Who here remembers those old 1000+ pages thick mail-order shopping catalogues? This was a (more or less) carefully curated collection of items because the catalogs could only have a finite number of pages. When Amazon started to accept virtually unvetted product listings from third parties, they opened the floodgates for lemons.
It's kind of a real world ACME equivalent now. I'm surprised that I don't make that duped coyote face more often after ordering from them.
The other part of the story is that a lot of formerly respectable quality brands now sell much poorer quality goods. I'm not sure whether this is adaptation to a lemon market, but it does reinforce the information asymmetry. Infindnlywlf thinking, "this used to be a good brand once, but can I still rely on them?"
Some of the bad incentives have always been there because they are fundamental to capitalism. But I feel that the Internet and global trade together have turbocharged a particularly nasty race to the bottom.
> The other part of the story is that a lot of formerly respectable quality brands now sell much poorer quality goods.
I've observed this too.
Somewhere, some marketing genius realized that brand reception is sticky, but changes to manufacturing processes can be rapid. There is thus an arbitrage opportunity. You start with a high-quality product with a beloved brand. You quickly change the factory to cheaply produce garbage instead. For some window of time, you can get people to buy these shitty products at a price commensurate with their brand perception and take a huge profit.
Of course, brand perception is sticky but not infinitely so and eventually information catches up with reality. Then you've permanently destroyed a brand's reputation. But for a brief moment in time, you can create a lot of shareholder value at the minor expense of making crappy products and disappointing people.
The canonical instance of this is, in full irony, one of the precursors of the Internet: the Whole Earth Catalog (instituted now largely as Wired Magazine). Its premise:
The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting. An item is listed in the CATALOG if it is deemed: (1) Useful as a tool, (2) Relevant to independent education, (3) High quality or low cost, (4) Not already common knowledge, (5) Easily available by mail.
Save that last, the current iteration of the Internet, the actual whole-Earth catalogue, is itself an anti WEC. Rather than "access to tools", it is overwhelmingly "access to shit".
(I could also have listed the Sears Catalog, somewhat less-credible offerings such as Sharper Image or Brookstone, or any number of others. Costco is a current exemplar of this strategy, in that it selects quality merchandise, as does (or did) Marks & Spencer. Not necessarily cheap, but high value.
I remember flipping through the Sear's Wish Book as child, coveting all the toys. You can still find old copies online: https://christmas.musetechnical.com/
What's actually happening is that China's manufacturing revolution has given us incredible access to cheap manufactured goods. So for instance, in the 1991 Sear's catalog an electric toothbrush costs $80 ( https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1991%20S... ). There are only brand name options. In terms of prevailing wages, that is about $200 in today's dollar. Now on Amazon you can get that same brand name toothbrush for $50, one quarter the price, or a nonsense-brand-name one for $10, 1/20th the price! One man's race-to-the-bottom is another's man paradise of inexpensive and abundant goods...
When China started making stuff so cheap, nobody wanted to buy a much more expensive brand-name Japanese or American or European made product. So even the brand names decided to move their production to China. But then gradually people learn there is no longer any brand name quality boost, and the Chinese manufacturers learn to sell direct to consumers, and so then you get the all the weird brand names, and consumers just buy those for cheaper since the brand names don't mean anything anymore anyways. And even if you wanted to introduce a higher quality version, there simply is no way to reliably educate the consumer and credibly prove to the consumer that your product is four times the durability at twice the price.
Thus the equilibrium is that for most products less than $100 its all going to be Chinese made, the product will be good enough that the consumer won't immediately return it, but other than that the quality is going to be mediocre, because there is no incentive to develop a brand name that stands for high quality products in that price range.
With more expensive goods, there are still are brands that pride themselves on high quality, durable products, eg, Toyota for cars, Bosch for appliances, Milwaukee for tools, Redwing for boots. But you have to do your research to know which brands are working to keep their reputation, and which brands are selling out.
> The other part of the story is that a lot of formerly respectable quality brands now sell much poorer quality goods.
I've felt this. A few years ago I bought Eddie Bauer sheets online and they pilled up so badly after one washing that I couldn't use them anymore.
I can see how they'd be willing to ship off cheap crap to Amazon whereas they'd be more protective of what they sell in their stores.
Amazon didn't even let me leave a negative review, some AI model must have decided I'm fraudulent. That would be especially ironic if the reason for my bad experience had been counterfeit products commingled with real ones.
what makes you think 1000 pages of catalog 2x per year is carefully curated? my experience is that it was also filled with random junk
I'd rather rely on online reviews. I'm pretty good at buying quality products sight unseen at this point. And with free returns, the risk is even lower.
No, they wouldn’t — that’s the point of this entire thread. A catalog with 100x the pages and items would be useless, impossible to organize, and expensive to stock. The creators of those catalogs, who lest we forget, were at the forefront of their own tech revolution, were keenly aware of the limitations and possibilities of their tools.
It's kind of a real world ACME equivalent now. I'm surprised that I don't make that duped coyote face more often after ordering from them.
The other part of the story is that a lot of formerly respectable quality brands now sell much poorer quality goods. I'm not sure whether this is adaptation to a lemon market, but it does reinforce the information asymmetry. Infindnlywlf thinking, "this used to be a good brand once, but can I still rely on them?"
Some of the bad incentives have always been there because they are fundamental to capitalism. But I feel that the Internet and global trade together have turbocharged a particularly nasty race to the bottom.