides.
Purchasing power is probably a better metric in a vacuum, but it's hard to analyze accurately
For example, the comment you're citing is claiming that because minimum wage has increased only 3x over the same period of time in which inflation has eroded the relative value of a dollar by 6x, that wages overall have increased at half the rate of inflation. But minimum wage is a measurement of a minimum, while inflation is a measurement of /average/ price increase so they can't be compared 1:1 in this way.
The housing argument also seems odd. In New Zealand (where I'm from -- I'm not familiar with the US' housing market, so the commenter could be right about that geo!) house prices have increased by far more than 20x since the 70s, but the houses available are of substantially higher quality due to improved regulations (e.g. all newer homes are subject to healthy homes rules which mandate insulation) so just comparing inflation-adjusted home prices vs income doesn't tell the full story
(Aside from that, a whole heap of items like food, electronics, transportation are all both far cheaper AND higher quality today than in the 70s)
“Higher quality” isn’t an objective measurement though. And it certainly doesn’t matter if the end result is that people cannot afford to buy it.
What I’d be interested to understand is whether changes to materials (be that buildings or home appliances) has caused an increase in the cost to manufacturer.
I’d wager most things have gotten cheaper to produce these days because the same improvements in technology that can be integrated into the product also applies to technology used to reduce the cost to manufacturer. Plus if wages are below inflation then any labour costs would have declined (relatively speaking) in that time too.
Modern US houses are made of the cheapest, shittiest, flimsiest materials money can buy. I go out of my way not to live in US housing less than 50 years old.
This isn't true for median purchasing power. You're looking at the federal minimum wage, not the median. Only about 1% of hourly workers earn $7.25 or less.
Median earnings were $48,070 in 1975, measured in 2024 dollars, and $51,370 in 2024.
Median earnings in 1970 were closer to 56k in today's dollars. 1970-1980 was a recessionary period, followed by stagflation in the 80s. I hate when people use that time period as an anchor to show growth. It's like using 2009 as an anchor.
I didn't choose 1975. That's the year the parent comment claimed median earnings have dropped from in comparison, so that's the year I have to use to refute the claim.
Estimated median earnings for full-time male workers peaked in 1973 in the chart, until surpassing it in the 2010s. It's hard to find directly comparable data for earlier decades, but estimates put wages significantly lower. If you anchored to the 1920s, 30s, 40s or 50s instead, you'd just show even more growth in median wage. If you're saying we shouldn't compare to the 70s or 80s either, then what's left? Just years after 1990?
What data are you using? It is hard to get solid numbers pre 1975. I looked at SSA Wage index which has 1970 at $6,186. Adjust using PCE, that is only $42,808 in present dollars.
In either case, IMO, +-10% over 60 years should just be considered flat. Calling it flat is probably generous considering how inflation has affected durable goods vs necessities. We can buy more appliances now, but places to put them have never been more expensive relative to income.
Where are you sourcing that data from? The graph I linked using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't go back that far, so comparing to 1970 would not be possible.
That's household income. You need to adjust for the change in households with multiple earners. That's why I said the census data is dirty and conflates things. The number of households with both parents working increased from 46% to 52%, so median household income staying flat means median income for individuals went down pretty significantly.
> The problem with the “adjusted for inflation” argument is that it does not factor in buying power. The increase in wages has risen at out half the rate of inflation, so sure; $20 in 1975 would be $124 today, but the minimum wage in 1975 was $2.10 an hour as opposed to $7.25 today, giving you half the buying power you had 50 years ago.
Now do the same analysis but using median wage not minimum. YouTube comments are for entertainment purposes only.
I'm really frustrated by inflation numbers because there doesn't seem to be a metric that makes sense.
CPI ignores the reality people feel (and swaps in cheaper items that aren't necessarily on par with the original to keep the number lower), gold isn't really a 1:1 with purchasing power...there must be some sort of useful composite metric that merges multiple data points over time like rental/house prices, CPI market basket, dollar vs hard assets like gold to come up with a more accurate number.
The CPI doesn’t arbitrarily “swap in” items. It changes based on consumer behavior. That’s why it now tracks streaming services but not VCRs. Similarly, if the price of Gala apples triples and everyone switches to Fuji, a fixed index would overstate the actual cost of living.
Insofar as gold impacts the cost of things people buy, it’s already included. Adding it directly to the CPI makes no more sense than adding Bitcoin or soybean futures.
The cost of housing is already is a massive component of the CPI.
But if you used to be able to afford steak and now all you can afford is ground turkey, readjusting the basket of goods for that shift in "preference" is just hiding the fact that nobody can afford steak anymore.
And similarly, the hedonic adjustments to smartphones sort of implicitly claim that the $100 cheap smartphone you can buy today is worth $8000 back in 2009 because of how much better processors and memory have gotten. But you can't buy an iPhone 1.0 for $1 to satisfy the need to have a phone that you can install apps onto (and the upgrade cost every few years as cheap phones can no longer run an O/S version that your banking app requires).
The assertion that the CPI simultaneously overlooks downward product substitution and prices in product improvements in order to paint an overly-rosy picture is belied by the fact that most stuff is cheaper than it’s ever been.
Thirty years ago, internet service was $2.95/hour (in 1996 dollars!), long-distance phone calls were 10 cents/minute, and a low-res 28” color TV with 5 channels cost a fortune.
I don't care about internet service, long distance phone calls, or TVs. I care about shelter, groceries, healthcare, and education. I can forego the former, I must buy the latter.
> a low-res 28” color TV with 5 channels cost a fortune.
Uh, back in 2000 (okay not quite 30 years ago, but getting close) I had a 36" Sony Wega which cost around $1500 with DirectTV and hundreds of channels. A 25" to 27" TV was more of a 1988 kind of thing (which is almost 40 years ago now). Being limited to 5 OTA channels was more of a 1980 thing.
But again you can't really buy that Sony Wega anymore, even though the CPI probably prices it at $20 these days.
Back 50 years ago, average household spend on the Internet was also $0, so it was very cheap, we weirdly didn't spend anything on it when I was growing up. Now I spend $80/month on it, and have trouble finding anything cheaper around here.
If you want to consider "communications spend", back in 1988, you might have spent $50/month on your landline, cable tv and newspaper subscription. Today households tend to spend $280/month on internet, wireless and streaming/cable services. That is actually double the CPI. They get lots more for that, but the cost of being an average middle class household has grown at double the CPI. And these days you need the internet in order to keep up with Joneses, it isn't really a choice.
US households faced much higher costs than you recall. According to the BLS, mean monthly expenditures were $44.75 on landline service, $13.50 on cable TV, and $12.33 on newspapers. That’s $70.33 in 1996 USD, or ~$193 in 2026 USD.
More households subscribe to services today, which inflates the "average expenditures" data cited below: 93% of 1988 households had a landline, 53% cable TV, and 63% newspaper. Compare with today's household services penetration: 98% mobile phone, 94% broadband, and 74% streaming media.
You’re right that this is less than the cost of internet + cell + streaming services today — these are ~50% higher than the 1988 bundle — but consider the differences: you can access almost any kind of content from almost anywhere. And you can consume it on a smart phone or TV that costs 75% less in real terms than that TV from 2000.
Meanwhile, real median household income grew from ~$65,130 in 1988 to $83,730 in 2024 — and furthermore, the tax burden on the middle class fell during this period.
You're only going to hear from people who think that the CPI underestimates inflation. If the CPI overestimates inflation for an given individual, they have no reason to comment on it.
Its also gotten harder to trust them to maintain that quality, too.
A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners, or even start selling a slightly different product with the same model number.
Or you find a decent brand that makes good products, they get popular and grow and in come the MBAs with ideas on how to increase profits. Or they get bought by Private Equity and carry on only by brand momentum.
> A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners
I think this is true, but for far less malicious reasons. Favourable reviews lead to popularity, which increases production pressures, which makes it harder to source quality materials and maintain a quality process while satisfying demand.
I have heard of several indie makers who, faced with sudden popularity, have to make the tough choice of speeding up the process at reduced quality (and thus dissatisfy customers) or be unable to fill orders (and thus dissatisfy customers). Everyone handles it differently but it's not pleasant for anyone.
Maybe they should just cap the number of orders at the number of items they can make and ask anybody else to sign up on a list? Anybody who chooses option 1 is obviously evil?
100% this. If you can't deliver the product i want, then fine. Don't lie to me and deliver a product inferior to what i ordered for the same price without warning. That's straight up malice.
Naturally the kind of thing that would be defended on HN nonetheless
Even if they don't go down! If sales figures rise less than they did last quarter, shareholders get unhappy. Part of the paradox of unsustainable infinite growth is that the stock market demands not flat profits, but growth and increasing growth.
Even for products without CR/WC-levels of traffic being thrown at them do this.
My parents had silverware they liked, 10-ish years later we had lost or chipped a handful of them and they bought replacements. They look identical and feel identical…. Except the new ones clearly used lighter (read: cheaper) materials and then put a weight inside the handle to make them feel the same. The problem is that the weight is not attached well and can become detached and start sliding around making the handle rattle when you turn/invert it.
Just so irritating to know that effectively every product/brand will do this in the end.
> The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also gotten harder in many cases.
And there's a perverse effect to that difficulty: even if you really want high quality, it can be so hard to be sure you're getting it that you give up and just by the cheapest thing, because at least then you know you're not getting taken advantage of (by buying crappy for premium prices).
My rule is to never buy the cheapest thing, because to a point, you get what you pay for. But my other rule is not to spend extra for brand recognition or supposed higher quality. There's a middle range where you get reasonable value, better-than-crap stuff. Too low and you're buying junk, too high and you're overpaying, perhaps for brand or reputation, for something you can get elsewhere for less.
The problem with that strategy is that, used at scale like it is, it just creates a perverse incentive to raise the prices on your crappy product, without changing anything else.
For example, in the liquor market, there are basically 4 price points for 750ml bottles: $20 and below is generally swill, but it's cheap swill. Companies here are competing on price. $40-60 gets you something worth drinking, but perhaps not prestigious. Companies here are competing on quality. $100 gets you something prestigious, and companies are competing on such, and the $200+ price point gets you something rare.
If I buy a $30 dollar bottle, in a sane world it would be something with a middling tradeoff between price and quality. Instead what you get is something that is as bad, if not worse, than the $20 stuff, because the company is simultaneously failing to compete on price AND on quality. That leaves them in the hail-mary zone of hoping to offload their product on uninformed buyers, who typically would be in $20 range, but think they're splurging on something a little nicer.
Same principle goes for consumer electronics, like headphones. There's the $20-ish range of cheap stuff, there's the >$100 range of good stuff (though less cleanly sorted than liquor, probably because people buy a lot more bottles over time than they do headphones), and no-mans land of $50 which suck and cost twice as much as the $20 pairs.
Agree with the sibling reply--clothing in particular this paradigm is dead, but it's dying out in general, too. I'm frequently finding myself with mid-range products of barely better quality than the bargain basement.
This has been the wisdom for a long time but in some areas, clothing especially, it has finally fallen apart.
Currently with clothes the cheapest are arguably good value, you get shit but at cheap prices. And high end you at least get good materials: it may not be "worth it" but if you want high quality fabric, which is extremely real, this is what you're paying. The midrange is the worst of both, quality barely if at all higher than the bottom level, but prices significantly higher.
This is too complicated to approach by looking at brands too. Accounting for diffusion lines, subbranding, white labeling etc there are almost no companies that make only bad or only good quality, and the quality is not very well correlated to price or brand prestige either.
For clothing there are currently very few general value signals that are still working, a huge contrast to 10 but even 5 years ago.
It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available. It means that people who couldn't in the past afford something at all, are now more likely to have some path to getting it.
And even if you could afford the higher quality, you may not need it anyway. I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater.
But you're right, when you do need the higher quality, it can be tough to differentiate.
> I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater.
I've been burned too often with this thinking. All too often the cheap tool isn't just light duty so it breaks, it is not good enough to do the job at all. If the motor is too weak the tool won't do the job. If the wrench isn't precise enough it will round the bolt - this is worse than breaking: you can't fix the thing at all anymore with any quality of tool.
I don't need the best tools, but I need one that is enough quality to do the job, and the cheap tools generally fail.
Anecdotally my experience is the opposite. I bought an angle grinder from Harbor Freight for something like $10 on sale. It's not something a pro could use every day but it has absolutely been fine for what I do with it: cutting the occasional piece of metal stock, sharpening the lawn mower blade once a year, etc.
be careful in promoting that strategy. HF is pretty bad, I had a friend go through 3 them in a day because he didn't have one on the job site and HF wasn't too far away.
the next step up is about 2x the price and will last a good year with professional use and maybe more if you can be bothered to replace the brushes.
so I'm glad that's working out for you, but there is more bottom to be found. I bought an attachment that came with a grinder that was so dinky and toy-like that it didn't last 20 minutes of light use.
this thread is covered with discussion about the problem of information asymmetry and rapidly decaying brands. to me the real issue is economic efficiency. the low end tool gets a double economic win, lower material and production costs, and increased frequency of purchase. every one of those purchases involves shipping, potential retail space, people's time spent shopping and returning crap. leading to a lot of outright waste. to me this really undermines the promise of capitalistic efficiency, since it prioritizes local optimization to an extreme over global optimization.
Your friend was heavily using a cheap tool at a job site. After the first one broke, the course of action is to go to home depot and buy the prosumer Milwaukee or Dewalt and return the harbor freight as time allows.
The point is you only need the expensive stuff rarely. You don’t triple down on cheap crap you actually use and abuse.
I’ve yet to see anyone lose money (including accounting for time) with this strategy. Going for stuff that costs 4-12x more right off the bat - unless for professional “mission critical” work - is going to average out to be a poor use of money for the vast majority of tool buyers.
There is of course an absolute floor here. No name brand tools on Amazon are going to perhaps be zero use, but they seem rather trivial to spot to me most of the time. Buying that Gearwrench socket set vs the Snap-on is almost always going to be a win for 99% of people unless you are a professional mechanic that relies on 100% uptime to make a living.
Harbor freight sells three tiers of many of their more popular tools and they're not shy about it. Most of their signage says "ok/better/best" and they're very transparent about what you're buying. I can buy a $9 angle grinder and on the same shelf I an also buy a $85 angle grinder, with the "better" model running ~$25-40. Harbor Freight used to have exclusively cheap junk but their "better" tier stuff is more than adequate for home DIYers
It probably helps that the founder is still the owner. Once that guy or his son dies (he's getting up there) it would not suprise me if the brand spirals into decay.
HF sells levels that aren't level lol. Squares that aren't square.
I love them for junk like zip ties and bungee cords and moving blankets; they sell the same cheap rack shelves as Menards, and honestly their free gift multimeter has served my guitar bench well for all over a decade. But their $20 jigsaw made like five cuts before it stopped cutting straight lol.
I love HF is what I'm saying, i just don't trust every item in the building
Honestly I've not found that to be the case unless you're buying the bottom of the barrel most pot metal tools possible. I've bought numerous wrenches for 5x-10x less than the professional sets that don't slip and I could hang a 5 foot cheater bar off of and nothing broke.
I have a $35 dollar battery powered angle grinder that I've used and abused viciously and it's keeping up with the ones that cost $200+.
The best rule of thumb for tools, at least if you have a decent collection of them for diverse but hobby/homeowner level projects is buy the cheapest to do the immediate job and then replace it with an expensive one if it breaks or you use it often and the better version improves efficiency or quality of life.
Once in a while you get “burned” and immediately end up buying two tools for the same job, but if that happens typically you can return it under retail warranty.
This is definitely the best advice I got way back in the day. I have a small collection of very high end tools I use quite often and abuse at least weekly. Or get use out of having the best quality available to me. But the vast majority of them get used a few times over a decade and sit in storage the rest of the time. I have zero use for a $1500 impact socket set. The $150 one does just fine, and I replace the two commonly used sizes I snap apart with expensive high quality versions while the others I may never use even once.
My power drill and impact driver? Best quality I could find and worth every penny. They bring me value just in the joy I get using them over the cheap stuff.
I find it is better to find the middle ground. There are often some "mid grade tools" that are plenty good for me and high quality. And I don't have the worry about something breaking or failing to perform.
I always figure if I was hiring a pro to do a task they would have good tools, so the first time I can get the good tool and be even money - the second time I have the tool and so I'm saving. (I also rent some tools, but that is for tasks that need an expensive tool I rarely use)
Buying the cheapest one initially also often teaches me what attributes I should value when I buy the more expensive version. Will I actually use this feature or that feature, or what ergonomic design choice works better for me?
Agreed. My brother is a painter and has commented, "At least in the past cheap tools were one-time-use, now they are usually zero-time-use. Built so poorly they don't even work out of the box."
I disagree. It's great that you can get a Wen track saw with 100 in of track for $200 with tax and a Makita with 100 in for $800. People who just want to cut a sheet of plywood aren't stuck paying $800, or more likely, using an inferior tool because the cost doesn't match value to them.
The problem isn't the availability of lower quality versions of a high-quality product, it's the transformation of a formerly high-quality product into a shitty-quality version, meanwhile, maintaining the same price, or worse, a higher price, than the former high-quality version of itself.
The price tags on tools don't go down with time, but the quality of the tools certainly does.
I'm all for tiering product lines, harbor freight is doing it right by offering their top-of-the-line in the Hercules brand, a "pretty good for non contractor" line with Bauer, and then there's lower tiers for one-offs. But if I look for, and buy, a Porter Cable tool, I'm buying it because I expect a certain performance and quality, but it's in fact a rug pull right now. That should be fraud.
I agree that it is nice to have the option when you don't need the quality. It is also nice to have the option when you are trying something new and don't know if you want to invest in quality. Yet the article goes further than that. They are suggesting that companies are capturing a significant fraction of the market, so there is less pressure to produce quality goods. Whether this is resulting in lower quality goods overall, people are debating over. On the other hand, it does seem to be making it difficult to determine what goods are higher quality.
> It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available.
The problem is that there is no way for consumers to know whether they are getting the good version or the shit version. This creates a structural incentive to not produce good versions since consumers will assume that the good version is just an over-priced shit version (because the expensive version is often just an over-priced shit version)
How much of the price reduction is directly attributable to externalities, for example the fact that to replace the lifetime of one expensive item there are going to be 10 cheap versions of the item tossed in the trash?
I watched some comparison videos like that, but the old product was always more expensive than what you'd tend to buy today.
Same seems to be true in that video you linked. And when you buy an equivalently-priced product today, it's better than it was 50 years ago. I only skipped through the video though.
The problem I have is that there's no easy way to go to an ecommerce marketplace and pick "I want to spend more for higher quality". You have to do your own external research.
That is what I miss the most from the old stores. I knew when I went to Sears I'd get a good enough thing. I could often find the exact same thing under a different name for less elsewhere if I looked (Sears made no secret that their house brands were someone else's product with the Sears name on it). I knew I could often find better if I looked. However I could trust that it was a good enough product for my needs and so only a few people had any reason to try elsewhere. (the above used to apply stores like J.C. Pennies, and Wards - though Wards was already failing when I was a kid)
Amazon has everything, but I don't want everything. I want someone to the comparisons for me so decide what is good enough. Reviews are worthless - even when not a scam (which many are), most people buy one and so they can only report it works they don't know how it compares to some other model that they didn't buy.
This is me with Costco. They're selective with what they stock, their margins are capped so I know I'm not getting fleeced buying abject junk. I have bought stuff from them based on trust of the store and not knowledge of the product.
It's the opposite of amazon, where not only do I have no trust in anything, everything feels adverserial. If I'm not vigilant, I will get hosed. I find it extremely unpleasant.
In some ways. The asterisk on it that gets really frustrating for me is that there are often SKUs manufactures make for them that are actually worse in meaningful ways.
I almost bought my Bosche dishwasher from them last year, because it was a bit cheaper than getting it at lowes. And then I noticed buried in the detail that the reason for that was it didn't have an auto-open drying feature that was one of the main reasons I was buying the dishwasher.
I guess this is kind of the opposite side of it though. I had done a bunch of research, and if I'd wanted to skip that and just buy the dishwasher at costco I would have ended up with a very good option at a reasonable price, even if it didn't have every feature possible, and costco would have done the work of eliminating all the cheap builder-grade junk for me.
Not all builder grade is junk. Apartment owners want a cheap appliance that will last for a long time. So mixed in that price range is both junk and high quality stuff with only the features you need (and generally intentionally ugly because even though the cost is the same nice is something people will pay for)
I agree with this entirely. I suppose it was partly an issue of limited floor space, but maybe the largest factor was that if a store sold junk mixed with good items, they could get a bad reputation.
Another factor of purchasing in "the old days", particularly for Sears, was that it was usually quite easy to get replacements for faulty products. None of this business of packaging things up, mailing them away and waiting. Walk up to the counter, show that the item was nonfunctional, and a cheery salesperson would go out back and get a new one for you. Sometimes they didn't even ask for a receipt. Sears had products that were "good enough", and they wanted customers to keep coming back. Of course it didn't last, but that wasn't just this particular company.
>there's no easy way to go to an ecommerce marketplace and pick "I want to spend more for higher quality".
It's not just that it's difficult for a purchaser to determine the balance between price and quality on a given product, that difficulty is deliberate. It goes well beyond the Boots Theory of Economic Unfairness[1]. Vast fortunes are extracted from a public who would make different (and arguably better) purchasing choices if they were not deceived by those who profit from the deception. It's become normalized, which does not change that the process of wealth transfer via deception (fraud under color of law) is destructive to law, society, and pretty much any sort of real public good.
> The problem I have is that there's no easy way to go to an ecommerce marketplace and pick "I want to spend more for higher quality".
Not even isolated to ecommerce, really. This is everything now. The cars you shop for, half on the lot were made by a different OEM and are rebadged and sold by this one. Clothing is a fucking mess, both in terms of quality and sizing. Corporate consolidation is a ludicrously under-discussed issue and one of the bigger reasons everything just kind of sucks now.
It's one of the things that keeps me with Apple really, for all the warts, at least I know what I'm fucking buying.
I think that's ok. I mean, I don't know how it could be trusted.
First, it's not an easy question to answer, especially for products with many qualities. For example, qualities of a kitchen knife: looks, ergonomics, steel type, ease of sharpening, edge retention, handle materials, grind, shape, thickness, weight, weight distribution, ease of maintenance, etc. Some qualities are opposed and some are subjective, so you can't "max out" a knife's qualities.
Second, even for unitask items, like a fire extinguisher, a store exists to make money. They'll always push you towards items with highest margins.
Aren't all of your points already addressed in the article?
> Someone in the industry pushed back on an earlier version of this piece with a fair point: VF Corp's brands still operate with their own design teams and their own headquarters. The brands aren't literally merged. And the premium tiers within North Face and JanSport still use quality materials. The Summit Series from TNF still has Cordura. You can still find a JanSport with YKK zippers if you know where to look.
> All of that is true. But it actually makes the argument worse, not better.
(emphasis mine)
> The fact that VF Corp kept the premium tiers intact while degrading the entry-level and mid-range products means this was a deliberate segmentation strategy. They still make the good version. They just also sell a garbage version under the same trusted name, in the same stores, to the people who don't know the difference. The brand reputation built by decades of quality products is now being used to move cheap products to buyers who trust the logo.
> Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to.
Admittedly, they still equate higher price with quality, but it doesn't change much about the problem that economies of scale degenerate into market failure when there is no real competition anymore.
I think this is a good analysis, and the topic is more nuanced than we might originally think. For me the modern problem is not that no quality products exist, but rather there is very little to actually help consumers understand when they're being fleeced by a luxury product which is no better than the "cheap" product. So many of these exist. They are "fancier" and have more feature, but do not actually have a better build quality or have better reliability.
The other big modern problem would be repair-ability. A lot of the old 1950s products might not be any better once you adjust for inflation but a LOT of them are significantly cheaper and easier to repair.
People used to study the items they were buying, not look at the brand.
You (probably) live in a hyper capitalistic society where many corporations promote their brands through lies and deception. That is a very strong filter already - avoid the (mostly American) transnational giant corporations and buy from companies that are mostly local and aren’t hyperscaling.
Sure the mainstream brands are shit but there are dozens, hundreds of brands for a fair price point that aren’t for every shitty corporation.
> The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also
> gotten harder in many cases.
There was a brief window in time where price would be a useful signal. Among all cheap crap, good quality did cost but also deliver. Then someone figured they can leverage branding to sell crap for the price of good quality items, and now even if you're willing to spend money you can't be sure you're actually getting the good stuff.
Buying not maybe the cheapest but the second cheapest is more expensive overall but unfortunately also more manageable.
I often searched BIFL sub-reddit to find things quality things and it did fail me in the past. After years of broken dishware created a weird collection, I followed the BIFL advice and bought Corelle glass dishes. Only three years later of daily heavy use and dishwasher all the dishes have degraded edge, which looks and feels just like chipped glass.
Looking through specialized forums helps sometimes, but then you are looking at Hermès dishware and doubting what are you paying for - quality or art.
> So it is often the case that today, you can get something for cheaper than you ever could in the past (albeit not at a great quality), and if you are willing to pay higher prices (but often about the same as you would have paid in the past), you can still get good or even better quality.
But with the advent and advances of several decades, aren't you supposed to be able to get better quality for cheaper today?
Akerlof famously wrote about this in 'The Market for Lemons'.
"Suppose buyers cannot distinguish between a high-quality car (a "peach") and a low-quality car (a "lemon"). Then they are only willing to pay a fixed price for a car that averages the value of a "peach" and "lemon" together (pavg). But sellers know whether they hold a peach or a lemon. Given the fixed price at which buyers will buy, sellers will sell only when they hold "lemons" (since plemon < pavg) and they will leave the market when they hold "peaches" (since ppeach > pavg). Eventually, as enough sellers of "peaches" leave the market, the average willingness-to-pay of buyers will decrease (since the average quality of cars on the market decreased), leading to even more sellers of high-quality cars to leave the market through a positive feedback loop. Thus the uninformed buyer's price creates an adverse selection problem that drives the high-quality cars from the market. Adverse selection is a market mechanism that can lead to a market collapse."
How much of it is people lost skill to determine quality. When everyone did some mending, population had baseline ability to discern quality in clothing, and clothing companies less likely to pull shenanigans.
With some product categories there are independent testing laboratories that do a fairly good job of determining quality. The automotive industry comes to mind.
It seems it's a revealed preference that most people really don't care that much about quality, or there would exist a host of companies like Consumer Reports to meet the demand. Complaining on social media about enshittification and evil corporations does not put skin in the game.
I myself constantly complain about the atrocious quality of most consumer software products, but I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to pay for a subscription to an independent testing report.
Doesn't the problem of quality now being barely distinguishable mean that manufacturers would aim to fool consumers by setting high prices to low quality goods to mimic as high quality goods (which probably can't be cheap by definition)?
If that is so - the rest of your points become invalid.
I think there are also 2 senses in which it's difficult to determine quality. The first sense is just that many things require expert attention, special tools, and or a lot of time to evaluate the quality. And for niche items, there might just not be a reputable reviewer out there. This is frustrating, but somewhat unavoidable.
The second sense is more insidious. Sometimes companies deliberately obfuscate the source and identity of products, making it difficult to even know if a product you saw a review of is the same product you'll get if you buy it now. I believe companies also do this simply to make price comparison impossible.
This is an abominable practice, and in my view should be extremely illegal. I'm very much a free market guy, but clearly labeling and identifying the products you sell should be a bare minimum requirement to gain access to any market.
I find that the cheaper option is often so much cheaper that buying several replacements is better than buying the better one. Ninja blenders vs Vitamix for example. Adding in the fact that I have no trusted evidence that Vitamix is actually better, I’d be fine replacing my Ninja every year vs amortizing the Vitamix over five or more years. And for the record my Ninja has been great so far.
I understand that logic, but as a counter, my time and frustration are worth something to me. I've actually owned both a Vitamix and a Ninja, and start basically every morning with a blended combo of protein/fruits/frozen greens, so it's a great example. A lot of the premium for me in a better product isn't just lasting longer and not throwing things away constantly, it's avoiding the frustration of using worse tools.
The vitamix has been thoughtless for me in 6 years of daily use other than sharpening the blade every so often and replacing the bearing for the blade once (both easily done by me at home). I wake up bleary eyed, throw my stuff in there, and let it eat for a minute while I get my coffee going. The ninja on the other hand did a consistently worse job, required me to remove it and shake the contents of the blender, and then randomly fried itself one day in a way that I had no chance at fixing and scrambled my breakfast plans for multiple days. What's daily frustration worth for a half decade of my life? At least to me, a lot more than the premium to get the better tool.
> I find that the cheaper option is often so much cheaper that buying several replacements is better than buying the better one. Ninja blenders vs Vitamix for example. Adding in the fact that I have no trusted evidence that Vitamix is actually better, I’d be fine replacing my Ninja every year vs amortizing the Vitamix over five or more years. And for the record my Ninja has been great so far.
I understand this logic, but the flaw here is that you are only considering bare functionality, not quality of function. This comes up a lot in small appliances and things like power tools, but is especially relevant in the kitchen. It's not only that you can perform a task better with a better quality product, it's that the result of the task is better for you. What do I mean by that? Well most cheaper products heavily utilize plastics, and shed microplastics due to friction wear during operation, where-as better quality products typically have more metal and glass construction and are designed with more isolation between the result of the task and the machine performing it.
The attitude you have here is common, and not necessarily incorrect from one perspective, but it is driving things like fast fashion and the proliferation of plastic on plastic contact in food prep in home kitchens, two of the highest contributing factors to microplastics ingestion, which is a problem that has strong correlations to population-scale hormonal imbalances, as well as key growing diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Our society is literally contributing to killing ourselves in order to shave a few pennies per-unit off basic everyday tools and conveniences.
> They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price
This is what so many don't understand, especially among the youth / reddit crowd. They expect their $25 jeans to be equivalent quality to the $25 or even $100 jeans from 60 years ago, for some reason. There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
There's also very few people who understand just how expensive things were back then, likely a result of having infinite cheap crap available. They don't know that in 1970, in today's money, a fridge was ~$4000, a burger and fries was $17, and a typical dress was $350. The only thing that has changed is that there are now options for cheap shitty things. You can still buy a very nice $4000 fridge if you want to.
> There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
But so many things did become cheaper and better: computers, availability and quality [1] of the music I can physically buy, the energy efficiency of modern fridges, the speed and safety of modern cars. Even my milk lasts impossibly long without spoiling.
If the replacement laptop battery I can buy today for ~$50 is leagues ahead of anything available in the 70s, then why aren't jeans and backpacks also miles ahead of what was available back then? No wonder the younger crowd is confused.
[1] Yes, CDs are objectively better than vinyl. Whether the audio mastering has kept up is a different topic.
I bought some $100 jeans a few months ago, hoping they would be better than the $25 I used to buy 30 years ago. They are not better than the $25 jean I can buy elsewhere today.
Not every $100 pair is made the same, and price is not a proxy for quality. You can definitely get a $100 pair that is meaningfully better than a $25 pair today.
"a burger and fries was $17"? That doesn't seem right.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mcdonalds-old-photos/ shows a menu at McDonalds from the early 1970s. A hamburger and fries was $0.63 or (assuming 1970 and adjusting for inflation) $5.36 now. A quarter pounder and fries was $1.27, or $10.81 now. Add $0.15 or $0.20 for a soda ($1.28 or $1.70).
My first >$20 burger dinner was in 1997. That's >$41.15 now.
EDIT: Ahh, here - price for a hamburger in the staffed dining car of a passenger train from Houston to Chicago, 1972, was $2, from https://archive.org/details/spacecity03spac_44/mode/2up?q=%2... while $3 gets you "grey sole with soup, salad, rolls, vegetables, and dessert." The author suggests the hamburger price is high, as an inducement "to observe formalities."
I could go back through my history to find the specific source I used, but it has absolutely no bearing on the point of the post, since even your McDonald's prices are higher than the current app+value menu prices, so I'm not going to and I struggle to understand why you wrote all that to not refute the central point.
Since the McDonald's burger is now cheaper (after adjusting for inflation) then is it also worse than it was in 1970?
Because if it's the same or better than it sure sounds an example of why people may have acquired "some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be".
My original comment was to mention that one of your numbers seemed rather high. To keep from it being a you-said-I-said thing, I gave supporting evidence. You didn't like the research I did, so I gave more supporting evidence that you are likely off by a factor of 2-3 for the hamburger prices.
Perhaps that means things weren't as expensive back then as you thought they were?
Like, while I can certainly find dresses in the $47 or higher range (you wrote "typical dress was $350") in this 1974 catalog https://archive.org/details/tog-shop-clothing-1974/page/n105... , that's from the Tog Shop, founded by fashion designer Paula Stafford, and with brands like Lacoste and the more expensive clothes list the designer or design house by name, which hardly seems typical at a time when Sears was selling dresses for less than half those prices and people made their own clothes to save money.
There's some great looking clothes in there, by the way.
And there were some expensive shitty things back then, like American cars which were soon to be trounced by Japanese imports that were both cheaper and better.
> Since the McDonald's burger is now cheaper (after adjusting for inflation) then is it also worse than it was in 1970?
Probably? I'm not going to assert it but I would be unsurprised.
> Because if it's the same or better than it sure sounds an example of why people may have acquired "some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be".
Again, what is your point? I'm sure there exists more than a few examples of things getting cheaper and better, maybe even most things? That doesn't mean it is a universal phenomenon that should be expected and cause anger when it doesn't happen.
Your multi-paragraphs about the dress... also doesn't refute the point that things were more expensive back then. There are many Temu dresses for <$10 which was $1.50 in 1970. The 1970 Sears catalog has most dresses around $10. Okay, great, the dress you prefer to compare is "only" 6.7x more expensive. You got me! Great work choosing cheaper examples than I did, for sheer pedantry! Muting you now as I don't find your post history otherwise valuable.
My point is that things weren't as dire in 1970 as you wrote. You can make your same argument without doubling their prices.
I think people are correct to be angry that RAM over the last year has gotten more expensive for the same quality.
I stopped buying jeans 20+ years ago when they started falling apart too quickly, even when I bought them from a Levis store. It may be possible to buy $212 jeans that have the equivalent durability of spending $25 on jeans back in 1970s, but wading through the dreck of expensive crappy jeans sold for brand recognition or where price is used as a false indicator of quality and durability is not worth my time.
That feeling of wasting my time is not captured by simply comparing prices.
> There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
But don't we see this everywhere, all the time? Pull up any of the recent Claude Code threads about the product's declining quality and you'll see at least a handful of well-upvoted comments about how text generators are definitely going to get cheaper while simultaneously getting "better" over time.
New things, like computers, get better and cheaper because they are new, so there is a lot of room for improvement. We have had a very long time to optimize making cotton into clothing, or growing and transporting wheat. There is a limit to how cheap those things can get for a given quality point and a given level of technology, and we've pretty much reached it.
> They don't know that in 1970, in today's money, a fridge was ~$4000, a burger and fries was $17, and a typical dress was $350.
The Internet Archive claims to have Sears Catalogues from many years including 1970. If we check out Spring/Summer 1970, we can see that they actually have the first 33 pages of a catalogue that prominently advertises "index begins on page 391".
Disappointing.
That said, a women's dress from those first 33 pages costs $11, or about $100 in today's money.
There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
It's less an implicit feeling, and more explicitly what's being marketed to us. Think about AI. It's being marketed that it will make everything better and cheaper. Computers before that. Machines before that. All kinds of things in between.
I don't doubt this is possible, especially if these technologies are properly democratized, but greed gets in the way, of course. No one wants to sell you just one fridge at a respectable mark up. These tools don't really go into making a better fridge, per se, but finding what you're willing to and how frequently you're willing to replace it and design planned obsolescence around that. They add subscription features. They want you to log into your fridge to track and sell your behavior, etc.
Because this is the promise made to us by capitalism/capitalists. Efficient markets will drive down prices/improve quality. A rising tide lifts all boats.
It's kind of like China after Tiananmen where the promise is quality of life will go up in exchange for nobody talks/questions.
If capitalism can't deliver on it's promise (more and more people don't feel that it is) then we need to have a talk.
Perhaps it's gotten harder to determine by eye, but Google will still point you towards trustworthy brands in 2 minutes. The problem is people don't care or can't be bothered to Google.
> Perhaps it's gotten harder to determine by eye, but Google will still point you towards trustworthy brands in 2 minutes.
One of the main points of the article is you cannot rely on the brand to determine quality. The marketers know how to exploit a reputation for quality and information asymmetries to push crappy goods, for instance:
> Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to.
And this:
> People who do get warranty replacements report receiving bags that are worse than the one they sent in. Thinner fabric. Cheaper hardware. You mailed back a 2016 JanSport and got a 2025 JanSport, and those are fundamentally different products.
When you Google, are you reading a rave review of a 2016 bag, when the 2026 model has been crapified? Is the bag you're looking at on Amazon the Walmart JanSport or the REI JanSport?
I care and can be bothered, but Google is now itself a worse product than it used to be.
It pushes sponsors links and garbage top-ten lists with Amazon sponsored links and other seo optimized content and none of it can be trusted.
People commonly use a reddit tag to search for products, so companies started creating accounts to shill for their products there too, make it look organic and all.
You can't find the best of any product in two minutes on Google, not with any confidence.
> Google will still point you towards trustworthy brands in 2 minutes
On what criteria are you evaluating trustworthiness? Because if you are finding it on google, you are effectively judging on SEO and marketing spend.
Sure, there are some more-or-less trustworthy review outlets, but those too often go to shit when editorial priorities change from on high (i.e. newwire cutter is a pale shadow of its former self)
If you don't know a reviewer who is trustworthy, how can you find one? There's enormous amounts of slop (both human and generated -- this was already a problem before the last couple years), and when some channel has signal, it attracts more noise generators. The subreddit or review site is only useful until it's well known, and then there's increasing pressure on mods or owners to cash in.
The immediately obvious path here is paying for the reviews or recommendations directly, like Consumer Reports, but there are two major problems with that:
first, the amount consumers can afford to pay doesn't support the additional cost of actually buying all the units and exhaustively testing them, when CR and similar sites are competing against supplier-supported sites, and
second, if you care about specific features or aspects of a product, it's unlikely that the reviewer tested that specifically.
I wish I knew of a good solution. In reality, what's probably going to mitigate in the short term is having your agent scour all the available information and make recommendations, at comparatively great expense.
I think Google has turned to garbage and especially for product reviews there is a flood of affiliate marketing grifters in every category. It takes effort and sometimes payment to find good reviews these days.
If you're looking for a backpack, I can't recommend Osprey enough. They are still a independent US company with a lifetime warranty they actually stand by. I had to call their customer service just last week after I ordered the wrong size bag. I was connected to an actual human immediately, and he sent me a prepaid return label, even though it was my fault and I was fully expecting to pay for return shipping myself. I own several of their bags and have never had a single issue with any of them.
There is a whole community of bag enthusiasts who intricately review backpacks. Packhacker etc. It's super easy to find reviews of most backpacks and plenty of video reviews detailing every feature on the bag - and even in some cases reviews after a few months of usage. Day one might feel great, but after a few trips you start noticing flaws.
I'd echo what one of the other commenters here said about AER and Cotopaxi. Although I have to say wearing my Cotopaxi Alppa 35l feels like a small child is trying to drag me to the floor compared to the comfort of having the AER straps on my back for the travel pack. I still love both though.
Aer is sort of an interesting case to me. At its core the nylon material they use certainly make the bags feel like they'd last forever.
But I feel like Aer also tends to include features or materials that are just not designed for BIFL longevity. Two that jump to mind are the PU coatings on a lot of their zippers and their use of elastic straps as the main way to secure water bottles (but they might be moving away from the elastic on their newest bags). Both of those feel like they have a much more limited lifespan (relative to some of the other aspects of the bags).
+1 to that and I'll also add Cotopaxi and AER (quite expensive but built like a tank) to the list.
My year-ish old backpack gave out so I recently committed to extensively researching and buying a new set of travel + tech bags that will last me basically forever, and I've been very happy with my purchases from these brands.
I have an Osprey backpacking pack that's about 10 years old. I had a squirrel chew through the zipper on the removable pouch. I sent it off to Osprey to be repaired and they sent me a brand new pouch.
Osprey USED to be good, but their quality has been on a sharp decline for the past decade.
The Farpoint is a case in point. I have an older one where the mini-backpack actually zipped onto the bigger one, and had a proper lifting handle integrated for lifting when it's lying flat (among other niceties). I accidentally left butter in it, and the smell was so bad that no amount of cleaning would expunge it. I just bought another one.
Absolute SHIT quality compared to my old one, the mini backpack now buckled rather pathetically to the big one, and no more solid handles (except the top one). Structural integrity is WEAK.
Needless to say I spent a LOT of time and effort cleaning up my old Farpoint, which I'm now using again. The "new" one? Sitting in storage along with the rest of my buyer's remorse.
My favorite bags I've had are from Mystery Ranch, but they're from before the Yeti acquisition, and I haven't tried any since, so I don't know how quality has held up. I do know they've eliminated a ton of their catalog.
Mystery Ranch is still doing pretty well for themselves. (I'm amused knowing that they crank out harnesses for Amazon employees left and right for their robot safety systems.)
I'm also a Red Oxx guy. Love my Sky Train backpack when I'm flying out. They quote a "no bull" warranty, and their CEO suggests to "be sure to include them in your will."
I'll add that I've had a very positive experience with a Projekt Gravy backpack since we're dropping favorite products. Excellent quality and I've been using this thing daily since 2021.
Top 1st-level comment tree involves passionate, math-based analyses of several decades of economic adjustments. Redefinitions of inflation adjustments ad nauseum; a math geek's approach to social sciences - which is not the subject of the article at all.
2nd 1st-level comment is a response to the title alone: a current, good backpack brand, with really no relevance to the subject of the article at all.
Dead horse but I find it astonishing that people can still miss AI writing like this.
Don't you find it incredibly grating that every paragraph grinds to a halt while 3 sentence fragments are repeated? Same rhetorical devices. Same tone. Same pointless constructions.
That's not good writing. It's cheap parlour tricks.
The rhythm continues almost as though the writing is in verse—with the effect of hypnotizing the reader so they don't notice nothing is being said at all. The result? Skimmable prose. Digestible reading. Shareable content.
It's not just bad style. It's actually rotting your brain. And if you can't notice that, maybe you weren't reading at all.
I envy you, I can’t even read more than a few paragraphs because this style of adding catchy sentences to make you go „wow“ every few sentences is so annoying.
The slow realization this whole article was AI prompted was such a disappointment to me. I'm fascinated by the subject matter, and it seems like the person who prompted it is aware of specifics at least... But I also don't want to feed myself LLM-induced pollution that might make it into my own writing or thinking patterns.
I mean, it's a post a week. I think that's pretty plausible. The worst part of this era is just not knowing if I'm reading generated output or genuine human thought.
> Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.
> That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above
> None of this shows up on the shelf. The colors are right. The logos are crisp. The product photography is excellent. You discover what you actually bought three months in, when the stitching pulls apart at every stress point.
Its thing X. Its thing Y. Its thing Z. And now I'm going to tell you about thing Q in a longer sentence.
More generally it's pure info dump. Everything is lists of things, all given the same weight, even if not literal bullet point lists or numbered lists.
Some other common things (not present in this article) that are dressed up lists are short titled paragraphs, and sequences of sentences that go "blah blah blah: blah blah blah."
Very little opinion added anywhere, but the punchy writing style where everything is given an overdone monotone overimportance masks it a little.
Pure infodump is not terrible for some things but I'd much rather it be less heavily processed by the LLM, and be upfront about the fact that it's a dressed up infodump with an LLM involved.
It could be a stylistic choice, except it's rapidly become an extremely popular one for some reason. It's also the default Claude style. So, take what you will from that. Either someone is writing exactly like Claude on purpose, or they just asked Claude to write something, but either way I'm entirely oversaturated on it. At this point I don't think "Claude", I just start skimming and then close the tab.
Even if a human were to try to write in this style intentionally I think they are very likely to express a few opinions, maybe an anecdote, maybe express their motivation in some way, and add a little more variation to tone.
Its not proof, but its certainly a smoking gun. Even when humans use that literary device, we don't typically do it every other paragraph. It feels like a pretty safe bet that an LLM wrote most of this.
How would you ever prove that it’s by an LLM? There’s no text an LLM can produce that I couldn’t theoretically type myself, too. But the style is strong evidence.
> It quite well can be (and I think it is) stylistic writing
I wish we could bet money on this. This is an LLM and I'd win that bet.
The ability to recognize the style comes from working with them.
It's quite possible the author wrote an outline or rough draft of the article and then asked the LLM to clean it up. But the final result has LLM tells all over.
"Stylistic writing" that just happens to perfectly match Claude's current default codeslopped output style, and the exact same style as the majority of posts that have made it onto the front page of HN in recent months. Just endless streams of short punchy sentences that are really just glorified bulleted lists with no substance to them.
Let's quit the gaslighting and acknowledge that no human actually writes this way consistently across every paragraph, unless they're intentionally trying to write badly.
"It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste LLM stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it."
The irony is that this is a perfect example of the thing the article complains about. Even writing is now of a lower quality thanks to LLMs. In this case you're paying with your time instead of money for a lower quality product than you'd get 10 years ago.
LLMs really like the "it's not this, it's that" framing. The short punchy lists/sequences also feel off to me.
I think it's also the reuse of the same strategy repeatedly throughout the article. I think most human writers often feel put off if they use the same literary device too much.
At this point, I'm running anything that has the "usual" AI tells through Pangram. Nine times out of ten, the article is 100% AI generated. (This one is 63%.)
I bought a north face backpack for college in 1998. It cost $60. It was an extravagant expense for me at the time and I felt horrible about it for weeks.
That backpack is currently at college with my son, who used it all through high school as well. It is by far the oldest and most durable daily-use object I’ve ever owned.
A cheap backpack ended up being the most expensive backpack I have ever owned.
In 2004 I was very young and all my income came from summer jobs, so I got a backpack from Walmart. It was one of their nicer models, had a lot of features and looked pretty good. IIRC it cost $20. I had worked all summer to save for an MP3 player, and 2 months after getting that backpack I getting off a bus, when I realized there was already a hole in the bottom of the bag. My MP3 player (a creative zen micro) had slipped out of the bag, and someone had already picked up my MP3 player and walked away with it. Adjusted for inflation I spent over $500 on that MP3 player. Even as an avid backpacker, I have not spent that much on fairly nice packs.
In 2007 I splurged and paid $100 for a backpack from Deuter, and I also felt a lot of guilt as that was a huge amount of money for me at the time for something like a backpack. It's been nearly 20 years, it's not just that the backpack is still working, it still functions virtually like new. None of the seams are stretching, even though it's been through incredible overstuffing and abuse. All of the zippers are smooth as silk, and even the cushioning on the straps and airflow offsets on the back are still supple and supportive.
We are the third owner of our Deuter baby/toddler backpack. We use it a fair a bit and it still looks like new. We don't need it anymore, so it's going on to a 4th owner who's going to get an amazing, comfortable, near-new carrier for the same token $20 bucks we paid.
Same, I was gifted a Sandqvist backpack ten years ago. I travel with it as my sole piece of luggage (you can imagine the overstuffing). It has outlived three laptop backpacks that don't go through half as much as it has.
It mentioned in the article that their higher end models are still well made. I bet you can still get nice NF or JanSport bags if you’re careful. If I had to guess, I’d say the models at REI are decent (or else they’d get yanked) while the ones at Target are the chintzy ones.
First day of my college freshman year, I purchased a Targus backpack for the heavy ass gaming laptop I had back then. I still use it decades later. It has carried stuff inside it for tens of thousands of miles, seen lots of abuse, weathered all sorts of conditions, and is still in really good shape. Not a single tear. Every compartment, every feature works the way it did on day of purchase. I'm honestly amazed every time I use it.
Pretty much the same story here. I'm on my 2nd Targus TXL617 (holds 17" laptop) in 18(?) years and I use it for everything every day. I've even used it for a short 3-day international business trip. I've used it at a dusty shooting range in the desert. It's been dropped, dragged, kicked, bitten (friend's dog) etc. and it still holds up.
I think Targus stopped making this model (maybe a trend towards smaller laptops), hopefully this one will keep working for a while before I need to find a good replacement.
What if its just bad use? I have some nice Targus model that I actually bought a second one because the zippers were opening. To my surprise, in a few weeks I got my first instance of zippers opening. Of course, I was overstuffing a bit at the top. I remembered that I had removed some guards that transform this model from more like a regular backpack to a clamshell. Maybe that is a very important feature I have to use, or the zippers will fail, when you carry a basketball there...
Yeah, I went to work for a law firm when I was 22, and I bought myself a 3/4 length cashmere-wool overcoat, and it was $750, and my parents thought it was ridiculous to spend that.
I'm 48 and not only do I still have it, it still looks like new, with no real care taken of it - wear it, put it away. The only issue I had was the liner in one arm pit started to unstitch a couple of inches, and a tailor took care of it in 20 minutes for $10 a decade ago.
You are definitely using it well. Not all people are such good carers of their stuff. My friend and I both both 200 Euro coat. Mine got worn out in 4 years, his is still going strong 10 years now. Same with other stuff. I just use my stuff very roughly. No point buying expensive stuff then
As much as the result for consumers sucks, is this just a result of the quality backpack business not being a very profitable business to be in anymore?
The reason they were able to buy all those backpack brands is because each of those brands were not making much money running a backpack company selling quality at a reasonable price. The purchaser makes some money leeching value out of the brand reputation, but then that brand value falls because of the crappy product, and they sell the brand because they leeched all the value out of it.
This is only possible because you can’t make much money selling quality for a good price. Consumers will pick lower quality for the cheapest price every time.
It's much more likely to be a result of the modern drive for companies to keep growing. This leads to a need to maximize profit endlessly, which in turn leads to cutting corners as much as you think you can get away with, or just ballooning prices. And this problem goes up and down the supply chain, of course - even if you want to run a non-growth business manufacturing quality backpacks, if your suppliers want to run growth businesses, they will eat up your margins and force your hand.
This obsession with ever increasing revenue is a major source of our worse and worse consumer economy.
One silver lining is that backpack industry doesn't have a huge moat. New companies can get started relatively easily as the older ones sell out and decay.
The bags I bought 15 years ago were made locally in San Francisco - Timbuk2 and Chrome - and had a reputation for quality. Now both brands are mainly produced overseas, but have been replaced by two other local brands with ties to the originals - Rickshaw and Mission Workshop.
The onslaught of far east imports is also a factor. They weren't very relevant 30 years ago outside of discount merchants. Now you pop on to Amazon and choose something that looks appealing from dozens of mystery meat brands.
That's not going to change though. Cheap asian manufacturing and wall st efficiency maximizing changed industry in America. Maybe there could be changes to how public markets are regulated to change BigCo incentives, but it will be hard to change consumer behaviour if they like buying cheap disposable crap for the lowest price.
There is still plenty of competition in the backpack market if you just visit an outdoors store instead of walmart. That's a higher end market though, which is where most high quality small/medium businesses flourish.
In theory, competition is what prevents this. If these small companies can sell products that provide more value then consumers buy the alternative.
I think the problem today is that it's extremely difficult to tell when you're buying quality or a brand. If there's a 40$ and a 100$ backpack, often the 100$ version does not actually have meaningfully improved quality - just better marketing.
The same goes for tons of products - brands nowadays are something companies build while they're young and relentlessly smash into the ground as they age because the value you're destroying isn't obvious. Shareholders get good results, and objectively it's probably the correct financial decisions for the company - doesn't make it any less shit.
I don't think it's actually that hard - 5 minutes of skimming on Reddit will do a lot. You can also usually see Wirecutter's recommendations (even if they paywall the full article). People just don't care upfront but complain later.
Absolutely this. I am sure there are recorded cases where companies have gone out of their way to make things break early but I think it’s more times than not simply that cost matters and consumers are the voters and for the majority cheap wins. The average consumer is not very thoughtful and will opt to buy the cheaper good. For sure there are many economic constraints and not everyone has the luxury of buying quality but that’s not always the issues.
This comes up a lot with washing machines and I sympathize with parts of it, why not standardize control boards more or other components in the machine but one of the biggest issues is simply the cost of labor in places like the US is high enough that it’s hard to make it cost effective to repair.
As easy as it is to blame customers, I don’t think it is irrational to just buy the cheapest. So many times the more expensive one isn’t any better and you are paying for branding and marketing, and just wasting your money.
At least if you buy the cheapest one you know you are at least saving money up front.
It also doesn't help that for school backpacks, the buyer and the user are different people. There is less incentive to take care of stuff, and when it breaks, parents are more likely to blame a bad backpack than to blame their children.
The high cost of labor has nothing to do with reusable parts of the washing machine. If it was all standardized, you could do a lot of repairs yourself.
It actually plays a pretty large role in the problem. This is like when people complain about not having enough small cars in America, they simply don’t sell well. Similarly, the average consumer does not want to be doing their own repairs. A lot of appliance repairs are already pretty darn easy.
When the base labor charge is already 10% or more of the total replacement cost it becomes hard to justify the repair.
Was revisiting the thought and it’s like the Framework laptop. There is absolutely a market for it but it’s far from the dominant market. Consumers on average simply don’t care.
Agreed. You can also say that they are better engineered for most use, nowadays. With the adage that anyone can build a bridge that doesn't fall over, an engineering team is needed to build one that has the minimum resources to stay up.
In particular, how durable do people think backpacks need to be? If you are going through them particularly quickly, maybe you are over loading compared to what they were designed for?
That's the end result of capitalism squeezing all disposable income from the people. Wage suppression, rent-seeking subscriptions, shrinkflation. When people barely have enough money to survive, they can't afford to buy things!
> A $35 JanSport that dies in eighteen months: $23 per year. Add the shipping cost when you try the warranty. Add the replacement cost when the claim gets denied. Add your time.
> A $200 bag that lasts ten years: $20 per year. Already cheaper. At fifteen years, which the well-built ones consistently do, you're at $13 per year.
This ignores the money you would earn by not giving money upfront. A 23$ expense every year is cheaper than 200$ upfront over 10 years, because you will earn 15 euros over that 170 Euro first year if you put it in S&P500. And then 12 nect year and and 10 in third year and you are already ahead of the 200 Eurro bag. And you just dont spend time in warranty. Just throw it away dn buy next one for 35 Euros.
You need to consider usage patterns as you evaluate the cost/quality value curve, though. $35 for a Jansport for a school kid who will brutalize their pack regardless is probably a much better value than a $130 Osprey that is objectively superior but which a teenager would still brutalize to death in 1-2 years of daily school use.
Fwiw, my elementary kid is on year 3 with her Lands End pack (which is way crappier than the Lands End / Eddie Bauer / LL Bean school packs from the 80s-00s), and my two older kids use Osprey Nebula packs in high school -- both also on year three. The Osprey packs are terrific, but would be overkill for a younger kid, and we purchased them mostly because our kids bike to school and needed something that would comfortable carry 20+ lbs of crap.
And my partner and I are on the other side of that, we have like 12 packs of every price point and size accumulated over the years, I have a couple 20 years old, and I can’t think of a single broken feature. Im gentle on all my stuff so I don’t need ultra rugged high quality and expensive gear, and I suspect most people don’t (granted kids can be diff).
It also ignores the fact that your backpack needs change.
At various points in my life I've needed:
- A huge backpack, then a small one
- Water bottle holders weren't important, then they were
- Straps I could tighten to hold a yoga mat weren't important, then they were
- A laptop slot wasn't important, then it was critical
Plus my preference in color has changed, as well as my aesthetic preferences.
Paying $200 for a backpack would be insane when I'll have different needs in a few years anyways. I buy cheap-ish backpacks, I've never had a zipper or seam fail on me before I needed to buy a new one for a different reason anyways. Or it was just stolen/lost.
My general life philosophy is to buy the cheapest thing that meets my needs generally, replace as necessary (since I often need to replace/upgrade for functional reasons anyways), and buy a very few expensive high-quality items that I know are actually worth it. Like a mid-tier espresso machine, a good leather jacket, quality boots, a decent home speaker, and... I'm honestly struggling to think of anything else.
The bigger issue for me is these business models prey on the poor and overworked. There are a lot of people who can’t buy a $200 backpack because they need that money for food, but they still need a backpack, only have time to grab something at Wal-Mart, and they get stuck in poverty product churn.
It’s like regressive taxation but carried out by capitalists.
I spent way too much money on a Peak Design backpack. 4 years in, the zipper broke. They honored the lifetime warranty, and swapped me for a brand new one.
That was my first time ever dealing with such a high-end product and a lifetime warranty.
Gonna echo that I love my Peak Design backpack. Only backpack I’ve ever owned that delighted me so much I told others and showed it off.
The design is a little dorky, especially now that every techbro in SF has one, but my god that thing has pockets and little details in all the right places. Been using mine for years and looks almost new.
One downside of high quality gear: Velomacchi (motorcycle bags/backpacks) seems to have gone out of business. Been using their stuff for almost 10 years. Feels indestructible, works great, but I’m never getting a replacement and I guess any warranty lasts only as long as the company …
Peak Design is the rare travel backpack I could find that has one massive storage compartment instead of 5+ small compartments. So you can really pack that thing efficiently.
And the 45L variant is the biggest thing you can use as a carry-on.
I've never spent $300 on a backpack before. It kinda stung. It's well-thought-out though. I've had it five years and it's been through a lot.
The FAQ says to hand-wash it which is annoying though. There's no way you're gently washing out the sort of grime that my human oil leaves on the straps from real use, like clinging to your bare shoulders during a long sweaty trip through Mexico.
So I feel a lil mischievous tossing the thing into the washing machine every year. Same way I feel using an alcohol wipe on my Macbook screen.
Echoing the efficiency. I just returned from a 1mo trip living out of the 45L, including a supply of dead-tree books.
That said, I've only had it a year and it's clearly not new anymore. Paint wear on the rivets, for example. I expect it'll be in rough shape when it's accumulated as many miles as the travel bag it's partially replacing.
+1 for Peak Design. I have yet to use the warranty, but the thing still looks new after lots and lots of travel, shoving under seats, tossed into train and bus overhead bins. The only real wear is the corners of the metal clip for the flap. Expensive, but in this case, you get what you pay for.
Yeah, they didn't question my warranty claim at all IIRC, and breaking the zipper was actually my fault. I had overstuffed the bag while in a giant hurry.
Hah, around the time of COVID, I was in SF renewing my Australian passport. Went into the Peak Design store, and was talking about my V1 Backpack, and the employee there was basically intimating that [my extremely trivial issue], if it somehowwww got just a little worse, would be covered by their lifetime warranty and also, just FYI, since we're out of stock on them, I'd get a V2 instead.
We always see consumers blamed for choosing price over quality. How about retailers taking the blame for dumbing down or removing product specs? If two items look identical but one costs more than the other how can consumer be blamed for choosing the cheaper ones? Especially in the age of LLMs, it you are building a quality product you need to include a spec sheet of what makes your product better than the competitor. Not dumbed down marketing speak like "lasts longer" but specific details justifying the premium, like "zippers made in Japan" or the stitching density, fabric specifics, etc. Consumers who care can use LLM to understand what it all means and make informed choice. But when the information is hidden consumer will choose the cheapest option.
Every backpack I've ever bought I was able to easily find all the relevant specifications I needed in order to choose a quality a pack. If you're looking at a pack which doesn't provide such specifications then that's an immediate giveaway that it's a low quality pack. It's not difficult, the average person really just does not care to do research. They instead just choose the cheapest one with the advertising that hooked them the best. But the information is there if you want it.
I've got a story of this but backwards. I know a guy, a hiking guru, moderately famous for his backpacks. He's an ultralight long distance enthusiast who designs much of his own equipment. I went to his house for a weekend session with a few people to learn to make our own, and I'm still using the one I made. For a few years he made and sold them out of his living room. Then he sold his brand to an outfit that scaled it up into a decent business.
But the lightweight hiking guru made ultralight backpacks, with thin material and very minimal extras. It was designed to be light by a guy who could sew, so he was happy to fix it as needed on the trail. To him that was a feature not a bug. Meanwhile the company that bought the brand and design necessarily made it more robust, feature-full, and twice as heavy. They were pretty much forced to by the number of returns they were getting.
So now I treasure my old backpack that worseonpurpose would probably deplore, and keep it repaired so that I don't have to make another or go buy one that worseonpurpose would probably like better.
Yep. Ultralight hikers are industrious and good maintainers. They take pride in lightweight bags and making them or acquiring them. Those hikers will deal with a defect on the trail or after they get to port and expect to do so with their pack.
Your average backpack consumer is a different breed. Cosmetic designs, logos, colors, and generic pockets are key marketing traits of consumer backpacks and small rips or tears are seen as reasons to replace the backpack.
I agree. I don't really get worseonpurpose's argument here.
I have two proper backpacks, an old UK made Karimor Jaguar from the late 80s and an OMM Classic 32 I bought recently. Although the Jag is pretty good shape considering its age it's the OMM that I reach for now.
The OMM is actually modern take on an old Karimor design from 1973 but if you take all the removable bits off it comes in at around 380g. That's almost 1.5Kg lighter than my old backpack. For short weekend trips that's a massive saving.
I seem to remember a story about Atom Packs and Aiguille Alpine. Aiguille make really tough packs for mountain rescue teams to throw equipment in. Atom Packs was founded to use slightly less robust but lighter materials for through hikers by a lad who did his apprenticeship Aiguille.
I think their merit in both approaches and I like the trade offs depending on use cases.
EDIT: I've just noticed that Aiguille now do "light" weight versions of their packs in 420D nylon. What I like about that is they are actually cheaper instead of charging a premium for thinner materials (hand made prices but still).
Nice. Karrimor backpacks (or rucksacks/daypacks as we called them back then) were the high water mark--I worked in the industry in the 80s and, in the tone of the article, it's very sad to see what's happened to Karrimor and Berghaus today, but back then they drove one another to new heights. I was always a fan or Lowe's stuff, who were the other UK giant.
All three brands were let down by the waterproof layers whcih after about ten years would degrade in horrible ways. Prior to the 90s this was less of a problem.
Aiguille are great. Probably the best bags around now. They will also make them to fit. When I was selling bags, fit was a big issue and if you made out that one size fitted all that would be seen as a sign of cheapness/cost cutting/lack of attention to detail. Karrimor and Berghaus both did their flagship bags in different back lengths, and companies competed hard on the diffent fitting systems.
I wonder if there's an advertising law angle here. If a company sells multiple products in the same product category, they really shouldn't be allowed to have them branded so that they seem like multiple companies. The main name/logo on these products should be required to have something that makes it clear that they're all from the same company.
They can pick one of their backpack brands to keep (and eliminate/sell off the rest), or they can tack "VF" onto the front of each brand name, or something like that. A customer shouldn't have to dig into the fine print or do research to know whether two products are from the same manufacturer.
It reminds me of EIG (Endurance International Group), who at least at one point owned a large portion of major mainstream webhosts (including Arvixe, Bluehost, Hostgator, A Small Orange, Site5...). They "streamlined" them all into one big operation, with reliability and customer support going to shit for every host they bought. But they kept all the brands separate, so people kept bouncing from host to host, wondering why they were all so shit, not realising that they never actually switched providers.
The YKK zipper on my North Face hard shell broke. Got it replaced under warranty. Half a year later, it broke again. Anecdotes, sure, but I'm now buying cheap jackets instead.
I suspect there may also be a strong "it's what people want" aspect to this.
Why do smartphones barely outlive their warranty period? Check the statistics on how long most people keep their phone before voluntarily replacing it, and it makes a lot more sense. Why invest in the premium components and workmanship to make your phone last 5 years, if 95% of your customers will not use it for more than 18 months? (These numbers are made up, but from what I remember, the reality is not far off from that).
I could totally believe a similar thing being at play for backpacks, jackets, shoes, etc. where the people who keep their stuff long enough to even notice it falling apart are a maybe vocal, but small minority.
Speaking of “worse on purpose,” I immediately tried to subscribe to this site’s RSS feed — none. Unthinkable on any blogging platform for most of the past twenty years.
Talk to any Aussie tech workers you know and chances are they or their friend has a Crumpler backpack. (No affiliation just a big fan).
Originally created by a bike courier who sick of bags breaking sewed a bag out of the toughest material he could get, marine canvas. To this day they make somewhat indestructible, well designed, trendy well loved bags.
Also they have a lifetime warranty and repair policy that is very hard to beat. Maybe you’re not local, but you can tell these will be well made (and they really are)
I picked up a Crumpler Brazillion Dollar Home bag about a decade back to carry all my photography gear, as there were no other bags on the market that would allow you to pack a large format monorail camera in them.
That bag is built like a tank. Still ticking along, a little scuffed up, but zero issues. If you're carting around a few thousand dollars worth of delicate gear, it definitely offers some serious peace of mind.
I bought Crumpler messenger bag about 15 years ago (in San Francisco when they still had a store there). Can confirm it’s indestructible. I’m glad to hear they’ve kept up their standards to this day!
I swear by Swiss Gear nowadays. However, it's been several years since I purchased one. I don't know if they've maintained the same high quality.
But I had a Swiss Gear backpack that was fantastic, and it lasted me nearly a decade. It was originally purchased at a Target. It was versatile and I could take it anywhere. It had little grommets to pass-through earphone cords and such. It survived even through several washes in a washing machine.
Then at a thrift store, I found a Swiss Gear suitcase. It has wheels and a telescoping handle. It expands very nicely. I have it stored away and still haven't found occasion to use it.
I also picked up a Swiss Gear laptop bag with a "messenger bag" shoulder strap. These I found at Office Depot. It's really nice. It has a velcro fastener to secure the laptop itself. It has mesh pockets for all kinds of accessories. If I don't put in a laptop, it can carry documents, folders, or binders. It's been very durable.
I was gifted a Swiss Gear backpack when I went off to school (over fifteen years ago now). It was good – albeit very heavy – for the first two or three years. Then the soft surfaces started wearing through, the mesh water bottle pocket on the side wore through, and finally one of the straps snapped. I started trying to figure out how to make a claim against their legendary warranty process... and found that at that time (2013 or 2014), in Canada, their backpacks had at most a 1-year limited warranty. Nuts!
It does seem like Swiss Gear are now directly represented in Canada (rather than being represented by a third party, like they were a decade ago), and their backpacks now have a five-year warranty. But I guess my point is: if you don't live in the US, make sure that the things that a brand is famous for hold true in your region, too.
The Swiss Gear backpack I used daily in college in 2008 is sitting beside me right now. I've put it through its paces over the past 18 years. I jogged here in the rain this morning with it weighed down with my laptop and a water bottle and other things.
Minus some fraying at the base of the front pouch, it's as good as new. I've been very happy with it.
Got me an Osprey ~12 years ago. Light as a feather, tough as nails. But it's not the kind of thing you can just sling over your shoulder like my old North Face bag (which was stolen). But yeah, the moral of the story is, as always, "If you want durable, don't buy it from Wal-Mart" (or Target, or Kohls, or Amazon)
This article is LLM written and unsourced so the entire thing could be a hallucination and there's no reason to trust any claim made in it, don't even read it
> A $35 JanSport that dies in eighteen months: $23 per year. […] A $200 bag that lasts ten years: $20 per year. Already cheaper.
If it is, it isn’t by much. The difference between $200 paid now versus 7 times $35 = $245 over a period of ten years is about 5 years of interest over $200. At 4% interest, that’s about $40.
Don't forget to account for your time buying each new one and writing your name in it. If you don't replace soon enough also account for the lost value of things that fall out the holes.
> People who do get warranty replacements report receiving bags that are worse than the one they sent in. Thinner fabric. Cheaper hardware. You mailed back a 2016 JanSport and got a 2025 JanSport, and those are fundamentally different products.
This rhymes. Recently, I took my iPhone 16 Pro in to swap out the screen (there was an ever growing dead spot, and they handled it free of charge). Unfortunately, the screen they replaced it with is much more fragile – hairline fractures within days. I know the replacement screen is of lesser structural quality, but I can't prove it. I've had iPhones since the day they debuted in 2007(?), and this moment connected the dots across years of screen replacements. The original is always much more durable.
My iPhone 16 Pro's screen got scratched/cracked within weeks of me getting it when none of my other iPhones (5 of them from the 3GS until the 13 mini) ever had any screen issues.
It's hard to not feel like the durability is decreasing.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars.
Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
Boots. I have bought Italian-made boots for 23 years - the same brand and model. 1. pair the inner lining died, rest was fine-to worn for 7 years, including laces, 2. pair lasted 7 years, the inner lining held this time, laces too. 3. pair was smaller than indicated, I stood the pain for one winter, could not "grow them", 4. pair has laces die after 1 year, leather cracking after 2 years, rubber seal opening after 2 years and lace (metal) hooks straightening from tying the laces. And this is the company, who has always promised exchange of soles for 100$ - but THAT has never been an issue.
Metal hooks, lace-weave and thread, leather, glue - I wonder how much they save, but I have bought my last pair.
Thread counts and Denier are poor metrics for items that employ technical fabrics, seam glues and other modern improvements that legitimately lower these sorts of simple measurements. People don't want to buy the same heavyweight waxed backpacks their grandparents used.
There definitely are BOM- and manufacturing reduction movements in these mature products but backpacks honestly don't seem nearly as bad as (eg) walking boots.
The Worse On Purpose article on power tools follows a similar tack. Offshore manufacturing, corporate consolidation and cheaper processes don't actually make the overall picture worse when we have affordable tools packing modern lithium batteries and brushless neodymium motors.
I gritted my teeth and bought a GoRuck GR1 a year ago. If it fell into a volcano, which is what it might take to destroy it, I’d buy another one. It’s still possible to find “buy it for life” backpacks but be prepared for eye-watering price tags.
I used my employer's fitness stipend to buy a GoRuck GR2, and I have no regrets. There is just a level of build quality that I desperately wish I could find in the other fitness and travel items I buy.
Same here. I love it. I completely get the cost criticisms: for the price it should be amazing. And yet, it is. I also wish I could level up my other purchases in the same way.
Yep. I like that the care instructions are literally to hose it off in the back yard and let it dry. This thing will outlive me.
But I main got it because I’m a relatively large guy with broad shoulders and other bags pinched my neck. I was given a Timbuk2 pack from work that I otherwise liked, but the straps were too close together. I could either wear it high on my back and have them mash my neck all day, or low on my back wear it’s much harder to carry weight.
(Side note to everyone: wear your backpack as high as possible when it’s even moderately loaded. When I see someone on BART with a huge backpack slung down by their hips, my back aches sympathetically. You want the heaviest load up between your shoulders.)
Edit: I also keep glancing at the 40L GR2, but it's just FOMO. Great bags, but huge. I don't want to schlep something that size to the office, and definitely not on some of the trails we hike.
I tend to find a relatively reliable model of something and stick with it.
I've noticed, without exception, across clothing, backpacks, and appliances that the next iteration is more cheaply made:
- Thinner fabrics
- Less stitching
- And on appliances and other tools, more plastic parts where they used to be metal.
My latest <LredactedG> washer has a newly plastic mounting bracket that appears designed to fail within a decade due to vibration. Even the metal backing is thinner that the previous generation.
Similar thing happened to the Linus Tech Tips backpack, it was supposed to have double bottoms, but chinese suppliers cheaped out. This is a very common chinese trick where they try to get away with something cheaper than specified. This is actually even expected when ordering stuff in large quantities from china, the supplier is guessing what parts they can cheap out on without anyone noticing, it’s not even considered fraud, but a kind of optimization.
On the flip side, a really good bag, and these have lasted so long I can not recall when I purchased them, are really expensive [https://www.tombihn.com/].
What is really irritating is that sometimes we see the same thing within a single brand (we have a garbage entry-level item and a top tier item which is good).
Tom Bihn sold recently, and doesn't do everything in the US any more. Also I don't know that they were ever "expensive" so much as priced to reflect the economic reality of being made in America and (from what I've read), treating their employees well.
Make sure your bag has YKK zippers (if it has zippers).
I used to sell outdoor equipment. If a brand cheaps out on zippers, I wouldn't trust it.
I really like my Patagonia Black hole mini MLC. Awesome access. Fits under an airplane seat. Generous laptop padding. Excellent zippers. Water bottle pocket. Lovely warranty (Patagonia store nearby often gives new product when I try to get product repaired).
I have a columbia backpack i bought like 20 years ago that doesnt have a ykk zipper but it's still in perfect condition, i've abused it a lot and the only thing broken is a rubber thingy it has for the headphones cable to go through.
I've been using the same Patagonia Black Hole backpack for nearly a decade, every day include bike commutes (and crashes). The longevity is frustrating at this point because I'd really like a larger one but can't bring myself to switch until this one fails (which may be never).
I don't see how it could be a surprise to anyone paying attention that a JanSport backpack doesn't deliver on quality. Perhaps there's more to the story but I got to the second AI slop one-liner and gave up.
This is a little late for your nice jacket, but a lot of zipper damage comes from dirt getting into the teeth and then the zip grinds everything up. Outdoors shops sell a zipper lubricant to keep the dirt from sticking.
I heard advice from Adam Savage on the topic of cost-vs-quality that I've found to be quite useful. It was something along the lines of:
When you're first getting into a new craft/hobby and need a specific tool, get the cheapest one you can buy. When you're first starting out, you probably don't really know how to judge quality, and you don't have a good sense for what features/enhancements you actually need (not to mention, you may or may not know you're actually going to stick with the hobby at all).
By the time that first cheap one breaks, or you gain some experience/skill and hit your frustration limit with it, you'll have a much better understanding of what you want out of the tool and will be better position to pick out the "best" version to suit your needs.
Seven years ago I bought a Jansport backpack for 50 usd, for daily use. After a year, its zipper broke. Shipping it to Jansport required to pay 15 usd for shipping. So instead, I bought in Walmart a generic backpack for 15 usd, that I still use seven years later. Never bought Jansport again.
While I would not disagree with many of the points made in TFA, I think this is a bad example to demonstrate the problem the author is trying to address.
Why? Over the last twenty years, many high end backpack designs have moved towards lighter weight materials and construction, because of trends in the world of backpacking.
This means that even in the high end segment of the market, comparing packs to ones from decades ago can be misleading - they are working with different design goals.
None of this eliminates the points about cheaper materials and construction at the lower end of the market, but it does make things a bit more complex than they need to be if a different example was used to illustrate all this.
I'm waiting for this to happen to Tom Bihn's bags now that they have new owners who're starting to outsource the smaller bags to Vietnam instead of sewing them in-house in Seattle. Luckily for me, I've got what I need from them and expect it to last for quite some time
They're still making a lot of things in the US, there's a list on this blog post from last fall (https://www.tombihn.com/blogs/main/fall-2025-factory-update-...). The "materials and transparency" section of each bag's page tells you where it's made. But the process has begun and you should probably grab anything you've been coveting before that list grows.
I've been using an Ikea Varldens for the past 6-8 years. Very efficient for my use case (2 work laptops, groceries, travel luggage, documents and earbud case, tools). It has a couple of nice small compartments and a single large one so it's very light for the size and material. Until now the only thing that's annoyed me was the long straps when riding a motorcycle, so I ran cable ties through the loops to stop them from slapping my hands and sides. It's seen quite a bit of abuse and it's still intact. It's even practically waterproof.
I'll jump in: I was stuck in layover many years ago and bought a Topo Designs backpack -- Google says it's a 30L Apex Global travel bag.
I use it every week, it shows no signs of degradation over approximately a decade. Huge beefy zippers, tons of pockets and organization for those who are into that.
I paid like $200, but seems like they're cheaper now. Hopefully not because of the reasons in the article. At the time, I believe they were a small company from the state my layover was in--maybe Colorado.
I firmly believe that many goods like this fall into a cycle.
Existing products are cheaply made and poor quality, so a new company emerges producing a higher quality product. Eventually word gets out and their sales blow up. But to keep their profits going up, they begin to coast and cut corners. Fast forward a decade or two, and now they're the ones making low quality gear, leaving the market open for a new high quality brand.
In short, high quality leads to recognition and growth, and then cutting corners leads to profit.
This is yet another instance of a weirdly specific domain that pops up and starts posting seemingly LLM-generated articles that follow a single pattern - in this case, how "they" made everything worse. We had a similar instance few days ago with smarterarticles.co.uk, and many others before that.
I get that this says something we might believe, but I don't think it's a good use of our time to engage with engineered nerd-bait that probably wasn't produced in good faith.
Meanwhile my LTT commuter backpack, while expensive, did not get worse on purpose. It’s so good I’ve considered getting their full size backpack as well.
There are so many examples of this. Processed food, sweets and so on. Cadbury, Toblerone, etc live on the brand recognition, but have come objectively worse over the years. Often they are owned by the same mega corp that have a strategy of milking the brands for as long as possible.
It's bait and switch on global, organised scale and it's almost impossible to fight except on an individual level.
I still use vintage Gravis Metro (my current one is 20 years old) and the smaller Japanese Gravis Mini Metro (my daily; currently 10 years old, with a few holes appearing in the non-cordura base).
My strategy with pretty much everything I can is to deeply research to find any Made In USA variant of whatever it is I’m trying to purchase, and buy whatever that is regardless of price. I’ve never had that fail me.
For backpacks, my Waterfield pack has held up fantastically across several years of regularly absolutely stuffing it with gear for my work travel.
Their lifetime warranty used to be taken extremely seriously, and I really don't know what lifetime they were referring to. I had an old external frame pack that was my grandfather's back when my father was a Boy Scout. That pack outlived its buyer, and I was still using at Philmont where they had the same model as a museum piece. One of the zippers broke, and the back mesh was disintegrating, and pretty much as a joke we made a warranty claim. They honored that, circa 2012 or so.
Their schoolbags were pretty great in the 2000s, too. Withstood some serious abuse, though their zippers were notably on the decline. But that was covered by warranty, so it was fine. By the mid 2010's, they were in full decline, and that's about when I stopped recommending their stuff.
Absolutely not the case. Back in the days of exterior frame packs, Jansport was likely one of the best brands anywhere in the world. Incredibly well designed and made.
OTOH, I haven't thought of Jansport as a go-to brand for a serious backpack in 30+ years ...
When I was a kid everyone knew that JanSport was the one to get if you actually wanted your bag to survive. Absolutely one of those things where you'd spend more replacing the cheaper bags over and over compared to buying the JanSport once.
- here is an idea for the next post: AAA gaming got worse on purpose. Dont forget to mention anti consumer practices by EA and Ubisoft when you are at it
Basically, all the old brands that had great quality were killed by private equity and have become skin suits worn by low-cost imitators trying to squeeze another penny out of customers. There are still good brands, but they are increasingly niche and you certainly pay a large premium for them.
I've been buying my bags from Timbuk2. High quality, I had a messenger bag that I gave away after 10 years and it was in great condition. I have a backpack and messenger bag for them. They are also designed to protect laptops/tablets really well.
The sale of the high quality brand allows the original entrepreneurs to exit their business to someone that thinks they can run it more efficiently. The decline in quality allows for innovative upstarts to try new things.
The math that makes this intentional
Price of a bag divided by years it actually lasts. That's your cost per year.
A $35 JanSport that dies in eighteen months: $23 per year. Add the shipping cost
when you try the warranty. Add the replacement cost when the claim gets denied.
Add your time.
A $200 bag that lasts ten years: $20 per year. Already cheaper. At fifteen years,
which the well-built ones consistently do, you're at $13 per year.
As much as people gripe about subscriptions, people forget there's an equivalent internal subscription rate to every product with a lifespan. And beyond that there's the opportunity cost of a large outlay with a FUD component around the longevity. Humans are, as far as i understand, hard-wired for irrational choices around shortermism vs long term bets, you basically have to externalize your thinking to accomplish better. (This could be by writing down your thoughts and then analyzing them externally as a critic, or by passing it off to an AI, etc).
The $25 bag compared to the $200 bag, has $175 worth of free cash flow for other (potentially unexpected) purchases, can be replaced when trends/use case changes (or it gets dirty, or lost...), the capital could be invested in the market to generate ~$1 a month of passive income, and as far as the human can tell it's roughly the same. Basically all the thoughts of a JIT marketplace but on the personal scale...
According to people in the thread, Deuter and Osprey are still independent and high-quality.
I don't know about backpacks specifically, but my general impression with Decathlon and their own brands has been that they somehow manage to be ridiculously cheap, while also being better made and lasting longer than many name brands that cost several times as much.
The problem is that there is a deliberate lack of information that clearly distinguishes the "technically a product" category from the "someone put effort into this" category. Price doesn't do it, brand doesn't do it, name recognition doesn't do it because companies are constantly enshittifying existing products, too.
Chicago School assholes backed by the conservative/"pro-business" think tanks that boomed in the post-war era managed to place some judges and influence some lawmakers to completely break our anti-trust enforcement in the '70s, by shifting from a standard of "enormous corporations may be assumed harmful" to "specific harm that's very expensive to prove must be demonstrated", all but entirely eliminating anti-trust action.
The term "allow" implies that some entity called "we" exists, and has the capacity to exercise control over over unrelated third-parties' ability to engage in organized activity. No such entity exists, nor has such capacity.
Yes. Governments are themselves just organizations of people doing things, based on the same motivations and incentive structures as every other organization. The distinction between corporations, governments, and every other form of organized activity in society is an illusion.
The trend of making articles out of sequences of pithy three-word soundbites rather than proper sentences is infuriating. It's super LLMy, yes, but it feels like even human-written content is like that these days.
Pure LLM, and it's a shame. The message and the content they are trying to pass are good and should be read by everybody out there. But god, the LLM writing, it feels like an Apple PR applied to a critique of capitalism.
First thing that entered my mind while reading this. I have been saying this to my familiy for some time now. Never mind the price point; those unknown brands are really quite good. I still have my bag from Ali from 6+ years ago.
I mean. If the cost per use of use is only slightly worse with these cheaper goods, you could just view that as a slight premium for the ability to switch styles every few years. It's also a smaller upfront investment, so taking account inflation it might not really be a big difference even considering that?
Clearly most people choose to buy cheaper stuff and producing higher quality, more expensive things makes you a niche company
This feels like the Arcteryx Hoodie situation. I've had a couple of them for going close to 5 or 8 years. I mistreat them - throwing them around, washing them normally in a machine, etc. Absolutely bullet proof with very mild pilling. When I went to buy the exact same thing, the newer models cost the same thing or more, but the reviews all complained that the product has changed, that it pills after a few months, etc.
The same thing happened to me with t shirt and other clothing brands.
Now if I buy something good, I'm rebuying multiple of it even if it's unneeded since apparently we live under the Law of Enshittification of Everything.
I think this is more of a case of the product getting worse incidentally. Contrast with leaders who are actually making things worse on purpose. Apparently, for no other reason than to be ugly and mean about it. I've been on this earth long enough to discover that monsters are real.
Windows 11 comes to mind as an example of something actually being made worse on purpose. Making it impossible to associate the original notepad.exe with text files is certainly not linked with business outcomes in any direct way. This seems to be purely about antagonizing the user base as much as possible. The only theory I can arrive at is that there is a secret cortisol harvesting scheme that results in better financial outcomes for Microsoft.
It helps to differentiate these cases. I don't like capitalism taken to the extreme, but the other thing is significantly worse. Intent makes all the difference. Engineered to suck vs sucks because it wasn't engineered are two completely different levels of evil.
I feel like there's another component: that the consumer base has become so detached from making things in general. We are surrounded in ever more stuff, ever more material, but collectively are out of touch with making things, with material, and assemblage there-of.
Our culture's perspective is as critic, as shopper, as buyer. Sure few of us were expect shoemakers or backpack makers, but people around us were industrious, did provide labor to make goods that people around them bought. The cycle of production had been directly apparent.
This is low key one of the things I really had hope for for a while with 3d printers: that they opened up & exposed what is. That they would be a force to spread insight & to regard the little mechanisms and means of the world all around us. I think that's a little bit true, but it's pretty niche, and I expect most prints are for static parts; no movement or dynamic behavior. And it's somewhat the anti-process: crafter in a box. It's still amazing but barring major changes, I have over indexed.
It's also worth noting the role of DMCA anti-cirumvention laws in casting mankind out of ever coming to grasp with what makes up the world. The combined legal and technological destruction of any right to repair is really not just about repair: it's an obstruction to humans understanding the world around them. We cannot become savvy in the world when the government tells us that business's right to keep us from knowing the world outstrips any mankind-the-toolmaker / natural scientist role/title/god-bourne nature, that cutting us off from the universe & living in ignorance is a hard cast legal binding fact. I find this to be as fallen as it comes. How do we stay alive as the race we were when our laws unwind the fantastic graces of inquiry the gods saw fit to give us?
The melodrama of this article really rubs me the wrong way, especially when some of the brands they mention do still make good backpacks (like The North Face). The author acknowledges that with "it's a deliberate segmentation" strategy... which is just another way of saying that they make stuff at all price points.
This is why brand loyalty or even brand recognition is stupid in the 21st century. Everything is made in the same factories anyway, so buying the Amazon item with a brand name like "FOOTHSYMPYZT" or whatever is the way to get exactly what you want. Just set the price point to whatever Amazon recommends and multiply it by 1.5 or 2.
> The brand reputation built by decades of quality products is now being used to move cheap products to buyers who trust the logo.
This is private equity in a nutshell, really. This is what every single PE leveraged buyout ultimately ends up doing. Take a beloved brand, or better yet (in this case) a group of related beloved brands, cut costs, and reap the profit margins until the brand dies.
Anecdotally this rings true with me. I have a 15 year old (at least) Samsonite backpack. It has zero signs of wear and has been on many trips, jammed under my feet in economy or on a dirty train floor. It was relatively expensive at the time at about $120.
It was looking a bit sad and dusty so I upgraded to a fancier looking Bellroy that cost twice as much. When it arrived I instantly knew it was going back. It felt cheap, it looked cheap, and the compartment layout did not feel at all utilitarian.
The issue here isn’t quality or market segmentation. The issue here is a de facto monopoly and the illusion of competition. Ok there’s also the issue of well known brand names now being entirely different companies and entirely different manufacturers.
I just bought an Eddie Bauer fleece. I own three, well four. The fourth is going straight back. It is garbage. Eddie Bauer is one of the brands that got bought and now rents out the label.
> The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.
I can't speak for everyone else but this isn't what I'm doing when I compare two backpacks. I'm comparing two different backpacks for their features and design. I don't really consider the brand name attached or care who owns it.
The enshittification of all things. It’s happening in the service industry, too. A lot of contractors like roofing and plumbing are being absorbed into private equity megacorps.
Just because I don't want them to go out of business. I bought a backpack goruck gr1 26l nearly 10 years ago in Feb of 2017.
I was a consulting and traveling heavily for many years and a digital nomad for others. I've carried that bag everywhere, it is good as new, I can hold a week of clothes in it, I recently got a vacuum pouch for winter thermals so that applies even for ski trips now. Its design lets me fill it up, zip it almost totally shut then compress it down to fit toiletries at the very top.
As much abuse as I've put it through it is still perfect. If moths or something don't get to it it may actually outlive me at this point I see so little wear.
Frankly I wish I could offer companies that make stuff that lasts forever a subscription fee or something to keep them using the same build quality, I mean cheap fast fashion/manf/etc seems to exert massive economic pressure to enshittify everything.
Capitalism ends up being owned by single companies across goods families. Private equity buys, strips, and bankrupts. Materials are engineered to fail near the end of their warranty. Companies lie about details hard to identify or prove. Companies use historical goodwill to loot the current landscape.
Well, guess what... since its all just plastic, the 2 posts that provide the downward force when turning get sheared off when you fucking use the thing.
We ended up going to an antique/flea market and found a all-metal juicer. It fucking works. And it likely will for the next 50 years.
Capitalism itself is the scam. It was sold to us of "innovation, innovation, innovation!" And its just "worsening, extraction, destruction".
I would argue not everything, just the things we remember. Those brands got popular, got sold and enshittified.
We remember these brands fondly (personally I had a JanSport bag all through elementary school) and that's why it sucks that they suck now but what we forget is now is there are 1000X more brands to choose from, some from megacorps trying to cut corners at every step. Some from small shops that genuinely want to make a great product.
The problem is visibility. Those good brands you have to go look for, you can't just go to WalMart or Target like in the early 2000's and expect to get a quality product. All the quality products now live on small websites scattered across the internet.
I remember even 26 years ago, stuff you bought was better crafted and could get parts to repair.
Now? Its non-replacable batteries. Ultrasonic welded casing (destroy-open only). Glues, glops of glues. Plastic/nylon gears instead of metal. Thinner/worse materials. Scams online everywhere (like the legitimate company XYZZY). Every online corporate presence whores it names out to fly-by-nights.
If I want to buy durable goods, its mostly not even for sale. Or I end up having to buy from Europe, or a boutique dealer in the States... that is if you can find them.
And even the boutique dealers like Tom Bihn sold out, and is now making their bags in some sweatshop shithole with lowering and lowering standards.
Private equity, and computers, optimized all the profits which drove profit quality down. We all have lower quality products to enrich a few finance individuals
Or more likely consumers vote with their dollar and cost matters over quality. PE is just a bad scape goat, there are obvious outliers but largely companies make products that consumers want.
Companies are incentivized to sell the worse, most expensive version of a product that they can convince someone to buy. Many companies sell with huge margins, meaning there is significant slack to allow quality to increase for the current price point - there just isn't enough competition to matter. Many manufacturing companies also have complex supply chains, making this problem worse as everyone along the chain tries to maximize their own margin.
It's not at all rare for a company to sell a quality product at a low margin for some years, building up a reputation, and then start decreasing quality to increase profitability once the quality branding is established.
Of course, optimal companies maximize for margin. Buyers have their own optimization mental model and maybe is surprising but a vast majority are thinking mostly on cost. Buyers and sellers do a dance and in the perfect long run you hit the optimal balance.
Consumers/buyers still play a large role in this, it is easier to put all the blame on PE or Big business.
This is the conventional thinking, but it ignores a huge factor - marketing. The major function of the gigantic advertising industry is to deceive consumers about the real qualities of a product, leaving price as the only only signal that they can detect through the noise, in most cases.
And advertising works in multiple ways to promote slop. Sometimes, it is directly by marketing bad products as cheap but high quality bargains. Sometimes it is, as I said, by using previous high quality products to sell low quality ones at the same prices. Sometimes it works by creating a huge pressure to consume more (such as the pressure on fashion trends), wiping out any care about durability (if it's considered poor taste to wear the same T-shirt two seasons in a row, why pwuld you buy a durable T-shirt?). Sometimes it works by mudding the waters, making consumers distrust any reviews that praise the quality of a product, leaving price and directly visible looks as the only signals that rational consumers can base their decision on.
So, overall, the blame for this state of affairs lies far more with the way the modern market was designed, than with consumers specifically.
It’s a dance between consumers and business. Sure some markets are heavily influenced by ads or simply what’s in fashion but ultimately it takes two to tango.
How do you come to that conclusion? It is certainly a luxury that not everyone can afford but for the average consumer in America it’s possible but folks still opt out.
I am okay with these big American corporations getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded, only to exist as a brand in a private-equity backed holding company.
This is because other companies come along to fill the niche occupied by the established brands. Since they can't cheapen the products any more than the behemoths can, they need to innovate and evolve.
As for the backpack product, I wish the likes of Eastpak and whatnot would just die, since they have not innovated in a very long time.
I don't disagree in principle. But, as a consumer, this makes purchasing a bit more complicated. BITD, I could just buy an EastPak or JanSport and be fairly sure it was a good bag. Not much thought or analysis required. Today, I have to dig through 100s of brands I've never heard, with most of their ad budget spent on influencers who maybe can't be trusted. It's not a recipe for a healthy market.
If you feel like spending several hundred dollars on a backpack (big if, I know), I can personally vouch for https://www.seventeenthirtythree.com/. It's more or less a one man show, and the guy is very obsessive about sourcing materials & assembly. Advertising is all word-of-mouth as far as I know. I at times feel anxious about his long term prospects for the exact reasons mentioned in the OP article - I have a backpack from this shop that's about a decade old and has zero visible wear. I think, in order to make this business model work, it's pretty much impossible to scale.
The issue is it reduces information availability to customers: if a customer finds a brand that produces high quality products that they know from experience they can trust, that trust can't propagate forward in time because the incentive it to abuse it for short-term profit, which is a net negative overall because the customer needs to find the new high quality product on the market, something that costs time and comes with risks itself. It's a market inefficiency.
These brands earned the consumers' esteem because decades ago their products pushed the envelope in the respective markets. By having their product quality severely degraded, this also lowers the bar for the niche brands. They no longer need to push the envelop to get a competitive advantage. They just need to replicate what was already possible. I.e. no real innovation is happening any more.
Also, for every 2 niche brands that are trying to get it right, you will get 1 that is sketchy: send designs to the cheapest manufactury in China, hire a few influencers to post on instagram, and you're done. Basically capitalizing on the misperception that "niche == better".
So, we are left as consumers to have to dilligently research every purchase, just to get the quality that was the standard a few years back. There's nothing to enjoy here.
Not to mention that at the bottom, this is just another manifestation of "fast fashion" and "planned obsolescence".
That's idiotic. As a consumer I'd prefer the same company to keep making the same good products forever. I don't have time to research which of the new brands is just as good.
I have a pair of Mountainsmith Lumbar packs, both either over or pushing 30 years old (I have two because I misplaced and replaced my first, but later found it).
It's an excellent pack, cinches up tight, mount it front or back, strap it to something else, you can pack the straps and use it as a simple satchel, or use the shoulder strap.
Very high quality materials and zippers.
It's for I'd consider "urban travel", great as a carry-on. Paperback books, tickets, meds, passports, journal, snacks. They've been in "the wild" but I don't drag them on rocks or things like that.
They're over $100 today, so not cheap, but at a glance on the website, they look pretty much identical to what I have (and I know my second has slight differences in design from my first).
Were I in the market, I wouldn't hesitate to drag and drop one into a cart and get another. I've not used their larger packs, and over time they've expanded their lumbar line. But I would completely expect their other products to be similar quality as the ones that I have.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."[1]
The essay show the timescale for "getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded" is 20 years or more, dating from the Eagle Creek purchase to the current "potentially up for sale."
That's a long time.
That means Theodores is also okay with the same decades-long process happening to "your power tools, your boots, your sunglasses, and about a dozen other product categories where a company you trusted quietly got absorbed by a corporation you've never heard of."
And after a new company X gains market share for its quality, we should expect the vulture capitalists to come swooping by again.
On the environmental side, every one of these packs is plastic waste after 18 months rather than 10 years.
It also means the methods people use to assess quality, despite omnipresent supercomputer phones and video-quality wireless networking, is ineffective, and manufacturers worsen their products knowing that. Why hasn't it gotten better?
So no, I don't see how Theodores comment about the chain of events should make anyone else also feel okay with it.
The "simple" answer is "markets aren't like textbooks".
Consumers are lazy and greedy.
The side effect of which is not-strict-enough regulation of negative externalities. In a perfect world, people would care about the downstream environment impact at least as much as they do about their time/money. But, they don't.
While I personally find this kind of thing extremely annoying, to me, the main problem is the _difficulty_ of determining quality. The Donut media guys did a (relatively unscientific) video comparing a whole bunch of products from the 50s to modern day across several price points. What they found was that the things that "looked" the same now were simultaneously worse and also much cheaper. They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price. It was just that the brands and names that used to be quality were now usually not as much.
So it is often the case that today, you can get something for cheaper than you ever could in the past (albeit not at a great quality), and if you are willing to pay higher prices (but often about the same as you would have paid in the past), you can still get good or even better quality.
The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also gotten harder in many cases.
edit: found the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4C62HC1HSo
> They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price.
I argue you must evaluate against median purchasing power; it accounts for inflation and (lack of) wage increases.
Comments from your linked video:
> The problem with the “adjusted for inflation” argument is that it does not factor in buying power. The increase in wages has risen at out half the rate of inflation, so sure; $20 in 1975 would be $124 today, but the minimum wage in 1975 was $2.10 an hour as opposed to $7.25 today, giving you half the buying power you had 50 years ago.
> healthcare, housing, and education ... have increased by an insane margin leaving people with less money once that has been paid for (if at all).
> It's even worse when you consider that people are paying 45-55% of their monthly income on a house that cost 20x more than it would have in 1975. Your buying power is fucked from all sides.
Purchasing power is probably a better metric in a vacuum, but it's hard to analyze accurately
For example, the comment you're citing is claiming that because minimum wage has increased only 3x over the same period of time in which inflation has eroded the relative value of a dollar by 6x, that wages overall have increased at half the rate of inflation. But minimum wage is a measurement of a minimum, while inflation is a measurement of /average/ price increase so they can't be compared 1:1 in this way.
The housing argument also seems odd. In New Zealand (where I'm from -- I'm not familiar with the US' housing market, so the commenter could be right about that geo!) house prices have increased by far more than 20x since the 70s, but the houses available are of substantially higher quality due to improved regulations (e.g. all newer homes are subject to healthy homes rules which mandate insulation) so just comparing inflation-adjusted home prices vs income doesn't tell the full story
(Aside from that, a whole heap of items like food, electronics, transportation are all both far cheaper AND higher quality today than in the 70s)
“Higher quality” isn’t an objective measurement though. And it certainly doesn’t matter if the end result is that people cannot afford to buy it.
What I’d be interested to understand is whether changes to materials (be that buildings or home appliances) has caused an increase in the cost to manufacturer.
I’d wager most things have gotten cheaper to produce these days because the same improvements in technology that can be integrated into the product also applies to technology used to reduce the cost to manufacturer. Plus if wages are below inflation then any labour costs would have declined (relatively speaking) in that time too.
Modern US houses are made of the cheapest, shittiest, flimsiest materials money can buy. I go out of my way not to live in US housing less than 50 years old.
This isn't true for median purchasing power. You're looking at the federal minimum wage, not the median. Only about 1% of hourly workers earn $7.25 or less.
Median earnings were $48,070 in 1975, measured in 2024 dollars, and $51,370 in 2024.
Median earnings in 1970 were closer to 56k in today's dollars. 1970-1980 was a recessionary period, followed by stagflation in the 80s. I hate when people use that time period as an anchor to show growth. It's like using 2009 as an anchor.
I didn't choose 1975. That's the year the parent comment claimed median earnings have dropped from in comparison, so that's the year I have to use to refute the claim.
Still, real wages in 1975 were relatively high compared to previous decades. See table A-7 here: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-2...
Estimated median earnings for full-time male workers peaked in 1973 in the chart, until surpassing it in the 2010s. It's hard to find directly comparable data for earlier decades, but estimates put wages significantly lower. If you anchored to the 1920s, 30s, 40s or 50s instead, you'd just show even more growth in median wage. If you're saying we shouldn't compare to the 70s or 80s either, then what's left? Just years after 1990?
What data are you using? It is hard to get solid numbers pre 1975. I looked at SSA Wage index which has 1970 at $6,186. Adjust using PCE, that is only $42,808 in present dollars.
Census data, it goes back way farther, but conflates things pre-1975 along a lot of variables since that was barely post-segregation.
Not sure how you're getting 42k: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/infl... spits out 51k for that number.
In either case, IMO, +-10% over 60 years should just be considered flat. Calling it flat is probably generous considering how inflation has affected durable goods vs necessities. We can buy more appliances now, but places to put them have never been more expensive relative to income.
What start date would you prefer? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Median purchasing power has increased by 12% since 1979 (data doesn't go back to 1975) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Real wages were down ~15-20% from 1970 to 1979... so, not a good year to anchor on.
Where are you sourcing that data from? The graph I linked using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't go back that far, so comparing to 1970 would not be possible.
US Census tracks income, its just harder to pull out since they don't provide nice charts like the fed.
Well there's this which goes back to 1967: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2025/demo/p60-... I'm having trouble finding the raw data though. In any case I'm not seeing any big drop in the 1970s.
That's household income. You need to adjust for the change in households with multiple earners. That's why I said the census data is dirty and conflates things. The number of households with both parents working increased from 46% to 52%, so median household income staying flat means median income for individuals went down pretty significantly.
> The problem with the “adjusted for inflation” argument is that it does not factor in buying power. The increase in wages has risen at out half the rate of inflation, so sure; $20 in 1975 would be $124 today, but the minimum wage in 1975 was $2.10 an hour as opposed to $7.25 today, giving you half the buying power you had 50 years ago.
Now do the same analysis but using median wage not minimum. YouTube comments are for entertainment purposes only.
I'm really frustrated by inflation numbers because there doesn't seem to be a metric that makes sense.
CPI ignores the reality people feel (and swaps in cheaper items that aren't necessarily on par with the original to keep the number lower), gold isn't really a 1:1 with purchasing power...there must be some sort of useful composite metric that merges multiple data points over time like rental/house prices, CPI market basket, dollar vs hard assets like gold to come up with a more accurate number.
The CPI doesn’t arbitrarily “swap in” items. It changes based on consumer behavior. That’s why it now tracks streaming services but not VCRs. Similarly, if the price of Gala apples triples and everyone switches to Fuji, a fixed index would overstate the actual cost of living.
Insofar as gold impacts the cost of things people buy, it’s already included. Adding it directly to the CPI makes no more sense than adding Bitcoin or soybean futures.
The cost of housing is already is a massive component of the CPI.
But if you used to be able to afford steak and now all you can afford is ground turkey, readjusting the basket of goods for that shift in "preference" is just hiding the fact that nobody can afford steak anymore.
And similarly, the hedonic adjustments to smartphones sort of implicitly claim that the $100 cheap smartphone you can buy today is worth $8000 back in 2009 because of how much better processors and memory have gotten. But you can't buy an iPhone 1.0 for $1 to satisfy the need to have a phone that you can install apps onto (and the upgrade cost every few years as cheap phones can no longer run an O/S version that your banking app requires).
The assertion that the CPI simultaneously overlooks downward product substitution and prices in product improvements in order to paint an overly-rosy picture is belied by the fact that most stuff is cheaper than it’s ever been.
Thirty years ago, internet service was $2.95/hour (in 1996 dollars!), long-distance phone calls were 10 cents/minute, and a low-res 28” color TV with 5 channels cost a fortune.
I don't care about internet service, long distance phone calls, or TVs. I care about shelter, groceries, healthcare, and education. I can forego the former, I must buy the latter.
Shelter, groceries, healthcare, and education comprise 53.2% of the CPI bundle.
> a low-res 28” color TV with 5 channels cost a fortune.
Uh, back in 2000 (okay not quite 30 years ago, but getting close) I had a 36" Sony Wega which cost around $1500 with DirectTV and hundreds of channels. A 25" to 27" TV was more of a 1988 kind of thing (which is almost 40 years ago now). Being limited to 5 OTA channels was more of a 1980 thing.
But again you can't really buy that Sony Wega anymore, even though the CPI probably prices it at $20 these days.
Back 50 years ago, average household spend on the Internet was also $0, so it was very cheap, we weirdly didn't spend anything on it when I was growing up. Now I spend $80/month on it, and have trouble finding anything cheaper around here.
If you want to consider "communications spend", back in 1988, you might have spent $50/month on your landline, cable tv and newspaper subscription. Today households tend to spend $280/month on internet, wireless and streaming/cable services. That is actually double the CPI. They get lots more for that, but the cost of being an average middle class household has grown at double the CPI. And these days you need the internet in order to keep up with Joneses, it isn't really a choice.
US households faced much higher costs than you recall. According to the BLS, mean monthly expenditures were $44.75 on landline service, $13.50 on cable TV, and $12.33 on newspapers. That’s $70.33 in 1996 USD, or ~$193 in 2026 USD.
More households subscribe to services today, which inflates the "average expenditures" data cited below: 93% of 1988 households had a landline, 53% cable TV, and 63% newspaper. Compare with today's household services penetration: 98% mobile phone, 94% broadband, and 74% streaming media.
You’re right that this is less than the cost of internet + cell + streaming services today — these are ~50% higher than the 1988 bundle — but consider the differences: you can access almost any kind of content from almost anywhere. And you can consume it on a smart phone or TV that costs 75% less in real terms than that TV from 2000.
Meanwhile, real median household income grew from ~$65,130 in 1988 to $83,730 in 2024 — and furthermore, the tax burden on the middle class fell during this period.
Sources: https://www.bls.gov/cex/1988/Standard/cusize.pdf https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
You're only going to hear from people who think that the CPI underestimates inflation. If the CPI overestimates inflation for an given individual, they have no reason to comment on it.
I'd argue that "the reality people feel" isn't a good aspect of any metric other than one that measure sentiment itself.
Its also gotten harder to trust them to maintain that quality, too.
A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners, or even start selling a slightly different product with the same model number.
Or you find a decent brand that makes good products, they get popular and grow and in come the MBAs with ideas on how to increase profits. Or they get bought by Private Equity and carry on only by brand momentum.
> A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners
I think this is true, but for far less malicious reasons. Favourable reviews lead to popularity, which increases production pressures, which makes it harder to source quality materials and maintain a quality process while satisfying demand.
I have heard of several indie makers who, faced with sudden popularity, have to make the tough choice of speeding up the process at reduced quality (and thus dissatisfy customers) or be unable to fill orders (and thus dissatisfy customers). Everyone handles it differently but it's not pleasant for anyone.
Maybe they should just cap the number of orders at the number of items they can make and ask anybody else to sign up on a list? Anybody who chooses option 1 is obviously evil?
100% this. If you can't deliver the product i want, then fine. Don't lie to me and deliver a product inferior to what i ordered for the same price without warning. That's straight up malice.
Naturally the kind of thing that would be defended on HN nonetheless
Maintain quality but raise prices to throttle demand to a sustainable rate? Hard to do instantaneously of course; easier said than done etc
Throttling demand means the sales figures go down which share holders don't like to see.
Even if they don't go down! If sales figures rise less than they did last quarter, shareholders get unhappy. Part of the paradox of unsustainable infinite growth is that the stock market demands not flat profits, but growth and increasing growth.
Even for products without CR/WC-levels of traffic being thrown at them do this.
My parents had silverware they liked, 10-ish years later we had lost or chipped a handful of them and they bought replacements. They look identical and feel identical…. Except the new ones clearly used lighter (read: cheaper) materials and then put a weight inside the handle to make them feel the same. The problem is that the weight is not attached well and can become detached and start sliding around making the handle rattle when you turn/invert it.
Just so irritating to know that effectively every product/brand will do this in the end.
> The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also gotten harder in many cases.
And there's a perverse effect to that difficulty: even if you really want high quality, it can be so hard to be sure you're getting it that you give up and just by the cheapest thing, because at least then you know you're not getting taken advantage of (by buying crappy for premium prices).
My rule is to never buy the cheapest thing, because to a point, you get what you pay for. But my other rule is not to spend extra for brand recognition or supposed higher quality. There's a middle range where you get reasonable value, better-than-crap stuff. Too low and you're buying junk, too high and you're overpaying, perhaps for brand or reputation, for something you can get elsewhere for less.
The problem with that strategy is that, used at scale like it is, it just creates a perverse incentive to raise the prices on your crappy product, without changing anything else.
For example, in the liquor market, there are basically 4 price points for 750ml bottles: $20 and below is generally swill, but it's cheap swill. Companies here are competing on price. $40-60 gets you something worth drinking, but perhaps not prestigious. Companies here are competing on quality. $100 gets you something prestigious, and companies are competing on such, and the $200+ price point gets you something rare.
If I buy a $30 dollar bottle, in a sane world it would be something with a middling tradeoff between price and quality. Instead what you get is something that is as bad, if not worse, than the $20 stuff, because the company is simultaneously failing to compete on price AND on quality. That leaves them in the hail-mary zone of hoping to offload their product on uninformed buyers, who typically would be in $20 range, but think they're splurging on something a little nicer.
Same principle goes for consumer electronics, like headphones. There's the $20-ish range of cheap stuff, there's the >$100 range of good stuff (though less cleanly sorted than liquor, probably because people buy a lot more bottles over time than they do headphones), and no-mans land of $50 which suck and cost twice as much as the $20 pairs.
Agree with the sibling reply--clothing in particular this paradigm is dead, but it's dying out in general, too. I'm frequently finding myself with mid-range products of barely better quality than the bargain basement.
This has been the wisdom for a long time but in some areas, clothing especially, it has finally fallen apart.
Currently with clothes the cheapest are arguably good value, you get shit but at cheap prices. And high end you at least get good materials: it may not be "worth it" but if you want high quality fabric, which is extremely real, this is what you're paying. The midrange is the worst of both, quality barely if at all higher than the bottom level, but prices significantly higher.
This is too complicated to approach by looking at brands too. Accounting for diffusion lines, subbranding, white labeling etc there are almost no companies that make only bad or only good quality, and the quality is not very well correlated to price or brand prestige either.
For clothing there are currently very few general value signals that are still working, a huge contrast to 10 but even 5 years ago.
That's a worthwhile observation.
It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available. It means that people who couldn't in the past afford something at all, are now more likely to have some path to getting it.
And even if you could afford the higher quality, you may not need it anyway. I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater.
But you're right, when you do need the higher quality, it can be tough to differentiate.
> I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater.
I've been burned too often with this thinking. All too often the cheap tool isn't just light duty so it breaks, it is not good enough to do the job at all. If the motor is too weak the tool won't do the job. If the wrench isn't precise enough it will round the bolt - this is worse than breaking: you can't fix the thing at all anymore with any quality of tool.
I don't need the best tools, but I need one that is enough quality to do the job, and the cheap tools generally fail.
Anecdotally my experience is the opposite. I bought an angle grinder from Harbor Freight for something like $10 on sale. It's not something a pro could use every day but it has absolutely been fine for what I do with it: cutting the occasional piece of metal stock, sharpening the lawn mower blade once a year, etc.
be careful in promoting that strategy. HF is pretty bad, I had a friend go through 3 them in a day because he didn't have one on the job site and HF wasn't too far away.
the next step up is about 2x the price and will last a good year with professional use and maybe more if you can be bothered to replace the brushes.
so I'm glad that's working out for you, but there is more bottom to be found. I bought an attachment that came with a grinder that was so dinky and toy-like that it didn't last 20 minutes of light use.
this thread is covered with discussion about the problem of information asymmetry and rapidly decaying brands. to me the real issue is economic efficiency. the low end tool gets a double economic win, lower material and production costs, and increased frequency of purchase. every one of those purchases involves shipping, potential retail space, people's time spent shopping and returning crap. leading to a lot of outright waste. to me this really undermines the promise of capitalistic efficiency, since it prioritizes local optimization to an extreme over global optimization.
Your friend was heavily using a cheap tool at a job site. After the first one broke, the course of action is to go to home depot and buy the prosumer Milwaukee or Dewalt and return the harbor freight as time allows.
The point is you only need the expensive stuff rarely. You don’t triple down on cheap crap you actually use and abuse.
I’ve yet to see anyone lose money (including accounting for time) with this strategy. Going for stuff that costs 4-12x more right off the bat - unless for professional “mission critical” work - is going to average out to be a poor use of money for the vast majority of tool buyers.
There is of course an absolute floor here. No name brand tools on Amazon are going to perhaps be zero use, but they seem rather trivial to spot to me most of the time. Buying that Gearwrench socket set vs the Snap-on is almost always going to be a win for 99% of people unless you are a professional mechanic that relies on 100% uptime to make a living.
This guy gets it, always start out with the cheap tool if you use it enough that it breaks than you spend more money.
I know guys with garages full of expensive tools they barely use because they don't want to be seen with a can tire tool.
Harbor freight sells three tiers of many of their more popular tools and they're not shy about it. Most of their signage says "ok/better/best" and they're very transparent about what you're buying. I can buy a $9 angle grinder and on the same shelf I an also buy a $85 angle grinder, with the "better" model running ~$25-40. Harbor Freight used to have exclusively cheap junk but their "better" tier stuff is more than adequate for home DIYers
It probably helps that the founder is still the owner. Once that guy or his son dies (he's getting up there) it would not suprise me if the brand spirals into decay.
HF sells levels that aren't level lol. Squares that aren't square.
I love them for junk like zip ties and bungee cords and moving blankets; they sell the same cheap rack shelves as Menards, and honestly their free gift multimeter has served my guitar bench well for all over a decade. But their $20 jigsaw made like five cuts before it stopped cutting straight lol.
I love HF is what I'm saying, i just don't trust every item in the building
>and the cheap tools generally fail.
Honestly I've not found that to be the case unless you're buying the bottom of the barrel most pot metal tools possible. I've bought numerous wrenches for 5x-10x less than the professional sets that don't slip and I could hang a 5 foot cheater bar off of and nothing broke.
I have a $35 dollar battery powered angle grinder that I've used and abused viciously and it's keeping up with the ones that cost $200+.
The best rule of thumb for tools, at least if you have a decent collection of them for diverse but hobby/homeowner level projects is buy the cheapest to do the immediate job and then replace it with an expensive one if it breaks or you use it often and the better version improves efficiency or quality of life.
Once in a while you get “burned” and immediately end up buying two tools for the same job, but if that happens typically you can return it under retail warranty.
This is definitely the best advice I got way back in the day. I have a small collection of very high end tools I use quite often and abuse at least weekly. Or get use out of having the best quality available to me. But the vast majority of them get used a few times over a decade and sit in storage the rest of the time. I have zero use for a $1500 impact socket set. The $150 one does just fine, and I replace the two commonly used sizes I snap apart with expensive high quality versions while the others I may never use even once.
My power drill and impact driver? Best quality I could find and worth every penny. They bring me value just in the joy I get using them over the cheap stuff.
I find it is better to find the middle ground. There are often some "mid grade tools" that are plenty good for me and high quality. And I don't have the worry about something breaking or failing to perform.
I always figure if I was hiring a pro to do a task they would have good tools, so the first time I can get the good tool and be even money - the second time I have the tool and so I'm saving. (I also rent some tools, but that is for tasks that need an expensive tool I rarely use)
Buying the cheapest one initially also often teaches me what attributes I should value when I buy the more expensive version. Will I actually use this feature or that feature, or what ergonomic design choice works better for me?
Agreed. My brother is a painter and has commented, "At least in the past cheap tools were one-time-use, now they are usually zero-time-use. Built so poorly they don't even work out of the box."
I disagree. It's great that you can get a Wen track saw with 100 in of track for $200 with tax and a Makita with 100 in for $800. People who just want to cut a sheet of plywood aren't stuck paying $800, or more likely, using an inferior tool because the cost doesn't match value to them.
The problem isn't the availability of lower quality versions of a high-quality product, it's the transformation of a formerly high-quality product into a shitty-quality version, meanwhile, maintaining the same price, or worse, a higher price, than the former high-quality version of itself.
The price tags on tools don't go down with time, but the quality of the tools certainly does.
I'm all for tiering product lines, harbor freight is doing it right by offering their top-of-the-line in the Hercules brand, a "pretty good for non contractor" line with Bauer, and then there's lower tiers for one-offs. But if I look for, and buy, a Porter Cable tool, I'm buying it because I expect a certain performance and quality, but it's in fact a rug pull right now. That should be fraud.
I agree that it is nice to have the option when you don't need the quality. It is also nice to have the option when you are trying something new and don't know if you want to invest in quality. Yet the article goes further than that. They are suggesting that companies are capturing a significant fraction of the market, so there is less pressure to produce quality goods. Whether this is resulting in lower quality goods overall, people are debating over. On the other hand, it does seem to be making it difficult to determine what goods are higher quality.
> It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available.
The problem is that there is no way for consumers to know whether they are getting the good version or the shit version. This creates a structural incentive to not produce good versions since consumers will assume that the good version is just an over-priced shit version (because the expensive version is often just an over-priced shit version)
How much of the price reduction is directly attributable to externalities, for example the fact that to replace the lifetime of one expensive item there are going to be 10 cheap versions of the item tossed in the trash?
There are a lot of products which are nowhere near my Pareto frontier, but for the most part I lack the information needed to make that judgement.
The result is that I, like others, spend too much on crappy products.
I watched some comparison videos like that, but the old product was always more expensive than what you'd tend to buy today.
Same seems to be true in that video you linked. And when you buy an equivalently-priced product today, it's better than it was 50 years ago. I only skipped through the video though.
The problem I have is that there's no easy way to go to an ecommerce marketplace and pick "I want to spend more for higher quality". You have to do your own external research.
That is what I miss the most from the old stores. I knew when I went to Sears I'd get a good enough thing. I could often find the exact same thing under a different name for less elsewhere if I looked (Sears made no secret that their house brands were someone else's product with the Sears name on it). I knew I could often find better if I looked. However I could trust that it was a good enough product for my needs and so only a few people had any reason to try elsewhere. (the above used to apply stores like J.C. Pennies, and Wards - though Wards was already failing when I was a kid)
Amazon has everything, but I don't want everything. I want someone to the comparisons for me so decide what is good enough. Reviews are worthless - even when not a scam (which many are), most people buy one and so they can only report it works they don't know how it compares to some other model that they didn't buy.
This is me with Costco. They're selective with what they stock, their margins are capped so I know I'm not getting fleeced buying abject junk. I have bought stuff from them based on trust of the store and not knowledge of the product.
It's the opposite of amazon, where not only do I have no trust in anything, everything feels adverserial. If I'm not vigilant, I will get hosed. I find it extremely unpleasant.
In some ways. The asterisk on it that gets really frustrating for me is that there are often SKUs manufactures make for them that are actually worse in meaningful ways.
I almost bought my Bosche dishwasher from them last year, because it was a bit cheaper than getting it at lowes. And then I noticed buried in the detail that the reason for that was it didn't have an auto-open drying feature that was one of the main reasons I was buying the dishwasher.
I guess this is kind of the opposite side of it though. I had done a bunch of research, and if I'd wanted to skip that and just buy the dishwasher at costco I would have ended up with a very good option at a reasonable price, even if it didn't have every feature possible, and costco would have done the work of eliminating all the cheap builder-grade junk for me.
Not all builder grade is junk. Apartment owners want a cheap appliance that will last for a long time. So mixed in that price range is both junk and high quality stuff with only the features you need (and generally intentionally ugly because even though the cost is the same nice is something people will pay for)
I agree with this entirely. I suppose it was partly an issue of limited floor space, but maybe the largest factor was that if a store sold junk mixed with good items, they could get a bad reputation.
Another factor of purchasing in "the old days", particularly for Sears, was that it was usually quite easy to get replacements for faulty products. None of this business of packaging things up, mailing them away and waiting. Walk up to the counter, show that the item was nonfunctional, and a cheery salesperson would go out back and get a new one for you. Sometimes they didn't even ask for a receipt. Sears had products that were "good enough", and they wanted customers to keep coming back. Of course it didn't last, but that wasn't just this particular company.
>there's no easy way to go to an ecommerce marketplace and pick "I want to spend more for higher quality".
It's not just that it's difficult for a purchaser to determine the balance between price and quality on a given product, that difficulty is deliberate. It goes well beyond the Boots Theory of Economic Unfairness[1]. Vast fortunes are extracted from a public who would make different (and arguably better) purchasing choices if they were not deceived by those who profit from the deception. It's become normalized, which does not change that the process of wealth transfer via deception (fraud under color of law) is destructive to law, society, and pretty much any sort of real public good.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
> The problem I have is that there's no easy way to go to an ecommerce marketplace and pick "I want to spend more for higher quality".
Not even isolated to ecommerce, really. This is everything now. The cars you shop for, half on the lot were made by a different OEM and are rebadged and sold by this one. Clothing is a fucking mess, both in terms of quality and sizing. Corporate consolidation is a ludicrously under-discussed issue and one of the bigger reasons everything just kind of sucks now.
It's one of the things that keeps me with Apple really, for all the warts, at least I know what I'm fucking buying.
I think that's ok. I mean, I don't know how it could be trusted.
First, it's not an easy question to answer, especially for products with many qualities. For example, qualities of a kitchen knife: looks, ergonomics, steel type, ease of sharpening, edge retention, handle materials, grind, shape, thickness, weight, weight distribution, ease of maintenance, etc. Some qualities are opposed and some are subjective, so you can't "max out" a knife's qualities.
Second, even for unitask items, like a fire extinguisher, a store exists to make money. They'll always push you towards items with highest margins.
Aren't all of your points already addressed in the article?
> Someone in the industry pushed back on an earlier version of this piece with a fair point: VF Corp's brands still operate with their own design teams and their own headquarters. The brands aren't literally merged. And the premium tiers within North Face and JanSport still use quality materials. The Summit Series from TNF still has Cordura. You can still find a JanSport with YKK zippers if you know where to look.
> All of that is true. But it actually makes the argument worse, not better.
(emphasis mine)
> The fact that VF Corp kept the premium tiers intact while degrading the entry-level and mid-range products means this was a deliberate segmentation strategy. They still make the good version. They just also sell a garbage version under the same trusted name, in the same stores, to the people who don't know the difference. The brand reputation built by decades of quality products is now being used to move cheap products to buyers who trust the logo.
> Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to.
Admittedly, they still equate higher price with quality, but it doesn't change much about the problem that economies of scale degenerate into market failure when there is no real competition anymore.
> The Donut media guys
Actually the speeeed guys, now. They left because Donut went to shit after getting purchased by Private Equity. Surprise, surprise.
There's some irony for you.
I think this is a good analysis, and the topic is more nuanced than we might originally think. For me the modern problem is not that no quality products exist, but rather there is very little to actually help consumers understand when they're being fleeced by a luxury product which is no better than the "cheap" product. So many of these exist. They are "fancier" and have more feature, but do not actually have a better build quality or have better reliability.
The other big modern problem would be repair-ability. A lot of the old 1950s products might not be any better once you adjust for inflation but a LOT of them are significantly cheaper and easier to repair.
I'd also recommend the Project Farm review of backpacks- https://youtu.be/cSm48oVCaWc?si=AbTyU9mzOJc5vfbR
I often see this argument but I don’t buy it.
People used to study the items they were buying, not look at the brand.
You (probably) live in a hyper capitalistic society where many corporations promote their brands through lies and deception. That is a very strong filter already - avoid the (mostly American) transnational giant corporations and buy from companies that are mostly local and aren’t hyperscaling.
Sure the mainstream brands are shit but there are dozens, hundreds of brands for a fair price point that aren’t for every shitty corporation.
Don’t buy Levi’s, buy Nudies.
> The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also > gotten harder in many cases.
There was a brief window in time where price would be a useful signal. Among all cheap crap, good quality did cost but also deliver. Then someone figured they can leverage branding to sell crap for the price of good quality items, and now even if you're willing to spend money you can't be sure you're actually getting the good stuff.
Buying not maybe the cheapest but the second cheapest is more expensive overall but unfortunately also more manageable.
It is difficult and requires time investment.
I often searched BIFL sub-reddit to find things quality things and it did fail me in the past. After years of broken dishware created a weird collection, I followed the BIFL advice and bought Corelle glass dishes. Only three years later of daily heavy use and dishwasher all the dishes have degraded edge, which looks and feels just like chipped glass.
Looking through specialized forums helps sometimes, but then you are looking at Hermès dishware and doubting what are you paying for - quality or art.
> So it is often the case that today, you can get something for cheaper than you ever could in the past (albeit not at a great quality), and if you are willing to pay higher prices (but often about the same as you would have paid in the past), you can still get good or even better quality.
But with the advent and advances of several decades, aren't you supposed to be able to get better quality for cheaper today?
Akerlof famously wrote about this in 'The Market for Lemons'.
"Suppose buyers cannot distinguish between a high-quality car (a "peach") and a low-quality car (a "lemon"). Then they are only willing to pay a fixed price for a car that averages the value of a "peach" and "lemon" together (pavg). But sellers know whether they hold a peach or a lemon. Given the fixed price at which buyers will buy, sellers will sell only when they hold "lemons" (since plemon < pavg) and they will leave the market when they hold "peaches" (since ppeach > pavg). Eventually, as enough sellers of "peaches" leave the market, the average willingness-to-pay of buyers will decrease (since the average quality of cars on the market decreased), leading to even more sellers of high-quality cars to leave the market through a positive feedback loop. Thus the uninformed buyer's price creates an adverse selection problem that drives the high-quality cars from the market. Adverse selection is a market mechanism that can lead to a market collapse."
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Yeah feels like the only way to find a quality product now is to find a good niche reviewer on YouTube and watch 5 hours of content.
A subreddit or forum like this is a good resource:
https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/
But it turns every decision into an exhausting research and optimization project.
How much of it is people lost skill to determine quality. When everyone did some mending, population had baseline ability to discern quality in clothing, and clothing companies less likely to pull shenanigans.
With some product categories there are independent testing laboratories that do a fairly good job of determining quality. The automotive industry comes to mind.
It seems it's a revealed preference that most people really don't care that much about quality, or there would exist a host of companies like Consumer Reports to meet the demand. Complaining on social media about enshittification and evil corporations does not put skin in the game.
I myself constantly complain about the atrocious quality of most consumer software products, but I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to pay for a subscription to an independent testing report.
Doesn't the problem of quality now being barely distinguishable mean that manufacturers would aim to fool consumers by setting high prices to low quality goods to mimic as high quality goods (which probably can't be cheap by definition)?
If that is so - the rest of your points become invalid.
I personally think many clothing brands are doing this. You absolutely cannot assume higher price points mean higher quality anymore
I think there are also 2 senses in which it's difficult to determine quality. The first sense is just that many things require expert attention, special tools, and or a lot of time to evaluate the quality. And for niche items, there might just not be a reputable reviewer out there. This is frustrating, but somewhat unavoidable.
The second sense is more insidious. Sometimes companies deliberately obfuscate the source and identity of products, making it difficult to even know if a product you saw a review of is the same product you'll get if you buy it now. I believe companies also do this simply to make price comparison impossible.
This is an abominable practice, and in my view should be extremely illegal. I'm very much a free market guy, but clearly labeling and identifying the products you sell should be a bare minimum requirement to gain access to any market.
I find that the cheaper option is often so much cheaper that buying several replacements is better than buying the better one. Ninja blenders vs Vitamix for example. Adding in the fact that I have no trusted evidence that Vitamix is actually better, I’d be fine replacing my Ninja every year vs amortizing the Vitamix over five or more years. And for the record my Ninja has been great so far.
I understand that logic, but as a counter, my time and frustration are worth something to me. I've actually owned both a Vitamix and a Ninja, and start basically every morning with a blended combo of protein/fruits/frozen greens, so it's a great example. A lot of the premium for me in a better product isn't just lasting longer and not throwing things away constantly, it's avoiding the frustration of using worse tools.
The vitamix has been thoughtless for me in 6 years of daily use other than sharpening the blade every so often and replacing the bearing for the blade once (both easily done by me at home). I wake up bleary eyed, throw my stuff in there, and let it eat for a minute while I get my coffee going. The ninja on the other hand did a consistently worse job, required me to remove it and shake the contents of the blender, and then randomly fried itself one day in a way that I had no chance at fixing and scrambled my breakfast plans for multiple days. What's daily frustration worth for a half decade of my life? At least to me, a lot more than the premium to get the better tool.
> I find that the cheaper option is often so much cheaper that buying several replacements is better than buying the better one. Ninja blenders vs Vitamix for example. Adding in the fact that I have no trusted evidence that Vitamix is actually better, I’d be fine replacing my Ninja every year vs amortizing the Vitamix over five or more years. And for the record my Ninja has been great so far.
I understand this logic, but the flaw here is that you are only considering bare functionality, not quality of function. This comes up a lot in small appliances and things like power tools, but is especially relevant in the kitchen. It's not only that you can perform a task better with a better quality product, it's that the result of the task is better for you. What do I mean by that? Well most cheaper products heavily utilize plastics, and shed microplastics due to friction wear during operation, where-as better quality products typically have more metal and glass construction and are designed with more isolation between the result of the task and the machine performing it.
The attitude you have here is common, and not necessarily incorrect from one perspective, but it is driving things like fast fashion and the proliferation of plastic on plastic contact in food prep in home kitchens, two of the highest contributing factors to microplastics ingestion, which is a problem that has strong correlations to population-scale hormonal imbalances, as well as key growing diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Our society is literally contributing to killing ourselves in order to shave a few pennies per-unit off basic everyday tools and conveniences.
> They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price
This is what so many don't understand, especially among the youth / reddit crowd. They expect their $25 jeans to be equivalent quality to the $25 or even $100 jeans from 60 years ago, for some reason. There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
There's also very few people who understand just how expensive things were back then, likely a result of having infinite cheap crap available. They don't know that in 1970, in today's money, a fridge was ~$4000, a burger and fries was $17, and a typical dress was $350. The only thing that has changed is that there are now options for cheap shitty things. You can still buy a very nice $4000 fridge if you want to.
> There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
But so many things did become cheaper and better: computers, availability and quality [1] of the music I can physically buy, the energy efficiency of modern fridges, the speed and safety of modern cars. Even my milk lasts impossibly long without spoiling.
If the replacement laptop battery I can buy today for ~$50 is leagues ahead of anything available in the 70s, then why aren't jeans and backpacks also miles ahead of what was available back then? No wonder the younger crowd is confused.
[1] Yes, CDs are objectively better than vinyl. Whether the audio mastering has kept up is a different topic.
I bought some $100 jeans a few months ago, hoping they would be better than the $25 I used to buy 30 years ago. They are not better than the $25 jean I can buy elsewhere today.
Not every $100 pair is made the same, and price is not a proxy for quality. You can definitely get a $100 pair that is meaningfully better than a $25 pair today.
"a burger and fries was $17"? That doesn't seem right.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mcdonalds-old-photos/ shows a menu at McDonalds from the early 1970s. A hamburger and fries was $0.63 or (assuming 1970 and adjusting for inflation) $5.36 now. A quarter pounder and fries was $1.27, or $10.81 now. Add $0.15 or $0.20 for a soda ($1.28 or $1.70).
That's a lot less than $17. Add $1.28
To double check, in 1983 a hamburger and fries was $1.82 - https://archive.org/details/ucladailybruin92losa/page/n542/m... .
That corresponds to $6.03 now.
What sort of hamburger places were you thinking of that charged 3x the price of McDonald's, and do they only charge $17 now?
Read More: https://www.tastingtable.com/1817109/big-mac-price-compariso...
Like at a diner, not at the cheapest possible place that existed.
You'll need to give more details.
Diners like the one portrayed in The Olympia Restaurant sketches on SNL were cheap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puJePACBoIo
Others now are far more than $18.
My first >$20 burger dinner was in 1997. That's >$41.15 now.
EDIT: Ahh, here - price for a hamburger in the staffed dining car of a passenger train from Houston to Chicago, 1972, was $2, from https://archive.org/details/spacecity03spac_44/mode/2up?q=%2... while $3 gets you "grey sole with soup, salad, rolls, vegetables, and dessert." The author suggests the hamburger price is high, as an inducement "to observe formalities."
$2 then is $15.80 now. Fries not included.
At https://archive.org/details/neworleansunderg0000coll/mode/2u... we read that an excellent hamburger at Ruby Red's in New Orleans cost $1.25 in 1970, which is $10.64 now. While at Bud's Broiler hamburgers run from $0.40 to $0.60. https://archive.org/details/neworleansunderg0000coll/page/22...
So I find it hard to believe most people back in 1970 were paying the equivalent of $17 for a burger and fries.
I could go back through my history to find the specific source I used, but it has absolutely no bearing on the point of the post, since even your McDonald's prices are higher than the current app+value menu prices, so I'm not going to and I struggle to understand why you wrote all that to not refute the central point.
Since the McDonald's burger is now cheaper (after adjusting for inflation) then is it also worse than it was in 1970?
Because if it's the same or better than it sure sounds an example of why people may have acquired "some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be".
My original comment was to mention that one of your numbers seemed rather high. To keep from it being a you-said-I-said thing, I gave supporting evidence. You didn't like the research I did, so I gave more supporting evidence that you are likely off by a factor of 2-3 for the hamburger prices.
Perhaps that means things weren't as expensive back then as you thought they were?
Like, while I can certainly find dresses in the $47 or higher range (you wrote "typical dress was $350") in this 1974 catalog https://archive.org/details/tog-shop-clothing-1974/page/n105... , that's from the Tog Shop, founded by fashion designer Paula Stafford, and with brands like Lacoste and the more expensive clothes list the designer or design house by name, which hardly seems typical at a time when Sears was selling dresses for less than half those prices and people made their own clothes to save money.
There's some great looking clothes in there, by the way.
And there were some expensive shitty things back then, like American cars which were soon to be trounced by Japanese imports that were both cheaper and better.
> Since the McDonald's burger is now cheaper (after adjusting for inflation) then is it also worse than it was in 1970?
Probably? I'm not going to assert it but I would be unsurprised.
> Because if it's the same or better than it sure sounds an example of why people may have acquired "some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be".
Again, what is your point? I'm sure there exists more than a few examples of things getting cheaper and better, maybe even most things? That doesn't mean it is a universal phenomenon that should be expected and cause anger when it doesn't happen.
Your multi-paragraphs about the dress... also doesn't refute the point that things were more expensive back then. There are many Temu dresses for <$10 which was $1.50 in 1970. The 1970 Sears catalog has most dresses around $10. Okay, great, the dress you prefer to compare is "only" 6.7x more expensive. You got me! Great work choosing cheaper examples than I did, for sheer pedantry! Muting you now as I don't find your post history otherwise valuable.
My point is that things weren't as dire in 1970 as you wrote. You can make your same argument without doubling their prices.
I think people are correct to be angry that RAM over the last year has gotten more expensive for the same quality.
I stopped buying jeans 20+ years ago when they started falling apart too quickly, even when I bought them from a Levis store. It may be possible to buy $212 jeans that have the equivalent durability of spending $25 on jeans back in 1970s, but wading through the dreck of expensive crappy jeans sold for brand recognition or where price is used as a false indicator of quality and durability is not worth my time.
That feeling of wasting my time is not captured by simply comparing prices.
> There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
But don't we see this everywhere, all the time? Pull up any of the recent Claude Code threads about the product's declining quality and you'll see at least a handful of well-upvoted comments about how text generators are definitely going to get cheaper while simultaneously getting "better" over time.
New things, like computers, get better and cheaper because they are new, so there is a lot of room for improvement. We have had a very long time to optimize making cotton into clothing, or growing and transporting wheat. There is a limit to how cheap those things can get for a given quality point and a given level of technology, and we've pretty much reached it.
> They don't know that in 1970, in today's money, a fridge was ~$4000, a burger and fries was $17, and a typical dress was $350.
The Internet Archive claims to have Sears Catalogues from many years including 1970. If we check out Spring/Summer 1970, we can see that they actually have the first 33 pages of a catalogue that prominently advertises "index begins on page 391".
Disappointing.
That said, a women's dress from those first 33 pages costs $11, or about $100 in today's money.
My source was https://thewarwhoop.com/9677/news/average-cost-of-dresses-th... but either source supports the point; you can get Temu dresses for a lot less than $100 now.
There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
It's less an implicit feeling, and more explicitly what's being marketed to us. Think about AI. It's being marketed that it will make everything better and cheaper. Computers before that. Machines before that. All kinds of things in between.
I don't doubt this is possible, especially if these technologies are properly democratized, but greed gets in the way, of course. No one wants to sell you just one fridge at a respectable mark up. These tools don't really go into making a better fridge, per se, but finding what you're willing to and how frequently you're willing to replace it and design planned obsolescence around that. They add subscription features. They want you to log into your fridge to track and sell your behavior, etc.
Because this is the promise made to us by capitalism/capitalists. Efficient markets will drive down prices/improve quality. A rising tide lifts all boats.
It's kind of like China after Tiananmen where the promise is quality of life will go up in exchange for nobody talks/questions.
If capitalism can't deliver on it's promise (more and more people don't feel that it is) then we need to have a talk.
> If capitalism can't deliver on it's promise (more and more people don't feel that it is) then we need to have a talk.
Perhaps even a strongly worded letter?
I mean I get your argument but it feels like one should adjust for wage growth instead. One labor unit of value converts to a shittier backpack.
The other side of that coin is that someone whose units of labor demand less value can still get into the market.
see terry pratchett's boots theory of economic fairness. They'll get into the market with something that costs more long term...
Perhaps it's gotten harder to determine by eye, but Google will still point you towards trustworthy brands in 2 minutes. The problem is people don't care or can't be bothered to Google.
> Perhaps it's gotten harder to determine by eye, but Google will still point you towards trustworthy brands in 2 minutes.
One of the main points of the article is you cannot rely on the brand to determine quality. The marketers know how to exploit a reputation for quality and information asymmetries to push crappy goods, for instance:
> Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to.
And this:
> People who do get warranty replacements report receiving bags that are worse than the one they sent in. Thinner fabric. Cheaper hardware. You mailed back a 2016 JanSport and got a 2025 JanSport, and those are fundamentally different products.
When you Google, are you reading a rave review of a 2016 bag, when the 2026 model has been crapified? Is the bag you're looking at on Amazon the Walmart JanSport or the REI JanSport?
Good points, but no one is reviewing the 2016 bag. It's all driven by CONSUME, and the products are always "Top 10 Thingamabobs of 2026".
I care and can be bothered, but Google is now itself a worse product than it used to be.
It pushes sponsors links and garbage top-ten lists with Amazon sponsored links and other seo optimized content and none of it can be trusted.
People commonly use a reddit tag to search for products, so companies started creating accounts to shill for their products there too, make it look organic and all.
You can't find the best of any product in two minutes on Google, not with any confidence.
> Google will still point you towards trustworthy brands in 2 minutes
On what criteria are you evaluating trustworthiness? Because if you are finding it on google, you are effectively judging on SEO and marketing spend.
Sure, there are some more-or-less trustworthy review outlets, but those too often go to shit when editorial priorities change from on high (i.e. newwire cutter is a pale shadow of its former self)
Will it? How do you know?
If you don't know a reviewer who is trustworthy, how can you find one? There's enormous amounts of slop (both human and generated -- this was already a problem before the last couple years), and when some channel has signal, it attracts more noise generators. The subreddit or review site is only useful until it's well known, and then there's increasing pressure on mods or owners to cash in.
The immediately obvious path here is paying for the reviews or recommendations directly, like Consumer Reports, but there are two major problems with that:
first, the amount consumers can afford to pay doesn't support the additional cost of actually buying all the units and exhaustively testing them, when CR and similar sites are competing against supplier-supported sites, and
second, if you care about specific features or aspects of a product, it's unlikely that the reviewer tested that specifically.
I wish I knew of a good solution. In reality, what's probably going to mitigate in the short term is having your agent scour all the available information and make recommendations, at comparatively great expense.
I think Google has turned to garbage and especially for product reviews there is a flood of affiliate marketing grifters in every category. It takes effort and sometimes payment to find good reviews these days.
If you're looking for a backpack, I can't recommend Osprey enough. They are still a independent US company with a lifetime warranty they actually stand by. I had to call their customer service just last week after I ordered the wrong size bag. I was connected to an actual human immediately, and he sent me a prepaid return label, even though it was my fault and I was fully expecting to pay for return shipping myself. I own several of their bags and have never had a single issue with any of them.
There is a whole community of bag enthusiasts who intricately review backpacks. Packhacker etc. It's super easy to find reviews of most backpacks and plenty of video reviews detailing every feature on the bag - and even in some cases reviews after a few months of usage. Day one might feel great, but after a few trips you start noticing flaws.
I'd echo what one of the other commenters here said about AER and Cotopaxi. Although I have to say wearing my Cotopaxi Alppa 35l feels like a small child is trying to drag me to the floor compared to the comfort of having the AER straps on my back for the travel pack. I still love both though.
Aer is sort of an interesting case to me. At its core the nylon material they use certainly make the bags feel like they'd last forever.
But I feel like Aer also tends to include features or materials that are just not designed for BIFL longevity. Two that jump to mind are the PU coatings on a lot of their zippers and their use of elastic straps as the main way to secure water bottles (but they might be moving away from the elastic on their newest bags). Both of those feel like they have a much more limited lifespan (relative to some of the other aspects of the bags).
+1 to that and I'll also add Cotopaxi and AER (quite expensive but built like a tank) to the list.
My year-ish old backpack gave out so I recently committed to extensively researching and buying a new set of travel + tech bags that will last me basically forever, and I've been very happy with my purchases from these brands.
I have an Osprey backpacking pack that's about 10 years old. I had a squirrel chew through the zipper on the removable pouch. I sent it off to Osprey to be repaired and they sent me a brand new pouch.
Osprey USED to be good, but their quality has been on a sharp decline for the past decade.
The Farpoint is a case in point. I have an older one where the mini-backpack actually zipped onto the bigger one, and had a proper lifting handle integrated for lifting when it's lying flat (among other niceties). I accidentally left butter in it, and the smell was so bad that no amount of cleaning would expunge it. I just bought another one.
Absolute SHIT quality compared to my old one, the mini backpack now buckled rather pathetically to the big one, and no more solid handles (except the top one). Structural integrity is WEAK.
Needless to say I spent a LOT of time and effort cleaning up my old Farpoint, which I'm now using again. The "new" one? Sitting in storage along with the rest of my buyer's remorse.
https://investor.helenoftroy.com/press-releases/press-releas...
I wonder if that coincides with their purchase by Helen Of Troy.
If you live in Switzerland and vibe with their brand, Freitag bags totally rock and never die.
I don’t think anyone below GenX is allowed to wear them.
Possibly only people that say "totally rock" can totally rock them.
My favorite bags I've had are from Mystery Ranch, but they're from before the Yeti acquisition, and I haven't tried any since, so I don't know how quality has held up. I do know they've eliminated a ton of their catalog.
I still have two Dana Designs packs I purchased in the mid-90s. They're going strong and supremely comfortable (one daypack, one backpacking pack).
Mystery Ranch is still doing pretty well for themselves. (I'm amused knowing that they crank out harnesses for Amazon employees left and right for their robot safety systems.)
I'm also a Red Oxx guy. Love my Sky Train backpack when I'm flying out. They quote a "no bull" warranty, and their CEO suggests to "be sure to include them in your will."
https://www.redoxx.com/products/sky-train-convertible-backpa...
I'll add that I've had a very positive experience with a Projekt Gravy backpack since we're dropping favorite products. Excellent quality and I've been using this thing daily since 2021.
I had a buckle that was broken on one of my backpacks. Sent a message to Osprey and they sent a replacement buckle. I was quite impressed.
Nice counterexample, forgot this brand even exists.
Peak HN!
Top 1st-level comment tree involves passionate, math-based analyses of several decades of economic adjustments. Redefinitions of inflation adjustments ad nauseum; a math geek's approach to social sciences - which is not the subject of the article at all.
2nd 1st-level comment is a response to the title alone: a current, good backpack brand, with really no relevance to the subject of the article at all.
> I'll be writing about those next.
I doubt it, you didn't write about this! You prompted it and signed your name to it.
I missed this but now that you point it out, seems plausible.
Pretty ironic on an article about quality products being replaced by cheaper ones.
Dead horse but I find it astonishing that people can still miss AI writing like this.
Don't you find it incredibly grating that every paragraph grinds to a halt while 3 sentence fragments are repeated? Same rhetorical devices. Same tone. Same pointless constructions.
That's not good writing. It's cheap parlour tricks.
The rhythm continues almost as though the writing is in verse—with the effect of hypnotizing the reader so they don't notice nothing is being said at all. The result? Skimmable prose. Digestible reading. Shareable content.
It's not just bad style. It's actually rotting your brain. And if you can't notice that, maybe you weren't reading at all.
this comment reeks of AI too, and the fact i can't tell if you're being tongue in cheek means i'm cooked
I think the comment is mimicking the style of the article.
I'm moderately sure it's intentional irony.
He or she is good at satirizing it!
I envy you, I can’t even read more than a few paragraphs because this style of adding catchy sentences to make you go „wow“ every few sentences is so annoying.
Keyana Sapp is the "author"
Good to know they hire that kind of incompetence at Palantir. It makes them less effective.
It always seems to be the case with these LLM blogs that if they're not about AI they are from someone heavily involved in AI, at least for now.
LinkedIn:
> Strategic Partnerships @ Palantir | AI Strategy
Not really incompetence if he hasn't looked at the article
Yep, I’d rather read the prompt.
The slow realization this whole article was AI prompted was such a disappointment to me. I'm fascinated by the subject matter, and it seems like the person who prompted it is aware of specifics at least... But I also don't want to feed myself LLM-induced pollution that might make it into my own writing or thinking patterns.
The article is clearly generated text, but it's also just low quality writing.
If the author _were_ aware of specifics, they could have just written the article. A list of bullet points would be better.
It's almost as if they made the article Worse, on Purpose.
Realized pretty quickly too. Then when I saw the related posts at the bottom being very recent sealed it for me.
I mean, it's a post a week. I think that's pretty plausible. The worst part of this era is just not knowing if I'm reading generated output or genuine human thought.
How can you tell?
Its got this ... cadence:
> Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.
> That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above
> None of this shows up on the shelf. The colors are right. The logos are crisp. The product photography is excellent. You discover what you actually bought three months in, when the stitching pulls apart at every stress point.
Its thing X. Its thing Y. Its thing Z. And now I'm going to tell you about thing Q in a longer sentence.
More generally it's pure info dump. Everything is lists of things, all given the same weight, even if not literal bullet point lists or numbered lists.
Some other common things (not present in this article) that are dressed up lists are short titled paragraphs, and sequences of sentences that go "blah blah blah: blah blah blah."
Very little opinion added anywhere, but the punchy writing style where everything is given an overdone monotone overimportance masks it a little.
Pure infodump is not terrible for some things but I'd much rather it be less heavily processed by the LLM, and be upfront about the fact that it's a dressed up infodump with an LLM involved.
I don’t see why that would be proof of being written by a LLM.
It quite well can be (and I think it is) stylistic writing, hammering the message home by repetition of blows.
It could be a stylistic choice, except it's rapidly become an extremely popular one for some reason. It's also the default Claude style. So, take what you will from that. Either someone is writing exactly like Claude on purpose, or they just asked Claude to write something, but either way I'm entirely oversaturated on it. At this point I don't think "Claude", I just start skimming and then close the tab.
Even if a human were to try to write in this style intentionally I think they are very likely to express a few opinions, maybe an anecdote, maybe express their motivation in some way, and add a little more variation to tone.
Its not proof, but its certainly a smoking gun. Even when humans use that literary device, we don't typically do it every other paragraph. It feels like a pretty safe bet that an LLM wrote most of this.
How would you ever prove that it’s by an LLM? There’s no text an LLM can produce that I couldn’t theoretically type myself, too. But the style is strong evidence.
> It quite well can be (and I think it is) stylistic writing
I wish we could bet money on this. This is an LLM and I'd win that bet.
The ability to recognize the style comes from working with them.
It's quite possible the author wrote an outline or rough draft of the article and then asked the LLM to clean it up. But the final result has LLM tells all over.
"Stylistic writing" that just happens to perfectly match Claude's current default codeslopped output style, and the exact same style as the majority of posts that have made it onto the front page of HN in recent months. Just endless streams of short punchy sentences that are really just glorified bulleted lists with no substance to them.
Let's quit the gaslighting and acknowledge that no human actually writes this way consistently across every paragraph, unless they're intentionally trying to write badly.
"It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste LLM stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it."
Yeah, all of that felt a lot like Claude's writing style.
The irony is that this is a perfect example of the thing the article complains about. Even writing is now of a lower quality thanks to LLMs. In this case you're paying with your time instead of money for a lower quality product than you'd get 10 years ago.
LLMs really like the "it's not this, it's that" framing. The short punchy lists/sequences also feel off to me.
I think it's also the reuse of the same strategy repeatedly throughout the article. I think most human writers often feel put off if they use the same literary device too much.
At this point, I'm running anything that has the "usual" AI tells through Pangram. Nine times out of ten, the article is 100% AI generated. (This one is 63%.)
Maybe the next expose on worseonpurpose.com will be blogging
I bought a north face backpack for college in 1998. It cost $60. It was an extravagant expense for me at the time and I felt horrible about it for weeks.
That backpack is currently at college with my son, who used it all through high school as well. It is by far the oldest and most durable daily-use object I’ve ever owned.
A cheap backpack ended up being the most expensive backpack I have ever owned.
In 2004 I was very young and all my income came from summer jobs, so I got a backpack from Walmart. It was one of their nicer models, had a lot of features and looked pretty good. IIRC it cost $20. I had worked all summer to save for an MP3 player, and 2 months after getting that backpack I getting off a bus, when I realized there was already a hole in the bottom of the bag. My MP3 player (a creative zen micro) had slipped out of the bag, and someone had already picked up my MP3 player and walked away with it. Adjusted for inflation I spent over $500 on that MP3 player. Even as an avid backpacker, I have not spent that much on fairly nice packs.
In 2007 I splurged and paid $100 for a backpack from Deuter, and I also felt a lot of guilt as that was a huge amount of money for me at the time for something like a backpack. It's been nearly 20 years, it's not just that the backpack is still working, it still functions virtually like new. None of the seams are stretching, even though it's been through incredible overstuffing and abuse. All of the zippers are smooth as silk, and even the cushioning on the straps and airflow offsets on the back are still supple and supportive.
I spent ~$400 on a Deuter baby/toddler backpack two years ago and it still works. Beautiful thing.
We are the third owner of our Deuter baby/toddler backpack. We use it a fair a bit and it still looks like new. We don't need it anymore, so it's going on to a 4th owner who's going to get an amazing, comfortable, near-new carrier for the same token $20 bucks we paid.
Same, I was gifted a Sandqvist backpack ten years ago. I travel with it as my sole piece of luggage (you can imagine the overstuffing). It has outlived three laptop backpacks that don't go through half as much as it has.
I bought a north face backpack 4 years ago. Looks brand new.
It mentioned in the article that their higher end models are still well made. I bet you can still get nice NF or JanSport bags if you’re careful. If I had to guess, I’d say the models at REI are decent (or else they’d get yanked) while the ones at Target are the chintzy ones.
How much does it weight? 6 pounds?
Good lightweight backpacks are not that durable. I have 12 years old 1.5 pound osprey, still in use, but age really shows.
First day of my college freshman year, I purchased a Targus backpack for the heavy ass gaming laptop I had back then. I still use it decades later. It has carried stuff inside it for tens of thousands of miles, seen lots of abuse, weathered all sorts of conditions, and is still in really good shape. Not a single tear. Every compartment, every feature works the way it did on day of purchase. I'm honestly amazed every time I use it.
Pretty much the same story here. I'm on my 2nd Targus TXL617 (holds 17" laptop) in 18(?) years and I use it for everything every day. I've even used it for a short 3-day international business trip. I've used it at a dusty shooting range in the desert. It's been dropped, dragged, kicked, bitten (friend's dog) etc. and it still holds up.
I think Targus stopped making this model (maybe a trend towards smaller laptops), hopefully this one will keep working for a while before I need to find a good replacement.
What if its just bad use? I have some nice Targus model that I actually bought a second one because the zippers were opening. To my surprise, in a few weeks I got my first instance of zippers opening. Of course, I was overstuffing a bit at the top. I remembered that I had removed some guards that transform this model from more like a regular backpack to a clamshell. Maybe that is a very important feature I have to use, or the zippers will fail, when you carry a basketball there...
Yeah, I went to work for a law firm when I was 22, and I bought myself a 3/4 length cashmere-wool overcoat, and it was $750, and my parents thought it was ridiculous to spend that.
I'm 48 and not only do I still have it, it still looks like new, with no real care taken of it - wear it, put it away. The only issue I had was the liner in one arm pit started to unstitch a couple of inches, and a tailor took care of it in 20 minutes for $10 a decade ago.
You are definitely using it well. Not all people are such good carers of their stuff. My friend and I both both 200 Euro coat. Mine got worn out in 4 years, his is still going strong 10 years now. Same with other stuff. I just use my stuff very roughly. No point buying expensive stuff then
As much as the result for consumers sucks, is this just a result of the quality backpack business not being a very profitable business to be in anymore?
The reason they were able to buy all those backpack brands is because each of those brands were not making much money running a backpack company selling quality at a reasonable price. The purchaser makes some money leeching value out of the brand reputation, but then that brand value falls because of the crappy product, and they sell the brand because they leeched all the value out of it.
This is only possible because you can’t make much money selling quality for a good price. Consumers will pick lower quality for the cheapest price every time.
It's much more likely to be a result of the modern drive for companies to keep growing. This leads to a need to maximize profit endlessly, which in turn leads to cutting corners as much as you think you can get away with, or just ballooning prices. And this problem goes up and down the supply chain, of course - even if you want to run a non-growth business manufacturing quality backpacks, if your suppliers want to run growth businesses, they will eat up your margins and force your hand.
This obsession with ever increasing revenue is a major source of our worse and worse consumer economy.
One silver lining is that backpack industry doesn't have a huge moat. New companies can get started relatively easily as the older ones sell out and decay.
The bags I bought 15 years ago were made locally in San Francisco - Timbuk2 and Chrome - and had a reputation for quality. Now both brands are mainly produced overseas, but have been replaced by two other local brands with ties to the originals - Rickshaw and Mission Workshop.
The onslaught of far east imports is also a factor. They weren't very relevant 30 years ago outside of discount merchants. Now you pop on to Amazon and choose something that looks appealing from dozens of mystery meat brands.
That's not going to change though. Cheap asian manufacturing and wall st efficiency maximizing changed industry in America. Maybe there could be changes to how public markets are regulated to change BigCo incentives, but it will be hard to change consumer behaviour if they like buying cheap disposable crap for the lowest price.
There is still plenty of competition in the backpack market if you just visit an outdoors store instead of walmart. That's a higher end market though, which is where most high quality small/medium businesses flourish.
Is this just the same kind of optimization? Consumers trying to optimize their margin while producers are trying to optimize theirs?
It leads to enshitification due to short term thinking but in the short term seems like a good decision.
In theory, competition is what prevents this. If these small companies can sell products that provide more value then consumers buy the alternative.
I think the problem today is that it's extremely difficult to tell when you're buying quality or a brand. If there's a 40$ and a 100$ backpack, often the 100$ version does not actually have meaningfully improved quality - just better marketing.
The same goes for tons of products - brands nowadays are something companies build while they're young and relentlessly smash into the ground as they age because the value you're destroying isn't obvious. Shareholders get good results, and objectively it's probably the correct financial decisions for the company - doesn't make it any less shit.
I don't think it's actually that hard - 5 minutes of skimming on Reddit will do a lot. You can also usually see Wirecutter's recommendations (even if they paywall the full article). People just don't care upfront but complain later.
Absolutely this. I am sure there are recorded cases where companies have gone out of their way to make things break early but I think it’s more times than not simply that cost matters and consumers are the voters and for the majority cheap wins. The average consumer is not very thoughtful and will opt to buy the cheaper good. For sure there are many economic constraints and not everyone has the luxury of buying quality but that’s not always the issues.
This comes up a lot with washing machines and I sympathize with parts of it, why not standardize control boards more or other components in the machine but one of the biggest issues is simply the cost of labor in places like the US is high enough that it’s hard to make it cost effective to repair.
As easy as it is to blame customers, I don’t think it is irrational to just buy the cheapest. So many times the more expensive one isn’t any better and you are paying for branding and marketing, and just wasting your money.
At least if you buy the cheapest one you know you are at least saving money up front.
It also doesn't help that for school backpacks, the buyer and the user are different people. There is less incentive to take care of stuff, and when it breaks, parents are more likely to blame a bad backpack than to blame their children.
The high cost of labor has nothing to do with reusable parts of the washing machine. If it was all standardized, you could do a lot of repairs yourself.
It actually plays a pretty large role in the problem. This is like when people complain about not having enough small cars in America, they simply don’t sell well. Similarly, the average consumer does not want to be doing their own repairs. A lot of appliance repairs are already pretty darn easy.
When the base labor charge is already 10% or more of the total replacement cost it becomes hard to justify the repair.
Was revisiting the thought and it’s like the Framework laptop. There is absolutely a market for it but it’s far from the dominant market. Consumers on average simply don’t care.
Agreed. You can also say that they are better engineered for most use, nowadays. With the adage that anyone can build a bridge that doesn't fall over, an engineering team is needed to build one that has the minimum resources to stay up.
In particular, how durable do people think backpacks need to be? If you are going through them particularly quickly, maybe you are over loading compared to what they were designed for?
That's the end result of capitalism squeezing all disposable income from the people. Wage suppression, rent-seeking subscriptions, shrinkflation. When people barely have enough money to survive, they can't afford to buy things!
> A $35 JanSport that dies in eighteen months: $23 per year. Add the shipping cost when you try the warranty. Add the replacement cost when the claim gets denied. Add your time.
> A $200 bag that lasts ten years: $20 per year. Already cheaper. At fifteen years, which the well-built ones consistently do, you're at $13 per year.
This ignores the money you would earn by not giving money upfront. A 23$ expense every year is cheaper than 200$ upfront over 10 years, because you will earn 15 euros over that 170 Euro first year if you put it in S&P500. And then 12 nect year and and 10 in third year and you are already ahead of the 200 Eurro bag. And you just dont spend time in warranty. Just throw it away dn buy next one for 35 Euros.
Or put another way, we need to compare the net present value.
The more expensive choice now is an investment into not buying future bags, and the future returns on that investment should be discounted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discounting
You need to consider usage patterns as you evaluate the cost/quality value curve, though. $35 for a Jansport for a school kid who will brutalize their pack regardless is probably a much better value than a $130 Osprey that is objectively superior but which a teenager would still brutalize to death in 1-2 years of daily school use.
Fwiw, my elementary kid is on year 3 with her Lands End pack (which is way crappier than the Lands End / Eddie Bauer / LL Bean school packs from the 80s-00s), and my two older kids use Osprey Nebula packs in high school -- both also on year three. The Osprey packs are terrific, but would be overkill for a younger kid, and we purchased them mostly because our kids bike to school and needed something that would comfortable carry 20+ lbs of crap.
And my partner and I are on the other side of that, we have like 12 packs of every price point and size accumulated over the years, I have a couple 20 years old, and I can’t think of a single broken feature. Im gentle on all my stuff so I don’t need ultra rugged high quality and expensive gear, and I suspect most people don’t (granted kids can be diff).
It also ignores the fact that your backpack needs change.
At various points in my life I've needed:
- A huge backpack, then a small one
- Water bottle holders weren't important, then they were
- Straps I could tighten to hold a yoga mat weren't important, then they were
- A laptop slot wasn't important, then it was critical
Plus my preference in color has changed, as well as my aesthetic preferences.
Paying $200 for a backpack would be insane when I'll have different needs in a few years anyways. I buy cheap-ish backpacks, I've never had a zipper or seam fail on me before I needed to buy a new one for a different reason anyways. Or it was just stolen/lost.
My general life philosophy is to buy the cheapest thing that meets my needs generally, replace as necessary (since I often need to replace/upgrade for functional reasons anyways), and buy a very few expensive high-quality items that I know are actually worth it. Like a mid-tier espresso machine, a good leather jacket, quality boots, a decent home speaker, and... I'm honestly struggling to think of anything else.
Terry Pratchett wrote an excellent metaphor for this concept: https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...
The bigger issue for me is these business models prey on the poor and overworked. There are a lot of people who can’t buy a $200 backpack because they need that money for food, but they still need a backpack, only have time to grab something at Wal-Mart, and they get stuck in poverty product churn.
It’s like regressive taxation but carried out by capitalists.
I spent way too much money on a Peak Design backpack. 4 years in, the zipper broke. They honored the lifetime warranty, and swapped me for a brand new one.
That was my first time ever dealing with such a high-end product and a lifetime warranty.
Just sharing because it was a good experience.
I love mine too, I have the messenger bag and the backpack. Both are in near perfect condition after years of use, commuting and travelling.
I love their camera straps and clips too, everything just works nicely together.
Gonna echo that I love my Peak Design backpack. Only backpack I’ve ever owned that delighted me so much I told others and showed it off.
The design is a little dorky, especially now that every techbro in SF has one, but my god that thing has pockets and little details in all the right places. Been using mine for years and looks almost new.
One downside of high quality gear: Velomacchi (motorcycle bags/backpacks) seems to have gone out of business. Been using their stuff for almost 10 years. Feels indestructible, works great, but I’m never getting a replacement and I guess any warranty lasts only as long as the company …
Peak Design is the rare travel backpack I could find that has one massive storage compartment instead of 5+ small compartments. So you can really pack that thing efficiently.
And the 45L variant is the biggest thing you can use as a carry-on.
https://www.peakdesign.com/products/travel-backpack?Size=45L...
I've never spent $300 on a backpack before. It kinda stung. It's well-thought-out though. I've had it five years and it's been through a lot.
The FAQ says to hand-wash it which is annoying though. There's no way you're gently washing out the sort of grime that my human oil leaves on the straps from real use, like clinging to your bare shoulders during a long sweaty trip through Mexico.
So I feel a lil mischievous tossing the thing into the washing machine every year. Same way I feel using an alcohol wipe on my Macbook screen.
Echoing the efficiency. I just returned from a 1mo trip living out of the 45L, including a supply of dead-tree books.
That said, I've only had it a year and it's clearly not new anymore. Paint wear on the rivets, for example. I expect it'll be in rough shape when it's accumulated as many miles as the travel bag it's partially replacing.
Annoying that there’s no “Made In X” declaration of origin on that site. Isn’t that required by law?
+1 for Peak Design. I have yet to use the warranty, but the thing still looks new after lots and lots of travel, shoving under seats, tossed into train and bus overhead bins. The only real wear is the corners of the metal clip for the flap. Expensive, but in this case, you get what you pay for.
Yeah, they didn't question my warranty claim at all IIRC, and breaking the zipper was actually my fault. I had overstuffed the bag while in a giant hurry.
Hah, around the time of COVID, I was in SF renewing my Australian passport. Went into the Peak Design store, and was talking about my V1 Backpack, and the employee there was basically intimating that [my extremely trivial issue], if it somehowwww got just a little worse, would be covered by their lifetime warranty and also, just FYI, since we're out of stock on them, I'd get a V2 instead.
We always see consumers blamed for choosing price over quality. How about retailers taking the blame for dumbing down or removing product specs? If two items look identical but one costs more than the other how can consumer be blamed for choosing the cheaper ones? Especially in the age of LLMs, it you are building a quality product you need to include a spec sheet of what makes your product better than the competitor. Not dumbed down marketing speak like "lasts longer" but specific details justifying the premium, like "zippers made in Japan" or the stitching density, fabric specifics, etc. Consumers who care can use LLM to understand what it all means and make informed choice. But when the information is hidden consumer will choose the cheapest option.
Every backpack I've ever bought I was able to easily find all the relevant specifications I needed in order to choose a quality a pack. If you're looking at a pack which doesn't provide such specifications then that's an immediate giveaway that it's a low quality pack. It's not difficult, the average person really just does not care to do research. They instead just choose the cheapest one with the advertising that hooked them the best. But the information is there if you want it.
I've got a story of this but backwards. I know a guy, a hiking guru, moderately famous for his backpacks. He's an ultralight long distance enthusiast who designs much of his own equipment. I went to his house for a weekend session with a few people to learn to make our own, and I'm still using the one I made. For a few years he made and sold them out of his living room. Then he sold his brand to an outfit that scaled it up into a decent business.
But the lightweight hiking guru made ultralight backpacks, with thin material and very minimal extras. It was designed to be light by a guy who could sew, so he was happy to fix it as needed on the trail. To him that was a feature not a bug. Meanwhile the company that bought the brand and design necessarily made it more robust, feature-full, and twice as heavy. They were pretty much forced to by the number of returns they were getting.
So now I treasure my old backpack that worseonpurpose would probably deplore, and keep it repaired so that I don't have to make another or go buy one that worseonpurpose would probably like better.
Yep. Ultralight hikers are industrious and good maintainers. They take pride in lightweight bags and making them or acquiring them. Those hikers will deal with a defect on the trail or after they get to port and expect to do so with their pack.
Your average backpack consumer is a different breed. Cosmetic designs, logos, colors, and generic pockets are key marketing traits of consumer backpacks and small rips or tears are seen as reasons to replace the backpack.
I agree. I don't really get worseonpurpose's argument here.
I have two proper backpacks, an old UK made Karimor Jaguar from the late 80s and an OMM Classic 32 I bought recently. Although the Jag is pretty good shape considering its age it's the OMM that I reach for now.
The OMM is actually modern take on an old Karimor design from 1973 but if you take all the removable bits off it comes in at around 380g. That's almost 1.5Kg lighter than my old backpack. For short weekend trips that's a massive saving.
I seem to remember a story about Atom Packs and Aiguille Alpine. Aiguille make really tough packs for mountain rescue teams to throw equipment in. Atom Packs was founded to use slightly less robust but lighter materials for through hikers by a lad who did his apprenticeship Aiguille.
I think their merit in both approaches and I like the trade offs depending on use cases.
EDIT: I've just noticed that Aiguille now do "light" weight versions of their packs in 420D nylon. What I like about that is they are actually cheaper instead of charging a premium for thinner materials (hand made prices but still).
> Karrimor Jaguar
Nice. Karrimor backpacks (or rucksacks/daypacks as we called them back then) were the high water mark--I worked in the industry in the 80s and, in the tone of the article, it's very sad to see what's happened to Karrimor and Berghaus today, but back then they drove one another to new heights. I was always a fan or Lowe's stuff, who were the other UK giant.
All three brands were let down by the waterproof layers whcih after about ten years would degrade in horrible ways. Prior to the 90s this was less of a problem.
Aiguille are great. Probably the best bags around now. They will also make them to fit. When I was selling bags, fit was a big issue and if you made out that one size fitted all that would be seen as a sign of cheapness/cost cutting/lack of attention to detail. Karrimor and Berghaus both did their flagship bags in different back lengths, and companies competed hard on the diffent fitting systems.
I wonder if there's an advertising law angle here. If a company sells multiple products in the same product category, they really shouldn't be allowed to have them branded so that they seem like multiple companies. The main name/logo on these products should be required to have something that makes it clear that they're all from the same company.
They can pick one of their backpack brands to keep (and eliminate/sell off the rest), or they can tack "VF" onto the front of each brand name, or something like that. A customer shouldn't have to dig into the fine print or do research to know whether two products are from the same manufacturer.
Tough to define and enforce, though.
It reminds me of EIG (Endurance International Group), who at least at one point owned a large portion of major mainstream webhosts (including Arvixe, Bluehost, Hostgator, A Small Orange, Site5...). They "streamlined" them all into one big operation, with reliability and customer support going to shit for every host they bought. But they kept all the brands separate, so people kept bouncing from host to host, wondering why they were all so shit, not realising that they never actually switched providers.
Whenever I buy something with a zipper I check that it’s YKK first.
If it isn’t, I know there’s a good chance they’re cheaping out on other places as well.
The YKK zipper on my North Face hard shell broke. Got it replaced under warranty. Half a year later, it broke again. Anecdotes, sure, but I'm now buying cheap jackets instead.
As far as I can tell, YKK has quality tiers now where not all YKK zippers are created equal. Rather unfortunate.
63% AI generated according to Pangram. Better than 100%; this makes me think that they wrote the copy manually then used an LLM to clean it up.
Anyway, VF also bought Timberland and, by proxy, Smartwool. They absolutely tanked both brands.
I was trying to figure out why this article got flagged. Thanks!
I suspect there may also be a strong "it's what people want" aspect to this.
Why do smartphones barely outlive their warranty period? Check the statistics on how long most people keep their phone before voluntarily replacing it, and it makes a lot more sense. Why invest in the premium components and workmanship to make your phone last 5 years, if 95% of your customers will not use it for more than 18 months? (These numbers are made up, but from what I remember, the reality is not far off from that).
I could totally believe a similar thing being at play for backpacks, jackets, shoes, etc. where the people who keep their stuff long enough to even notice it falling apart are a maybe vocal, but small minority.
Speaking of “worse on purpose,” I immediately tried to subscribe to this site’s RSS feed — none. Unthinkable on any blogging platform for most of the past twenty years.
Same experience. “No feed found.” I chuckled at the irony and closed the tab.
Talk to any Aussie tech workers you know and chances are they or their friend has a Crumpler backpack. (No affiliation just a big fan).
Originally created by a bike courier who sick of bags breaking sewed a bag out of the toughest material he could get, marine canvas. To this day they make somewhat indestructible, well designed, trendy well loved bags.
Also they have a lifetime warranty and repair policy that is very hard to beat. Maybe you’re not local, but you can tell these will be well made (and they really are)
https://www.crumpler.com/pages/repair
Not sure if they ship to the US. But worth a look if you are serious about excellent well made well design backpacks.
https://www.crumpler.com/collections/backpacks
I know so many Aussie tech folk who swear by the Crunpler Entity as their laptop bag of choice.
https://www.crumpler.com/products/entity?variant=44393825992...
I picked up a Crumpler Brazillion Dollar Home bag about a decade back to carry all my photography gear, as there were no other bags on the market that would allow you to pack a large format monorail camera in them.
That bag is built like a tank. Still ticking along, a little scuffed up, but zero issues. If you're carting around a few thousand dollars worth of delicate gear, it definitely offers some serious peace of mind.
Exactly, got one in 2015 in Melb and is still being used daily.
I bought Crumpler messenger bag about 15 years ago (in San Francisco when they still had a store there). Can confirm it’s indestructible. I’m glad to hear they’ve kept up their standards to this day!
Just had a look and seems that you can get a pretty decent range of pre-owned crumpler bags on eBay and similar. Worth a look.
I swear by Swiss Gear nowadays. However, it's been several years since I purchased one. I don't know if they've maintained the same high quality.
But I had a Swiss Gear backpack that was fantastic, and it lasted me nearly a decade. It was originally purchased at a Target. It was versatile and I could take it anywhere. It had little grommets to pass-through earphone cords and such. It survived even through several washes in a washing machine.
Then at a thrift store, I found a Swiss Gear suitcase. It has wheels and a telescoping handle. It expands very nicely. I have it stored away and still haven't found occasion to use it.
I also picked up a Swiss Gear laptop bag with a "messenger bag" shoulder strap. These I found at Office Depot. It's really nice. It has a velcro fastener to secure the laptop itself. It has mesh pockets for all kinds of accessories. If I don't put in a laptop, it can carry documents, folders, or binders. It's been very durable.
I was gifted a Swiss Gear backpack when I went off to school (over fifteen years ago now). It was good – albeit very heavy – for the first two or three years. Then the soft surfaces started wearing through, the mesh water bottle pocket on the side wore through, and finally one of the straps snapped. I started trying to figure out how to make a claim against their legendary warranty process... and found that at that time (2013 or 2014), in Canada, their backpacks had at most a 1-year limited warranty. Nuts!
It does seem like Swiss Gear are now directly represented in Canada (rather than being represented by a third party, like they were a decade ago), and their backpacks now have a five-year warranty. But I guess my point is: if you don't live in the US, make sure that the things that a brand is famous for hold true in your region, too.
The Swiss Gear backpack I used daily in college in 2008 is sitting beside me right now. I've put it through its paces over the past 18 years. I jogged here in the rain this morning with it weighed down with my laptop and a water bottle and other things.
Minus some fraying at the base of the front pouch, it's as good as new. I've been very happy with it.
Got me an Osprey ~12 years ago. Light as a feather, tough as nails. But it's not the kind of thing you can just sling over your shoulder like my old North Face bag (which was stolen). But yeah, the moral of the story is, as always, "If you want durable, don't buy it from Wal-Mart" (or Target, or Kohls, or Amazon)
This article is LLM written and unsourced so the entire thing could be a hallucination and there's no reason to trust any claim made in it, don't even read it
> A $35 JanSport that dies in eighteen months: $23 per year. […] A $200 bag that lasts ten years: $20 per year. Already cheaper.
If it is, it isn’t by much. The difference between $200 paid now versus 7 times $35 = $245 over a period of ten years is about 5 years of interest over $200. At 4% interest, that’s about $40.
Don't forget to account for your time buying each new one and writing your name in it. If you don't replace soon enough also account for the lost value of things that fall out the holes.
> People who do get warranty replacements report receiving bags that are worse than the one they sent in. Thinner fabric. Cheaper hardware. You mailed back a 2016 JanSport and got a 2025 JanSport, and those are fundamentally different products.
This rhymes. Recently, I took my iPhone 16 Pro in to swap out the screen (there was an ever growing dead spot, and they handled it free of charge). Unfortunately, the screen they replaced it with is much more fragile – hairline fractures within days. I know the replacement screen is of lesser structural quality, but I can't prove it. I've had iPhones since the day they debuted in 2007(?), and this moment connected the dots across years of screen replacements. The original is always much more durable.
But again, sadly I can't prove it.
My iPhone 16 Pro's screen got scratched/cracked within weeks of me getting it when none of my other iPhones (5 of them from the 3GS until the 13 mini) ever had any screen issues.
It's hard to not feel like the durability is decreasing.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars.
Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
Boots. I have bought Italian-made boots for 23 years - the same brand and model. 1. pair the inner lining died, rest was fine-to worn for 7 years, including laces, 2. pair lasted 7 years, the inner lining held this time, laces too. 3. pair was smaller than indicated, I stood the pain for one winter, could not "grow them", 4. pair has laces die after 1 year, leather cracking after 2 years, rubber seal opening after 2 years and lace (metal) hooks straightening from tying the laces. And this is the company, who has always promised exchange of soles for 100$ - but THAT has never been an issue.
Metal hooks, lace-weave and thread, leather, glue - I wonder how much they save, but I have bought my last pair.
VIBRAM boots and soles.
Thread counts and Denier are poor metrics for items that employ technical fabrics, seam glues and other modern improvements that legitimately lower these sorts of simple measurements. People don't want to buy the same heavyweight waxed backpacks their grandparents used.
There definitely are BOM- and manufacturing reduction movements in these mature products but backpacks honestly don't seem nearly as bad as (eg) walking boots.
The Worse On Purpose article on power tools follows a similar tack. Offshore manufacturing, corporate consolidation and cheaper processes don't actually make the overall picture worse when we have affordable tools packing modern lithium batteries and brushless neodymium motors.
I gritted my teeth and bought a GoRuck GR1 a year ago. If it fell into a volcano, which is what it might take to destroy it, I’d buy another one. It’s still possible to find “buy it for life” backpacks but be prepared for eye-watering price tags.
I used my employer's fitness stipend to buy a GoRuck GR2, and I have no regrets. There is just a level of build quality that I desperately wish I could find in the other fitness and travel items I buy.
Same here. I love it. I completely get the cost criticisms: for the price it should be amazing. And yet, it is. I also wish I could level up my other purchases in the same way.
Seriously, I've had my GR1 since 2013 and it's still flawless. It replaced my bike messenger bags (Chrome, Mission Workshop).
It's been through sand, mud, dust and just shakes the abuse off like nothing.
I do wish half the time though that I'd bought a 40L GR2 though.
Yep. I like that the care instructions are literally to hose it off in the back yard and let it dry. This thing will outlive me.
But I main got it because I’m a relatively large guy with broad shoulders and other bags pinched my neck. I was given a Timbuk2 pack from work that I otherwise liked, but the straps were too close together. I could either wear it high on my back and have them mash my neck all day, or low on my back wear it’s much harder to carry weight.
(Side note to everyone: wear your backpack as high as possible when it’s even moderately loaded. When I see someone on BART with a huge backpack slung down by their hips, my back aches sympathetically. You want the heaviest load up between your shoulders.)
Edit: I also keep glancing at the 40L GR2, but it's just FOMO. Great bags, but huge. I don't want to schlep something that size to the office, and definitely not on some of the trails we hike.
I've gone on one or two trips every year where the GR1 wasn't big enough and I needed a separate small bag.
But granted, I wouldn't want to be hauling that around every day either, it's just more convenient for the overall pack.
Makes perfect sense. If I were going for a longer single-bag trip, I'd probably be running the same calculus in my head.
Another very satisfied GR1 owner here. It has outlasted all my previous packs. I'd lean towards the 26l GR2 if I were looking now.
I tend to find a relatively reliable model of something and stick with it.
I've noticed, without exception, across clothing, backpacks, and appliances that the next iteration is more cheaply made:
- Thinner fabrics
- Less stitching
- And on appliances and other tools, more plastic parts where they used to be metal.
My latest <LredactedG> washer has a newly plastic mounting bracket that appears designed to fail within a decade due to vibration. Even the metal backing is thinner that the previous generation.
Similar thing happened to the Linus Tech Tips backpack, it was supposed to have double bottoms, but chinese suppliers cheaped out. This is a very common chinese trick where they try to get away with something cheaper than specified. This is actually even expected when ordering stuff in large quantities from china, the supplier is guessing what parts they can cheap out on without anyone noticing, it’s not even considered fraud, but a kind of optimization.
On the flip side, a really good bag, and these have lasted so long I can not recall when I purchased them, are really expensive [https://www.tombihn.com/].
What is really irritating is that sometimes we see the same thing within a single brand (we have a garbage entry-level item and a top tier item which is good).
guess who has a new owner and is starting to make some of their bags overseas
https://www.tombihn.com/blogs/main/fall-2025-factory-update-...
Tom Bihn sold recently, and doesn't do everything in the US any more. Also I don't know that they were ever "expensive" so much as priced to reflect the economic reality of being made in America and (from what I've read), treating their employees well.
Make sure your bag has YKK zippers (if it has zippers).
I used to sell outdoor equipment. If a brand cheaps out on zippers, I wouldn't trust it.
I really like my Patagonia Black hole mini MLC. Awesome access. Fits under an airplane seat. Generous laptop padding. Excellent zippers. Water bottle pocket. Lovely warranty (Patagonia store nearby often gives new product when I try to get product repaired).
I have a columbia backpack i bought like 20 years ago that doesnt have a ykk zipper but it's still in perfect condition, i've abused it a lot and the only thing broken is a rubber thingy it has for the headphones cable to go through.
I've been using the same Patagonia Black Hole backpack for nearly a decade, every day include bike commutes (and crashes). The longevity is frustrating at this point because I'd really like a larger one but can't bring myself to switch until this one fails (which may be never).
I don't see how it could be a surprise to anyone paying attention that a JanSport backpack doesn't deliver on quality. Perhaps there's more to the story but I got to the second AI slop one-liner and gave up.
I've got quite expensive ski jacket with 4 YKK zippers.
3 of 4 zippers are broken after few years of usage.
This is a little late for your nice jacket, but a lot of zipper damage comes from dirt getting into the teeth and then the zip grinds everything up. Outdoors shops sell a zipper lubricant to keep the dirt from sticking.
I have multiple ski jackets and ski a couple times a week. No broken YKK zippers.
Do you know a better zipper?
I heard advice from Adam Savage on the topic of cost-vs-quality that I've found to be quite useful. It was something along the lines of:
When you're first getting into a new craft/hobby and need a specific tool, get the cheapest one you can buy. When you're first starting out, you probably don't really know how to judge quality, and you don't have a good sense for what features/enhancements you actually need (not to mention, you may or may not know you're actually going to stick with the hobby at all).
By the time that first cheap one breaks, or you gain some experience/skill and hit your frustration limit with it, you'll have a much better understanding of what you want out of the tool and will be better position to pick out the "best" version to suit your needs.
Seven years ago I bought a Jansport backpack for 50 usd, for daily use. After a year, its zipper broke. Shipping it to Jansport required to pay 15 usd for shipping. So instead, I bought in Walmart a generic backpack for 15 usd, that I still use seven years later. Never bought Jansport again.
Curious if the generic one had YKK zippers and the Jansport did not, since people frequently emphasize their value.
If you're looking for a backpack that can survive just about anything, and don't mind a "tactical" look, check out Savotta:
https://www.savotta.fi/collections/backpacks
They're expensive, but last a lifetime or more.
I'd like to try one of them, it's on my list whenever I'll need a new backpack!
Product labels should prominently display the parent corporation. Whatever is the top of the chain of ownership.
While I would not disagree with many of the points made in TFA, I think this is a bad example to demonstrate the problem the author is trying to address.
Why? Over the last twenty years, many high end backpack designs have moved towards lighter weight materials and construction, because of trends in the world of backpacking.
This means that even in the high end segment of the market, comparing packs to ones from decades ago can be misleading - they are working with different design goals.
None of this eliminates the points about cheaper materials and construction at the lower end of the market, but it does make things a bit more complex than they need to be if a different example was used to illustrate all this.
I'm waiting for this to happen to Tom Bihn's bags now that they have new owners who're starting to outsource the smaller bags to Vietnam instead of sewing them in-house in Seattle. Luckily for me, I've got what I need from them and expect it to last for quite some time
I didn't know about this and that's extremely disappointing. I already bought one bag from them but I guess I doubt I will be buying another.
They're still making a lot of things in the US, there's a list on this blog post from last fall (https://www.tombihn.com/blogs/main/fall-2025-factory-update-...). The "materials and transparency" section of each bag's page tells you where it's made. But the process has begun and you should probably grab anything you've been coveting before that list grows.
The irony of composing this article about industrial sameness with an LLM is too much.
Since we're all shilling our favourite backpacks:
I've been using an Ikea Varldens for the past 6-8 years. Very efficient for my use case (2 work laptops, groceries, travel luggage, documents and earbud case, tools). It has a couple of nice small compartments and a single large one so it's very light for the size and material. Until now the only thing that's annoyed me was the long straps when riding a motorcycle, so I ran cable ties through the loops to stop them from slapping my hands and sides. It's seen quite a bit of abuse and it's still intact. It's even practically waterproof.
I'll jump in: I was stuck in layover many years ago and bought a Topo Designs backpack -- Google says it's a 30L Apex Global travel bag.
I use it every week, it shows no signs of degradation over approximately a decade. Huge beefy zippers, tons of pockets and organization for those who are into that.
I paid like $200, but seems like they're cheaper now. Hopefully not because of the reasons in the article. At the time, I believe they were a small company from the state my layover was in--maybe Colorado.
I have a topo pack too, very high quality and the design seems timeless to me.
I firmly believe that many goods like this fall into a cycle.
Existing products are cheaply made and poor quality, so a new company emerges producing a higher quality product. Eventually word gets out and their sales blow up. But to keep their profits going up, they begin to coast and cut corners. Fast forward a decade or two, and now they're the ones making low quality gear, leaving the market open for a new high quality brand.
In short, high quality leads to recognition and growth, and then cutting corners leads to profit.
This is yet another instance of a weirdly specific domain that pops up and starts posting seemingly LLM-generated articles that follow a single pattern - in this case, how "they" made everything worse. We had a similar instance few days ago with smarterarticles.co.uk, and many others before that.
I get that this says something we might believe, but I don't think it's a good use of our time to engage with engineered nerd-bait that probably wasn't produced in good faith.
Meanwhile my LTT commuter backpack, while expensive, did not get worse on purpose. It’s so good I’ve considered getting their full size backpack as well.
There are so many examples of this. Processed food, sweets and so on. Cadbury, Toblerone, etc live on the brand recognition, but have come objectively worse over the years. Often they are owned by the same mega corp that have a strategy of milking the brands for as long as possible.
It's bait and switch on global, organised scale and it's almost impossible to fight except on an individual level.
I still use vintage Gravis Metro (my current one is 20 years old) and the smaller Japanese Gravis Mini Metro (my daily; currently 10 years old, with a few holes appearing in the non-cordura base).
My strategy with pretty much everything I can is to deeply research to find any Made In USA variant of whatever it is I’m trying to purchase, and buy whatever that is regardless of price. I’ve never had that fail me.
For backpacks, my Waterfield pack has held up fantastically across several years of regularly absolutely stuffing it with gear for my work travel.
JanSport was always a budget-ish / not great brand from what I remember. I used them, but high quality was never their thing.
Their lifetime warranty used to be taken extremely seriously, and I really don't know what lifetime they were referring to. I had an old external frame pack that was my grandfather's back when my father was a Boy Scout. That pack outlived its buyer, and I was still using at Philmont where they had the same model as a museum piece. One of the zippers broke, and the back mesh was disintegrating, and pretty much as a joke we made a warranty claim. They honored that, circa 2012 or so.
Their schoolbags were pretty great in the 2000s, too. Withstood some serious abuse, though their zippers were notably on the decline. But that was covered by warranty, so it was fine. By the mid 2010's, they were in full decline, and that's about when I stopped recommending their stuff.
Absolutely not the case. Back in the days of exterior frame packs, Jansport was likely one of the best brands anywhere in the world. Incredibly well designed and made.
OTOH, I haven't thought of Jansport as a go-to brand for a serious backpack in 30+ years ...
When I was a kid everyone knew that JanSport was the one to get if you actually wanted your bag to survive. Absolutely one of those things where you'd spend more replacing the cheaper bags over and over compared to buying the JanSport once.
- dont see a contact page on your website at all and your archive has only 3 posts https://www.worseonpurpose.com/
- here is an idea for the next post: AAA gaming got worse on purpose. Dont forget to mention anti consumer practices by EA and Ubisoft when you are at it
This should be called what it is: Brand Fracking
Trust will be arbitraged until there are few information asymmetries to exploit.
Basically, all the old brands that had great quality were killed by private equity and have become skin suits worn by low-cost imitators trying to squeeze another penny out of customers. There are still good brands, but they are increasingly niche and you certainly pay a large premium for them.
I tried to use the Teton 65L to ruck. Just put a 50 lbs bag of wheat in there.
Shoulder strap failed on insert to main pack after six 1-hour rucks . Got a replacement. Zipper failed at bottom on another one.
Wanted to increase load to 100 lbs, but gonna have to go with a different brand.
I've been buying my bags from Timbuk2. High quality, I had a messenger bag that I gave away after 10 years and it was in great condition. I have a backpack and messenger bag for them. They are also designed to protect laptops/tablets really well.
I'm still daily-ing a Timbuk2 from a decade ago and it looks fantastic, no issues whatsoever.
Unpopular take here but I'm really ok with this.
The sale of the high quality brand allows the original entrepreneurs to exit their business to someone that thinks they can run it more efficiently. The decline in quality allows for innovative upstarts to try new things.
nah, you've described it objectively. maybe should add pollution from over production and consumption of shit gear.
The $25 bag compared to the $200 bag, has $175 worth of free cash flow for other (potentially unexpected) purchases, can be replaced when trends/use case changes (or it gets dirty, or lost...), the capital could be invested in the market to generate ~$1 a month of passive income, and as far as the human can tell it's roughly the same. Basically all the thoughts of a JIT marketplace but on the personal scale...
Parts of it read like a response to
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47778933
Sam Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness
AI;Didn't Read (AIDR)
"Make Your Own Gear" / MYOG sites have tutorials on how to make your own backpacks if you want to go that route
> JanSport still advertises a lifetime warranty...Go try to use it.
Literally every product with a lifetime warranty does this same game. It's best to read them as puffery.
Did they also buy Deuter and Osprey? What about Decathlon?
According to people in the thread, Deuter and Osprey are still independent and high-quality.
I don't know about backpacks specifically, but my general impression with Decathlon and their own brands has been that they somehow manage to be ridiculously cheap, while also being better made and lasting longer than many name brands that cost several times as much.
So it’s bad that now apart from high quality expensive option (which is still available!) you can also get cheaper, lower quality one?
The problem is that there is a deliberate lack of information that clearly distinguishes the "technically a product" category from the "someone put effort into this" category. Price doesn't do it, brand doesn't do it, name recognition doesn't do it because companies are constantly enshittifying existing products, too.
That's deplorable. We probably need to dig one or more levels deeper though.
What changed to enable and popularized these bad business practices?
I recommend Deuter backpacks. German overengineering at its best. After ten years my backpack is still good as new.
man, im feeling EXTREMELY vindicated with buying a backpack from a smaller, independent brand (Epperson Mountaineering)
my backpack hasn't shown any major signs of wear or tear in the.. idk, 5 years since purchase?
I left the shoulder sling in an airplane a couple years ago - it was in virtually perfect condition as well, I'm still pretty bummed at its loss.
Why do we allow megacorporations to exist at all?
Chicago School assholes backed by the conservative/"pro-business" think tanks that boomed in the post-war era managed to place some judges and influence some lawmakers to completely break our anti-trust enforcement in the '70s, by shifting from a standard of "enormous corporations may be assumed harmful" to "specific harm that's very expensive to prove must be demonstrated", all but entirely eliminating anti-trust action.
The term "allow" implies that some entity called "we" exists, and has the capacity to exercise control over over unrelated third-parties' ability to engage in organized activity. No such entity exists, nor has such capacity.
In theory, governments have the ability to curtail the activity of corporations.
Are you challenging that idea?
Yes. Governments are themselves just organizations of people doing things, based on the same motivations and incentive structures as every other organization. The distinction between corporations, governments, and every other form of organized activity in society is an illusion.
Google “Capitalism”
This is some damn irritating writing. This writing irritates me more than a broken backpack seam would.
The trend of making articles out of sequences of pithy three-word soundbites rather than proper sentences is infuriating. It's super LLMy, yes, but it feels like even human-written content is like that these days.
Pure LLM, and it's a shame. The message and the content they are trying to pass are good and should be read by everybody out there. But god, the LLM writing, it feels like an Apple PR applied to a critique of capitalism.
I am highly confident this article was AI generated
You what? I buy my backpacks from Aliexpress.
First thing that entered my mind while reading this. I have been saying this to my familiy for some time now. Never mind the price point; those unknown brands are really quite good. I still have my bag from Ali from 6+ years ago.
in the old days the brand name was also the company name. now brand names mean nothing.
I mean. If the cost per use of use is only slightly worse with these cheaper goods, you could just view that as a slight premium for the ability to switch styles every few years. It's also a smaller upfront investment, so taking account inflation it might not really be a big difference even considering that?
Clearly most people choose to buy cheaper stuff and producing higher quality, more expensive things makes you a niche company
AI slop, I'm sure the contents are interesting but after a few paragraphs of the LLM "tone" I gave up.
Thank goodness for Project Farm on YouTube
As the saying goes, being poor is expensive.
Osprey backpacks have worked well for me.
This feels like the Arcteryx Hoodie situation. I've had a couple of them for going close to 5 or 8 years. I mistreat them - throwing them around, washing them normally in a machine, etc. Absolutely bullet proof with very mild pilling. When I went to buy the exact same thing, the newer models cost the same thing or more, but the reviews all complained that the product has changed, that it pills after a few months, etc.
The same thing happened to me with t shirt and other clothing brands.
Now if I buy something good, I'm rebuying multiple of it even if it's unneeded since apparently we live under the Law of Enshittification of Everything.
I think this is more of a case of the product getting worse incidentally. Contrast with leaders who are actually making things worse on purpose. Apparently, for no other reason than to be ugly and mean about it. I've been on this earth long enough to discover that monsters are real.
Windows 11 comes to mind as an example of something actually being made worse on purpose. Making it impossible to associate the original notepad.exe with text files is certainly not linked with business outcomes in any direct way. This seems to be purely about antagonizing the user base as much as possible. The only theory I can arrive at is that there is a secret cortisol harvesting scheme that results in better financial outcomes for Microsoft.
It helps to differentiate these cases. I don't like capitalism taken to the extreme, but the other thing is significantly worse. Intent makes all the difference. Engineered to suck vs sucks because it wasn't engineered are two completely different levels of evil.
Haven't you heard? Worse is better.
It's a fun thread here.
I feel like there's another component: that the consumer base has become so detached from making things in general. We are surrounded in ever more stuff, ever more material, but collectively are out of touch with making things, with material, and assemblage there-of.
Our culture's perspective is as critic, as shopper, as buyer. Sure few of us were expect shoemakers or backpack makers, but people around us were industrious, did provide labor to make goods that people around them bought. The cycle of production had been directly apparent.
This is low key one of the things I really had hope for for a while with 3d printers: that they opened up & exposed what is. That they would be a force to spread insight & to regard the little mechanisms and means of the world all around us. I think that's a little bit true, but it's pretty niche, and I expect most prints are for static parts; no movement or dynamic behavior. And it's somewhat the anti-process: crafter in a box. It's still amazing but barring major changes, I have over indexed.
It's also worth noting the role of DMCA anti-cirumvention laws in casting mankind out of ever coming to grasp with what makes up the world. The combined legal and technological destruction of any right to repair is really not just about repair: it's an obstruction to humans understanding the world around them. We cannot become savvy in the world when the government tells us that business's right to keep us from knowing the world outstrips any mankind-the-toolmaker / natural scientist role/title/god-bourne nature, that cutting us off from the universe & living in ignorance is a hard cast legal binding fact. I find this to be as fallen as it comes. How do we stay alive as the race we were when our laws unwind the fantastic graces of inquiry the gods saw fit to give us?
Pangram says this article is about 50% AI generated, including the opening several paragraphs.
The melodrama of this article really rubs me the wrong way, especially when some of the brands they mention do still make good backpacks (like The North Face). The author acknowledges that with "it's a deliberate segmentation" strategy... which is just another way of saying that they make stuff at all price points.
its the normal cycle of sports gear
This is why brand loyalty or even brand recognition is stupid in the 21st century. Everything is made in the same factories anyway, so buying the Amazon item with a brand name like "FOOTHSYMPYZT" or whatever is the way to get exactly what you want. Just set the price point to whatever Amazon recommends and multiply it by 1.5 or 2.
I still have shoes I bought decades ago. Those brands are now nothing special, after the companies were bought or taken over by private equity.
These are really good backpacks imo https://www.sporthouse.ie/
> The brand reputation built by decades of quality products is now being used to move cheap products to buyers who trust the logo.
This is private equity in a nutshell, really. This is what every single PE leveraged buyout ultimately ends up doing. Take a beloved brand, or better yet (in this case) a group of related beloved brands, cut costs, and reap the profit margins until the brand dies.
Anecdotally this rings true with me. I have a 15 year old (at least) Samsonite backpack. It has zero signs of wear and has been on many trips, jammed under my feet in economy or on a dirty train floor. It was relatively expensive at the time at about $120.
It was looking a bit sad and dusty so I upgraded to a fancier looking Bellroy that cost twice as much. When it arrived I instantly knew it was going back. It felt cheap, it looked cheap, and the compartment layout did not feel at all utilitarian.
The issue here isn’t quality or market segmentation. The issue here is a de facto monopoly and the illusion of competition. Ok there’s also the issue of well known brand names now being entirely different companies and entirely different manufacturers.
I just bought an Eddie Bauer fleece. I own three, well four. The fourth is going straight back. It is garbage. Eddie Bauer is one of the brands that got bought and now rents out the label.
Is there any way I can see all of the mergers and conglomerations of large companies?
Blue Bell ice cream and Jan-sport backpacks owned by the same company seems crazy to me.
> The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.
I can't speak for everyone else but this isn't what I'm doing when I compare two backpacks. I'm comparing two different backpacks for their features and design. I don't really consider the brand name attached or care who owns it.
> This is the pattern. Acquisition. Cost optimization. Quality decline. Warranty narrowing. Brand equity extraction. And eventually, divestiture.
PE at work.
Friendly reminder that antitrust enforcement and deregulation are incompatible
Wait until you hear about glasses!
Global enshittification is the end goal of capitalism.
> From a shareholder's perspective, the bag that falls apart is the better product.
As long as we collectively decide to keep living in a society dictated by shareholders, this shit will just keep getting worse and worse and worse...
I hate this so much.
The enshittification of all things. It’s happening in the service industry, too. A lot of contractors like roofing and plumbing are being absorbed into private equity megacorps.
Just because I don't want them to go out of business. I bought a backpack goruck gr1 26l nearly 10 years ago in Feb of 2017.
I was a consulting and traveling heavily for many years and a digital nomad for others. I've carried that bag everywhere, it is good as new, I can hold a week of clothes in it, I recently got a vacuum pouch for winter thermals so that applies even for ski trips now. Its design lets me fill it up, zip it almost totally shut then compress it down to fit toiletries at the very top.
As much abuse as I've put it through it is still perfect. If moths or something don't get to it it may actually outlive me at this point I see so little wear.
Frankly I wish I could offer companies that make stuff that lasts forever a subscription fee or something to keep them using the same build quality, I mean cheap fast fashion/manf/etc seems to exert massive economic pressure to enshittify everything.
Its EVERYTHING that has gotten worse, on purpose.
Capitalism ends up being owned by single companies across goods families. Private equity buys, strips, and bankrupts. Materials are engineered to fail near the end of their warranty. Companies lie about details hard to identify or prove. Companies use historical goodwill to loot the current landscape.
Take for example, a citrus squeezer. We needed what I thought was a decent juicer. https://us.josephjoseph.com/products/helix-citrus-juicer-yel...
Well, guess what... since its all just plastic, the 2 posts that provide the downward force when turning get sheared off when you fucking use the thing.
We ended up going to an antique/flea market and found a all-metal juicer. It fucking works. And it likely will for the next 50 years.
Capitalism itself is the scam. It was sold to us of "innovation, innovation, innovation!" And its just "worsening, extraction, destruction".
> Its EVERYTHING
I would argue not everything, just the things we remember. Those brands got popular, got sold and enshittified.
We remember these brands fondly (personally I had a JanSport bag all through elementary school) and that's why it sucks that they suck now but what we forget is now is there are 1000X more brands to choose from, some from megacorps trying to cut corners at every step. Some from small shops that genuinely want to make a great product.
The problem is visibility. Those good brands you have to go look for, you can't just go to WalMart or Target like in the early 2000's and expect to get a quality product. All the quality products now live on small websites scattered across the internet.
Dont gaslight me.
I remember even 26 years ago, stuff you bought was better crafted and could get parts to repair.
Now? Its non-replacable batteries. Ultrasonic welded casing (destroy-open only). Glues, glops of glues. Plastic/nylon gears instead of metal. Thinner/worse materials. Scams online everywhere (like the legitimate company XYZZY). Every online corporate presence whores it names out to fly-by-nights.
If I want to buy durable goods, its mostly not even for sale. Or I end up having to buy from Europe, or a boutique dealer in the States... that is if you can find them.
And even the boutique dealers like Tom Bihn sold out, and is now making their bags in some sweatshop shithole with lowering and lowering standards.
Private equity, and computers, optimized all the profits which drove profit quality down. We all have lower quality products to enrich a few finance individuals
Optimization is gonna kill us all in the end.
Or more likely consumers vote with their dollar and cost matters over quality. PE is just a bad scape goat, there are obvious outliers but largely companies make products that consumers want.
Companies are incentivized to sell the worse, most expensive version of a product that they can convince someone to buy. Many companies sell with huge margins, meaning there is significant slack to allow quality to increase for the current price point - there just isn't enough competition to matter. Many manufacturing companies also have complex supply chains, making this problem worse as everyone along the chain tries to maximize their own margin.
It's not at all rare for a company to sell a quality product at a low margin for some years, building up a reputation, and then start decreasing quality to increase profitability once the quality branding is established.
Of course, optimal companies maximize for margin. Buyers have their own optimization mental model and maybe is surprising but a vast majority are thinking mostly on cost. Buyers and sellers do a dance and in the perfect long run you hit the optimal balance.
Consumers/buyers still play a large role in this, it is easier to put all the blame on PE or Big business.
This is the conventional thinking, but it ignores a huge factor - marketing. The major function of the gigantic advertising industry is to deceive consumers about the real qualities of a product, leaving price as the only only signal that they can detect through the noise, in most cases.
And advertising works in multiple ways to promote slop. Sometimes, it is directly by marketing bad products as cheap but high quality bargains. Sometimes it is, as I said, by using previous high quality products to sell low quality ones at the same prices. Sometimes it works by creating a huge pressure to consume more (such as the pressure on fashion trends), wiping out any care about durability (if it's considered poor taste to wear the same T-shirt two seasons in a row, why pwuld you buy a durable T-shirt?). Sometimes it works by mudding the waters, making consumers distrust any reviews that praise the quality of a product, leaving price and directly visible looks as the only signals that rational consumers can base their decision on.
So, overall, the blame for this state of affairs lies far more with the way the modern market was designed, than with consumers specifically.
Feel free to blame whoever you want.
It’s a dance between consumers and business. Sure some markets are heavily influenced by ads or simply what’s in fashion but ultimately it takes two to tango.
Or more likely consumers aren't paid enough to buy quality.
How do you come to that conclusion? It is certainly a luxury that not everyone can afford but for the average consumer in America it’s possible but folks still opt out.
I am okay with these big American corporations getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded, only to exist as a brand in a private-equity backed holding company.
This is because other companies come along to fill the niche occupied by the established brands. Since they can't cheapen the products any more than the behemoths can, they need to innovate and evolve.
As for the backpack product, I wish the likes of Eastpak and whatnot would just die, since they have not innovated in a very long time.
I don't disagree in principle. But, as a consumer, this makes purchasing a bit more complicated. BITD, I could just buy an EastPak or JanSport and be fairly sure it was a good bag. Not much thought or analysis required. Today, I have to dig through 100s of brands I've never heard, with most of their ad budget spent on influencers who maybe can't be trusted. It's not a recipe for a healthy market.
If you feel like spending several hundred dollars on a backpack (big if, I know), I can personally vouch for https://www.seventeenthirtythree.com/. It's more or less a one man show, and the guy is very obsessive about sourcing materials & assembly. Advertising is all word-of-mouth as far as I know. I at times feel anxious about his long term prospects for the exact reasons mentioned in the OP article - I have a backpack from this shop that's about a decade old and has zero visible wear. I think, in order to make this business model work, it's pretty much impossible to scale.
The issue is it reduces information availability to customers: if a customer finds a brand that produces high quality products that they know from experience they can trust, that trust can't propagate forward in time because the incentive it to abuse it for short-term profit, which is a net negative overall because the customer needs to find the new high quality product on the market, something that costs time and comes with risks itself. It's a market inefficiency.
Why would you be ok with that?
These brands earned the consumers' esteem because decades ago their products pushed the envelope in the respective markets. By having their product quality severely degraded, this also lowers the bar for the niche brands. They no longer need to push the envelop to get a competitive advantage. They just need to replicate what was already possible. I.e. no real innovation is happening any more.
Also, for every 2 niche brands that are trying to get it right, you will get 1 that is sketchy: send designs to the cheapest manufactury in China, hire a few influencers to post on instagram, and you're done. Basically capitalizing on the misperception that "niche == better".
So, we are left as consumers to have to dilligently research every purchase, just to get the quality that was the standard a few years back. There's nothing to enjoy here.
Not to mention that at the bottom, this is just another manifestation of "fast fashion" and "planned obsolescence".
That's idiotic. As a consumer I'd prefer the same company to keep making the same good products forever. I don't have time to research which of the new brands is just as good.
I have a pair of Mountainsmith Lumbar packs, both either over or pushing 30 years old (I have two because I misplaced and replaced my first, but later found it).
It's an excellent pack, cinches up tight, mount it front or back, strap it to something else, you can pack the straps and use it as a simple satchel, or use the shoulder strap.
Very high quality materials and zippers.
It's for I'd consider "urban travel", great as a carry-on. Paperback books, tickets, meds, passports, journal, snacks. They've been in "the wild" but I don't drag them on rocks or things like that.
They're over $100 today, so not cheap, but at a glance on the website, they look pretty much identical to what I have (and I know my second has slight differences in design from my first).
Were I in the market, I wouldn't hesitate to drag and drop one into a cart and get another. I've not used their larger packs, and over time they've expanded their lumbar line. But I would completely expect their other products to be similar quality as the ones that I have.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If other companies come along to fill the niche then how is it that the likes of Eastpak and whatnot have not died?
They are - the article finishes with them being for sale because they no longer generate money. They are not dead yet, but they are clearly out.
I give a more complete followup at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779948 .
The article hints that they are dying - the holding company is looking to offload them because profits are down.
I did not explain myself well enough.
The essay show the timescale for "getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded" is 20 years or more, dating from the Eagle Creek purchase to the current "potentially up for sale."
That's a long time.
That means Theodores is also okay with the same decades-long process happening to "your power tools, your boots, your sunglasses, and about a dozen other product categories where a company you trusted quietly got absorbed by a corporation you've never heard of."
And after a new company X gains market share for its quality, we should expect the vulture capitalists to come swooping by again.
On the environmental side, every one of these packs is plastic waste after 18 months rather than 10 years.
It also means the methods people use to assess quality, despite omnipresent supercomputer phones and video-quality wireless networking, is ineffective, and manufacturers worsen their products knowing that. Why hasn't it gotten better?
So no, I don't see how Theodores comment about the chain of events should make anyone else also feel okay with it.
The "simple" answer is "markets aren't like textbooks".
Consumers are lazy and greedy.
The side effect of which is not-strict-enough regulation of negative externalities. In a perfect world, people would care about the downstream environment impact at least as much as they do about their time/money. But, they don't.