"and the evils of capitalism itself"
This is your answer, it is planed obsolescence and corporate greed. You mentioned yourself that old citrus juicer still works after over 80 years. Its not just your juicer, but old washing machines, dishwashers, fridges all old house appliances and tools.
This is your answer, it is planed obsolescence and corporate greed. You mentioned yourself that old citrus juicer still works after over 80 years. Its not just your juicer, but old washing machines, dishwashers, fridges all old house appliances and tools.
Problem is, since our economy has become financialized to that extent that companies only care about next quarter, there is no interest in producing longlisting products, because if they did, people would rarely buy new stuff. So new stuff is made to last 2-3 years, just enough to keep customers returning for more, if they break earlier than 2 years, customer will go to other brand, but 2+ years is long enough for customer to keep brand loyalty.
Same thing happened to electronic, majority of phones/laptops have non replicable batteries for same reason, they make it very expensive to replace battery, our impossible to do so. Repairs on modern electronic is very difficult in many cases impossible.
Sadly, it is in corporate interest to make low quality products, and it will continue to be so for forseable future (sure there are exceptions, but those are far in between or very expensive ).
I think of the 3 year old Samsung Refrigerator I had to replace, meanwhile, not kidding I have a much older friend whose 1950's Frigidaire was still in use as an original appliance to his house of the same vintage. Sure it is an energy hog, but it works.
What's great about capitalism is that we have choices. I disagree that all modern goods are subpar. It takes a while to research and find them, but there are still things that are solidly made. They are more expensive, naturally.
I make the choice to have fewer things, but higher quality things. If you want more quality goods, buy more quality goods, or at least fewer sub-par goods. As the author states, there are still good quality things available at thrift stores, too.
I own a manufacturing company, and while it's easy (and often correct) to blame the failures on shoddy quality and quick bucks, that's not the only thing going on. Ask any refrigerator or appliance repair shop, and they'll tell you (off the record) that modern regulations by and large forbid the older more robust materials and ways of doing things because the EPA had deemed them "inefficient" or polluting. A modern fridge cannot use the older coolants because they degrade ozone, but the new ones just do not work well unless you run much much higher compression - compression which makes solder joints and welds fail in the system, leaking the new coolant right out. And those compressors have to run more "efficiently", which the EPA Energy Star rating forces to be shorter cycles, which don't work, so the fridge runs more often and harder to do the same work - and the compressors therefore fail far more frequently. I've got a 50 year old chest freezer that runs like a champ, but my kitchen fridge died after 10 years, while its replacement died after 2 years. Lead is a superior electronics solder, while lead-free solder alloys are brittle and prone to cracking - but lead is often banned in consumer electronics (nevermind that it's easily recycled, unlike lead-free alloys which are also more toxic to mine, and more difficult to recycle). On and on and on it goes.
And then there are the consumers who will buy the cheap imported appliances, and not the more expensive (and more robust) US made ones - that's not down to corporate greed, but down to a myriad of factors without easy solution.
This is the best comment in here and nobody has seen it.
Yes, if you ask anyone who actually produces, they will explain to you 14,000 ways the government has needlessly made the world worse. Why? Because bureaucrats are useless people who don’t produce anything and never know WTF they are talking about and their only satisfaction in life comes from creating new bullshit that interferes with producers.
My friend owns a trucking company and he said the exhaust systems now cost $30,000 plus $1500/mo for the special fluid and it used to just be an $1800 normal human-style exhaust setup. You can literally buy insurance for the exhaust systems it’s so expensive…….but they had that for 10 years and now it’s time to switch to batteries and each truck will cost $800,000 and single moms will no longer be able to afford food.
Most of my customers are in the trucking industry, on the utility vehicle side. They have been dealing with ratcheting pain levels for about 15 years now. And the "green" tech? Don't get me started - they're not allowed to idle their engines in so many places, so they can't charge their batteries to keep their equipment running, so they're towing big generators around. Talk about rampant bureaucratic BS.
I busted the coolant line in my refrigerator over the summer. The new one looks nice, very shiny, yet it can't maintain its temperature. It's either too warm or too cold. I miss the twenty-year-old one.
I sold real estate for several years, over 100 homes. When homes were being rehabbed, I frequently had home inspectors and contractors ask if they culd have the broken 1980's dishwashers. Why? Because they worked. They had good disposals in the bottom. They had good motors. For the cost of a few parts, these guys who knew how to repair them would end up getting a dishwasher that was better than mine at home.
Speaking as a former head of a manufacturing company,, when designing a product to sell, you ask yourself, "What is the customer willing to pay for?" I inherited a product line that was very feature rich, but did not return a sufficient profit to guarantee long term corporate survival. The customer was willing to buy our product, but only if the product's price was low enough as he/she did not really value all of the features of our product and was not willing to pay for all of them.
I had our product managers go through the product features and either take out features that the customer had to buy if they wanted them,, or redesign features to take out costs to provide a sufficient overall product return.
It was an effort to have the customer pay for features he/she really wanted and yet provide an acceptable level of perceived quality. It was a delicate balance, and is something most manufacturers are forced to do if they want to stay in business.
Capitalism hasn't changed between the 1940's and now. Government regulation and inflation have both increased exponentially, so they are the problem.
The government regulates the paint that can be used to mark dials and measuring cups. The government regulates the composition of materials used in coffee grinders. In short, the government regulates everything. Robust stuff manufactured in the 1940's is most likely illegal in today's over regulated pseudo socialst society. The last thing we need is more government messing around with capitalism. We passed the point of diminishing returns for government regulation a very long time ago.
Inflation is the other government made quality destroyer. When inflation increases the price of a product, some manufacturers think the best way to preserve sales, in the short run, is to cut costs by reducing quality. The shattered casserole dish is the result. Inflation benefits the government because it's a big debtor. By reducing the value of the dollars the government owes through inflation, the government makes it easier to pay its debt.
Increasing govenrment involvement in the economy is a vicious cycle. Quality goes down the more government is involved. Then socialsts say capitalism has failed, so we need more government intervention in the economy.
Maybe we have to own it,fess up and not pass the buck. Corporations aren’t driven by greed any more than us. Have asked for a raise or declined it when offered? Maybe it is because we don’t demand quality. We accept style over substance.
Kevin's right Raz. It isn't capitalism that's the problem. It's the crony capitalism and growing fascism in America that elevates and rewards loyalty to the elite dogma rather than producing quality goods made by fairly paid American workers.
They are supposed to be loyal to shareholders. They are the owners. There is only one type of capitalism. If they make bad products, they will eventually go out of business. We are all free to purchase from any company we want to.
CEO's get promoted by cutting cost then move on to the next job. No long term commitment like back when things were a family business and CEO cared about the business and they knew and card for workers. Now most CEO's care about the next year or two stock prices to cash in on options before moving on. Employees are industrial cogs that can be replaced when broken.
No. It is not “capitalism”. It is crime. We make these products in countries that don’t have our laws and then pretend it’s not a violation of the law because there was a container ship in between us and the crimes.
It also isn’t “corporate greed”. All corporations are “greedy” because 100% of people are greedy. The company that made the good old blenders was greedy. It’s not greed. It’s being manufactured in countries where people cannot read and live in houses made of cinderblocks. So yeah, the quality is not great.
Great comment Kevin to great essay. I will add that the crushing of Small biz by woke elites in order to concentrate all biz into huge monopolistic corps allows woke elites an easier world to control. Huge corps run by woke execs can ignore reliability and quality because no small competitor is making a better product. And it appears consumers are more ok than in the past with disposable products. Also the complexity of all digital devices make them inherently more unreliable or the huge corps making them have enough monopolistic control that no one can compete with them even with a more reliable
Damn right we aren't. I lived through the vast hollowing out of the American Heartland in the 1970s and '80s and saw hundreds of thousands of productive citizens thrown out of work so T-shirts would cost $5 instead of $8. Horrible.
While what you say is true, it was not that simple. I remember how the US car industry produced inferior products until the Japanese competition came along.
Many industries did not help themselves by being sloppy about costs.
Absolutely. American automakers produced wretched small cars--and their large ones were prone to heavy rusting and mechanical failures--until Japanese automakers entered our market and smoked the competition. Extreme hubris in Detroit produced derision, then alarm, then plunging sales, then, finally, competence. I still will put Honda up against any American car as a model manufacturer, but American carmakers are better for having to compete.
American corporations can do that, too, and keep not just the factories and jobs in this country, but revenue and profits. They just ... don't. On just our domestic market alone we could have it all. But, we don't.
I am driving a 2007 Honda Fit with 252,000 — around the moon and headed back. When I bought it, I couldn't find an American manufacturer who made a gas-sipping car. Wondering if I can get this car to 500,000 miles?
Many of us want quality and are willing to pay for it. But we literally cannot find that quality no matter what the price tag.
The Amana appliances I bought in the 1970s were still running perfectly when I sold the house that contained them in 2018. Buy new from any manufacturer, at any price point, and I'm replacing those appliances within five years.
Craftsman tools from the 1960s work perfectly today. The same tools bought in the past five years break, chip, round, and strip. Yes, there's a "lifetime guarantee," but I don't want to keep replacing them. Finding high-quality "stuff" at any price is a challenge, and "we" are not complicit in that.
You are so right Shane; I gave in to my wife's urging and replaced the dishwasher that I had installed when we built our house over two decades ago. It got dishes spick and span and had never once had an issue. I got the new really quiet and supposedly highly efficient unit put in and took the old one to my daughter's house and installed it. I regretted it in a week. The new one had to have dishes hand-washed before you tried to wash them if you wanted them clean. The old one still works great. Also I own a great deal of Craftsman tools that I collected like coins or stamps over the years and very clearly remember the first addition to my collection that was made overseas. It was a pair of small bolt-cutters that I was shocked to see were made in Japan. It made me sad, but not nearly so much as when I saw the first ones coming from China. It has taken years of slow decline followed by rapid decline to come to our sorry state of today.
Thanks, Willie, I feel your pain. I hated to abandon my ancient appliances because they were working perfectly even after 35 years of service. But I moved out of state and had to leave them behind. Fortunately, my tool collection was portable, and I still delight in using wrenches and screwdrivers from the 1940s that will outlast me.
Same for the high efficiency washing machines. It is far from efficient to have to wash the same load three times because "high efficiency" means not enough water to soak the load. I could not even bring myself to sell the poor excuse for an appliance. I just let the guy who brought the old-time Speed Queen replacement. Awww, clean clothes again.
Absolutely, Lynne. "High efficiency" is a scam when you're forced to flush the toilet thrice to get everything clear, wash dishes and laundry twice to get them clean, and spend longer in the shower rinsing soap out of your hair because the water flow is so restricted. What did we gain with all this "efficiency?"
Why do companies do this? Since the vast majority of people will not pay for quality, companies make the economically rational decision to produce products of lower quality. They are just responding to market demand.
One clear example is the tight seating on airlines. People may complain, but the vast majority of the public that travels maybe once a year, is willing to put up with it to keep the cost of their travel down.
I agree. But in a nation this vast, you’d think that there would be enough demand for quality in, say, washers and dryers for a manufacturer to produce a line that was more expensive in exchange for, say, twenty-year warranty. But even ultra lux Viking and Subzero appliances are plagued with early failure issues, Consumer Reports says.
It's a creeping phenomenon. Consumers have been trained to accept more frequent replacement of products that used to last decades. Once that becomes the norm, it's too tempting for even companies that make luxury items to start cutting corners that will cause failure in a shorter period of time.
Nor does it helps that certain components are made almost exclusively in China, particularly microchips. Anything that requires microchips to function is going to be susceptible to the failure rate common for all Chinese goods.
The desire "to buy the cheapest" is not within us all. A lot of folks know that you get what you pay for and so do not go the cheapest route, myself included. I think what you mean is people do not want to overpay or that they want to pay the best price. I was a Walmart shopper in my twenties, in part because of Sam Walton's
Made in the USA marketing. By the mid to late 80s that was no longer true. Along about that time I had a customer service issue and I vote with my wallet so I never went back. But before long I realized that the life of most Walmart goods was not very long. Which meant I had to replace them more often. Which meant although per trip to Walmart was cheaper, overall it cost me more.
Some people, such as yourself, learn to overcome the desire for the cheapest. Most people either do not, or cannot buy the "better" brand. Otherwise there would not be so much cheap stuff around.
I am sure you have found out that some of the formerly good brands no longer have high quality. I am sure you have also found, as I have, that you go into a store, they have smaller selections because of the online marketplace, and often what they do have is not the best quality. I have found that recommendations from the trades people are often the best places to find good appliances.
As a friend of mine once said: you get what you pay for, at most.
I agree with all of that except that everything is cheap because that is what people want. That is the point of the article we are commenting on -any people are fed up with valueless crap that passes for consumer goods. Personally I have at this point disavowed all of the big box stores. And I rarely use Amazon.
I agree that is the point of the article, but people often say one thing, but their behavior is often different. I try to avoid Amazon and the big box stores, but sometimes there is no choice.
I'd be MORE than willing to pay more for US made goods, problem is I can't find any. I definitely look at the label and try my best to avoid Chinese made products.
I try to avoid Chinese products as well. The problem is that components and natural resources come from different places, and often are assembled in another place. Automobiles and the iPhone are classic examples.
It's impossible to avoid Chinese products. There was a woman who tried to do that for one year back in the 2000s and wrote a book about it. And it's much worse now. They even set up dodgy "American" companies that will do the last little step of assembling what are entirely manufactured in China components, so they can say "Made in USA" to fool those who try to buy domestic.
I have managed to avoid a few. It is possible, for example, to find out who is behind some of the Amazon storefronts. I understand the difficulties, but one can try, and the more people that try, and protest about it, the more likely it will change.
More than that, it's buying products from countries with no rule of law and no tort recourse for bad products. The middleman companies whose names we see pay so little for this landfill that they just eat the cost of replacement when they have to.
We used to sell some of this landfill (called "recycling") to Asian countries which was amusing in that it was a bidirectional landfill flow. Tridirectional, really, because all they would do with it is haul it back out to sea and dump it and these floating islands of garbage would float back across the ocean on easterly currents.
There is an excellent book written about why Chinese manufactures are of so poor quality, written by an American who lived and worked there for a dozen years as a manufacturers representative for hire - a go between for western companies outsourcing manufacture in China. It's very eye-opening. Countless specific examples. "Made Poorly in China" is the title. Don't recall the author's name. He is no longer welcome there.
Are you actually trying to say that the only reason stuff sucks now is because it is all made somewhere else? Come on man. Sure that's probably true for a percentage of the commercial industry, but you make it sound like that's the only thing at work here. I mean, my '99 Camry still runs like a dream, but I certainly can't say the same thing for a few American cars I've owned over the years. Or is that different because it's Japanese and not Chinese?
Not nearly everything is the result of Marxist overreach for crying out loud. And it is perfectly true that a lot of crap, American crap, has gotten crappier over the decades. Some of that you can blame on overseas manufacture, sure, but a shit ton of it you can't. Poor quality American stuff is not just the fault of cheap labor on the other side of the world, it's also the fault of our own companies.
Being American does not somehow make us immune to producing cheap shit, no one is.
This is a fairly circular argument. When American countries manufacture overseas is it an American good anymore? Not to me. And of course there are quality goods manufactured overseas. But to compare your Camry to the gross crappification of American consumer goods is comparing apples and oranges. Toyota is a Japanese company with pretty high standards regardless of where the manufacturing process is located. IMO that cannot be said of far too many American products. I think of it as the Shark Tankification of America. And you can get good quality merchandise from China. But there is a lot of really cheap stuff too. That old adage you get what you pay for is true.
When you look at specific products that used to be manufactured in the U.S., but are now manufactured off-shore, the difference is glaring.
The Singer sewing machine my parents got for me for Christmas in 1978 was made in the U.S., and it gave me 20 years of good service before the gears broke. If I'd known then what I know now, I've have paid to have the gears replaced instead of buying a new machine. When I purchased the EXACT SAME MODEL (but no longer made in the U.S.), the frame gradually warped over the course of about 5 years until the feed dogs no longer grabbed and the needle no longer came down in the right place.
Similarly, I have Revere Ware copper-bottom saucepans that were bought new by my mother in the 1950s, when they were still manufactured in the U.S. They're still in excellent condition. But when I went to buy the same products new as a wedding gift to my oldest son and his wife, product reviews made it clear that the Revere Ware manufactured off-shore is junk. I had to go to eBay to find pans that were old enough to have been made in the U.S. (which were, of course, still in excellent condition).
While you make a good point that American companies that have off-shored their manufacturing are still responsible for the slippage in quality, the effort to cut costs that led to off-shoring in the first place seems to have affected quality standards as well.
As for your Camry, Japanese manufacturing standards are well-known to be high. American companies have tried (mostly in vain--due to differences in culture) to copy the Japanese way.
The reality is that countries gain a reputation for producing certain products very well. And China has a very well-deserved reputation for producing shoddy goods that are very cheap and break easily.
I wish i could just blame it off on China or Marxism, but I have to admit you are right. Certainly there is a percentage, maybe higher than you expect since we get some parts for all kings of things that are built here .. elsewhere.
However that is not the whole story (neither is corporate greed). Human nature, we always want to point fingers at someone else, and generally in the direction of people we do not like.
Greed (and envy) play a part, but by consumers as well as corporations. We are a nation of spoiled brats. We want things cheaper. We want more "features". We devalue our items by adding more and more things we want but didn't need. This doesn't just apply to manufacturing either. Consider colleges. They used to teach. Now its a social club, with swimming pools and safe spaces. Every conceivable (and some not) experiences are added. Tuition has of course skyrocketed and the quality of education?
Couple that with the lack of investment in the product, company, nation or whatever. People jump jobs frequently, you are not going to be working at not-a-pen company in three years, why do you care about its long term value? You just want a raise and some more time off before you hop to the next job. That goes for CEOs all the way down. As a bonus for some maybe you get to post on twitter that you work for "that" company to build your social capital.
I am sure regulations have played a role too, the companies do have to cut cost elsewhere to cover this, because I guarantee you the consumer is not going to. However how we value companies as a society has changed too. Is it more important to have a good product, or be a "good" company. Good can be relative based on which side of the isle you are on. Do they protect the climate, protect workers from "harm", promote equity? Do they provide the best benefits, did they publicly state they are apolitical?
ALL of these things have a cost, either in money or time taken away from what the company is focused on.
Maybe I am a bit cynical but as much as we complain, I do not think people would pay more for quality. We want more AND cheaper, if someone did focus on quality and function they would likely go out of business. My orange peeler costs just as much, but doesn't do anything else? No way, I don't care how long it lasts! My friend has one that can peel 3 different ways, plays music, and can connect to the iphone!
I pay more for quality. .And I mean quality, not name. Fortunately I have been this way for a long time (I have been in a Walmart twice in thirty years and I was with someone else who was shopping there) so I have a lot of quality stuff that lasts. But on those occasions I need a new consumer good, quality is harder and harder to come by. If what you want is cheap, what you get is cheap. Which you have to replace more often. Which costs more in the long run. Seems foolish to me.
“We are a nation of spoiled brats. We want things cheaper”
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Literally all humans want things cheaper. That is not it. The problem is when cheaper things are made available via crime AKA globalism.
This is what happens when the federal government intentionally vacates its responsibility to restrict foreign entanglements and combines that with doing something that is NOT their job, regulating the shit out of domestic businesses, which puts domestic companies at an absurd disadvantage.
Forget China, think of Mexico. Imagine if Arizona suddenly had the regulatory regime of Mexico AKA no regime. Arizona would eat up all of the manufacturing and it would become incredibly corrupt and quality would subsequently suffer.
We get some good stuff from Mexico. This isn’t something that’s just 100% all the way terrible immediately. But Mexico is a corrupt country. So if you’re making car parts in Mexico eventually the corruption will kick in, along with the low quality workforce, and over time you have the $2600 Samsung refrigerator I bought that breaks after 18 months because of parts from China.
Your comments about Mexico corruption would suggest that you think they are an outlier. How about the shit show in Washington DC - and the latest 1.7 trillion dollar example of corruption on steroids? Mexico is corrupt - but Washington DC is the same circus - just different clowns.
Oh we absolutely will end up like Mexico because of the DC cartel. We just aren’t totally there yet because of how the founders set up the country. But we are getting very close.
You make a very good point about the lack of loyalty affecting quality. CEOs and other administrators jump from company to company, caring only about padding the next quarter's profits so they can put that on their next resume. Workers, too, have no reason to become good at their jobs, because they'll be jumping ship for a different job in a year or two.
Even at the car parts factory where my husband works, only a handful of employees have spent their entire working lives there, despite the fact that the job pays well and has good benefits. Whereas my dad worked at Geneva Steel from the time he came back from WWII until he retired.
“Or is that different because it's Japanese and not Chinese?”
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Yes. China is a communist dictatorship. The people in charge are Marxists. As such they are grotesque fundamentally unethical people who do not care if they send you broken shit.
To make doubly clear, I’m talking about the leadership in China……and also the people who support them obviously, but we have no idea how many people that is because you get killed for opposing the government.
And that's why all of our stuff sucks now, because some of it is made in a Marxist country? Yet stuff made in European countries, with a much higher degree of social welfare economy than us, is somehow still high quality. Okay...
Socialism doesn't automatically make shit crap any more than capitalism doesn't automatically make shit great. That's obscenely simplistic.
No the socialism in Europe just bankrupts your society eventually. And they absolutely do not have a much higher degree of social welfare than we do. We may have passed them at this point. If not we will soon.
Obviously I never said capitalism automatically makes shit great. Straw man.
The European countries are not socialist. In some of them, the economic sector has more freedom than here in the United States. The issue there is they tax the consumer side more heavily.
In none of those countries do the governments own the means of production. Socialist countries are/were China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, England at one time, etc.
When the government tells you what type of energy to use and who to hire and how to operate every single aspect of your business, and then they seize half of the profits you are able to scratch out after you were forced to comply with all of their inefficient trashy ideas………they de facto own the means of production.
Do you basically only think it’s communism if the government rolls up in tanks and leather boots? If the IRS and all of the various and sundry regulators, all of whom can imprison you if you don’t comply, if they drove tanks and wore leather boots would that add clarity?
First of all, communism is a very specific type of system, what you are referring to is creeping totalitarianism. So what types of government regulation do you support? What inefficient trashy ideas are you referring to? Do you want to abolish the IRS - do you want there to be no penalties for tax cheats?
There is a lot that could be improved in this country, but you are not going to stop the progressives and the woke crowd, but throwing epithets around t hat really do not apply.
Your comments remind me of what Whittaker Chambers wrote to Bill Buckley about Senator Joseph McCarthy. Chambers aid McCarthy was like a performer who was hit by a tomato from the audience, and not knowing exactly where it came from excoriated everyone.
I don’t quite get the analogy. This particular comments section is populated 90% with people who totally agree with me. So if you’re suggesting I’m in here excoriating everyone then that’s just factually incorrect and nonsensical given the political leanings of this group. I’m excoriating the government, but that doesn’t fit with your analogy.
If I was in a left-wing comments section I would be excoriating everyone, but that’s because everyone would be throwing tomatoes at me, so your analogy still doesn’t work.
I think that’s just a little zinger you wanted to use, but sadly you used it incorrectly.
I am aware that this is creeping totalitarianism. The fact that you are unaware how far it has crept is informative as is your request for me to name some examples of bureaucratic interference, as if you’re not really convinced there’s a problem of any real significance.
I never said you excoriated people here, your comments were made against the entire Democratic party. Hence my comment is exactly correct. I have no idea whether 1% or 99% of the people on the forum agree with you or not. It is irrelevant.
Do you really expect the elected representatives to make detailed rules about manufacturing, medicine, foreign policy, border control, fiscal policy, etc.? There is a reason why the regulatory state has arisen given the complexities of modern society, and that is why I asked you for specific examples. It is easy to make generalizations, it is hard to deal with the actual reality of dealing with reality. You still have not told me whether the government should have the power to go after tax violations.
Excellent points. Your point on greed especially resonates. I always romanticize people & companies of the past, but they were subject to the same human nature that we have.
Just for kicks, watch the debate between Al Gore and Ross Perot that was moderated a few decades ago by Larry King. It’s on YouTube. All this offshoring of middle class jobs and the environmental destruction of cheap disposable crap from China wasn’t accidental or inevitable. It was a choice made for us, not by us.
The "giant sucking sound" - of all those manufacturing jobs going overseas. Uttered by Ross Perot in one of his debates back in '92. I remember being impressed by him and his inescapable logic. As a Democrat I discounted him.
It’s the same bullshit different century today. Ross Perot definitely had American interests at heart, the current administration don’t even know that there are American people between them and their paycheck. And as for the media President45 described them in one sentence “They are the enemy of the people”
I have a friend that was a staffer for several politicians in DC and he reports they are a completely different breed of not giving on shit about the People. The whole thing is a game to them. Look at Bitch McConnell - he just purposely withheld MILLIONS of Trump generated PAC cash from a half dozen Senate candidates their states chose. Just to deny Trump a victory. Miserable cretins, nothing more.
It's not a plot. It's the combination of people's natural tendency to want to save money by buying what they hope (foolishly) is the same thing for the cheapest possible price - with the Internet and Amazon, which enables direct price comparisons. Reviews no longer work, as companies have sprung up which flood them with fake positive reviews. You can't get better quality by opting for more expensive variants because sellers have realized people do this and will sell the exact same product under different company names at different price points.
I know this is a little off topic, but as a health coach, I would try to get my clients to buy organic veggies for $1 more a pound. That's 25 cents per person and they would not do it. But would spend $3 for a cup of coffee. Dr. Mark Hyman spoke to an executive at Coke and asked why we use high fructose corn syrup in the US and he said consumer would not pay an extra few cents for real sugar, and he needed to sell more product.
But even real sugar is harvested by virtual slave labor in horrific conditions. If we had to pay the REAL costs of it and pay and house people humanely most people would balk at doing so.
I agree. I follow (for the most part) the clean living diet approach and "shop the edges" of the grocery store. I do spend more on quality items but I don't spend on all that highly processed and packaged stuff so spend about the same as I did before.
Yep, 25 years now designing and manufacturing American OEM durable goods and the 'developing' country competitors we essentially subsidize have zero of the regulations we have that are imposed by our own governments. The Chinese can't compete with my company's competencies, but I am sure our government will provide them with the tools to do so.
The same economic incentive you decry today was valid fifty years ago! It is always in the corporate interest to increase sales, in 1923 as in 2023. That doesn't seem to explain the lack of quality in today's products.
But what wasn’t true 50 or more years ago is consumer boredom and FOMO. People want new, new, new all the time. As consumers we’re our own worst enemy.
We have gotten used to cheap throw-away stuff - think IKEA which has furnished many an apartment with stuff that lasts a couple of years before people move on to more expensive decor: : think of clothes from H&M that, like the yellow mitterns fall apart within weeks , but people - young ones especially - love to shop and buy new stuff. It is only old folks who love to brag that the dress is 20 years old. The costume institute at the Met Museum of Art has clothes that are almost 100 years old which could be worn today.
Another point. Many people are renters and landlords don't usually put in top of the line appliances. I lived for 9 years in a studio and had to replace the garbage disposal 4 times and the dishwasher twice. If people want affordable housing, they will get affordable appliances.
Most city people have never seen a landfill so have no idea the consequences of their "throw aways" have on the environment. However, the number of second hand shops is growing, so maybe things will change.
I bought a Viking stove 20 years ago when we remodeled our kitchen. That thing is a workhorse I've never had to get repaired. I'm sure it will outlast me. Quality is pricey.
We replaced our washer and dryer about five years ago. It was shocking how much the big box stores wanted for the sets with the fancy electronic gadgets. One salesperson to,d me up front not to count on our purchase lasting twenty plus years as had the ones we were replacing. My husband stubbornly insisted we go with Maytag Commercial, which are anything but slick looking with very basic controls. I think they resemble the juicer that Walter Kirn describes. Here’s hoping that sacrificing the cool factor pays off for us.
We have an appliance repairmen in our town but sometimes it is cheaper to buy than repair. I lived in the tropics and ran our A/Cs 24 hours a day. When we moved back to the States we sold our 20 year old still running A/Cs and all of our 20+year old still working appliances.
Exactly. The financialized economy is from the Fed-induced business cycle. It took time to hollow out industry and attract the best and brightest to the place of the highest (and most artificial) returns, finance. Take away central banking and finance is a mature industry like any other with stable, unremarkable, returns.
Well done, Mr. Kirn! If we don’t like the Fed allocating resources (enriching our politicians, unelected bureaucrats, and their donors and decreasing the value of just about everything), let’s just wait for the full maturation of the global economy brought to you by your friendly World Economic Forum. This ain’t your Adam Smith economics, folks. Is it any wonder they want us to eat bugs?
The Fed is only restricting the economy right now because they have to because Democrats are communists.
All that is required to stop inflation is to turn off welfare. But Democrats won’t do that because they are communists.
So what the Fed has to do is raise interest rates which slows down business and causes layoffs. People getting fired has the same impact on inflation as turning off welfare. The only difference is you crush the economy and the suffering is shifted from welfare recipients to the people who lost their jobs.
The Fed also doesn’t print money. They are forced to print money to pay for Democrat programs.
Turn off welfare and the Fed will never change interest rates or print money ever again.
Excellent post Kevin, wish you would write your own substack. You never beat about the bush you get straight to the point it’s such a pleasure to read!
Is it not about the vicious circle of wanting everything to be as cheap as possible and the competition for these dollars?
Here, in the states, This feels really prominent, though, the price pressure creep and cheap goods is now very normal in other places such as Western Europe .
The more we want cheaper stuff, the less quality we will get. Yes, you could spend more money on something such as timberline boots , for example. Seems like that would have the pedigree of the brand . However, on a recent walk in the rain, these boots fell apart completely .
Even if you want to pay for quality, that is made somewhere other than China or Bangladesh, how do you find these goods ?
There is no doubt the quality of everything is shoddy. We talk. About this almost every day in our family . But what is a conscientious and reasonable consumer to do ? How can we change the situation?
We need to cut all economic ties with China, not just for economic reasons but for moral reasons. China makes Hitler look like a girl scout selling cookies door to door.
Guess who are the most avid supports of this brutality? Left wing industrial giants like Nike, Disney, GM and Apple.
The problem is that it is difficult to know where anything is manufactured, and parts or natural resources come from various places and is assembled somewhere else. The iPhone and automobiles are classic examples.
I'm getting told it's this cold because of global warming. I'm expecting the next time I get a raise that I think it too low it will be because of global warming.
Our conception of how long a product should last seemingly dwindles, too. Of course, as we progressively lose faith in products’ durability and the companies manufacturing them, they, in turn, lower the bar for quality.
"and the evils of capitalism itself"
This is your answer, it is planed obsolescence and corporate greed. You mentioned yourself that old citrus juicer still works after over 80 years. Its not just your juicer, but old washing machines, dishwashers, fridges all old house appliances and tools.
Problem is, since our economy has become financialized to that extent that companies only care about next quarter, there is no interest in producing longlisting products, because if they did, people would rarely buy new stuff. So new stuff is made to last 2-3 years, just enough to keep customers returning for more, if they break earlier than 2 years, customer will go to other brand, but 2+ years is long enough for customer to keep brand loyalty.
Same thing happened to electronic, majority of phones/laptops have non replicable batteries for same reason, they make it very expensive to replace battery, our impossible to do so. Repairs on modern electronic is very difficult in many cases impossible.
Sadly, it is in corporate interest to make low quality products, and it will continue to be so for forseable future (sure there are exceptions, but those are far in between or very expensive ).
I think of the 3 year old Samsung Refrigerator I had to replace, meanwhile, not kidding I have a much older friend whose 1950's Frigidaire was still in use as an original appliance to his house of the same vintage. Sure it is an energy hog, but it works.
It seems whatever works well hogs energy, and the energy-efficient pieces have short shelf lives.
What's great about capitalism is that we have choices. I disagree that all modern goods are subpar. It takes a while to research and find them, but there are still things that are solidly made. They are more expensive, naturally.
I make the choice to have fewer things, but higher quality things. If you want more quality goods, buy more quality goods, or at least fewer sub-par goods. As the author states, there are still good quality things available at thrift stores, too.
I own a manufacturing company, and while it's easy (and often correct) to blame the failures on shoddy quality and quick bucks, that's not the only thing going on. Ask any refrigerator or appliance repair shop, and they'll tell you (off the record) that modern regulations by and large forbid the older more robust materials and ways of doing things because the EPA had deemed them "inefficient" or polluting. A modern fridge cannot use the older coolants because they degrade ozone, but the new ones just do not work well unless you run much much higher compression - compression which makes solder joints and welds fail in the system, leaking the new coolant right out. And those compressors have to run more "efficiently", which the EPA Energy Star rating forces to be shorter cycles, which don't work, so the fridge runs more often and harder to do the same work - and the compressors therefore fail far more frequently. I've got a 50 year old chest freezer that runs like a champ, but my kitchen fridge died after 10 years, while its replacement died after 2 years. Lead is a superior electronics solder, while lead-free solder alloys are brittle and prone to cracking - but lead is often banned in consumer electronics (nevermind that it's easily recycled, unlike lead-free alloys which are also more toxic to mine, and more difficult to recycle). On and on and on it goes.
And then there are the consumers who will buy the cheap imported appliances, and not the more expensive (and more robust) US made ones - that's not down to corporate greed, but down to a myriad of factors without easy solution.
This is the best comment in here and nobody has seen it.
Yes, if you ask anyone who actually produces, they will explain to you 14,000 ways the government has needlessly made the world worse. Why? Because bureaucrats are useless people who don’t produce anything and never know WTF they are talking about and their only satisfaction in life comes from creating new bullshit that interferes with producers.
My friend owns a trucking company and he said the exhaust systems now cost $30,000 plus $1500/mo for the special fluid and it used to just be an $1800 normal human-style exhaust setup. You can literally buy insurance for the exhaust systems it’s so expensive…….but they had that for 10 years and now it’s time to switch to batteries and each truck will cost $800,000 and single moms will no longer be able to afford food.
Most of my customers are in the trucking industry, on the utility vehicle side. They have been dealing with ratcheting pain levels for about 15 years now. And the "green" tech? Don't get me started - they're not allowed to idle their engines in so many places, so they can't charge their batteries to keep their equipment running, so they're towing big generators around. Talk about rampant bureaucratic BS.
I busted the coolant line in my refrigerator over the summer. The new one looks nice, very shiny, yet it can't maintain its temperature. It's either too warm or too cold. I miss the twenty-year-old one.
I sold real estate for several years, over 100 homes. When homes were being rehabbed, I frequently had home inspectors and contractors ask if they culd have the broken 1980's dishwashers. Why? Because they worked. They had good disposals in the bottom. They had good motors. For the cost of a few parts, these guys who knew how to repair them would end up getting a dishwasher that was better than mine at home.
Speaking as a former head of a manufacturing company,, when designing a product to sell, you ask yourself, "What is the customer willing to pay for?" I inherited a product line that was very feature rich, but did not return a sufficient profit to guarantee long term corporate survival. The customer was willing to buy our product, but only if the product's price was low enough as he/she did not really value all of the features of our product and was not willing to pay for all of them.
I had our product managers go through the product features and either take out features that the customer had to buy if they wanted them,, or redesign features to take out costs to provide a sufficient overall product return.
It was an effort to have the customer pay for features he/she really wanted and yet provide an acceptable level of perceived quality. It was a delicate balance, and is something most manufacturers are forced to do if they want to stay in business.
Capitalism hasn't changed between the 1940's and now. Government regulation and inflation have both increased exponentially, so they are the problem.
The government regulates the paint that can be used to mark dials and measuring cups. The government regulates the composition of materials used in coffee grinders. In short, the government regulates everything. Robust stuff manufactured in the 1940's is most likely illegal in today's over regulated pseudo socialst society. The last thing we need is more government messing around with capitalism. We passed the point of diminishing returns for government regulation a very long time ago.
Inflation is the other government made quality destroyer. When inflation increases the price of a product, some manufacturers think the best way to preserve sales, in the short run, is to cut costs by reducing quality. The shattered casserole dish is the result. Inflation benefits the government because it's a big debtor. By reducing the value of the dollars the government owes through inflation, the government makes it easier to pay its debt.
Increasing govenrment involvement in the economy is a vicious cycle. Quality goes down the more government is involved. Then socialsts say capitalism has failed, so we need more government intervention in the economy.
Vicious cycle, indeed.
Maybe we have to own it,fess up and not pass the buck. Corporations aren’t driven by greed any more than us. Have asked for a raise or declined it when offered? Maybe it is because we don’t demand quality. We accept style over substance.
Kevin's right Raz. It isn't capitalism that's the problem. It's the crony capitalism and growing fascism in America that elevates and rewards loyalty to the elite dogma rather than producing quality goods made by fairly paid American workers.
I call it "corporatism." When a business is more loyal to its shareholders than its customers, it is something other than mom-and-pop capitalism.
They are supposed to be loyal to shareholders. They are the owners. There is only one type of capitalism. If they make bad products, they will eventually go out of business. We are all free to purchase from any company we want to.
CEO's get promoted by cutting cost then move on to the next job. No long term commitment like back when things were a family business and CEO cared about the business and they knew and card for workers. Now most CEO's care about the next year or two stock prices to cash in on options before moving on. Employees are industrial cogs that can be replaced when broken.
“Employees are industrial cogs that can be replaced when broken.”
So true. And infuriating.
No. It is not “capitalism”. It is crime. We make these products in countries that don’t have our laws and then pretend it’s not a violation of the law because there was a container ship in between us and the crimes.
It also isn’t “corporate greed”. All corporations are “greedy” because 100% of people are greedy. The company that made the good old blenders was greedy. It’s not greed. It’s being manufactured in countries where people cannot read and live in houses made of cinderblocks. So yeah, the quality is not great.
Great comment Kevin to great essay. I will add that the crushing of Small biz by woke elites in order to concentrate all biz into huge monopolistic corps allows woke elites an easier world to control. Huge corps run by woke execs can ignore reliability and quality because no small competitor is making a better product. And it appears consumers are more ok than in the past with disposable products. Also the complexity of all digital devices make them inherently more unreliable or the huge corps making them have enough monopolistic control that no one can compete with them even with a more reliable
Product.
'A container ship between us and the crimes.'
Well done, Kevin.
My only rule of thumb is that the heavier the product the better. Light is brand new and worthless; heavy, well, this sucker's been around.
If it's as old as me, pause for thought, and then I'll pay more..
Right you are, Mr. Durant?
We want cheap stuff, and third world countries with minimal regulation, and lower standards of living are how that can be done. We are complicit.
I certainly didn't ask American companies to move their manufacturing to China. We are not complicit.
You were outvoted in the market place by all those who wanted cheaper prodcuts.
Damn right we aren't. I lived through the vast hollowing out of the American Heartland in the 1970s and '80s and saw hundreds of thousands of productive citizens thrown out of work so T-shirts would cost $5 instead of $8. Horrible.
While what you say is true, it was not that simple. I remember how the US car industry produced inferior products until the Japanese competition came along.
Many industries did not help themselves by being sloppy about costs.
Absolutely. American automakers produced wretched small cars--and their large ones were prone to heavy rusting and mechanical failures--until Japanese automakers entered our market and smoked the competition. Extreme hubris in Detroit produced derision, then alarm, then plunging sales, then, finally, competence. I still will put Honda up against any American car as a model manufacturer, but American carmakers are better for having to compete.
American corporations can do that, too, and keep not just the factories and jobs in this country, but revenue and profits. They just ... don't. On just our domestic market alone we could have it all. But, we don't.
I am driving a 2007 Honda Fit with 252,000 — around the moon and headed back. When I bought it, I couldn't find an American manufacturer who made a gas-sipping car. Wondering if I can get this car to 500,000 miles?
The trade deal in the 90's finished us off.
Many of us want quality and are willing to pay for it. But we literally cannot find that quality no matter what the price tag.
The Amana appliances I bought in the 1970s were still running perfectly when I sold the house that contained them in 2018. Buy new from any manufacturer, at any price point, and I'm replacing those appliances within five years.
Craftsman tools from the 1960s work perfectly today. The same tools bought in the past five years break, chip, round, and strip. Yes, there's a "lifetime guarantee," but I don't want to keep replacing them. Finding high-quality "stuff" at any price is a challenge, and "we" are not complicit in that.
You are so right Shane; I gave in to my wife's urging and replaced the dishwasher that I had installed when we built our house over two decades ago. It got dishes spick and span and had never once had an issue. I got the new really quiet and supposedly highly efficient unit put in and took the old one to my daughter's house and installed it. I regretted it in a week. The new one had to have dishes hand-washed before you tried to wash them if you wanted them clean. The old one still works great. Also I own a great deal of Craftsman tools that I collected like coins or stamps over the years and very clearly remember the first addition to my collection that was made overseas. It was a pair of small bolt-cutters that I was shocked to see were made in Japan. It made me sad, but not nearly so much as when I saw the first ones coming from China. It has taken years of slow decline followed by rapid decline to come to our sorry state of today.
Thanks, Willie, I feel your pain. I hated to abandon my ancient appliances because they were working perfectly even after 35 years of service. But I moved out of state and had to leave them behind. Fortunately, my tool collection was portable, and I still delight in using wrenches and screwdrivers from the 1940s that will outlast me.
Same for the high efficiency washing machines. It is far from efficient to have to wash the same load three times because "high efficiency" means not enough water to soak the load. I could not even bring myself to sell the poor excuse for an appliance. I just let the guy who brought the old-time Speed Queen replacement. Awww, clean clothes again.
Absolutely, Lynne. "High efficiency" is a scam when you're forced to flush the toilet thrice to get everything clear, wash dishes and laundry twice to get them clean, and spend longer in the shower rinsing soap out of your hair because the water flow is so restricted. What did we gain with all this "efficiency?"
Why do companies do this? Since the vast majority of people will not pay for quality, companies make the economically rational decision to produce products of lower quality. They are just responding to market demand.
One clear example is the tight seating on airlines. People may complain, but the vast majority of the public that travels maybe once a year, is willing to put up with it to keep the cost of their travel down.
I agree. But in a nation this vast, you’d think that there would be enough demand for quality in, say, washers and dryers for a manufacturer to produce a line that was more expensive in exchange for, say, twenty-year warranty. But even ultra lux Viking and Subzero appliances are plagued with early failure issues, Consumer Reports says.
It is not just appliances, I find even brands such as LL Bean are not as good as they used to be.
I would agree that there should be a market for high quality goods, but you need a company that is not run the the finance people.
It's a creeping phenomenon. Consumers have been trained to accept more frequent replacement of products that used to last decades. Once that becomes the norm, it's too tempting for even companies that make luxury items to start cutting corners that will cause failure in a shorter period of time.
Nor does it helps that certain components are made almost exclusively in China, particularly microchips. Anything that requires microchips to function is going to be susceptible to the failure rate common for all Chinese goods.
We want cheap stuff, and using third world countries is how that can be accomplished. We are complicit as well.
True to a degree. But those who are that way, and I am not one, were made that way by marketing.
I think marketing has created the demand for a lot of those goods, but the desire to buy the cheapest is within us all.
The desire "to buy the cheapest" is not within us all. A lot of folks know that you get what you pay for and so do not go the cheapest route, myself included. I think what you mean is people do not want to overpay or that they want to pay the best price. I was a Walmart shopper in my twenties, in part because of Sam Walton's
Made in the USA marketing. By the mid to late 80s that was no longer true. Along about that time I had a customer service issue and I vote with my wallet so I never went back. But before long I realized that the life of most Walmart goods was not very long. Which meant I had to replace them more often. Which meant although per trip to Walmart was cheaper, overall it cost me more.
Some people, such as yourself, learn to overcome the desire for the cheapest. Most people either do not, or cannot buy the "better" brand. Otherwise there would not be so much cheap stuff around.
I am sure you have found out that some of the formerly good brands no longer have high quality. I am sure you have also found, as I have, that you go into a store, they have smaller selections because of the online marketplace, and often what they do have is not the best quality. I have found that recommendations from the trades people are often the best places to find good appliances.
As a friend of mine once said: you get what you pay for, at most.
I agree with all of that except that everything is cheap because that is what people want. That is the point of the article we are commenting on -any people are fed up with valueless crap that passes for consumer goods. Personally I have at this point disavowed all of the big box stores. And I rarely use Amazon.
I agree that is the point of the article, but people often say one thing, but their behavior is often different. I try to avoid Amazon and the big box stores, but sometimes there is no choice.
I'd be MORE than willing to pay more for US made goods, problem is I can't find any. I definitely look at the label and try my best to avoid Chinese made products.
I remember the Daily Wire saying they wanted to make their travel mugs in the US and could not find any company to make them here.
I try to avoid Chinese products as well. The problem is that components and natural resources come from different places, and often are assembled in another place. Automobiles and the iPhone are classic examples.
That is very, very true. And the labeling is outright deceptive.
It's impossible to avoid Chinese products. There was a woman who tried to do that for one year back in the 2000s and wrote a book about it. And it's much worse now. They even set up dodgy "American" companies that will do the last little step of assembling what are entirely manufactured in China components, so they can say "Made in USA" to fool those who try to buy domestic.
I have managed to avoid a few. It is possible, for example, to find out who is behind some of the Amazon storefronts. I understand the difficulties, but one can try, and the more people that try, and protest about it, the more likely it will change.
More than that, it's buying products from countries with no rule of law and no tort recourse for bad products. The middleman companies whose names we see pay so little for this landfill that they just eat the cost of replacement when they have to.
We used to sell some of this landfill (called "recycling") to Asian countries which was amusing in that it was a bidirectional landfill flow. Tridirectional, really, because all they would do with it is haul it back out to sea and dump it and these floating islands of garbage would float back across the ocean on easterly currents.
There is an excellent book written about why Chinese manufactures are of so poor quality, written by an American who lived and worked there for a dozen years as a manufacturers representative for hire - a go between for western companies outsourcing manufacture in China. It's very eye-opening. Countless specific examples. "Made Poorly in China" is the title. Don't recall the author's name. He is no longer welcome there.
Thanks for the book recommendation. I definitely will check it out.
Are you actually trying to say that the only reason stuff sucks now is because it is all made somewhere else? Come on man. Sure that's probably true for a percentage of the commercial industry, but you make it sound like that's the only thing at work here. I mean, my '99 Camry still runs like a dream, but I certainly can't say the same thing for a few American cars I've owned over the years. Or is that different because it's Japanese and not Chinese?
Not nearly everything is the result of Marxist overreach for crying out loud. And it is perfectly true that a lot of crap, American crap, has gotten crappier over the decades. Some of that you can blame on overseas manufacture, sure, but a shit ton of it you can't. Poor quality American stuff is not just the fault of cheap labor on the other side of the world, it's also the fault of our own companies.
Being American does not somehow make us immune to producing cheap shit, no one is.
This is a fairly circular argument. When American countries manufacture overseas is it an American good anymore? Not to me. And of course there are quality goods manufactured overseas. But to compare your Camry to the gross crappification of American consumer goods is comparing apples and oranges. Toyota is a Japanese company with pretty high standards regardless of where the manufacturing process is located. IMO that cannot be said of far too many American products. I think of it as the Shark Tankification of America. And you can get good quality merchandise from China. But there is a lot of really cheap stuff too. That old adage you get what you pay for is true.
When you look at specific products that used to be manufactured in the U.S., but are now manufactured off-shore, the difference is glaring.
The Singer sewing machine my parents got for me for Christmas in 1978 was made in the U.S., and it gave me 20 years of good service before the gears broke. If I'd known then what I know now, I've have paid to have the gears replaced instead of buying a new machine. When I purchased the EXACT SAME MODEL (but no longer made in the U.S.), the frame gradually warped over the course of about 5 years until the feed dogs no longer grabbed and the needle no longer came down in the right place.
Similarly, I have Revere Ware copper-bottom saucepans that were bought new by my mother in the 1950s, when they were still manufactured in the U.S. They're still in excellent condition. But when I went to buy the same products new as a wedding gift to my oldest son and his wife, product reviews made it clear that the Revere Ware manufactured off-shore is junk. I had to go to eBay to find pans that were old enough to have been made in the U.S. (which were, of course, still in excellent condition).
While you make a good point that American companies that have off-shored their manufacturing are still responsible for the slippage in quality, the effort to cut costs that led to off-shoring in the first place seems to have affected quality standards as well.
As for your Camry, Japanese manufacturing standards are well-known to be high. American companies have tried (mostly in vain--due to differences in culture) to copy the Japanese way.
The reality is that countries gain a reputation for producing certain products very well. And China has a very well-deserved reputation for producing shoddy goods that are very cheap and break easily.
You are so right about Revereware. I wish I’d kept mine. The new stuff is lightweight and warps easily.
So basically, we have to find products as old as we are.
Enjoyed your post, Celia.
We think alike. I keep finding that you have beat me to making some point - or three.
I wish i could just blame it off on China or Marxism, but I have to admit you are right. Certainly there is a percentage, maybe higher than you expect since we get some parts for all kings of things that are built here .. elsewhere.
However that is not the whole story (neither is corporate greed). Human nature, we always want to point fingers at someone else, and generally in the direction of people we do not like.
Greed (and envy) play a part, but by consumers as well as corporations. We are a nation of spoiled brats. We want things cheaper. We want more "features". We devalue our items by adding more and more things we want but didn't need. This doesn't just apply to manufacturing either. Consider colleges. They used to teach. Now its a social club, with swimming pools and safe spaces. Every conceivable (and some not) experiences are added. Tuition has of course skyrocketed and the quality of education?
Couple that with the lack of investment in the product, company, nation or whatever. People jump jobs frequently, you are not going to be working at not-a-pen company in three years, why do you care about its long term value? You just want a raise and some more time off before you hop to the next job. That goes for CEOs all the way down. As a bonus for some maybe you get to post on twitter that you work for "that" company to build your social capital.
I am sure regulations have played a role too, the companies do have to cut cost elsewhere to cover this, because I guarantee you the consumer is not going to. However how we value companies as a society has changed too. Is it more important to have a good product, or be a "good" company. Good can be relative based on which side of the isle you are on. Do they protect the climate, protect workers from "harm", promote equity? Do they provide the best benefits, did they publicly state they are apolitical?
ALL of these things have a cost, either in money or time taken away from what the company is focused on.
Maybe I am a bit cynical but as much as we complain, I do not think people would pay more for quality. We want more AND cheaper, if someone did focus on quality and function they would likely go out of business. My orange peeler costs just as much, but doesn't do anything else? No way, I don't care how long it lasts! My friend has one that can peel 3 different ways, plays music, and can connect to the iphone!
I pay more for quality. .And I mean quality, not name. Fortunately I have been this way for a long time (I have been in a Walmart twice in thirty years and I was with someone else who was shopping there) so I have a lot of quality stuff that lasts. But on those occasions I need a new consumer good, quality is harder and harder to come by. If what you want is cheap, what you get is cheap. Which you have to replace more often. Which costs more in the long run. Seems foolish to me.
“We are a nation of spoiled brats. We want things cheaper”
—————————————————
Literally all humans want things cheaper. That is not it. The problem is when cheaper things are made available via crime AKA globalism.
This is what happens when the federal government intentionally vacates its responsibility to restrict foreign entanglements and combines that with doing something that is NOT their job, regulating the shit out of domestic businesses, which puts domestic companies at an absurd disadvantage.
Forget China, think of Mexico. Imagine if Arizona suddenly had the regulatory regime of Mexico AKA no regime. Arizona would eat up all of the manufacturing and it would become incredibly corrupt and quality would subsequently suffer.
We get some good stuff from Mexico. This isn’t something that’s just 100% all the way terrible immediately. But Mexico is a corrupt country. So if you’re making car parts in Mexico eventually the corruption will kick in, along with the low quality workforce, and over time you have the $2600 Samsung refrigerator I bought that breaks after 18 months because of parts from China.
Your comments about Mexico corruption would suggest that you think they are an outlier. How about the shit show in Washington DC - and the latest 1.7 trillion dollar example of corruption on steroids? Mexico is corrupt - but Washington DC is the same circus - just different clowns.
Oh we absolutely will end up like Mexico because of the DC cartel. We just aren’t totally there yet because of how the founders set up the country. But we are getting very close.
You make a very good point about the lack of loyalty affecting quality. CEOs and other administrators jump from company to company, caring only about padding the next quarter's profits so they can put that on their next resume. Workers, too, have no reason to become good at their jobs, because they'll be jumping ship for a different job in a year or two.
Even at the car parts factory where my husband works, only a handful of employees have spent their entire working lives there, despite the fact that the job pays well and has good benefits. Whereas my dad worked at Geneva Steel from the time he came back from WWII until he retired.
This is the best comment I've read so far. It's the Idiocracy, "Man".
“Not nearly everything is the result of Marxist overreach for crying out loud.”
I'm glad somebody said it.
And great analogy referencing cars.
Everything is not from Marxist overreach. However, everything I complain about is from Marxist overreach.
😂😂
Including some things in the US
“Or is that different because it's Japanese and not Chinese?”
————————————————
Yes. China is a communist dictatorship. The people in charge are Marxists. As such they are grotesque fundamentally unethical people who do not care if they send you broken shit.
To make doubly clear, I’m talking about the leadership in China……and also the people who support them obviously, but we have no idea how many people that is because you get killed for opposing the government.
If true that is still the responsibility/fault of the American company that slaps its label.on the product. My personal.pet peeve is pet food.
And that's why all of our stuff sucks now, because some of it is made in a Marxist country? Yet stuff made in European countries, with a much higher degree of social welfare economy than us, is somehow still high quality. Okay...
Socialism doesn't automatically make shit crap any more than capitalism doesn't automatically make shit great. That's obscenely simplistic.
No the socialism in Europe just bankrupts your society eventually. And they absolutely do not have a much higher degree of social welfare than we do. We may have passed them at this point. If not we will soon.
Obviously I never said capitalism automatically makes shit great. Straw man.
The European countries are not socialist. In some of them, the economic sector has more freedom than here in the United States. The issue there is they tax the consumer side more heavily.
In none of those countries do the governments own the means of production. Socialist countries are/were China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, England at one time, etc.
When the government tells you what type of energy to use and who to hire and how to operate every single aspect of your business, and then they seize half of the profits you are able to scratch out after you were forced to comply with all of their inefficient trashy ideas………they de facto own the means of production.
Do you basically only think it’s communism if the government rolls up in tanks and leather boots? If the IRS and all of the various and sundry regulators, all of whom can imprison you if you don’t comply, if they drove tanks and wore leather boots would that add clarity?
First of all, communism is a very specific type of system, what you are referring to is creeping totalitarianism. So what types of government regulation do you support? What inefficient trashy ideas are you referring to? Do you want to abolish the IRS - do you want there to be no penalties for tax cheats?
There is a lot that could be improved in this country, but you are not going to stop the progressives and the woke crowd, but throwing epithets around t hat really do not apply.
Your comments remind me of what Whittaker Chambers wrote to Bill Buckley about Senator Joseph McCarthy. Chambers aid McCarthy was like a performer who was hit by a tomato from the audience, and not knowing exactly where it came from excoriated everyone.
no IRS. no tax cheats..
I don’t quite get the analogy. This particular comments section is populated 90% with people who totally agree with me. So if you’re suggesting I’m in here excoriating everyone then that’s just factually incorrect and nonsensical given the political leanings of this group. I’m excoriating the government, but that doesn’t fit with your analogy.
If I was in a left-wing comments section I would be excoriating everyone, but that’s because everyone would be throwing tomatoes at me, so your analogy still doesn’t work.
I think that’s just a little zinger you wanted to use, but sadly you used it incorrectly.
I am aware that this is creeping totalitarianism. The fact that you are unaware how far it has crept is informative as is your request for me to name some examples of bureaucratic interference, as if you’re not really convinced there’s a problem of any real significance.
What kind of government regulation do I support??
*presses caps lock with pinky finger
THE KIND THAT IS DONE BY ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES
I never said you excoriated people here, your comments were made against the entire Democratic party. Hence my comment is exactly correct. I have no idea whether 1% or 99% of the people on the forum agree with you or not. It is irrelevant.
Do you really expect the elected representatives to make detailed rules about manufacturing, medicine, foreign policy, border control, fiscal policy, etc.? There is a reason why the regulatory state has arisen given the complexities of modern society, and that is why I asked you for specific examples. It is easy to make generalizations, it is hard to deal with the actual reality of dealing with reality. You still have not told me whether the government should have the power to go after tax violations.
Excellent points. Your point on greed especially resonates. I always romanticize people & companies of the past, but they were subject to the same human nature that we have.
Just for kicks, watch the debate between Al Gore and Ross Perot that was moderated a few decades ago by Larry King. It’s on YouTube. All this offshoring of middle class jobs and the environmental destruction of cheap disposable crap from China wasn’t accidental or inevitable. It was a choice made for us, not by us.
Good post, Art.
The "giant sucking sound" - of all those manufacturing jobs going overseas. Uttered by Ross Perot in one of his debates back in '92. I remember being impressed by him and his inescapable logic. As a Democrat I discounted him.
But I was wrong.
Kudos Lee. If more folks could admit when they are wrong this world would be a far better place.
It’s the same bullshit different century today. Ross Perot definitely had American interests at heart, the current administration don’t even know that there are American people between them and their paycheck. And as for the media President45 described them in one sentence “They are the enemy of the people”
I have a friend that was a staffer for several politicians in DC and he reports they are a completely different breed of not giving on shit about the People. The whole thing is a game to them. Look at Bitch McConnell - he just purposely withheld MILLIONS of Trump generated PAC cash from a half dozen Senate candidates their states chose. Just to deny Trump a victory. Miserable cretins, nothing more.
It's not a plot. It's the combination of people's natural tendency to want to save money by buying what they hope (foolishly) is the same thing for the cheapest possible price - with the Internet and Amazon, which enables direct price comparisons. Reviews no longer work, as companies have sprung up which flood them with fake positive reviews. You can't get better quality by opting for more expensive variants because sellers have realized people do this and will sell the exact same product under different company names at different price points.
I know this is a little off topic, but as a health coach, I would try to get my clients to buy organic veggies for $1 more a pound. That's 25 cents per person and they would not do it. But would spend $3 for a cup of coffee. Dr. Mark Hyman spoke to an executive at Coke and asked why we use high fructose corn syrup in the US and he said consumer would not pay an extra few cents for real sugar, and he needed to sell more product.
But even real sugar is harvested by virtual slave labor in horrific conditions. If we had to pay the REAL costs of it and pay and house people humanely most people would balk at doing so.
your brain sees sugar as sugar. including that dreaded killer syrup.. "organic" is a farce one dollar MORE a POUND? that is a rip off..
I agree. I follow (for the most part) the clean living diet approach and "shop the edges" of the grocery store. I do spend more on quality items but I don't spend on all that highly processed and packaged stuff so spend about the same as I did before.
Good for you! The best investment we can make is with our health.
what is a "health coach"?
Very, very true. And buying online you can not even give it the feel test. How heavy is it? How is it assembled? ...
Yes! I re-watched that 45 minutes of greatness and it was soooo prescient when I watched it in 1993.
Yep, 25 years now designing and manufacturing American OEM durable goods and the 'developing' country competitors we essentially subsidize have zero of the regulations we have that are imposed by our own governments. The Chinese can't compete with my company's competencies, but I am sure our government will provide them with the tools to do so.
Also we’re being “punked” by China. They make $hitty goods that don’t last so we have to buy more (and pollute our country in the process.)
Payback for us shipping our supposedly recyclable trash to them, perhaps?
They stopped taking it some time back.
So now it is going to Cambodia or Thailand or somewhere close by.
Solid point.
The same economic incentive you decry today was valid fifty years ago! It is always in the corporate interest to increase sales, in 1923 as in 2023. That doesn't seem to explain the lack of quality in today's products.
But what wasn’t true 50 or more years ago is consumer boredom and FOMO. People want new, new, new all the time. As consumers we’re our own worst enemy.
We have gotten used to cheap throw-away stuff - think IKEA which has furnished many an apartment with stuff that lasts a couple of years before people move on to more expensive decor: : think of clothes from H&M that, like the yellow mitterns fall apart within weeks , but people - young ones especially - love to shop and buy new stuff. It is only old folks who love to brag that the dress is 20 years old. The costume institute at the Met Museum of Art has clothes that are almost 100 years old which could be worn today.
Another point. Many people are renters and landlords don't usually put in top of the line appliances. I lived for 9 years in a studio and had to replace the garbage disposal 4 times and the dishwasher twice. If people want affordable housing, they will get affordable appliances.
Most city people have never seen a landfill so have no idea the consequences of their "throw aways" have on the environment. However, the number of second hand shops is growing, so maybe things will change.
I bought a Viking stove 20 years ago when we remodeled our kitchen. That thing is a workhorse I've never had to get repaired. I'm sure it will outlast me. Quality is pricey.
True. But Walter bought a rather costly washing machine and it lasted, what did he write(?), four years.
We replaced our washer and dryer about five years ago. It was shocking how much the big box stores wanted for the sets with the fancy electronic gadgets. One salesperson to,d me up front not to count on our purchase lasting twenty plus years as had the ones we were replacing. My husband stubbornly insisted we go with Maytag Commercial, which are anything but slick looking with very basic controls. I think they resemble the juicer that Walter Kirn describes. Here’s hoping that sacrificing the cool factor pays off for us.
Remember the days when people actually got their appliances repaired? Now it's impossible to even find a repairman.
We have an appliance repairmen in our town but sometimes it is cheaper to buy than repair. I lived in the tropics and ran our A/Cs 24 hours a day. When we moved back to the States we sold our 20 year old still running A/Cs and all of our 20+year old still working appliances.
Exactly. The financialized economy is from the Fed-induced business cycle. It took time to hollow out industry and attract the best and brightest to the place of the highest (and most artificial) returns, finance. Take away central banking and finance is a mature industry like any other with stable, unremarkable, returns.
Well done, Mr. Kirn! If we don’t like the Fed allocating resources (enriching our politicians, unelected bureaucrats, and their donors and decreasing the value of just about everything), let’s just wait for the full maturation of the global economy brought to you by your friendly World Economic Forum. This ain’t your Adam Smith economics, folks. Is it any wonder they want us to eat bugs?
The Fed is only restricting the economy right now because they have to because Democrats are communists.
All that is required to stop inflation is to turn off welfare. But Democrats won’t do that because they are communists.
So what the Fed has to do is raise interest rates which slows down business and causes layoffs. People getting fired has the same impact on inflation as turning off welfare. The only difference is you crush the economy and the suffering is shifted from welfare recipients to the people who lost their jobs.
The Fed also doesn’t print money. They are forced to print money to pay for Democrat programs.
Turn off welfare and the Fed will never change interest rates or print money ever again.
What to you is a communist?
Wanting a welfare state does not make you a communist.
Marx called communism scientific socialism, and socialist countries own the means of production.
Excellent post Kevin, wish you would write your own substack. You never beat about the bush you get straight to the point it’s such a pleasure to read!
I have my own Substack but it is incredibly profane because that is where I vent. Buyer beware (it’s free).
😂😂😂
Don't forget about the root cause of our inflation: the Executive branch stopping ALL domestic energy development.
Yip under President Trump we were energy independent it makes you think WTF happened
China.
Is it not about the vicious circle of wanting everything to be as cheap as possible and the competition for these dollars?
Here, in the states, This feels really prominent, though, the price pressure creep and cheap goods is now very normal in other places such as Western Europe .
The more we want cheaper stuff, the less quality we will get. Yes, you could spend more money on something such as timberline boots , for example. Seems like that would have the pedigree of the brand . However, on a recent walk in the rain, these boots fell apart completely .
Even if you want to pay for quality, that is made somewhere other than China or Bangladesh, how do you find these goods ?
There is no doubt the quality of everything is shoddy. We talk. About this almost every day in our family . But what is a conscientious and reasonable consumer to do ? How can we change the situation?
We need to cut all economic ties with China, not just for economic reasons but for moral reasons. China makes Hitler look like a girl scout selling cookies door to door.
Guess who are the most avid supports of this brutality? Left wing industrial giants like Nike, Disney, GM and Apple.
Don’t buy any of the above products in fact I’m going out on a limb here BOYCOTT them!
The problem is that it is difficult to know where anything is manufactured, and parts or natural resources come from various places and is assembled somewhere else. The iPhone and automobiles are classic examples.
This is true.
It is getting colder than a witch's tit. Thank God for global warming otherwise this freeze would be much worse.
I'm getting told it's this cold because of global warming. I'm expecting the next time I get a raise that I think it too low it will be because of global warming.
You can't win with the GW hucksters. If it is too hot it's global warming. If it's too cold, it's global warming.
Trump was in the process of doing that with his first-point-of-sale tariffs in Asia. It is why they had him removed.
Yip 💯 correct!
Change in business practices…
Our conception of how long a product should last seemingly dwindles, too. Of course, as we progressively lose faith in products’ durability and the companies manufacturing them, they, in turn, lower the bar for quality.