> all of these expectations have been casually met with retail goods within living memory .. there are a few generations rattling around that haven't encountered it
often enough in life to come to expect it.
It's worse than that, because even for those who are old enough memory can be short and it's hard to viscerally understand that things were different some 10 or 15 years ago. It would be interesting to see a stress-test for a contemporary low end bookshelf from Walmart vs an older one, and to see a "hours of labor required for purchase" breakdown, but I'm pretty sure I know what it would look like.
People are aware that things like planned obsolescence happen, but underestimate how common it is, and are less aware that premium offerings where you pay extra for extra quality are also just a scam. I buy commercial products for everything I can hoping that classic capitalism is still working as intended, because maybe in more B2B transactions which are often high volume, companies are still somewhat afraid of losing a customer while they run their race to the bottom. But the relationship between consumers and corporations has drastically changed to be almost ridiculously adversarial, and increasingly you can't opt out by doing your research, or buying once-trusted brands, or spending extra money.
From coffee-makers to mouse traps, almost everything sucks, even after you give up on Amazon. And since we're here, the old saying "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" also seems hilariously naive and dated. Today you'd start with a marketing department and a few bribes to setup exclusive government and municipal distribution contracts if you were serious, and then make the worst possible trap you could get away with. With 8 billion people and a world-wide market, what kind of idiot would care about customers returning? A startup would invent the perfect thing in a day, then sell it to Big MouseTrap who would squash it, increase ad budgets, and push substandard mouse technology even harder.
While we're all getting used to the treadmill of buy, break, and buy again as if this were just normal, let's take a moment to contemplate the old man yelling at the clouds. It's not always for his benefit only, but sometimes truly an effort to educate the public about something they are missing.
It does make me wonder why we aren't really seeing "guaranteed quality" brands pop up. There's an increasingly large market of consumers who are tired of getting screwed over by literally every single product they buy. Surely there must be a way to run a viable business which is 10-20% more expensive than its competition, but which isn't complete crap and willing to back that up with things like extended warranty?
There are plenty of these: Toyota, Honda, Apple, Maglite, Duracell, Energizer, Gilette, Tide, Pampers, Visa, Lay's, Coca Cola. Before you laugh at the last ones, consider how amazing it is that you can go into a grocery store and buy a bag of chips and it will always taste exactly like the last one, or that you can walk into a store with a piece of plastic and in less than a second pay for things with it.
Isn't this what Anker has largely done. In a world of might be good/might be crap cables, chargers, batteries, etc. You can always select the Anker variety on Amazon. It'll cost you a bit more than whatever random product, but you know they are reliable. It's priced much cheaper than an OEM (Apple, Google, Samsung, etc.) accessory but is more reliable (quality wise) than no-name accessories.
> When storing our unit, we noticed that the yokes didn't allow the ear cups to lay flat on the table. It also seems like pressing them down puts pressure on the yokes, which can mean that this part may get damaged over time if you're constantly folding and unfolding them to store in their carrying case. While our unit hasn't had issues, there are reports (for example, here and here) that the hinges and headband can crack.
You will find countless reports of hinges breaking after a few months of light use about every model that came out in the last 5-10 years, yet nothing has been done to fix it.
I would assume Anker chargers and cables are high quality, and simultaneously assume anything else of theirs is low quality and just a way to disproportionately profit off of the brand’s reputation.
> Surely there must be a way to run a viable business which is 10-20% more expensive than its competition
I think the bottom feeders have driven the cost of garbage down so far that it's no longer a 10-20% price premium to get trustworthy things.
eg grinders. You could (I have a 15+ year old one that has been repaired multiple times as gears have worn out, that withstands 3-6x daily uses) sell a very long-lived coffee grinder (Baratza) for $200. You can buy a piece of crap for $40. Unsurprisingly, that piece of crap is completely unrepairable and doesn't even do a good job of grinding... but it's cheap.
Because consumers have been conditioned to expect that extended warranties are just another layer of scam, maybe to extract consumer data, maybe just to get a slightly higher price. I think if you see these then you have to assume they are unenforceable anyway due to some fine print, and you risk finding this out after spending way too much time navigating terrible robot phone systems and similar harassment.
In a lot of contexts, consumers will never be able to trust products/manufacturers again. What can work though is if stores/distributors provide the warranty though, because unlike consumers, they may still have some power.
For many people, that's Apple. You pay a premium, but the product will not shitty in many ways that the competition can be. Sure, they drop the ball from time to time (see the MBP keyboard fiasco c.a. 7 years ago), but at least they try.
Baseless speculation on my part: investment is going to be tricky to acquire when you're talking about what amounts to a lifestyle business with monster capital requirements to get off the ground. Tooling up for manufacturing isn't cheap, and making shit doesn't offer the kinds of returns that investors find attractive?
> There's an increasingly large market of consumers who are tired of getting screwed over by literally every single product they buy.
That number isn't increasing, it is constantly dropping, which is how we got where we are. Boiled frogs, and Overton Windows, etc.
And once you've kept the quality of something low for about 20 years, you start having people enter the market who have never known the quality to be high.
The perception that the number of dissatisfied people is rising comes from a bunch of people getting old and comparing new stuff to 30 year old stuff, and being loud about it. And when we were young, old people were yelling about the quality of dishes, furniture, books, buildings etc. And we just accepted the crappy stuff because it was all that was available.
We buy the crappy stuff now, too, because the people who make the good stuff mark it up like crazy; the good stuff takes tooling and expertise that is now hard to locate and even recognize if you aren't familiar with it. Good stuff ends up being low competition in small markets of knowledgeable people who probably already own the best stuff that they rarely have to replace, and who are more likely to be brand loyal (although not blindly.) When we have to buy the crappy stuff, we complain about it online.
> Surely there must be a way to run a viable business which is 10-20% more expensive than its competition, but which isn't complete crap and willing to back that up with things like extended warranty?
So I say that there's no reason for those people not to mark it up 100-200%, because they're not going to sell any more than if they only mark it up 10-20%. They're not going to throw money away, at least not forever. Somebody smart is going to get in there and mark it up and/or lower the quality and drain the value of the brand (a brand that they can hedge with smart marketing.)
It's worse than that, because even for those who are old enough memory can be short and it's hard to viscerally understand that things were different some 10 or 15 years ago. It would be interesting to see a stress-test for a contemporary low end bookshelf from Walmart vs an older one, and to see a "hours of labor required for purchase" breakdown, but I'm pretty sure I know what it would look like.
People are aware that things like planned obsolescence happen, but underestimate how common it is, and are less aware that premium offerings where you pay extra for extra quality are also just a scam. I buy commercial products for everything I can hoping that classic capitalism is still working as intended, because maybe in more B2B transactions which are often high volume, companies are still somewhat afraid of losing a customer while they run their race to the bottom. But the relationship between consumers and corporations has drastically changed to be almost ridiculously adversarial, and increasingly you can't opt out by doing your research, or buying once-trusted brands, or spending extra money.
From coffee-makers to mouse traps, almost everything sucks, even after you give up on Amazon. And since we're here, the old saying "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" also seems hilariously naive and dated. Today you'd start with a marketing department and a few bribes to setup exclusive government and municipal distribution contracts if you were serious, and then make the worst possible trap you could get away with. With 8 billion people and a world-wide market, what kind of idiot would care about customers returning? A startup would invent the perfect thing in a day, then sell it to Big MouseTrap who would squash it, increase ad budgets, and push substandard mouse technology even harder.
While we're all getting used to the treadmill of buy, break, and buy again as if this were just normal, let's take a moment to contemplate the old man yelling at the clouds. It's not always for his benefit only, but sometimes truly an effort to educate the public about something they are missing.