Funny baader-meinhof moment for me reading this. My wife recently bought me some Brooks Brothers polo shirts that essentially dissolved the first time they were washed. I had never seen a shirt that was such poor quality. We were both flabbergasted, and the employees apparently gave her a bit of a hard time when she tried to return them.
I suppose I now know why.
What this company is doing is taking advantage of, and really creating, adverse selection. They buy a brand for its reputation, destroy everything that made it worthwhile and abuse the information asymmetry of the public still believing they're buying the now non-existent brand. It could be seen very easily as a form of fraud.
Brooks has their "factory outlet" crap that is also what you're likely to see at "overstock" stores like Nordstrom Rack (or TJ Max, though I'm not sure they get Brooks-branded stuff; NR does). That entire market is basically one big decentralized fraud operation, they took a model that used to involve selling brands' real goods that had, for whatever reason, not sold well or had minor quality defects, at steep discounts, and replaced that with pretending to do that but actually selling terrible trash with a "nice" brand label on it. "Factory" and "overstock" stores are basically a complete lie that the FTC hasn't seen fit to do anything about because the government is captured by rich crime-loving assholes. They exist solely to trick you into over-paying for Walmart tier crap.
BB's main-line stuff has also been declining in quality, so that's no guarantee either, unfortunately. I think Covid ended most or all of their remaining US production, which was already on the way out.
Some sub-labels like 1818 are still OK. On sale. Even Brooks' best stuff hasn't been worth full price since... IDK, the '90s probably.
I hear complaints about 401k balances dropping. But I don’t think I’ve heard complaints about it not going fast enough because we haven’t had a long period of slow stock market growth in a long time.
How many folks within five to ten years of retirement do you talk to? If you’re surrounded by people under 50, you probably wouldn’t hear much about it.
It's frustrating that it's hard to know what's going to be good quality.
I bought a base layer years ago that basically fell apart after 1 month. It was like it was made of tissue paper. I bought a different one that has been AWESOME and has lasted 4 years so far with no signs of wear.
Definitely feels like fraud to me too.
Kind of reminds me of Amazon listings where some seller has some decent quality product, collects a lot of high reviews, then uses the same listing and does a complete switcharoo to a much shittier more profitable product, replacing images and the description, but keeping the higher rating from earlier. Which also to me sounds like fraud.
At least the Chinese brands don’t try and hide it much like the companies listed here, they’ll just generate a new 5-letter new company to sell low quality crap.
I (or really, my parents) were burned by something like this recently. They bought my kid an FAO Schwarz marble run tower for Christmas. It's made of terrible plastic, with rough seams, and every play session ends when a marble gets stuck somewhere nearly impossible to reach. It requires partial disassembly, bending, and a screwdriver to pry things out.
I was shocked that an FAO Schwarz toy sucked so much. I looked at reviews on Amazon to see if anyone else had these problems, and they had. The FAO Schwarz brand had been bought by the ThreeSixty Group in 2016. Now it's just a way to polish the image of cheap toys.
This is one of the reasons 3D printers are becoming a lot more common in homes not inhabited by the sort of geek/nerd like me who you would (correctly) assume owned a 3D printer or two.
Yes, something you print yourself will likely be lower quality than a bought one from years ago and you'll pay more in material and time than buying a new one will cost, but... it may be no worse quality than a new bought set, possibly better, replacement parts can be reproduced easily or additional parts added to the set cheaply (no buying a full set to get a couple of extra pieces that you want) and things can be customised.
One of the bigger 3D catalogue sites (I think MakerWorld, but without checking I'm not 100% certain) ran a marble-run themed contest some months ago for which there were a lot of interesting entries, some just copies of basic parts/sets (great if that is what you are looking for) but also some that were more innovative than that. If you have a printer, or know someone who has, it might be worth you looking into that if your kid would appreciate a new set, there are a lot of free designs¹ out there you could experiment with.
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[1] and paid ones, some designers try to make a living this way and some of them produce designs that are well worth the cost as they may be free of issues more amateur designs could have
I bought a teddy bear from them in 2014 and another in 2025. It's night and day. The earlier one is really high quality, the newer one feels like I won it from a claw machine.
FAO's used to be a prestige NYC brand. Of course, they carried many other branded products but those were mostly top-shelf (and expensive) as well. A LOT of formerly pretty high quality brands have ended up getting sold off to brand management companies and the like. I just got a few pairs of shoes from AllBirds because while the name will live on I have no doubt the quality will become pretty generic now that it's no longer a Silicon Valley must-have thing.
Support brands with values and local manufacturing. For example: American Giant, Origin, Crye Precision, Randolph Engineering, American Optical, and many more.
+1 on Origin. 100% of their good are built from American-grown/made materials, built by American hands. It's wayyyy more expensive than most common brands ($99 for a pair of jeans), but if you compare them to "luxury" brands like Lululemon, it's comparable and wasn't manufactured using slave labor.
Personally, I love using Origin for everything I can afford to use them for. I acknowledge not everyone has the privilege to spend $99 on a pair of jeans, but if you find yourself able, I think it's worthy to support American manufacturing.
Shout out to American Giant. I have like 15 t-shirts from them, some are ten years old and they look new. Buying good stuff saves money in the long run!
> The important piece of information is "is this brand good, right now, when I'm looking to make a purchase."
Right, which is the very thing that makes branding less than useful. You have to research everything before every purchase regardless of the brand precisely because the brand is no longer a good indicator of quality. That means that the brand doesn't mean much. Just because a brand signified high-quality goods yesterday doesn't mean it signifies the same today.
I can confidently say I use and enjoy almost all of those brands. A great litmus test for whether a company makes good products is whether they make them locally enough for the CEO to regularly visit the factory.
A somewhat humorous example is System76, where their US built stuff (cases, keyboards) are made with relatively thick aluminum and are surprisingly sturdy, while their laptops can be flimsy and are less ruggidly build. I think it's easier to say "good enough" when your laptop ships from clevo and you don't have a real choice in the build quality
You can notice the quality difference when things are actually built to last. I work a lot with electronics and need good work-holding tools. I didn't use to focus on that and just bought cheap crap. I then heard of PanaVise (made in Reno, NV) and got their tools, absolutely SOLID. Over-built, heavy and built to LAST!
I still use my System76 Gazelle Pro laptop I bought in 2014. The battery lasts for barely an hour but the machine still works great and is still my daily driver for my personal use. The plastic feels a bit cheap but it has held up just fine.
We really shouldn't be creating and allowing a society where the rich can get rich off of destroying the quality of life for everyone else. Smells like guaranteed eventual revolution to me.
Also, don't these people understand that they are destroying everything they was good. Like, surely they understand through all the corporate speak and distended responsibilities that they are directly making everyone's lives worse, for profit. If they do it to toys, to electronics, to websites, apps, then they do it to housing, to Healthcare, to education, to food, to survival itself. These people are literally, intentionally ruining as many people's lives as much as possible in the most effective way they can other than walking down the street shooting random people. Likely, the distributed and multiplied increments of shittifying add up to much more than killing some people, and yet we let them get away with it.
Is there any kind of legal framework that can take into account quality of life? I assume it would be pretty distopian in other ways. But when the "market" exists only to consolidate power into rich peoples hands so they can steal more and more and more from people who aren't rich, isn't that at least a crime of the soul?
Last question. If every hedgefund, private equity group was dissolved overnight, and prevented from ever being recreated. The owners forced to find a way to survive that didn't destroy others hard work, what would we lose? I'm sure they provide some kind of actual service for literally anyone other than making rich people richer right? But what? What is it that these financial frameworks actually do that helps anyone?
They do it because, In the words of Gordon Gecko, they can.
To them, theres a never ending line of hungry vultures right behind them, and if they do not do it, someone will take their place and do it and profit from it. So naturally they MUST do it, because it will inevitably be done also.
> What is it that these financial frameworks actually do that helps anyone?
They are supposed to clean out inefficiencies in economies. They theoretically expose weakness and exploit it, so it can be rebuilt stronger.
Its hard to argue against the premise - In a true capitalistic system. The problem is, the good old USA is a crony capitalistic system, and the politicians are for sale. When private equity can simply erode your business structure with policy, and then buy you out. It is not real capitalism.
At the end of the day, capitalism is the best system we have. The problem is the corruption of man, until we patch that bug, its going to keep causing these exploitable buffer overflows. Unfortunately, the code is in our limbic system, which is really old legacy code
I recently had to gift someone some books, so I decided to try B&N online shipping since Amazon sometimes damages books. I ordered 3 books: all 3 came loose in a big box, all 3 were damaged: they looked like used books, unacceptable as a gift. I returned them, they didn't have ship-to-store option (which was what Gemini was telling me to push for), and they sent me new ones: all 3 arrived damaged, again. It turns out, B&N is worse than Amazon: 100% book damage rate on 6 books, worse customer support, worse return policy, worse everything. Enshitification 100%.
I have found basically no way to buy books online where they don't arrive damaged at this point. I've gone through multiple return/rebuy cycles with Amazon trying to get an undamaged copy and have just given up. I don't know if it's my local distribution center, but it's something like 90% damaged on arrival at this point.
Amazon has had massive quality reduction over the years in their service, but this one and the poor-quality knock-off books are the ones that bother me most.
When people talk about AI replacing jobs, this is what it will look like. Companies that care about quality will use AI to make humans more productive and enhance their overall offering. Companies that only care about profit (read: most) will fire people, add in AI, and ship garbage. Other CEOs will see the results (read: profits) and copy this. We'll end up with shittier products and services than before and not much else.
The author of website will be flooded with submissions about almost every known brand.
Instead of ledger of bad brands it should track brands that remain, - it will be a lot easier and less work.
Same with household appliances. Most of the familiar names are shadows of their former selves. Unlike in clothes though the quality alternatives are usually really expensive.
Author here. Good catch... you're right. The wool is still woven in Pendleton and Washougal, but finished product sourcing is a mix and some blankets are now assembled offshore. Will update the Ledger entry and the essay today.
Why are you writing this and what's your goal? Are you actually checking every fact in the articles?
I think you'd do well to cite a lot more of your sources, especially given the AI concerns. Cite legal filings, public records, reddit comments, whatever. Verifiability would help.
I had to buy a new "Hudson Bay" blanket after a fire. There's apparently still a good mill in Minnesota that produces a look-alike and the product seems really nice. But a lot of the traditional brands are pretty mediocre at this point.
I've been seeing fabric from their US mill, but manufacturing elsewhere (like the DR) for years.
So far I've done OK assuming anything they make that's not 100% wool is cheap trash they're using to cash in on the name (they sell cotton shirts, and linen-cotton blends, and some synthetic blends—all extremely suspect, I avoid these at any price) but the 100% wool stuff is OK even if the construction's not in the US. That's served me well so far, but I reckon it's only a matter of time before they fully enshittify. Luckily their heavier shirts last years and years with occasional mending of e.g. tears (if you wear them as actual work and outdoors-activities shirts, you're gonna tear them sometimes).
The interesting thing here is that this is about brands being bought out of bankruptcy and licensed. The trademark system in the US exists to prevent consumer confusion, one might think that if a company ceases to exist, the trademark shouldn’t survive.
I was surprised by the bit about Costco selling the outlet-tier trash. I don't currently have a membership, but I've generally understood their position to be quality at cost.
I used to love Brooks Brothers shirt, I would get them used and wear them to rags and they were the best.
The Duluth Trading Company runs cringe ads in my opinion but I traded my evil twin's old black Carhartt coat for a red Duluth coat that my son got from his last employer with a small monogram for my winter phase foxographer costume and it is 100% great.
> Champion was acquired from HanesBrands in October 2024 for $1.2 billion...
I was wondering why these shirts went to hell. This was probably my favorite brand in the 2010s. Super durable and thick cotton shirts. I'd still be wearing them if I hadn't gained weight.
I think there's a lot of hidden inflation in this. Or, if not outright inflation, something similar to it.
Look at what it costs to get a work shirt (I mean, for physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s or ordered by the US military in the 1940s, which in neither case could be regarded as super-fancy. You're probably looking at minimum $150.
You want a button-up shirt that isn't total shit? Over $100. On clearance.
You "can" dress in cheaper alternatives, but those are so bad that their equivalent in the 1930s effectively didn't exist as a new product. You'd be looking at second- or third-hand good (by modern standards, not necessarily anything remarkable for the time, see again those work shirts) clothes, or some simply-constructed homemade garment.
On the plus(?) side we now have clothes so cheap that even though they develop holes or split seams within months, they're not worth repairing even for fairly-poor people, which is... something.
Dressing yourself in new clothes is a lot cheaper now. Dressing yourself in the same quality of new clothes? Maybe not.
[EDIT: This goes for plenty of stuff that's not clothes, and with more-recent products to compare them to. I've learned though my wife buying toys for our kids that modern standard-tier Barbies are trash compared to the ones from the '80s, fewer points of articulation, far worse cloth for the clothes, weaker construction, and fewer pieces of clothing or other accessories included. You have to buy from "fancier" Barbie product lines that are way more expensive, or buy non-Barbie dolls that cost a lot more than a modern entry-level Barbie, to get something that's actually similar to a standard Barbie doll in the '80s. So if you look at just "what did a Barbie cost 40 years ago versus today?" you'll get a misleading idea of how those costs have changed, because the actual comp to a modern standard-tier Barbie is some terrible, cheap Barbie knock-off from the Dollar Tree or wherever, in 1986; the cost to get the same-quality product, regardless of brand, has increased a lot more than whatever the cost difference is between a basic 1986 Barbie and a basic 2026 Barbie]
This is such an important point. So much of inflation is not $THING used to cost $X and now costs $Y, but that $THING is significantly lower quality than it used to be. Quality is famously difficult to quantify (Pirsig), so it is much easier to manipulate it without people noticing. A product that looks the same, but is slightly worse, at purchase time is a lot harder to identify than the same product that costs 20% more, so businesses prefer it.
That happens incrementally over years, until the product is a shadow of its former self.
> Look at what it costs to get a work shirt (I mean, for physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s or ordered by the US military in the 1940s, which in neither case could be regarded as super-fancy. You're probably looking at minimum $150.
Of course, this is still cheaper than it was in the 1940s. With my disposable income I could afford to buy a few $150 shirts a month. A worker of my social class in the 1940s could not.
I don't need the quality so I buy $5 Gildan shirts instead. I do buy Made in Canada cat toys for my little guy though. Different priorities.
Multiple $150 shirts per month? That's vastly out of range for the vast majority of human beings alive in the United States right now. I know i definitely could not afford a $300-$450/month increase in expenditure, it would literally bankrupt me. I've already had to sell all the stocks i had just to stay afloat renting and eating normal home made good food in a not so expensive city as a relatively high paid graduate student. There's like hundreds of thousands of people in this city making less than I am. Certainly some of them are working physical labor, blue collar jobs. There's a certain tendency to assume that we are the average in income, no matter where we are. And since going back to school and living near $0 savings for years I've learned that what i thought before was very very wrong. Assuming every blue collar worker can afford multiple $150 shirts per month is wild. I'm sure lots of them are well paid, but that's just not realistic for the a huge portion of people working in America now
I don't know what the right term is but yeah it's not quite inflation. IIRC households pre-ww2 were spending 15% of their budget on clothing, and the farther back you go the higher that gets even to the point where the concept of "budget" breaks down and the entire family's activities were oriented around procuring food and cloth.
Good fabric has always been and is still very expensive! We have created much cheaper alternatives but if you want the quality your predecessors had you better be prepared to look 15% of your household budget in the face. Homemade isn't even an alternative here. Most of the cost of good clothing is in the fabric and there's just no way around this.
If we go with that 15% of household budget, that would be something like 10k and people used to buy a lot less clothing back then than they do today, probably less than 10 items a year. Now, if you take 1k you can probably find a tailor who makes you well tailored trousers, and another 1k for a jacket. This is not how we shop for clothing today, the productivity gains go into fast fashion, being able to buy trousers each month.
I'm not completely sure and I only have the insight of an interested hobbyist here but I don't think it's a single reason.
A lot of it is that the production improvements have mostly been in developing processes for synthetic replacements. Natural fibers are agricultural products: wool comes from sheep, that are raised on land, harvested and processed by skilled laborers, with natural variance in the input & output; linen, cotton, silk different variants of the same constraints. Polyester is not like this and it indeed can scale vastly and be very cheap. Rayon can be produced from basically any cellulose input so same.
So a lot of what would be productive gains have just shifted over to these other modes. Cotton is the main natural fiber the industry focuses on and it is mostly a lot cheaper now than it was in the past.
This is an excellent analysis. It's also why I stopped considering a brand as an indicator of quality (in either direction) a long time ago. That something is a recognizable brand doesn't really mean much.
Extracting any useful signal from brands requires keeping up with news about the businesses, and keeping track of various sub-labels and the hieroglyphic knowledge to distinguish them, which is so fucking tedious but is still easier than evaluating every single garment you're interested in in-person (and developing the skills and knowledge to perform that evaluation).
Or you just have enough money to buy only from less-widely-known but actually-good brands and don't worry much about price. The ones that haven't started cashing in on their "high class" branding by moving down-market toward the middle class... yet.
This is the rational response to this "financialization" of brands, and it leads to high-quality goods being chased out of the market entirely (see "The Market for Lemons"), except for ultra-expensive niche brands
Super interesting -- outside the premise which we all know to be true. What is their goal here -- to crowdsource information so that we have a public record of note for companies? What are they planning to do with that information etc?
Author here. The goal is a permanent public record of who owns what, and what that ownership has done to the product, so consumers can make informed purchasing decisions. The long-form essays are the investigations, the Brand Ledger is the ongoing reference. Readers tip me on brands to dig into, and entries get updated as news and reader reports come in.
Consumers have power to affect change with their dollars... providing they have the right information
Can you make this but for local health services so I don’t end up at a dentist owned be PE who spend more time hard selling me than cleaning during appointments?
> Super interesting -- outside the premise which we all know to be true.
Obviously we do not "all know it to be true," since this business model works.
> What is their goal here -- to crowdsource information so that we have a public record of note for companies? What are they planning to do with that information etc?
This website? You kinda make it sound like a conspiracy. This seems like basic consumer advocacy: identify a problem, get the information out there so consumers can make better choices and not be fooled, and maybe (a long-shot) get some kind of cultural or legislative change to solve the problem.
Speaking of the latter, it would probably be a good idea to change bankruptcy law so that brands and trademarks cannot be sold in liquidation (at least without the associated business operations). Practices like the article describe undermine the social value of a trademark, and turn them into an opportunity for deception.
Though with these kinds of blogs, if it gets successful and influential, eventually it may just turn to a pay-to-play. IIRC, that's what happened to "mattress review" blogs.
They're iterating AI-written consumer populist blog posts and using us as guinea pigs, until we stop noticing they're AI. Their last one was "Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose", which we did great on. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777209, flagged off main page)
Don't let them get away with this, they're using a topic that we all appreciate specifically to divide our reactions into "if it's AI, it's good! What's the problem?" and god knows what the actual endgame is. But it's certainly not Palantir maintaining a consumer rights blog.
FWIW fact check is great, their RAG stuff works fine. But the unsourced "anonymous anecdotes" are made up, can't find backing for any of them and they're sort of entry-level rage-bait. (ex. DC shoes snowboard boots now designed in Florida by people that never designed snowboard boot)
I'm going to admit I'm emotionally invested in this blog. I really enjoyed this write up.
I'm troubled by your statement because I can't tell if you are saying it is incorrect and AI made it and therefore BAD. Or if you are just saying AI made it and therefore BAD.
Writing is at such a precipice. Every time I compose an email, gmail underlines every single sentence to say there is a better and more concise way of saying it. I feel stupid so I generally accept it. Isn't this AI writing as well? But, the thoughts and intentions are mine.
How is this different here? The author is pointing out really relevant information that I know anecdotally to be true. If that story is 85% written by AI, or 15% written by AI, I still see the human behind it.
I'm troubled by AI writing, don't get me wrong. But, it deserves further thought. (And, I also have strong negative bias towards palantir...)
If the byline said "written with AI assistance, anecdotes verified," I'd have no issue. The problem isn't the tool, it's the undisclosed institutional author using a sympathetic topic as a vehicle.
Editing suggestions are qualitatively different from writing the thing wholesale.
The anecdotes appear fabricated. I couldn't source the DC Shoes / Florida designer claim.
Generally, I'm sympathetic towards this worldview, and it would be disruptive to its impact to have obviously AI-written articles being passed around as authoritative grounding.
Even if 100% correct and verifiable, "obviously AI-written" and "100% correct" is enough for people who aren't as sympathetic as us to the overall point to dismiss it.
I'm sympathetic to their case, the phrase I'm trying to make happen is "AI DDOS'ing" - we can't people new to the material to read and verify endless reams of words, they approach infinity in the limit.
This feels like the new frontier for "journalism": can we easily verify it?
That feels like a step in the right direction, regardless of how it happens.
People like Steve Bannon know this, and have called what you describe "flooding the zone" and it works. Our brains can't process excess information so we search for simple answers. AI will make this exponentially more effective as a tactic for spreading narratives.
Can we have something like this blog that's not AI slop? Please!
This is an illustration of why AI is terrible: it just destroys trust. Is the blog good or bad? It's really hard to tell without putting in more work than it'd take to write a similar article.
At least in the pre-AI days, if you saw polished writing, it meant someone at least put some effort into it.
gross. I want to unread it now. annoying because this kind of brand degradation is something important to me. but that's not enough to make me read a Palantir AI dude.
I was working on a grant application a few days back, tl;dr: color science x LACMA, big art museum in LA. Opus 4.7 told me to include my AP exam scores from _19 years ago_. I took 13 in one year, which is highly rare, but certainly not CV/grant application material at 37 years old, and it didn't need to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find something to say.
Is there a review platform that focuses on brands, rather than on stores? For instance, if I look for Brooks Brothers reviews, I get reviews of individual stores, of their website, and a couple articles talking about the business. It seems like a good way to combat the information asymmetry being exploited here would be a trustworthy (I know, good luck) review platform that focuses on overall brands, rather than specific outlet channels. This seems like it ought to exist, but I'm not aware of where.
It seems like that may be partly what this site is trying to build with the ledger, but it looks focused only on the "bad".
Author here. The Ledger is designed to cover both sides. 59 Approved brands right now, 31 on Watchlist, plus the Avoid list and Former Great. It's meant to answer "what's still worth buying" just as much as "what's not."
It's a living document and has just been released - will be expanded quickly
Very curious to see what you do with it. I like the premise very much and will be checking back to see how it develops.
Just as feedback, the reason I got the feeling that it was largely focused on "the bad" is that the "approved" entries seem much lower signal. For instance, I opened Leatherman to get a sense of why it was approved, but there was essentially no information there other than ownership. Maybe that's your focus, but it's a little difficult to get a sense of why I should be confident in it as a buyer.
Best luck with the project, it seems like meaningful work.
Trawling Reddit with great care and a critical eye, plus obscurer topic-specific forums, is the best solution I've come up with. Though even those are full lies-for-pay (advertising) especially on Reddit.
Buy the cheapest thing available. They won't have the money to screw you and they can't mismanage any extra money you want to give to charity if you don't let them touch it.
I am picky about what shoes I wear because I have toebox trouble. I used to like Brooks the best but the price has skyrocketed and I think they are going in the direction of fashion over quality. Now my mainstay is Pumas but I have a pair of New Balance shoes I am carefully breaking in that might enhance the gait of a character I play but also put a lot of stress on my legs.
Once in a while I find a $35 shoe at Walmart that is compatible with my feet and looks great and lasts about half as long as $70 shoe but most of the time Walmart doesn't have them in stock which is sad.
In the business of apparel, I think this is a natural consequence of high-end buyers turning their noses up at long-lived brands, and working to differentiate themselves from mainstream middle-class buyers. It's a revolt against modernism making more and more goods accessible to people outside the economic and cultural elite.
If you're fancy, what do you do when mass production and the internet make the markers of fanciness accessible to the very people you're trying to be fancier than? For one, you stigmatize mass production and elevate artisanal handmade goods. Those are inherently impossible to democratize. Another thing you can do is replace the appreciation of quality with the act of discovery as proof of elevated taste. Make taste a moving target, so the dirty unwashed masses are always a step behind.
Brands like Brooks Brothers or Eddie Bauer have no place in this system. The best the masses can do to imitate the elites is buy cheap fast fashion from brands that go viral and don't live long enough for anyone to know their quality before they're gone.
> If you're fancy, what do you do when mass production and the internet make the markers of fanciness accessible to the very people you're trying to be fancier than?
We need a Manhattan Project for curing Cluster B disorders.
one thing to note (I didn't see it in the article or the comments as of this moment) but a thing that happened a lot with eg LL Bean was, people were buying old Bean stuff from yard sales and so on, then returning it for a new one, under the lifetime warranty. The implicit "customer for life" cycle was thus broken, and they were giving all-but-free stuff to people who had little intention of ever buying new.
Part of the marketing for a consumer hostile change like this is cooking up a reason to blame the victim.
Look at the implicit assumptions we're supposed to make in the story you shared, like there was some point in time when people decided to start abusing the policy, necessitating the change. Like people cared about new ll bean so much they'd scour garage sales and do the return fraud. Like they hadn't built this margin into their product to begin with. Like they didn't have a dozen other ways to address these trends, if they were actually happening. (like restricting the policy to original purchasers, requiring you to have a receipt, tracking it themselves, etc)
It really seems like hogwash if you think about it critically. They just wanted to expand their margins, simplify bookkeeping, etc.
This is entirely by design. From a shareholder's perspective, the only thing that matters is number go up, when you take over a struggling company, they will squeeze every last drop of life from it in order to get some profit.
The fact that they are being quite secretive about their outsourcing, or at least not publishing it as a restructuring plan that they lay out to customers, is a little scummy, but makes sense for private equity. Milk as many people as they can while they still trust the brand.
From a shareholder's perspective, it's working as expected. And that's the real issue. If brands took more care of not expanding too fast that they require private equity and give away their ownership of the company slowly, then with patience and customer respect, we see its a good mix. But it seems people just get greedy or something and want it all faster.
Well someone had to pay for rich peoples yacht money. And since these 1000x hard workers don't find the amount of money they would earn with a honest product acceptable they buy a good brand and sell it out, riding the lucrative downwards curve at the cost of the environment, the employees, the subcontractors, the customer.
Some people disrespect drug addicts, homeless people or sex workers. To me the people behind such practises are below contempt.
> Wait for a beloved brand to hit financial trouble. Buy the intellectual property out of bankruptcy: the name, the logo, the trademarks.
The alternative is to shut down. That's how this whole system works: the brand can be sold, because the alternative is to cease existing.
I hate that the brand is worthwhile on its own. But: that's the point! The company invested in making the brand worth something by having it represent a promise. That promise isn't worth anything when the brand can be sold separately from the process of making the thing. The brand continues to be worth something, though.
This mechanism is a core feature of capitalism. Companies can be sold for parts, and those parts can lie to consumers. There's almost certainly a regulatory answer, but the behavior of the roll-up firms isn't unique to any particular firm. It's exactly the kind of value extraction the system is designed to support.
> Billabong board shorts lasted a decade of salt water and sun,
I've had a Billabong orange t-shirt last almost 15 years of sun and salt water from time to time, one of the best clothes-related purchases I've ever made. Sad to see that that's now a thing of the past.
Just but either professional (as in practitioners of a trade us it) or military products — those tend to be much better than “consumers” products.
They cost more but they will last a lifetime.
Of course not super applicable to every aspect of fashion, but I’ve been doing this for all kinds of products for years and was never disappointed.
For fashion I would recommend to hit up small designers, ideally someone you know personally. It will cost more but look amazing and last many years.
> Just but either professional (as in practitioners of a trade us it) or military products — those tend to be much better than “consumers” products. They cost more but they will last a lifetime.
Eh, I'm not sure that's such good advice. IIRC, I remember stumbling across tacticool "military grade" USB thumb drives, for instance. I doubt those are any better than your typical name-brand drive. "Professional" seems to be an often used marketing keyword to indicate quality or power (e.g. "Mac Pro").
Some keywords that may work better are "industrial" and "commercial," they don't have the same ring to them as "professional" and "military grade."
Political and economic orders or systems matter, of course, but ultimately, even good ones fail, because ultimately all political/social/economic orders depend on the quality of their participants. No system can neutralize the effects of human vice and stupidity as such, because every system is the product of the actions of those very same people.
If capitalism is about meeting market demands apart from any objective sense of quality, then yes. It's basically curve fitting.
The reason things are shittier is because the market is shittier. Consumer demands shape what companies make and sell. If companies can get away with selling garbage, because the market is undiscerning, then they will make garbage.
It's the same with politics. Ultimately, the quality of a political culture is determined by its participants.
The real problem isn't capitalism, but consumerism, which, among other defects, prioritizes the maximization of quantity over quality.
Funny baader-meinhof moment for me reading this. My wife recently bought me some Brooks Brothers polo shirts that essentially dissolved the first time they were washed. I had never seen a shirt that was such poor quality. We were both flabbergasted, and the employees apparently gave her a bit of a hard time when she tried to return them.
I suppose I now know why.
What this company is doing is taking advantage of, and really creating, adverse selection. They buy a brand for its reputation, destroy everything that made it worthwhile and abuse the information asymmetry of the public still believing they're buying the now non-existent brand. It could be seen very easily as a form of fraud.
Brooks has their "factory outlet" crap that is also what you're likely to see at "overstock" stores like Nordstrom Rack (or TJ Max, though I'm not sure they get Brooks-branded stuff; NR does). That entire market is basically one big decentralized fraud operation, they took a model that used to involve selling brands' real goods that had, for whatever reason, not sold well or had minor quality defects, at steep discounts, and replaced that with pretending to do that but actually selling terrible trash with a "nice" brand label on it. "Factory" and "overstock" stores are basically a complete lie that the FTC hasn't seen fit to do anything about because the government is captured by rich crime-loving assholes. They exist solely to trick you into over-paying for Walmart tier crap.
BB's main-line stuff has also been declining in quality, so that's no guarantee either, unfortunately. I think Covid ended most or all of their remaining US production, which was already on the way out.
Some sub-labels like 1818 are still OK. On sale. Even Brooks' best stuff hasn't been worth full price since... IDK, the '90s probably.
> the government is captured by rich crime-loving assholes
It’s funny how fast average joe complains when a lack of economic growth slows down their 401k’s though…
Edit: Apparently I’m surrounded by non-standard Joe
Is selling substandard trash at premium prices really "growth"? What are we growing?
I hear complaints about 401k balances dropping. But I don’t think I’ve heard complaints about it not going fast enough because we haven’t had a long period of slow stock market growth in a long time.
Does he? I don't think I've ever heard that complaint.
How many folks within five to ten years of retirement do you talk to? If you’re surrounded by people under 50, you probably wouldn’t hear much about it.
I'm surrounded by people in that age group (I'm one of them, even), and I don't remember any of them talking about this.
It's frustrating that it's hard to know what's going to be good quality.
I bought a base layer years ago that basically fell apart after 1 month. It was like it was made of tissue paper. I bought a different one that has been AWESOME and has lasted 4 years so far with no signs of wear.
Definitely feels like fraud to me too. Kind of reminds me of Amazon listings where some seller has some decent quality product, collects a lot of high reviews, then uses the same listing and does a complete switcharoo to a much shittier more profitable product, replacing images and the description, but keeping the higher rating from earlier. Which also to me sounds like fraud.
At least the Chinese brands don’t try and hide it much like the companies listed here, they’ll just generate a new 5-letter new company to sell low quality crap.
hmm... but that doesn't guarantee that the customer will buy from "my main brand"
rather, if I know A is a "family brand" of B(rooks bro?), then I'll try to NOT buy from A, and buy from C/D/E/F/G/etc instead
I (or really, my parents) were burned by something like this recently. They bought my kid an FAO Schwarz marble run tower for Christmas. It's made of terrible plastic, with rough seams, and every play session ends when a marble gets stuck somewhere nearly impossible to reach. It requires partial disassembly, bending, and a screwdriver to pry things out.
I was shocked that an FAO Schwarz toy sucked so much. I looked at reviews on Amazon to see if anyone else had these problems, and they had. The FAO Schwarz brand had been bought by the ThreeSixty Group in 2016. Now it's just a way to polish the image of cheap toys.
This is one of the reasons 3D printers are becoming a lot more common in homes not inhabited by the sort of geek/nerd like me who you would (correctly) assume owned a 3D printer or two.
Yes, something you print yourself will likely be lower quality than a bought one from years ago and you'll pay more in material and time than buying a new one will cost, but... it may be no worse quality than a new bought set, possibly better, replacement parts can be reproduced easily or additional parts added to the set cheaply (no buying a full set to get a couple of extra pieces that you want) and things can be customised.
One of the bigger 3D catalogue sites (I think MakerWorld, but without checking I'm not 100% certain) ran a marble-run themed contest some months ago for which there were a lot of interesting entries, some just copies of basic parts/sets (great if that is what you are looking for) but also some that were more innovative than that. If you have a printer, or know someone who has, it might be worth you looking into that if your kid would appreciate a new set, there are a lot of free designs¹ out there you could experiment with.
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[1] and paid ones, some designers try to make a living this way and some of them produce designs that are well worth the cost as they may be free of issues more amateur designs could have
I bought a teddy bear from them in 2014 and another in 2025. It's night and day. The earlier one is really high quality, the newer one feels like I won it from a claw machine.
Yo, Teddy bear from a claw machine at the end of the 90’s were high quality btw
FAO's used to be a prestige NYC brand. Of course, they carried many other branded products but those were mostly top-shelf (and expensive) as well. A LOT of formerly pretty high quality brands have ended up getting sold off to brand management companies and the like. I just got a few pairs of shoes from AllBirds because while the name will live on I have no doubt the quality will become pretty generic now that it's no longer a Silicon Valley must-have thing.
Support brands with values and local manufacturing. For example: American Giant, Origin, Crye Precision, Randolph Engineering, American Optical, and many more.
+1 on Origin. 100% of their good are built from American-grown/made materials, built by American hands. It's wayyyy more expensive than most common brands ($99 for a pair of jeans), but if you compare them to "luxury" brands like Lululemon, it's comparable and wasn't manufactured using slave labor.
Personally, I love using Origin for everything I can afford to use them for. I acknowledge not everyone has the privilege to spend $99 on a pair of jeans, but if you find yourself able, I think it's worthy to support American manufacturing.
Shout out to American Giant. I have like 15 t-shirts from them, some are ten years old and they look new. Buying good stuff saves money in the long run!
Same here.. i bulk buy tons of AG (American Giant) t-shirts (Premium Slub Crew Tee is awesome) and tons of their jeans too.
Interesting. Hadn't heard of American Giant. I buy AG Jeans and Robert Barakett shirts, and this is my usual outfit. However, AG Jeans (https://www.agjeans.com/) is distinct from American Giant jeans (https://www.american-giant.com/collections/mens-bottoms).
I also struggle to identify quality brands. Generally just shop at Nordstorm.
I meant American Giant jeans https://www.american-giant.com/collections/mens-bottoms :)
Is there any reason to believe that the same carpet-pull won't occur with those brands?
I thought the whole trick was arbitrage on the delayed awareness of reduced quality.
> Is there any reason to believe that the same carpet-pull won't occur with those brands?
No, but nothing's forever. The important piece of information is "is this brand good, right now, when I'm looking to make a purchase."
> The important piece of information is "is this brand good, right now, when I'm looking to make a purchase."
Right, which is the very thing that makes branding less than useful. You have to research everything before every purchase regardless of the brand precisely because the brand is no longer a good indicator of quality. That means that the brand doesn't mean much. Just because a brand signified high-quality goods yesterday doesn't mean it signifies the same today.
And, before major purchases, check to make sure that private equity firm has not bought them.
I can confidently say I use and enjoy almost all of those brands. A great litmus test for whether a company makes good products is whether they make them locally enough for the CEO to regularly visit the factory.
A somewhat humorous example is System76, where their US built stuff (cases, keyboards) are made with relatively thick aluminum and are surprisingly sturdy, while their laptops can be flimsy and are less ruggidly build. I think it's easier to say "good enough" when your laptop ships from clevo and you don't have a real choice in the build quality
You can notice the quality difference when things are actually built to last. I work a lot with electronics and need good work-holding tools. I didn't use to focus on that and just bought cheap crap. I then heard of PanaVise (made in Reno, NV) and got their tools, absolutely SOLID. Over-built, heavy and built to LAST!
I still use my System76 Gazelle Pro laptop I bought in 2014. The battery lasts for barely an hour but the machine still works great and is still my daily driver for my personal use. The plastic feels a bit cheap but it has held up just fine.
Wasn't System76 working on a laptop? Whatever happened to that?
Private equity destroys everything it touches
Lots of brands are public and also shit now.
Perhaps the issue is that MBAs are ruining everything?
Pivot from shoes to Ai for a quick 580% gain.
except for the shareholder's wallets. sometimes.
We really shouldn't be creating and allowing a society where the rich can get rich off of destroying the quality of life for everyone else. Smells like guaranteed eventual revolution to me.
Also, don't these people understand that they are destroying everything they was good. Like, surely they understand through all the corporate speak and distended responsibilities that they are directly making everyone's lives worse, for profit. If they do it to toys, to electronics, to websites, apps, then they do it to housing, to Healthcare, to education, to food, to survival itself. These people are literally, intentionally ruining as many people's lives as much as possible in the most effective way they can other than walking down the street shooting random people. Likely, the distributed and multiplied increments of shittifying add up to much more than killing some people, and yet we let them get away with it.
Is there any kind of legal framework that can take into account quality of life? I assume it would be pretty distopian in other ways. But when the "market" exists only to consolidate power into rich peoples hands so they can steal more and more and more from people who aren't rich, isn't that at least a crime of the soul?
Last question. If every hedgefund, private equity group was dissolved overnight, and prevented from ever being recreated. The owners forced to find a way to survive that didn't destroy others hard work, what would we lose? I'm sure they provide some kind of actual service for literally anyone other than making rich people richer right? But what? What is it that these financial frameworks actually do that helps anyone?
They do it because, In the words of Gordon Gecko, they can.
To them, theres a never ending line of hungry vultures right behind them, and if they do not do it, someone will take their place and do it and profit from it. So naturally they MUST do it, because it will inevitably be done also.
> What is it that these financial frameworks actually do that helps anyone?
They are supposed to clean out inefficiencies in economies. They theoretically expose weakness and exploit it, so it can be rebuilt stronger.
Its hard to argue against the premise - In a true capitalistic system. The problem is, the good old USA is a crony capitalistic system, and the politicians are for sale. When private equity can simply erode your business structure with policy, and then buy you out. It is not real capitalism.
At the end of the day, capitalism is the best system we have. The problem is the corruption of man, until we patch that bug, its going to keep causing these exploitable buffer overflows. Unfortunately, the code is in our limbic system, which is really old legacy code
I think they know what they're doing and have no reason to care. Why would they? They're getting rich.
Also Barnes & Noble weirdly
You're trying to say they are good quality!?
I recently had to gift someone some books, so I decided to try B&N online shipping since Amazon sometimes damages books. I ordered 3 books: all 3 came loose in a big box, all 3 were damaged: they looked like used books, unacceptable as a gift. I returned them, they didn't have ship-to-store option (which was what Gemini was telling me to push for), and they sent me new ones: all 3 arrived damaged, again. It turns out, B&N is worse than Amazon: 100% book damage rate on 6 books, worse customer support, worse return policy, worse everything. Enshitification 100%.
I have found basically no way to buy books online where they don't arrive damaged at this point. I've gone through multiple return/rebuy cycles with Amazon trying to get an undamaged copy and have just given up. I don't know if it's my local distribution center, but it's something like 90% damaged on arrival at this point.
Amazon has had massive quality reduction over the years in their service, but this one and the poor-quality knock-off books are the ones that bother me most.
The ledger seems useful, I expect to consult it when making future purchases: https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/
When people talk about AI replacing jobs, this is what it will look like. Companies that care about quality will use AI to make humans more productive and enhance their overall offering. Companies that only care about profit (read: most) will fire people, add in AI, and ship garbage. Other CEOs will see the results (read: profits) and copy this. We'll end up with shittier products and services than before and not much else.
The author of website will be flooded with submissions about almost every known brand. Instead of ledger of bad brands it should track brands that remain, - it will be a lot easier and less work.
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/status/approved
Same with household appliances. Most of the familiar names are shadows of their former selves. Unlike in clothes though the quality alternatives are usually really expensive.
Love Pendleton but they have moved some production to Mexico and other spots. Check before you buy
For example, Pendleton Ganado Matelassé Blanket | Belk https://share.google/0QaaEXgLnNu0EKClr
Author here. Good catch... you're right. The wool is still woven in Pendleton and Washougal, but finished product sourcing is a mix and some blankets are now assembled offshore. Will update the Ledger entry and the essay today.
Please address the criticisms that this is AI written slop here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47850659.
Why are you writing this and what's your goal? Are you actually checking every fact in the articles?
I think you'd do well to cite a lot more of your sources, especially given the AI concerns. Cite legal filings, public records, reddit comments, whatever. Verifiability would help.
I had to buy a new "Hudson Bay" blanket after a fire. There's apparently still a good mill in Minnesota that produces a look-alike and the product seems really nice. But a lot of the traditional brands are pretty mediocre at this point.
I've been seeing fabric from their US mill, but manufacturing elsewhere (like the DR) for years.
So far I've done OK assuming anything they make that's not 100% wool is cheap trash they're using to cash in on the name (they sell cotton shirts, and linen-cotton blends, and some synthetic blends—all extremely suspect, I avoid these at any price) but the 100% wool stuff is OK even if the construction's not in the US. That's served me well so far, but I reckon it's only a matter of time before they fully enshittify. Luckily their heavier shirts last years and years with occasional mending of e.g. tears (if you wear them as actual work and outdoors-activities shirts, you're gonna tear them sometimes).
The interesting thing here is that this is about brands being bought out of bankruptcy and licensed. The trademark system in the US exists to prevent consumer confusion, one might think that if a company ceases to exist, the trademark shouldn’t survive.
I usually check out this subreddit. It's not perfect, but it's a start: https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife
I was surprised by the bit about Costco selling the outlet-tier trash. I don't currently have a membership, but I've generally understood their position to be quality at cost.
I'm glad they had the "Brands That Still Make Their Own Stuff" list, that was my first thought. What other brands are still decent?
Arcteryx, despite being owned by a larger corporation, is still high quality. Their hardshell jackets are the gold standard.
I've also had success with Mountain Hardware, Outdoor Research (jackets and pants).
(I do search and rescue, so a lot of focus on outdoor stuff. It is also really hard on gear so anything cheaply made gets destroyed pretty quickly.)
Check their ledger for a full database of the goods and bads: https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/
Italicizing every hyperlink makes this strange for the reader as italics are typically used to indicate emphasis.
I used to love Brooks Brothers shirt, I would get them used and wear them to rags and they were the best.
The Duluth Trading Company runs cringe ads in my opinion but I traded my evil twin's old black Carhartt coat for a red Duluth coat that my son got from his last employer with a small monogram for my winter phase foxographer costume and it is 100% great.
> Champion was acquired from HanesBrands in October 2024 for $1.2 billion...
I was wondering why these shirts went to hell. This was probably my favorite brand in the 2010s. Super durable and thick cotton shirts. I'd still be wearing them if I hadn't gained weight.
I think there's a lot of hidden inflation in this. Or, if not outright inflation, something similar to it.
Look at what it costs to get a work shirt (I mean, for physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s or ordered by the US military in the 1940s, which in neither case could be regarded as super-fancy. You're probably looking at minimum $150.
You want a button-up shirt that isn't total shit? Over $100. On clearance.
You "can" dress in cheaper alternatives, but those are so bad that their equivalent in the 1930s effectively didn't exist as a new product. You'd be looking at second- or third-hand good (by modern standards, not necessarily anything remarkable for the time, see again those work shirts) clothes, or some simply-constructed homemade garment.
On the plus(?) side we now have clothes so cheap that even though they develop holes or split seams within months, they're not worth repairing even for fairly-poor people, which is... something.
Dressing yourself in new clothes is a lot cheaper now. Dressing yourself in the same quality of new clothes? Maybe not.
[EDIT: This goes for plenty of stuff that's not clothes, and with more-recent products to compare them to. I've learned though my wife buying toys for our kids that modern standard-tier Barbies are trash compared to the ones from the '80s, fewer points of articulation, far worse cloth for the clothes, weaker construction, and fewer pieces of clothing or other accessories included. You have to buy from "fancier" Barbie product lines that are way more expensive, or buy non-Barbie dolls that cost a lot more than a modern entry-level Barbie, to get something that's actually similar to a standard Barbie doll in the '80s. So if you look at just "what did a Barbie cost 40 years ago versus today?" you'll get a misleading idea of how those costs have changed, because the actual comp to a modern standard-tier Barbie is some terrible, cheap Barbie knock-off from the Dollar Tree or wherever, in 1986; the cost to get the same-quality product, regardless of brand, has increased a lot more than whatever the cost difference is between a basic 1986 Barbie and a basic 2026 Barbie]
This is such an important point. So much of inflation is not $THING used to cost $X and now costs $Y, but that $THING is significantly lower quality than it used to be. Quality is famously difficult to quantify (Pirsig), so it is much easier to manipulate it without people noticing. A product that looks the same, but is slightly worse, at purchase time is a lot harder to identify than the same product that costs 20% more, so businesses prefer it.
That happens incrementally over years, until the product is a shadow of its former self.
> Look at what it costs to get a work shirt (I mean, for physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s or ordered by the US military in the 1940s, which in neither case could be regarded as super-fancy. You're probably looking at minimum $150.
Of course, this is still cheaper than it was in the 1940s. With my disposable income I could afford to buy a few $150 shirts a month. A worker of my social class in the 1940s could not.
I don't need the quality so I buy $5 Gildan shirts instead. I do buy Made in Canada cat toys for my little guy though. Different priorities.
Multiple $150 shirts per month? That's vastly out of range for the vast majority of human beings alive in the United States right now. I know i definitely could not afford a $300-$450/month increase in expenditure, it would literally bankrupt me. I've already had to sell all the stocks i had just to stay afloat renting and eating normal home made good food in a not so expensive city as a relatively high paid graduate student. There's like hundreds of thousands of people in this city making less than I am. Certainly some of them are working physical labor, blue collar jobs. There's a certain tendency to assume that we are the average in income, no matter where we are. And since going back to school and living near $0 savings for years I've learned that what i thought before was very very wrong. Assuming every blue collar worker can afford multiple $150 shirts per month is wild. I'm sure lots of them are well paid, but that's just not realistic for the a huge portion of people working in America now
I don't know what the right term is but yeah it's not quite inflation. IIRC households pre-ww2 were spending 15% of their budget on clothing, and the farther back you go the higher that gets even to the point where the concept of "budget" breaks down and the entire family's activities were oriented around procuring food and cloth.
Good fabric has always been and is still very expensive! We have created much cheaper alternatives but if you want the quality your predecessors had you better be prepared to look 15% of your household budget in the face. Homemade isn't even an alternative here. Most of the cost of good clothing is in the fabric and there's just no way around this.
> if you want the quality your predecessors had you better be prepared to look 15% of your household budget in the face
But why? That would imply productivity in the industry hasn't risen at all. Which isn't true.
Look at televisions, for example. 1% of what they cost in 1960 and 1000x better.
(Don't @ me with "smart TVs have ads now". You know what I really mean)
If we go with that 15% of household budget, that would be something like 10k and people used to buy a lot less clothing back then than they do today, probably less than 10 items a year. Now, if you take 1k you can probably find a tailor who makes you well tailored trousers, and another 1k for a jacket. This is not how we shop for clothing today, the productivity gains go into fast fashion, being able to buy trousers each month.
Tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
I'm not completely sure and I only have the insight of an interested hobbyist here but I don't think it's a single reason.
A lot of it is that the production improvements have mostly been in developing processes for synthetic replacements. Natural fibers are agricultural products: wool comes from sheep, that are raised on land, harvested and processed by skilled laborers, with natural variance in the input & output; linen, cotton, silk different variants of the same constraints. Polyester is not like this and it indeed can scale vastly and be very cheap. Rayon can be produced from basically any cellulose input so same.
So a lot of what would be productive gains have just shifted over to these other modes. Cotton is the main natural fiber the industry focuses on and it is mostly a lot cheaper now than it was in the past.
I love the pure nihilisitc audacity of calling the company “Authentic Brands”.
This is an excellent analysis. It's also why I stopped considering a brand as an indicator of quality (in either direction) a long time ago. That something is a recognizable brand doesn't really mean much.
Extracting any useful signal from brands requires keeping up with news about the businesses, and keeping track of various sub-labels and the hieroglyphic knowledge to distinguish them, which is so fucking tedious but is still easier than evaluating every single garment you're interested in in-person (and developing the skills and knowledge to perform that evaluation).
Or you just have enough money to buy only from less-widely-known but actually-good brands and don't worry much about price. The ones that haven't started cashing in on their "high class" branding by moving down-market toward the middle class... yet.
This is the rational response to this "financialization" of brands, and it leads to high-quality goods being chased out of the market entirely (see "The Market for Lemons"), except for ultra-expensive niche brands
Have you ever thought "I won't use Google products because they keep killing them?" or "nobody got fired for buying Intel?"
Super interesting -- outside the premise which we all know to be true. What is their goal here -- to crowdsource information so that we have a public record of note for companies? What are they planning to do with that information etc?
Author here. The goal is a permanent public record of who owns what, and what that ownership has done to the product, so consumers can make informed purchasing decisions. The long-form essays are the investigations, the Brand Ledger is the ongoing reference. Readers tip me on brands to dig into, and entries get updated as news and reader reports come in.
Consumers have power to affect change with their dollars... providing they have the right information
Can you make this but for local health services so I don’t end up at a dentist owned be PE who spend more time hard selling me than cleaning during appointments?
> Super interesting -- outside the premise which we all know to be true.
Obviously we do not "all know it to be true," since this business model works.
> What is their goal here -- to crowdsource information so that we have a public record of note for companies? What are they planning to do with that information etc?
This website? You kinda make it sound like a conspiracy. This seems like basic consumer advocacy: identify a problem, get the information out there so consumers can make better choices and not be fooled, and maybe (a long-shot) get some kind of cultural or legislative change to solve the problem.
Speaking of the latter, it would probably be a good idea to change bankruptcy law so that brands and trademarks cannot be sold in liquidation (at least without the associated business operations). Practices like the article describe undermine the social value of a trademark, and turn them into an opportunity for deception.
Though with these kinds of blogs, if it gets successful and influential, eventually it may just turn to a pay-to-play. IIRC, that's what happened to "mattress review" blogs.
What a lot of these discussions are missing is that designer labels aren't high-quality either, especially newer brands.
A lot of the newer brands take time to learn from their experience to ramp up quality, from materials to stitching.
Get this: the byline, Keyana Sapp? A Palantir employee in AI strategy. https://www.linkedin.com/in/keyanasapp/
They're iterating AI-written consumer populist blog posts and using us as guinea pigs, until we stop noticing they're AI. Their last one was "Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose", which we did great on. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777209, flagged off main page)
Don't let them get away with this, they're using a topic that we all appreciate specifically to divide our reactions into "if it's AI, it's good! What's the problem?" and god knows what the actual endgame is. But it's certainly not Palantir maintaining a consumer rights blog.
FWIW fact check is great, their RAG stuff works fine. But the unsourced "anonymous anecdotes" are made up, can't find backing for any of them and they're sort of entry-level rage-bait. (ex. DC shoes snowboard boots now designed in Florida by people that never designed snowboard boot)
I'm going to admit I'm emotionally invested in this blog. I really enjoyed this write up.
I'm troubled by your statement because I can't tell if you are saying it is incorrect and AI made it and therefore BAD. Or if you are just saying AI made it and therefore BAD.
Writing is at such a precipice. Every time I compose an email, gmail underlines every single sentence to say there is a better and more concise way of saying it. I feel stupid so I generally accept it. Isn't this AI writing as well? But, the thoughts and intentions are mine.
How is this different here? The author is pointing out really relevant information that I know anecdotally to be true. If that story is 85% written by AI, or 15% written by AI, I still see the human behind it.
I'm troubled by AI writing, don't get me wrong. But, it deserves further thought. (And, I also have strong negative bias towards palantir...)
> the unsourced "anonymous anecdotes" are made up
This would be enough to make me distrust the whole thing.
If the byline said "written with AI assistance, anecdotes verified," I'd have no issue. The problem isn't the tool, it's the undisclosed institutional author using a sympathetic topic as a vehicle.
Editing suggestions are qualitatively different from writing the thing wholesale.
The anecdotes appear fabricated. I couldn't source the DC Shoes / Florida designer claim.
Generally, I'm sympathetic towards this worldview, and it would be disruptive to its impact to have obviously AI-written articles being passed around as authoritative grounding.
Even if 100% correct and verifiable, "obviously AI-written" and "100% correct" is enough for people who aren't as sympathetic as us to the overall point to dismiss it.
I'm sympathetic to their case, the phrase I'm trying to make happen is "AI DDOS'ing" - we can't people new to the material to read and verify endless reams of words, they approach infinity in the limit.
Really good points, thanks so much.
This feels like the new frontier for "journalism": can we easily verify it?
That feels like a step in the right direction, regardless of how it happens.
People like Steve Bannon know this, and have called what you describe "flooding the zone" and it works. Our brains can't process excess information so we search for simple answers. AI will make this exponentially more effective as a tactic for spreading narratives.
Can we have something like this blog that's not AI slop? Please!
This is an illustration of why AI is terrible: it just destroys trust. Is the blog good or bad? It's really hard to tell without putting in more work than it'd take to write a similar article.
At least in the pre-AI days, if you saw polished writing, it meant someone at least put some effort into it.
gross. I want to unread it now. annoying because this kind of brand degradation is something important to me. but that's not enough to make me read a Palantir AI dude.
Weirdly, the author has his mediocre GRE scores on his LinkedIn page.
I was working on a grant application a few days back, tl;dr: color science x LACMA, big art museum in LA. Opus 4.7 told me to include my AP exam scores from _19 years ago_. I took 13 in one year, which is highly rare, but certainly not CV/grant application material at 37 years old, and it didn't need to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find something to say.
Is there a review platform that focuses on brands, rather than on stores? For instance, if I look for Brooks Brothers reviews, I get reviews of individual stores, of their website, and a couple articles talking about the business. It seems like a good way to combat the information asymmetry being exploited here would be a trustworthy (I know, good luck) review platform that focuses on overall brands, rather than specific outlet channels. This seems like it ought to exist, but I'm not aware of where.
It seems like that may be partly what this site is trying to build with the ledger, but it looks focused only on the "bad".
Author here. The Ledger is designed to cover both sides. 59 Approved brands right now, 31 on Watchlist, plus the Avoid list and Former Great. It's meant to answer "what's still worth buying" just as much as "what's not."
It's a living document and has just been released - will be expanded quickly
Very curious to see what you do with it. I like the premise very much and will be checking back to see how it develops.
Just as feedback, the reason I got the feeling that it was largely focused on "the bad" is that the "approved" entries seem much lower signal. For instance, I opened Leatherman to get a sense of why it was approved, but there was essentially no information there other than ownership. Maybe that's your focus, but it's a little difficult to get a sense of why I should be confident in it as a buyer.
Best luck with the project, it seems like meaningful work.
Trawling Reddit with great care and a critical eye, plus obscurer topic-specific forums, is the best solution I've come up with. Though even those are full lies-for-pay (advertising) especially on Reddit.
Buy the cheapest thing available. They won't have the money to screw you and they can't mismanage any extra money you want to give to charity if you don't let them touch it.
I am picky about what shoes I wear because I have toebox trouble. I used to like Brooks the best but the price has skyrocketed and I think they are going in the direction of fashion over quality. Now my mainstay is Pumas but I have a pair of New Balance shoes I am carefully breaking in that might enhance the gait of a character I play but also put a lot of stress on my legs.
Once in a while I find a $35 shoe at Walmart that is compatible with my feet and looks great and lasts about half as long as $70 shoe but most of the time Walmart doesn't have them in stock which is sad.
In the business of apparel, I think this is a natural consequence of high-end buyers turning their noses up at long-lived brands, and working to differentiate themselves from mainstream middle-class buyers. It's a revolt against modernism making more and more goods accessible to people outside the economic and cultural elite.
If you're fancy, what do you do when mass production and the internet make the markers of fanciness accessible to the very people you're trying to be fancier than? For one, you stigmatize mass production and elevate artisanal handmade goods. Those are inherently impossible to democratize. Another thing you can do is replace the appreciation of quality with the act of discovery as proof of elevated taste. Make taste a moving target, so the dirty unwashed masses are always a step behind.
Brands like Brooks Brothers or Eddie Bauer have no place in this system. The best the masses can do to imitate the elites is buy cheap fast fashion from brands that go viral and don't live long enough for anyone to know their quality before they're gone.
> If you're fancy, what do you do when mass production and the internet make the markers of fanciness accessible to the very people you're trying to be fancier than?
We need a Manhattan Project for curing Cluster B disorders.
one thing to note (I didn't see it in the article or the comments as of this moment) but a thing that happened a lot with eg LL Bean was, people were buying old Bean stuff from yard sales and so on, then returning it for a new one, under the lifetime warranty. The implicit "customer for life" cycle was thus broken, and they were giving all-but-free stuff to people who had little intention of ever buying new.
Part of the marketing for a consumer hostile change like this is cooking up a reason to blame the victim.
Look at the implicit assumptions we're supposed to make in the story you shared, like there was some point in time when people decided to start abusing the policy, necessitating the change. Like people cared about new ll bean so much they'd scour garage sales and do the return fraud. Like they hadn't built this margin into their product to begin with. Like they didn't have a dozen other ways to address these trends, if they were actually happening. (like restricting the policy to original purchasers, requiring you to have a receipt, tracking it themselves, etc)
It really seems like hogwash if you think about it critically. They just wanted to expand their margins, simplify bookkeeping, etc.
This is entirely by design. From a shareholder's perspective, the only thing that matters is number go up, when you take over a struggling company, they will squeeze every last drop of life from it in order to get some profit.
The fact that they are being quite secretive about their outsourcing, or at least not publishing it as a restructuring plan that they lay out to customers, is a little scummy, but makes sense for private equity. Milk as many people as they can while they still trust the brand.
From a shareholder's perspective, it's working as expected. And that's the real issue. If brands took more care of not expanding too fast that they require private equity and give away their ownership of the company slowly, then with patience and customer respect, we see its a good mix. But it seems people just get greedy or something and want it all faster.
Well someone had to pay for rich peoples yacht money. And since these 1000x hard workers don't find the amount of money they would earn with a honest product acceptable they buy a good brand and sell it out, riding the lucrative downwards curve at the cost of the environment, the employees, the subcontractors, the customer.
Some people disrespect drug addicts, homeless people or sex workers. To me the people behind such practises are below contempt.
> Wait for a beloved brand to hit financial trouble. Buy the intellectual property out of bankruptcy: the name, the logo, the trademarks.
The alternative is to shut down. That's how this whole system works: the brand can be sold, because the alternative is to cease existing.
I hate that the brand is worthwhile on its own. But: that's the point! The company invested in making the brand worth something by having it represent a promise. That promise isn't worth anything when the brand can be sold separately from the process of making the thing. The brand continues to be worth something, though.
This mechanism is a core feature of capitalism. Companies can be sold for parts, and those parts can lie to consumers. There's almost certainly a regulatory answer, but the behavior of the roll-up firms isn't unique to any particular firm. It's exactly the kind of value extraction the system is designed to support.
Betteridge's Law of Trademarks: anything called "Authentic Brands Group" is as far away from authentic as possible.
There's a broader law: If it needs to insist on what it is, it probably isn't. E.g. "People's Democratic Republic of Foo".
> Billabong board shorts lasted a decade of salt water and sun,
I've had a Billabong orange t-shirt last almost 15 years of sun and salt water from time to time, one of the best clothes-related purchases I've ever made. Sad to see that that's now a thing of the past.
Just but either professional (as in practitioners of a trade us it) or military products — those tend to be much better than “consumers” products. They cost more but they will last a lifetime. Of course not super applicable to every aspect of fashion, but I’ve been doing this for all kinds of products for years and was never disappointed. For fashion I would recommend to hit up small designers, ideally someone you know personally. It will cost more but look amazing and last many years.
Stop buying so much shit in general.
> Just but either professional (as in practitioners of a trade us it) or military products — those tend to be much better than “consumers” products. They cost more but they will last a lifetime.
Eh, I'm not sure that's such good advice. IIRC, I remember stumbling across tacticool "military grade" USB thumb drives, for instance. I doubt those are any better than your typical name-brand drive. "Professional" seems to be an often used marketing keyword to indicate quality or power (e.g. "Mac Pro").
Some keywords that may work better are "industrial" and "commercial," they don't have the same ring to them as "professional" and "military grade."
The impression I've gotten from ex-military folks is that regarding "military grade" as a marker of quality is a habit they find particularly funny.
Yeah, isn't the joke that "military grade" means made by the lowest bidder?
I hate to be the guy to say it, but this is just capitalism working as intended.
I'll repeat my definitions/understandings of capitalism as generally understood within the USA today:
1. strong entrepeneurial culture, limited obstacles from government when starting new business ventures and/or products & services
2. a "free" market, meaning that in broad terms government does not control prices nor what can be bought & sold or how much or when it is sold
3. distribution of profit generally goes to capital (stockholders) rather than employees.
None of these require enshittification. I also believe that we could have a thriving and vibrant economy without #3.
Political and economic orders or systems matter, of course, but ultimately, even good ones fail, because ultimately all political/social/economic orders depend on the quality of their participants. No system can neutralize the effects of human vice and stupidity as such, because every system is the product of the actions of those very same people.
Not really - it’s __one form__ of capitalism working as intended but capitalism (like most -isms) can take many vastly different forms.
There can be a much better form of capitalism also in the US - since this whole thread and discussion is pretty US-centric.
No True Scotsman eh?
If capitalism is about meeting market demands apart from any objective sense of quality, then yes. It's basically curve fitting.
The reason things are shittier is because the market is shittier. Consumer demands shape what companies make and sell. If companies can get away with selling garbage, because the market is undiscerning, then they will make garbage.
It's the same with politics. Ultimately, the quality of a political culture is determined by its participants.
The real problem isn't capitalism, but consumerism, which, among other defects, prioritizes the maximization of quantity over quality.
But capitalism helps create consumerism. Demand is manufactured, not just met.
It really isn't though. Capitalism doesn't have to be like this. This is a side effect of certain aspects of capitalism.
It's like saying lack of innovation is communism working as intended.
The last time this slop blog made the front page, a week ago, it got 400+ points and nearly 400 comments before getting flagged off the front page.
Can we catch it quicker this time?