I find it odd how corporate greed is always the focal point. But its never consumer greed. The consumer is the one who dictate's a market. So cheap, low quality products are the direct result of consumers paying for a less expensive product. The consumer has proven it doesn't care about quality. So as much as corporations are greedy so are consumers.
Someone linked to The Market for Lemons below. This is exactly right. We now live in the World of Lemons. Everything is lemons, because we can only properly judge quality for the tiny number of things we truly care about. For everything else, we just buy the cheapest thing, because by definition we don’t care enough to do otherwise.
The only possible solution is to buy less stuff, to the point where you have the capacity to care more about each thing, and enough money to pay for these things, which will inevitably cost more.
Exactly this. Oh no, these airline seats are cramped and miserable and were backed in like sardines, what’s wrong with these airlines, but I’ll buy whatever ticket is the cheapest.
I read years ago about a drill which was sold at Walmart with the same sku as in higher-end stores but the Walmart version had plastic gears. This was due to pricing pressure by Walmart on the manufacturer.
Me, personally, I seek out first Swiss brands then German brands when buying most things. I'm willing to pay extra.
In fact I'm a little pissed off this week because I ordered some oxygen absorbers off a Swiss website that listed a Swiss address but they were shipped directly from china. Investigating the site more closely, yeah, it's just a fake website made to look Swiss.
I did a little research study back in 2003 where I went to various grocers and purchased the same product at these grocers and compared.
Walmart has larger boxes, and less contents, universally, for pretty much everything in a box, and they charge 1/3 more for their 2/3rds of what you get everywhere else. They make nearly 50% more profit from that little slight of hand. And try discussing this with any shoppers and they will say "but the box is bigger", <- actual statement from a CS PhD, demonstrating how it does not matter your education, once outside of that specialization you're an idiot.
I'm pretty sure that this sort of thing happens for stuff in big box home improvement stores like Home Depot and Lowe's, too. Things like plumbing fixtures that appear to be identical to counterparts in smaller stores will have off-by-one or suffixed product numbers, and are made with cheaper plastic internal parts than when purchased elsewhere.
There are Chinese machine manufacturers who use fake German brand names because for a long time Germany was selling the manufacturing machinery to China and they have a good national brand image.
This entire site can be boiled down to: products get decrease in quality when customers don't know or don't care what quality is.
Price is a clear and obvious thing to measure, quality is much more difficult. Consumers get little or no formal education in quality, and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly. Any review site that is paid for by ads or affiliate links has the default position of trying to get you to buy something.
Why do I no longer have any reliable signals for quality? Price, brand, materials, and word of mouth are all you really get, but price and materials are meaningless and brand and word of mouth stop mattering as a company starts to coast on its reputation for higher margin. Genuinely don't know how customers are supposed to choose quality when they want it. I always want it.
One massive unmentioned counterexample: High quality Chinese tools continue to proliferate and sucker-punch these brands for being so egregious with quality. They are now the high quality standard if you know what brands to look for, and not because their competition got worse as mentioned here, they are simply iterating and improving and making better tools and designs than they did 10 years ago. Sometimes you are getting the exact same tool as the name-brand but with less warranty for a fraction of the price. "Corporate Greed" is self-correcting in a free and fair market! Vote with your wallet.
>Knipex is family-owned out of Germany. They make what many consider the best pliers on the planet. Part of a larger group (Knipex Group) but not publicly traded, not for sale.
A company makes a really good product as first challenging incumbents. They get so big, they eventually become the incumbent. All this time, they’re probably losing money on the product or breaking even. Eventually, investors will want returns on their investment. This will first happen with prices increases to save the quality of the product. Once they can’t raise prices anymore, the quality will be decreased. By this point, the brand is strong enough to get sales even on this worse product.
Then another company will come in and make the same product but better than the incumbent. The cycle continues.
My point is find these new companies that are trying to get market share by making a higher quality product. And if you really like that product, buy 2.
Chasing eternal profit growth isn’t a fact of life, notwithstanding the mythology of commodification. Neither are all investors motivated purely by profit. Neither is it clear that everything can be improved upon (much less that outsiders can improve on it better than the incumbent). Sometimes “do a thing, do it with excellence, make a modest living from it” is enough.
One thing I like about Mr. Sapp’s work at Worse On Purpose here—he (or perhaps his LLM, or perhaps he’s LLM) gives considerable attention to firms that don’t do it that way. Where:
> Quality, ownership, and stewardship all check out. […] Most of these are family-owned, trust-owned, employee-owned, or publicly traded with a long track record of not selling out.
It’s useful to have actionable alternatives, and I put more stock in his organizing thesis given how well its brand preferences line up with my own.
Once a product becomes so big it cannot increase in market share the only way to increase the total amount of profit it generates it by reducing the cost to produce the product or increasing the price.
“corporate greed” is a signal to me of low quality commentary. The opening premise of Econ is that consumers want all the goods for free and producers want to give nothing in exchange gor as much money as they can.
Incredibly depressing, but a good and important thing to read!
Not to sound overly cheerful, but shout out to my Makita DHP484 combo drill/driver and 100 piece bit set that, for a low three figure price, is far more powerful and capable than the noisy old corded monster it replaces.
Looks like that’s one factor. A number of brands I expected to be marked as Avoid based on who owns them were indeed marked as such. Pleased to see a few of my chosen brands were marked as good. Shame that basically no sun glasses company is good.
It makes sense to ask WHY this is hard. People can disagree endlessly on why.
But a big part is, that antitrust/monopoly legislation has been almost completely dismantled and detoothed within the last 35 years, starting back with Reagan,
and accelerating through the 90's when Clinton was at the wheel.
The tiny bit that is still left, is only enforced either when parties fail to pay the bribe, or are bribed to enforce it, by other actors.
Once you allow markets to consolidate into a single monolith, any new competitors will only be allowed to live, until they become big enough for the established incumbent to notice and then squish, with their unlimited access to resources.
There is little incentive to start a competing business, if you know the trajectory is "IF SUCCESS THEN SQUISH".
I think it's just human nature, people that are ruthless with buisness are more likely to stay afloat compared to the moral alternative that always on the edge of collapsing
The legal and regulatory obstacles to starting a business probably don't help but IMO the bigger issue is trying to break into markets that are dominated by massive global players who benefit from economies of scale and access to funding that newer companies don't have.
The other side of this is that consumers don't have the information required to properly differentiate between competitors. If I'm shopping for a new TV I have no idea where or how it is made which is why so many people default to brand names as very rough proxies for quality. That information asymmetry is exactly what websites like this are trying to combat, but it's clearly an uphill struggle.
I'm not only talking about legal and regulatory issues, indeed.
I think one of the big ones is rent. Suuuure you can just take some months to invent a product, but if you start with a $3000 loss per month, that's a high bar to clear.
Another one is lack of pressure. The person who invented the TV was surely thinking about how much money he would make or how much he would change society. But now there are so many TVs for under $500, what would I really add by making a new one that wouldn't have been optimized and battle-hardened and would be otherwise identical to all the others? (From the reverse side too, why would I buy a $1000 TV identical to a $500 one? Market for lemons. Fairphone's in this position.)
Not quite. "Getting worse" is discussing a mechanism where a product first has a good reputation, for good reasons. It's not "minimum viable".
And then the company proceeds to exploit that reputation for all it's worth, by making the product cheaper to make, while keeping the sale price the same, knowing that it takes a long time for the reputation to catch up. But eventually it does and the brand is basically defunct. Used up and discarded, being drained of reputational value.
The "minimum viable product" is part of the development process. If you are already at a certain quality and choose to make it worse, this is something else. Enshittification or just greed come to my mind.
Clearly it's just the start and end state of product development: make an MVP—the very worst thing people will buy, start to gain market share while you improve, reach market saturation, merge with competition, "value engineer" back to MVP—the very worst thing people will still buy.
The “minimum” means minimum price. There is a big market for the lowest price product in case a customer wants the lowest quality product because they only need to use it a couple times or for a trivial task.
Buying a cheap tool at Harbor Freight first and then going for the more expensive tool is a good way to save money.
But "worse on purpose" products typically decrease the quality (and cost to make) without decreasing the sale price to match. It's exploiting the product's reputation for being premium not minimum.
I find it odd how corporate greed is always the focal point. But its never consumer greed. The consumer is the one who dictate's a market. So cheap, low quality products are the direct result of consumers paying for a less expensive product. The consumer has proven it doesn't care about quality. So as much as corporations are greedy so are consumers.
I think this is the wrong take.
If this was really the truth, the brand names wouldn't matter. But instead the brand ends up as the sole desirable target in the corporate sales.
I think the more likely answer is that being an expert judge on a product's quality is just very hard.
More so when you have to buy it before you can use it.
So people tend to trust brands they've had good experiences with, or heard others having good experiences with.
The greed here is in leveraging that trust to sell a shitty updated version of the product.
Yeah. Nobody is innocent here.
Someone linked to The Market for Lemons below. This is exactly right. We now live in the World of Lemons. Everything is lemons, because we can only properly judge quality for the tiny number of things we truly care about. For everything else, we just buy the cheapest thing, because by definition we don’t care enough to do otherwise.
The only possible solution is to buy less stuff, to the point where you have the capacity to care more about each thing, and enough money to pay for these things, which will inevitably cost more.
Exactly this. Oh no, these airline seats are cramped and miserable and were backed in like sardines, what’s wrong with these airlines, but I’ll buy whatever ticket is the cheapest.
Companies organize and consumers can't. Seems pretty obvious.
I read years ago about a drill which was sold at Walmart with the same sku as in higher-end stores but the Walmart version had plastic gears. This was due to pricing pressure by Walmart on the manufacturer.
Me, personally, I seek out first Swiss brands then German brands when buying most things. I'm willing to pay extra.
In fact I'm a little pissed off this week because I ordered some oxygen absorbers off a Swiss website that listed a Swiss address but they were shipped directly from china. Investigating the site more closely, yeah, it's just a fake website made to look Swiss.
I did a little research study back in 2003 where I went to various grocers and purchased the same product at these grocers and compared.
Walmart has larger boxes, and less contents, universally, for pretty much everything in a box, and they charge 1/3 more for their 2/3rds of what you get everywhere else. They make nearly 50% more profit from that little slight of hand. And try discussing this with any shoppers and they will say "but the box is bigger", <- actual statement from a CS PhD, demonstrating how it does not matter your education, once outside of that specialization you're an idiot.
I've met CS PhD students in AI (a field that almost exclusively uses python) be completely unable to start a python script on their machine.
Well obviously you just ask an LLM.
I'm pretty sure that this sort of thing happens for stuff in big box home improvement stores like Home Depot and Lowe's, too. Things like plumbing fixtures that appear to be identical to counterparts in smaller stores will have off-by-one or suffixed product numbers, and are made with cheaper plastic internal parts than when purchased elsewhere.
There are Chinese machine manufacturers who use fake German brand names because for a long time Germany was selling the manufacturing machinery to China and they have a good national brand image.
This entire site can be boiled down to: products get decrease in quality when customers don't know or don't care what quality is.
Price is a clear and obvious thing to measure, quality is much more difficult. Consumers get little or no formal education in quality, and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly. Any review site that is paid for by ads or affiliate links has the default position of trying to get you to buy something.
Why do I no longer have any reliable signals for quality? Price, brand, materials, and word of mouth are all you really get, but price and materials are meaningless and brand and word of mouth stop mattering as a company starts to coast on its reputation for higher margin. Genuinely don't know how customers are supposed to choose quality when they want it. I always want it.
The market for lemons is always bustling, I guess [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
One massive unmentioned counterexample: High quality Chinese tools continue to proliferate and sucker-punch these brands for being so egregious with quality. They are now the high quality standard if you know what brands to look for, and not because their competition got worse as mentioned here, they are simply iterating and improving and making better tools and designs than they did 10 years ago. Sometimes you are getting the exact same tool as the name-brand but with less warranty for a fraction of the price. "Corporate Greed" is self-correcting in a free and fair market! Vote with your wallet.
Example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/harborfreight/comments/1v1ujxe/hmmm...
Which directly contradicts the blog's post about Knipex never selling-out on quality:
https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-power-tools-got-worse-...
>Knipex is family-owned out of Germany. They make what many consider the best pliers on the planet. Part of a larger group (Knipex Group) but not publicly traded, not for sale.
I call this the cycle of disruption.
A company makes a really good product as first challenging incumbents. They get so big, they eventually become the incumbent. All this time, they’re probably losing money on the product or breaking even. Eventually, investors will want returns on their investment. This will first happen with prices increases to save the quality of the product. Once they can’t raise prices anymore, the quality will be decreased. By this point, the brand is strong enough to get sales even on this worse product.
Then another company will come in and make the same product but better than the incumbent. The cycle continues.
My point is find these new companies that are trying to get market share by making a higher quality product. And if you really like that product, buy 2.
Chasing eternal profit growth isn’t a fact of life, notwithstanding the mythology of commodification. Neither are all investors motivated purely by profit. Neither is it clear that everything can be improved upon (much less that outsiders can improve on it better than the incumbent). Sometimes “do a thing, do it with excellence, make a modest living from it” is enough.
One thing I like about Mr. Sapp’s work at Worse On Purpose here—he (or perhaps his LLM, or perhaps he’s LLM) gives considerable attention to firms that don’t do it that way. Where:
> Quality, ownership, and stewardship all check out. […] Most of these are family-owned, trust-owned, employee-owned, or publicly traded with a long track record of not selling out.
It’s useful to have actionable alternatives, and I put more stock in his organizing thesis given how well its brand preferences line up with my own.
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/status/approved
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/methodology
Once a product becomes so big it cannot increase in market share the only way to increase the total amount of profit it generates it by reducing the cost to produce the product or increasing the price.
This seems like what he said but less words
“corporate greed” is a signal to me of low quality commentary. The opening premise of Econ is that consumers want all the goods for free and producers want to give nothing in exchange gor as much money as they can.
Incredibly depressing, but a good and important thing to read!
Not to sound overly cheerful, but shout out to my Makita DHP484 combo drill/driver and 100 piece bit set that, for a low three figure price, is far more powerful and capable than the noisy old corded monster it replaces.
Interesting (and very helpful!) that they keep a list of good brands. I wonder how they judge that - do they just look at ownership?
Looks like that’s one factor. A number of brands I expected to be marked as Avoid based on who owns them were indeed marked as such. Pleased to see a few of my chosen brands were marked as good. Shame that basically no sun glasses company is good.
I've come to the conclusion this proliferates because it's very hard to start a business. If there was tons of competition the market would decide.
It makes sense to ask WHY this is hard. People can disagree endlessly on why. But a big part is, that antitrust/monopoly legislation has been almost completely dismantled and detoothed within the last 35 years, starting back with Reagan, and accelerating through the 90's when Clinton was at the wheel. The tiny bit that is still left, is only enforced either when parties fail to pay the bribe, or are bribed to enforce it, by other actors. Once you allow markets to consolidate into a single monolith, any new competitors will only be allowed to live, until they become big enough for the established incumbent to notice and then squish, with their unlimited access to resources. There is little incentive to start a competing business, if you know the trajectory is "IF SUCCESS THEN SQUISH".
I think it's just human nature, people that are ruthless with buisness are more likely to stay afloat compared to the moral alternative that always on the edge of collapsing
The legal and regulatory obstacles to starting a business probably don't help but IMO the bigger issue is trying to break into markets that are dominated by massive global players who benefit from economies of scale and access to funding that newer companies don't have.
The other side of this is that consumers don't have the information required to properly differentiate between competitors. If I'm shopping for a new TV I have no idea where or how it is made which is why so many people default to brand names as very rough proxies for quality. That information asymmetry is exactly what websites like this are trying to combat, but it's clearly an uphill struggle.
I'm not only talking about legal and regulatory issues, indeed.
I think one of the big ones is rent. Suuuure you can just take some months to invent a product, but if you start with a $3000 loss per month, that's a high bar to clear.
Another one is lack of pressure. The person who invented the TV was surely thinking about how much money he would make or how much he would change society. But now there are so many TVs for under $500, what would I really add by making a new one that wouldn't have been optimized and battle-hardened and would be otherwise identical to all the others? (From the reverse side too, why would I buy a $1000 TV identical to a $500 one? Market for lemons. Fairphone's in this position.)
Thats why competition is so important in the market
This is why independent review organizations are so important in the market.
Related: "A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
Thanks, I hate it
It is really disappointing how this site’s text appears to be mostly AI generated (60% or so on Pangram).
I guess you could say this site is… worse on purpose.
"Worse on purpose" is just "Minimum viable product"
The definition of “viable” matters
Not quite. "Getting worse" is discussing a mechanism where a product first has a good reputation, for good reasons. It's not "minimum viable".
And then the company proceeds to exploit that reputation for all it's worth, by making the product cheaper to make, while keeping the sale price the same, knowing that it takes a long time for the reputation to catch up. But eventually it does and the brand is basically defunct. Used up and discarded, being drained of reputational value.
The "minimum viable product" is part of the development process. If you are already at a certain quality and choose to make it worse, this is something else. Enshittification or just greed come to my mind.
Clearly it's just the start and end state of product development: make an MVP—the very worst thing people will buy, start to gain market share while you improve, reach market saturation, merge with competition, "value engineer" back to MVP—the very worst thing people will still buy.
The “minimum” means minimum price. There is a big market for the lowest price product in case a customer wants the lowest quality product because they only need to use it a couple times or for a trivial task.
Buying a cheap tool at Harbor Freight first and then going for the more expensive tool is a good way to save money.
> The “minimum” means minimum price.
But "worse on purpose" products typically decrease the quality (and cost to make) without decreasing the sale price to match. It's exploiting the product's reputation for being premium not minimum.
Its because of monopolies
It's just crapitalism - make thing as cheap as possible and charge as much as possible.
What you call crapitalism is actually just capitalism.