My local Montana landfill is full of the remains of short-lived coffee grinders, pens, peelers, laptops. After Christmas, I’ll need to reserve a bigger plot.
I am so glad that Walter is being mainlined like this; he is a real treasure. I hope that he DOES last a bit longer than he seems to indicate. Who else can chit chat about kitchen gadgets and product reliability and tease out a thread that ravels all the way back to the underpinnings of our society? AND make it easily accessible and humorous and engaging? His (I am assuming pronouns here) mind works in a surprising and delightful manner and he illuminates and elucidates with some real gut level homilies and such that can have a bit of a bite. I await Fridays eagerly for the discussions he has with Matt Taibbi about current goings-on too. My only quibble is that his words aren't nearly as glib as his prose, but that is as much about me as him. Thanks Walter, and thanks Bari for platforming so many talented people. Keep up the good work.
Matt and Walter do a podcast called something like This Week in America that comes out on Fridays. They have about a dozen episodes so far and they play well together. Matt is extremely data driven and precise and Walter is eclectic and right brained so it is a good match. I subscribe to Matt and think that is where I get it.
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 ).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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!
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
I think part of it was consumer expectations were higher. People had less money and they were not prepared to just accept things breaking. The whole tradition of wedding gifts was to provide a couple with the hardware they needed for life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The worst of these offenses is the previously high quality products that now are cheaply made so the CEO can pay him/her self a bigger bonus. (Wow am I a genius!! cheaper materials = more money for me!! the fools buying won't even notice!!)
I have lived my life in Levis - they used to last years, now six months until a hole in the knee.
Totes umbrellas were once a great gift, now they are the same cheap umbrella as sold on the street.
And don't get me started on Krups coffee makers... whatever happened to "German engineering"?
The evil “CEOs” have always sought to maximize profits. The current problem is that our CEOs are trained in business schools by Ivy League globalist Democrats who don’t like the United States.
But none of this would be a problem if our government was doing one of the three or four things they actually are supposed to do: restricting foreign entanglements.
If you make products in countries where the people in charge are atheist Marxists, and thus fundamentally unethical, then the product will suffer. Same if you make products in countries where people live in cinderblock houses and can’t read.
Instead of regulating the holy shit out of every business activity in the United States, all that is needed is a crackdown on foreign entanglements. Failing to regulate the only thing they are supposed to regulate hasn’t worked out. Shocking.
It’s frustrating. American manufacturing is paralyzed by mandates and laws and regulations to protect everything. Yet, we import and buy products made in China in unregulated, horrible for everyone and everything conditions. The epitome of hypocrisy.
Maytag is owned by Whirlpool (which wisely retained the name for its own product lines) and they manufacture some appliances in China. Some Whirlpool and Maytag units are indeed produced in the USA, but not all. Also be advised that Assembled in the USA” and “Made in the USA” are two different things. Items must have a certain percentage of their parts produced in the U.S. to have the “Made in the USA” sticker applied. When they don’t meet that percentage, the phrasing will change. Either way, your grandparents’ Maytag of yesteryear is long gone. That being said, I’d still take a base model (or better yet-a commercial) Maytag unit over a Samsung. If you’ve got an old unit from 25-30 years ago, run it until it dies, then fix it or get someone else to fix it if you can. Whatever you replace it with will not last as long.
I bought a Maytag set in 1994 that lasted 25 years. I think the dryer (at my sisters house) is still going, but you don't see Maytag repair man commercials anymore since whirlpool bought them out,
They have virtually guaranteed that manufacturing will never come back, as a result of energy policy.
As in Australia, the 'climate' commitments that result in exceedingly expensive (and unreliable) energy will ensure manufacturing stays in third world countries, where the 'climate' rules don't apply.
The companies make their profits, but nothing really changes in the environment.
My husband went through two Mercedes in the first few years of our marriage before I put my foot down and said no more European cars, even German ones. The first had a fire in the wiring harness in the trunk which left him stranded in a remote location for hours. The second had nonstop electrical problems which usually manifested in the windows and sunroof opening unbidden at random times (during a rainstorm was common timing) and refused to close.
I always say about Mercedes and BMW... it's not too little or poor engineering... it's over engineering! My husband drives wealthy people in their cars (he got rid of his limousine 10 or so years ago) and their fancy cars (add Range Rovers to this list, oh and Porsche too) are always an issue. My Toyota Camry is 14 years old and I have replaced tires and fluids....he always says he would take my Camry over a Mercedes any day!
My husband put his 87 Tacoma up for sale. It had gotten stolen from my apartment, he got it back 2 weeks later with all her parts gone for sheet metal! He rebuilt all the sheet metal and he could tell they had not joy rided (okay not a real word!) it because the stuff on the dash was perfectly in place. He drove it another 100K miles. When he listed it, he had 30 offers. I was so sad when he sold that truck. His reason...it was gonna need brakes! Such a sad day. I think if he hit the lotto he would buy that truck back. He sees them on bring-a-trailer going for 70K all redone!
I think we're seeing the difference between the days people made something because they wanted to make it and so the natural approach was to make something you're proud of and charge what it cost plus something for yourself; and (now) when people make something because it's a way to make money and so you (or your company) naturally makes it as cheap as possible, which leads to people competing on price and the buying public using that as their only selection criteria, which drives quality ever-downward. I don't see how we get out of this, and the environmental impact is huge. Even electric vehicles are becoming cheap flimsy things based on software and madly expensive batteries. They're like iPhones, and will just get thrown away in a few years, not worth repairing or upgrading.
As one bright note, I believe there is a growing slice of the population who do see through this - who are realising that anything made before about 1990 will be of an entirely different quality, and is worth grabbing if you find it, because you simply can't get stuff like that any more. It will be made of slow-grown wood, not fast-growth timber; made more by hand than on a CNC machine; use British or German or US steel rather than cheap imported. Use enough materials to do a proper job, rather than as little as they can get away with. And the final difference, which you allude to early in your article, is that these old things are fixable. They come apart, they use straightforward components, they can be mended. if you know how to look after them, they will go on virtually for ever.
I would add that they replaced quality with marketing.
You don't sell a product on the reputation of its lasting quality, you sell it on a slick marketing campaign fed directly to targeted consumers that are accustomed to judging by fad and appearance.
The first house we bought was built around 1999. I never got the kitchen I wanted because all the money went into re-building the foundation - drainage issues and quality issues (and let's not talk about the dishwasher replaced twice over 14 years, and the oven, and the microwave, and the AC). The second house we bought was built in 1989. It is twice the size of the first house (yes, more space than we need). The utilities cost the same due to better quality construction. This pre-1990 house is so much better built. I've got some normal maintenance issues to deal with, but, four years in, no evidence of quality issues.
One of the reasons we have always bought old houses is that the construction quality is better. Old houses do develop issues over time, but they are usually worth repairing.
Boy, isn't that the truth. The house we own now was built in 1896. Two-story Victorian built out of clear fir and cedar. Eleven foot ceilings. Solid as a rock. Not well insulated though.
Based on the evidence we've discovered during remodeling, our current house actually incorporated a structure that was built before its theoretical build date of 1874. One downstairs corner of the house was built with non-dimensional lumber on a stone foundation. That lumber is a bear to cut, drill, or screw into--much more solid stuff than anything you can buy new.
If you are in eastern U.S. it's probably hardwood. This house was all built with local softwoods (Olympic Peninsula). All the original structure is cut with honest dimensions (e.g. 2 x 6" instead of 1-1/2 x 3-1/2").
I bought a "loaf" of sourdough bread in the grocery store yesterday and noticed it is half of a round loaf. For the price a full round loaf. This must help the Government lie about inflation.
I'm in the Midwest. Not sure what species the wood is in the oldest part of the house. The boards are dark brown on the outside, but closer to cedar colored inside, although there's no scent to suggest they are actually cedar.
I've noticed that product shrink is happening faster and faster. Christmas treats are especially affected. Popcorn tins are smaller. Shortbread cookie tins are smaller.
Yes! I could repair anything on my 1970s stove because everything was nuts, bolts, and screws. I ordered a new coil or timer unit online and installed them myself; not a big deal.
Today, with computer chips and non-mechanical connectors, I can't fix jack.
I think you're missing the general point of his piece. He uses personal anecdotes to illustrate the fact that quality of goods and services has generally declined. I think we can all agree with that, and that it's extremely unfortunate. Giving him tips on how to fix his issues, while helpful, isn't really what the essay was for.
I think you miss the point that it’s easy to overcome some of the quality issues. Sure you can whine, which you and he are, but so what? It is what it is.
If overall quality has declined it's not so easy to overcome. It is what it is? Come on, we should just accept it and move on? The only thing I agree with you on is that no solutions are offered, but again I don't think that's the point of his essay. It's an exposition...what do you expect?
Ok I will never buy a consumer item again. I and my six children will live as naked barefoot hermits in the desert and eat locusts and honey like John the Baptist. Thanks for the helpful advice!
Ms. Reeks - I was referring to goods made in China. Our enemy. I know it's hard to avoid them but there are some alternatives. If we all stopped buying their crap we'd all be better off.
Yes, and by the way, all we need is one air burst atomic weapon that produces an EMP to fry the entire lot of this electronic crap. In addition to our power grid which the FERC still refuses to harden against it.
Awesome essay. But look, this is primarily due to the State, it’s monetary inflation and it’s war against public consumer goods in the guise of environmental regulations. Do not discount this. It’s real, and it’s pervasive.
I recently went through a two month process to replace an A/C coil from a top manufacturer, a simple product. Why? Because, not China, but all such manufacturers are moving their lines to the new products as environmental regulations are putting the “older” ones into forced obsolescence. They are forced to do more with less. The net effect is anti-green. Waste, useless products, less real wealth, and as you point out brilliantly in this essay, social degradation.
Inflation then rears its head as an entirely monetary phenomenon, and leads to inevitable need by suppliers to cut cost. The ill social effects of guaranteed inflation are legion and understood by only 0.001% of the population and even less so by economists. But there is one! I urge all to read Jorg Guido Hullsman’s magnificent “the Ethics of Money Production” and see what has been obvious all along.
Our culture has degraded too, outside of all this, but I’m not convinced people don’t want well made things (yet), but simply have this issue of affordability and constant attack from the State’s nudges on all of our products.
Lastly if I may add to the rant, what rent seeking behavior from private industry? How about cars? Do people appreciate that if you put a modern gas engine in a 1985 Honda Accord, that thing might get 65-70 mpg? And of course that car would be illegal today and yesterday because “crash safety”, a set of standards entirely defined by industry to kill foreign competition and its lighter cars. But the State did their bidding in a classic example of fascism that we pretend isn’t fascism.
We have a pool pump that needs replaced. I can buy the same model at Lowe’s for $400. Our pool guy gave us a bid for $2700 because “new federal efficiency regulations.” He might be shining us on, but he might not.
I truly like the way this piece was structured and it had a Rooney-type quality about it - which made it, along with the juicer, feel old and timeless. It had a nice beat and you can dance to it - or something like that. It made me remember what it was like to watch Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon with my grandfather while he chewed mixed nuts in his dentures that never failed him. As I dig out my mother’s 1979 Cuisinart mixer to make cookies this week, I will remember this missive as I marvel at the “on/off” lettering still visible after 40-odd years. Cheers Mr. Kirn. May your future driving experiences be electrified.
“It’s important to get to the essayistic part, where I ask what it means when the objects in our lives demoralize us in a blizzard of malfunctions that seem to be hastening by the month.”
———————————————————
The disdain I have for ‘free trade’ ‘libertarians’ cannot be matched. Doing business with Communist China isn’t trade, it’s criminal activity. Often those crimes are human rights violations.
But it’s fine, you see, because it is fReE tRaDe because we put a container ship in between the crimes and the end consumer. HERP DERP.
Obviously, a larger downside, somewhat more significant than your blender falling apart, is that ‘free trade’ has proven to be the most grave national security threat in the history of the United States. Your blender money helped buy a chubby psychopath named Xi some hypersonic nukes. Smart.
Even if you take the assbackward shitholes that we are propping up with ‘free trade’ out of the discussion, you still must wonder, how did they ever sell people on the idea that getting a 14% discount on televisions is a good deal when the result is that you have a bunch of unemployed neighbors and you now can’t access modern medicines like antibiotics.
Good job ‘libertarians’, you psychotic grifting frauds.
(I am generally predisposed to libertarian principals but I am not a fan of behaving like a heedless buffoon, which is what libertarianism often leads to because it becomes a utopian ideology)
Don’t forget that outsourcing raw materials production, when it wasn’t absolutely necessary, caused the Ukraine war which is currently starving and freezing people to death in Europe.
China should never have been admitted to the WTO. Doing so, hoping it would join civilized society, was a ruse. Communism failed miserably in the early 1900’s because those state actors were poor. It scars the shit out me to think that China today has so much wealth, the first time in recent history that a communist regime also had economic might. And yet the US government either remains blind to the obvious, or silent.
Yes and I wrote it ‘libertarian’ so as to hopefully not offend the sensible and intelligent libertarians like yourself.
It’s the libertopians who are the problem because they apply ideological utopian thinking which is not appropriate for planet earth.
It’s how you get
“No but free speech means guys who are aroused by dressing like women have a constitutional right to play with children while dressed like women on government property.”
And yes, they infuriate me. They assume--much like utopian communists, interestingly enough--that all human beings naturally play well with others, despite the fact that tens of thousands of years of human history has proven the exact opposite.
Just because humans manage their own affairs best without undue authoritarian control DOESN'T mean that anything and everything must be allowed. In fact, that is a dangerous practice when it comes to how people are allowed to treat other people. The point of having laws is to set socially agreed-upon limits on behavior toward others. And I would like to think that most people would agree that exposing children to sexual behavior in public is outside the limits.
Another thing that libertopians don't focus on is punishment for law-breaking. For a libertarian society to work, laws HAVE to have teeth. Because the point is not to reform wrong-doers; it's to remove them from participating in society because they have demonstrated in a very objective way that they refuse to play well with others.
First, I am grateful to not be bickering over identity, political alignment , the general misanthropic discourses of our discontented age. Instead, a near universal problem for those accustomed to Western ease. Your assertions and testimony , spot on; only this week, a treasured toaster, nearly 25 years old- so a "newish" one, appeared to be in its death throes . We panicked for no repair shop would touch it- for if it isn't a SubZero refrigerator or a Wolf range, society does not consider it worth a repair. Mournfully we purchased an expensive replacement , it sparkled with the gloss of newness but promised nothing- thankfully the household gods shone and the "problem", one we overlooked, was simply a minor household electrical one. With great glee I shipped the flashy usurping toaster trash back to its maker and my creaky old toaster now receives the homage of a dowager.
The truth is unless you are willing to go down the SubZero/Wolf route, which we do frequently, you cannot possess the most reasonable expectation that carrots will actually be peeled nor expect reasonable responsibility from its makers. We've become so accustomed to the insubstantial, materially , culturally and spiritually that as you mention Morris' dictum (of which I have spent my life heeding) is near impossible.
I've resorted to anachronisms, I now use a fountain pen, an aesthetic experience that slows one down and reveals the grace of cursive ; bar soap only, liquid soap are an insult to our ancestors who spent countless generations perfecting the hardening of fat into solid; thrift and antique shops as often as poossible- the perversity that an 18th century chair can be found far cheaper than a landfill bound Target seating is a testimony to our decline.
And I try to chuckle at the fact that at long last I am the grumpy old man I always wanted to be and that I have so much to gripe about . God bless, Happy Chanukah, Merry Christmas, happy New Year 🕊
This is so true. My dad, who grew up in post-war Romania, always told us how he had one pencil that had to last the whole school year. He used it down to the nub. And paper was a whole other rarity. But it had value. I suppose when we gained access to everything it lost its value and in turn its worth. Which is worse? Not having it or not wanting it? Happy holidays to you. :)
I'm an avid photographer. I have a 1930s Leica that still runs like a champ, and remains repairable if it breaks. Can't say the same of my digital camera. One of my daughters resurrected a mechanical typewriter, and an even older (pre WWI) camera. 2 others regularly use turntables and records now. Pentax announced this week that they will being making new fully mechanical SLR cameras soon - after they re-learn how to do it before they forget entirely.
I don't know how many electric hand mixers I've gone through in 30 years of married life--at least 5 or 6, if not more. When I fell heir to my mom's ancient GE hand mixer, I tucked it away, only pulling it out after my last "new" one died.
Based on the styling, it must be at *least* 50 years old, if not 60. It still works just fine.
You're singing my song, Walter. I'm so dismayed by the poor quality of clothing, even brands that previously were of "good" quality, which is to say, are not "cheap" dollar-wise. I'm sick of pilling shirts/tops, of colors fading, of jeans wearing way too quickly. It's beyond disturbing.
Dearborn Denim is an American jeans company making proper (and decently priced) jeans in Chicago. They're more than twice the price of Wranglers, but I got 4 pairs several years ago that are still going strong.
When I moved up to NH a few years ago from Princeton NJ and needed to obtain a snowblower, a local steered me to a small-engine dealer and told me I'd regret buying the same model from a box store. Manufacturers use cheaper (i.e..: more likely to fail) parts in the models they ship to box stores in order to keep their products price-competitive and use more reliable (and expensive) parts in the models they sell through dealers. As he put it, the box store price will ultimately be more costly than the dealer price. My Ariens has been kicking butt on my driveway for four years now.
This formula does not work on everything, of course, but any product that is sold both in box stores and through manufacturer's licensed dealers is always better from the dealer. As Peter Venkman said to Egon, "Good safety tip."
Good tip. A plumber from a big plumbing company in my City told me something similar. He said that if you buy your replacement toilet, faucet, etc, from them it will cost more but will be much better quality. They warranty their work and materials and it was costly to support warranties so all the internal parts of the faucet would be brass not plastic. He was an employee and didn’t have any financial interest in this. The problem as consumers is we don’t know which products have brass parts and which have plastic parts.
Quality of people has gone down as well. Concepts like integrity, honesty, consistency, professional pride, loyalty, customer service sound like anachronism.
To those blaming capitalism, the issue had surfaced during the sad attempts at communism first. I fear return to that evil experiment.
Personally, I believe that the reason lies within cultural lines of different civilizations. That's why some used to be more successful than others. Globalization has mixed it all up and now we are witnessing the decline overall.
Absolutely so true and reminds us that the old shit you use works better and could care less what others think. That's why I drive a 20-year-old vehicle. No payments and it works just fine. No need to be like the pretend clowns in commercials. My electric car I can't afford and the high cost of electricity. The batteries that are toxic and a shelf life for each vehicle. No thanks.
What is even more sad is that so few people realize that we are committing environmental destruction on a greater scale with green energy. See the wind generator blades kill large birds and the blades when they need replacing, are cut into approximately 23-foot sections and buried in landfills to be there for eternity. Solar panels, expected by 2050 to have 250 Million Tons in landfills leaking lead and other elements into the ground. Ethanol that uses fuel to make and costs maybe more per gallon (Gasoline is more efficient than ethanol. One gallon of gasoline is equal to 1.5 gallons of ethanol.) to make than sells for. If it leaks into the ground, it is really, really bad for the environment. But the government subsidizes it.
So, we out-source our production to China and other third world countries with forced labor and crappy labor and environmental laws and procedures. Then wonder why it breaks and falls apart. Raise your hand for that item you opened, and it actually didn't even work. Low cost, shit, throw it away. Well thank you Congress and Senate for your caring. Make sure the corporations' pony-up for campaign donations. Maybe bobble head AOC and her lemmings can figure out how to re-cycle all of the green energy crap that continues to flow into our land dumps. Naw, never mind, the green energy sector has bought the so-called law makers and owns them. So welcome to the new perfect caring world.
A toaster that doesn't toast despite the quality associated with brand name, a door knob with plastic inner parts so the brand name can meet a Big Box store price point, but then breaks, damaging the brand name...but my real complaint is the online reviews. They are paid for reviews, and some read so repetitively across the various sites that I wonder if they aren't all written by the same writer. I'm not even sure if I can believe in the granddaddy of them all, Consumer Reports.
Ive stopped believing in CR. They employ the modern media fear mongering I hate ("is your grocery store meat poisonous?"..."are there heavy metals in your chocolate??"). Their biases are pretty obvious (always proclaiming the wonders of EVs and rarely pointing out the downsides). I was truly disgusted when they came down on the side of artificial Christmas trees. (My 83 year old mom sends me a free subscription every year, haha.)
I am so glad that Walter is being mainlined like this; he is a real treasure. I hope that he DOES last a bit longer than he seems to indicate. Who else can chit chat about kitchen gadgets and product reliability and tease out a thread that ravels all the way back to the underpinnings of our society? AND make it easily accessible and humorous and engaging? His (I am assuming pronouns here) mind works in a surprising and delightful manner and he illuminates and elucidates with some real gut level homilies and such that can have a bit of a bite. I await Fridays eagerly for the discussions he has with Matt Taibbi about current goings-on too. My only quibble is that his words aren't nearly as glib as his prose, but that is as much about me as him. Thanks Walter, and thanks Bari for platforming so many talented people. Keep up the good work.
Totally agree—Mr. Kirn is a treasure! So enjoy reading his essays—from the first sentence to the last.
America This Week is absolutely my drop everything listen first podcast
Me too.
Where are the Friday discussions you refer to?
They are on Matt Taibbi’s Substack. Best fifty bucks you’ll ever spend.
Yes - I pruned back my sub-stacks but not that one. Matt and Walter’s weekly discussion is a real gem.
Matt and Walter do a podcast called something like This Week in America that comes out on Fridays. They have about a dozen episodes so far and they play well together. Matt is extremely data driven and precise and Walter is eclectic and right brained so it is a good match. I subscribe to Matt and think that is where I get it.
As a paid subscriber to Matt Taibbi on Substack you have access to their Friday call together. It is something to look forward to every week.
Following? I want to listen as well....
"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 ).
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.
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.
Yes! I re-watched that 45 minutes of greatness and it was soooo prescient when I watched it in 1993.
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.
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.
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.
Very, very true. And buying online you can not even give it the feel test. How heavy is it? How is it assembled? ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are so right about Revereware. I wish I’d kept mine. The new stuff is lightweight and warps easily.
“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.
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!
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.
“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.
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.
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
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.
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.
We want cheap stuff, and using third world countries is how that can be accomplished. We are complicit as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Solid point.
'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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
I certainly didn't ask American companies to move their manufacturing to China. We are not complicit.
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.
The trade deal in the 90's finished us off.
You were outvoted in the market place by all those who wanted cheaper prodcuts.
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.
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.
China.
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
😂😂😂
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.
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?
I think part of it was consumer expectations were higher. People had less money and they were not prepared to just accept things breaking. The whole tradition of wedding gifts was to provide a couple with the hardware they needed for life.
Change in business practices…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The worst of these offenses is the previously high quality products that now are cheaply made so the CEO can pay him/her self a bigger bonus. (Wow am I a genius!! cheaper materials = more money for me!! the fools buying won't even notice!!)
I have lived my life in Levis - they used to last years, now six months until a hole in the knee.
Totes umbrellas were once a great gift, now they are the same cheap umbrella as sold on the street.
And don't get me started on Krups coffee makers... whatever happened to "German engineering"?
The evil “CEOs” have always sought to maximize profits. The current problem is that our CEOs are trained in business schools by Ivy League globalist Democrats who don’t like the United States.
But none of this would be a problem if our government was doing one of the three or four things they actually are supposed to do: restricting foreign entanglements.
If you make products in countries where the people in charge are atheist Marxists, and thus fundamentally unethical, then the product will suffer. Same if you make products in countries where people live in cinderblock houses and can’t read.
Instead of regulating the holy shit out of every business activity in the United States, all that is needed is a crackdown on foreign entanglements. Failing to regulate the only thing they are supposed to regulate hasn’t worked out. Shocking.
It’s frustrating. American manufacturing is paralyzed by mandates and laws and regulations to protect everything. Yet, we import and buy products made in China in unregulated, horrible for everyone and everything conditions. The epitome of hypocrisy.
Yes, my Maytag washer & dryer were made in America and run like a top.
My mom's Maytag dryer ran for over 40 years.
Maytag is owned by Whirlpool (which wisely retained the name for its own product lines) and they manufacture some appliances in China. Some Whirlpool and Maytag units are indeed produced in the USA, but not all. Also be advised that Assembled in the USA” and “Made in the USA” are two different things. Items must have a certain percentage of their parts produced in the U.S. to have the “Made in the USA” sticker applied. When they don’t meet that percentage, the phrasing will change. Either way, your grandparents’ Maytag of yesteryear is long gone. That being said, I’d still take a base model (or better yet-a commercial) Maytag unit over a Samsung. If you’ve got an old unit from 25-30 years ago, run it until it dies, then fix it or get someone else to fix it if you can. Whatever you replace it with will not last as long.
I bought a Maytag set in 1994 that lasted 25 years. I think the dryer (at my sisters house) is still going, but you don't see Maytag repair man commercials anymore since whirlpool bought them out,
Yeh, those Maytag repair guys sat around a lot doing nothing 😂😂.
Mine too! They are Maytag Commercial and pretty ugly but reliable.
Ugly is as ugly does, meaning, Maytag Commercials are beautiful!
They have virtually guaranteed that manufacturing will never come back, as a result of energy policy.
As in Australia, the 'climate' commitments that result in exceedingly expensive (and unreliable) energy will ensure manufacturing stays in third world countries, where the 'climate' rules don't apply.
The companies make their profits, but nothing really changes in the environment.
My favorite shit is when people are like
“But there’s not enough lithium for the batteries. This won’t work!!”
The point is that it won’t work. That’s the point.
…but the holes are in such high demand! Look at any person under 30- the more holes in your jeans, the more hip you are!
It’s called ripped jeans🤣🤣
My husband went through two Mercedes in the first few years of our marriage before I put my foot down and said no more European cars, even German ones. The first had a fire in the wiring harness in the trunk which left him stranded in a remote location for hours. The second had nonstop electrical problems which usually manifested in the windows and sunroof opening unbidden at random times (during a rainstorm was common timing) and refused to close.
I always say about Mercedes and BMW... it's not too little or poor engineering... it's over engineering! My husband drives wealthy people in their cars (he got rid of his limousine 10 or so years ago) and their fancy cars (add Range Rovers to this list, oh and Porsche too) are always an issue. My Toyota Camry is 14 years old and I have replaced tires and fluids....he always says he would take my Camry over a Mercedes any day!
We have a Lexus that is decades old, the last year manufactured on the Japanese army truck model.
My 4Runner is 16 years old. Do the prescribed maintenance and it just keeps performing.
My husband put his 87 Tacoma up for sale. It had gotten stolen from my apartment, he got it back 2 weeks later with all her parts gone for sheet metal! He rebuilt all the sheet metal and he could tell they had not joy rided (okay not a real word!) it because the stuff on the dash was perfectly in place. He drove it another 100K miles. When he listed it, he had 30 offers. I was so sad when he sold that truck. His reason...it was gonna need brakes! Such a sad day. I think if he hit the lotto he would buy that truck back. He sees them on bring-a-trailer going for 70K all redone!
I have to admit I have recently bought jeans with holes in them as the grunge fashion has caught on at last for aging women.
Nice article, and a real interest of mine.
I think we're seeing the difference between the days people made something because they wanted to make it and so the natural approach was to make something you're proud of and charge what it cost plus something for yourself; and (now) when people make something because it's a way to make money and so you (or your company) naturally makes it as cheap as possible, which leads to people competing on price and the buying public using that as their only selection criteria, which drives quality ever-downward. I don't see how we get out of this, and the environmental impact is huge. Even electric vehicles are becoming cheap flimsy things based on software and madly expensive batteries. They're like iPhones, and will just get thrown away in a few years, not worth repairing or upgrading.
As one bright note, I believe there is a growing slice of the population who do see through this - who are realising that anything made before about 1990 will be of an entirely different quality, and is worth grabbing if you find it, because you simply can't get stuff like that any more. It will be made of slow-grown wood, not fast-growth timber; made more by hand than on a CNC machine; use British or German or US steel rather than cheap imported. Use enough materials to do a proper job, rather than as little as they can get away with. And the final difference, which you allude to early in your article, is that these old things are fixable. They come apart, they use straightforward components, they can be mended. if you know how to look after them, they will go on virtually for ever.
I would add that they replaced quality with marketing.
You don't sell a product on the reputation of its lasting quality, you sell it on a slick marketing campaign fed directly to targeted consumers that are accustomed to judging by fad and appearance.
Thank you for writing this - I really enjoyed it.
The first house we bought was built around 1999. I never got the kitchen I wanted because all the money went into re-building the foundation - drainage issues and quality issues (and let's not talk about the dishwasher replaced twice over 14 years, and the oven, and the microwave, and the AC). The second house we bought was built in 1989. It is twice the size of the first house (yes, more space than we need). The utilities cost the same due to better quality construction. This pre-1990 house is so much better built. I've got some normal maintenance issues to deal with, but, four years in, no evidence of quality issues.
One of the reasons we have always bought old houses is that the construction quality is better. Old houses do develop issues over time, but they are usually worth repairing.
Boy, isn't that the truth. The house we own now was built in 1896. Two-story Victorian built out of clear fir and cedar. Eleven foot ceilings. Solid as a rock. Not well insulated though.
Based on the evidence we've discovered during remodeling, our current house actually incorporated a structure that was built before its theoretical build date of 1874. One downstairs corner of the house was built with non-dimensional lumber on a stone foundation. That lumber is a bear to cut, drill, or screw into--much more solid stuff than anything you can buy new.
If you are in eastern U.S. it's probably hardwood. This house was all built with local softwoods (Olympic Peninsula). All the original structure is cut with honest dimensions (e.g. 2 x 6" instead of 1-1/2 x 3-1/2").
I bought a "loaf" of sourdough bread in the grocery store yesterday and noticed it is half of a round loaf. For the price a full round loaf. This must help the Government lie about inflation.
I'm in the Midwest. Not sure what species the wood is in the oldest part of the house. The boards are dark brown on the outside, but closer to cedar colored inside, although there's no scent to suggest they are actually cedar.
I've noticed that product shrink is happening faster and faster. Christmas treats are especially affected. Popcorn tins are smaller. Shortbread cookie tins are smaller.
Yes! I could repair anything on my 1970s stove because everything was nuts, bolts, and screws. I ordered a new coil or timer unit online and installed them myself; not a big deal.
Today, with computer chips and non-mechanical connectors, I can't fix jack.
I have an electric skillet I don’t use often but it works perfectly and is over 40 years old. It’s made in the US so that proves how old.
Here’s some comments on your troubles
The mittens were most likely made in Asia. So what if they were cute. You should have known. Besides a mitten is just a mitten
Get some dark nail polish Redo the numbers on your measuring cups and washer. And quit whining
Anything you buy pitched to save the earth really doesn’t.
Finally, what kind of pens are you buying? Change brands for heck sake.
Oh, you need to understand that the more bells and whistles on something, the more things that can go wrong. Go as unfancy as possible.
I think you're missing the general point of his piece. He uses personal anecdotes to illustrate the fact that quality of goods and services has generally declined. I think we can all agree with that, and that it's extremely unfortunate. Giving him tips on how to fix his issues, while helpful, isn't really what the essay was for.
I think you miss the point that it’s easy to overcome some of the quality issues. Sure you can whine, which you and he are, but so what? It is what it is.
If overall quality has declined it's not so easy to overcome. It is what it is? Come on, we should just accept it and move on? The only thing I agree with you on is that no solutions are offered, but again I don't think that's the point of his essay. It's an exposition...what do you expect?
It’s fun to commiserate
Sure, but the point is that stuff should work. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask.
Then stop buying it. Recognizing that most of it is made (Trumpian pause) in CHINA.
Ok I will never buy a consumer item again. I and my six children will live as naked barefoot hermits in the desert and eat locusts and honey like John the Baptist. Thanks for the helpful advice!
Ms. Reeks - I was referring to goods made in China. Our enemy. I know it's hard to avoid them but there are some alternatives. If we all stopped buying their crap we'd all be better off.
Oh ok. Sorry my dude. You are right, of course, and I am undercaffeinated and undercomprehending.
“under” 🤣🤣
No worries. I laughed out loud at the retort. John the Baptist??? Inspire. The image that created in my mind.....
🤣🤣
"Locust ... it's what's for dinner!"
Danke Herr Schwab!!!
🤮
Yes, and by the way, all we need is one air burst atomic weapon that produces an EMP to fry the entire lot of this electronic crap. In addition to our power grid which the FERC still refuses to harden against it.
Or use a pencil?
I was going to try that, but I can't figure out how to plug it in.
Good advice.
The consumer is to blame for some of this.
Awesome essay. But look, this is primarily due to the State, it’s monetary inflation and it’s war against public consumer goods in the guise of environmental regulations. Do not discount this. It’s real, and it’s pervasive.
I recently went through a two month process to replace an A/C coil from a top manufacturer, a simple product. Why? Because, not China, but all such manufacturers are moving their lines to the new products as environmental regulations are putting the “older” ones into forced obsolescence. They are forced to do more with less. The net effect is anti-green. Waste, useless products, less real wealth, and as you point out brilliantly in this essay, social degradation.
Inflation then rears its head as an entirely monetary phenomenon, and leads to inevitable need by suppliers to cut cost. The ill social effects of guaranteed inflation are legion and understood by only 0.001% of the population and even less so by economists. But there is one! I urge all to read Jorg Guido Hullsman’s magnificent “the Ethics of Money Production” and see what has been obvious all along.
Our culture has degraded too, outside of all this, but I’m not convinced people don’t want well made things (yet), but simply have this issue of affordability and constant attack from the State’s nudges on all of our products.
Lastly if I may add to the rant, what rent seeking behavior from private industry? How about cars? Do people appreciate that if you put a modern gas engine in a 1985 Honda Accord, that thing might get 65-70 mpg? And of course that car would be illegal today and yesterday because “crash safety”, a set of standards entirely defined by industry to kill foreign competition and its lighter cars. But the State did their bidding in a classic example of fascism that we pretend isn’t fascism.
I have noticed how many "green" things are not really green at all. It's the virtue signal that counts, not the actual benefit to the environment.
We shouldn’t buy into it cancel the green culture it’s crap anyway
We have a pool pump that needs replaced. I can buy the same model at Lowe’s for $400. Our pool guy gave us a bid for $2700 because “new federal efficiency regulations.” He might be shining us on, but he might not.
I truly like the way this piece was structured and it had a Rooney-type quality about it - which made it, along with the juicer, feel old and timeless. It had a nice beat and you can dance to it - or something like that. It made me remember what it was like to watch Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon with my grandfather while he chewed mixed nuts in his dentures that never failed him. As I dig out my mother’s 1979 Cuisinart mixer to make cookies this week, I will remember this missive as I marvel at the “on/off” lettering still visible after 40-odd years. Cheers Mr. Kirn. May your future driving experiences be electrified.
“It’s important to get to the essayistic part, where I ask what it means when the objects in our lives demoralize us in a blizzard of malfunctions that seem to be hastening by the month.”
———————————————————
The disdain I have for ‘free trade’ ‘libertarians’ cannot be matched. Doing business with Communist China isn’t trade, it’s criminal activity. Often those crimes are human rights violations.
But it’s fine, you see, because it is fReE tRaDe because we put a container ship in between the crimes and the end consumer. HERP DERP.
Obviously, a larger downside, somewhat more significant than your blender falling apart, is that ‘free trade’ has proven to be the most grave national security threat in the history of the United States. Your blender money helped buy a chubby psychopath named Xi some hypersonic nukes. Smart.
Even if you take the assbackward shitholes that we are propping up with ‘free trade’ out of the discussion, you still must wonder, how did they ever sell people on the idea that getting a 14% discount on televisions is a good deal when the result is that you have a bunch of unemployed neighbors and you now can’t access modern medicines like antibiotics.
Good job ‘libertarians’, you psychotic grifting frauds.
(I am generally predisposed to libertarian principals but I am not a fan of behaving like a heedless buffoon, which is what libertarianism often leads to because it becomes a utopian ideology)
Not to mention that the entire "supply chain" charade is entirely the result of our "trade" with that Oriental mafia. (Oh wait, I just did).
Don’t forget that outsourcing raw materials production, when it wasn’t absolutely necessary, caused the Ukraine war which is currently starving and freezing people to death in Europe.
But I’m sure Saddamyr Husseinskyy will fix it.
China should never have been admitted to the WTO. Doing so, hoping it would join civilized society, was a ruse. Communism failed miserably in the early 1900’s because those state actors were poor. It scars the shit out me to think that China today has so much wealth, the first time in recent history that a communist regime also had economic might. And yet the US government either remains blind to the obvious, or silent.
Libertarianism requires a heavy dose of pragmatism to be workable.
Yes and I wrote it ‘libertarian’ so as to hopefully not offend the sensible and intelligent libertarians like yourself.
It’s the libertopians who are the problem because they apply ideological utopian thinking which is not appropriate for planet earth.
It’s how you get
“No but free speech means guys who are aroused by dressing like women have a constitutional right to play with children while dressed like women on government property.”
It’s all so unbelievably herp derp.
Libertopians--I like that!
And yes, they infuriate me. They assume--much like utopian communists, interestingly enough--that all human beings naturally play well with others, despite the fact that tens of thousands of years of human history has proven the exact opposite.
Just because humans manage their own affairs best without undue authoritarian control DOESN'T mean that anything and everything must be allowed. In fact, that is a dangerous practice when it comes to how people are allowed to treat other people. The point of having laws is to set socially agreed-upon limits on behavior toward others. And I would like to think that most people would agree that exposing children to sexual behavior in public is outside the limits.
Another thing that libertopians don't focus on is punishment for law-breaking. For a libertarian society to work, laws HAVE to have teeth. Because the point is not to reform wrong-doers; it's to remove them from participating in society because they have demonstrated in a very objective way that they refuse to play well with others.
“Potemkin Pens” is a good name for a band.
A friend saw them open for the Moscow Mullets at the St. Petersburg art show.
First, I am grateful to not be bickering over identity, political alignment , the general misanthropic discourses of our discontented age. Instead, a near universal problem for those accustomed to Western ease. Your assertions and testimony , spot on; only this week, a treasured toaster, nearly 25 years old- so a "newish" one, appeared to be in its death throes . We panicked for no repair shop would touch it- for if it isn't a SubZero refrigerator or a Wolf range, society does not consider it worth a repair. Mournfully we purchased an expensive replacement , it sparkled with the gloss of newness but promised nothing- thankfully the household gods shone and the "problem", one we overlooked, was simply a minor household electrical one. With great glee I shipped the flashy usurping toaster trash back to its maker and my creaky old toaster now receives the homage of a dowager.
The truth is unless you are willing to go down the SubZero/Wolf route, which we do frequently, you cannot possess the most reasonable expectation that carrots will actually be peeled nor expect reasonable responsibility from its makers. We've become so accustomed to the insubstantial, materially , culturally and spiritually that as you mention Morris' dictum (of which I have spent my life heeding) is near impossible.
I've resorted to anachronisms, I now use a fountain pen, an aesthetic experience that slows one down and reveals the grace of cursive ; bar soap only, liquid soap are an insult to our ancestors who spent countless generations perfecting the hardening of fat into solid; thrift and antique shops as often as poossible- the perversity that an 18th century chair can be found far cheaper than a landfill bound Target seating is a testimony to our decline.
And I try to chuckle at the fact that at long last I am the grumpy old man I always wanted to be and that I have so much to gripe about . God bless, Happy Chanukah, Merry Christmas, happy New Year 🕊
This is so true. My dad, who grew up in post-war Romania, always told us how he had one pencil that had to last the whole school year. He used it down to the nub. And paper was a whole other rarity. But it had value. I suppose when we gained access to everything it lost its value and in turn its worth. Which is worse? Not having it or not wanting it? Happy holidays to you. :)
I'm an avid photographer. I have a 1930s Leica that still runs like a champ, and remains repairable if it breaks. Can't say the same of my digital camera. One of my daughters resurrected a mechanical typewriter, and an even older (pre WWI) camera. 2 others regularly use turntables and records now. Pentax announced this week that they will being making new fully mechanical SLR cameras soon - after they re-learn how to do it before they forget entirely.
I don't know how many electric hand mixers I've gone through in 30 years of married life--at least 5 or 6, if not more. When I fell heir to my mom's ancient GE hand mixer, I tucked it away, only pulling it out after my last "new" one died.
Based on the styling, it must be at *least* 50 years old, if not 60. It still works just fine.
You're singing my song, Walter. I'm so dismayed by the poor quality of clothing, even brands that previously were of "good" quality, which is to say, are not "cheap" dollar-wise. I'm sick of pilling shirts/tops, of colors fading, of jeans wearing way too quickly. It's beyond disturbing.
Dearborn Denim is an American jeans company making proper (and decently priced) jeans in Chicago. They're more than twice the price of Wranglers, but I got 4 pairs several years ago that are still going strong.
When I moved up to NH a few years ago from Princeton NJ and needed to obtain a snowblower, a local steered me to a small-engine dealer and told me I'd regret buying the same model from a box store. Manufacturers use cheaper (i.e..: more likely to fail) parts in the models they ship to box stores in order to keep their products price-competitive and use more reliable (and expensive) parts in the models they sell through dealers. As he put it, the box store price will ultimately be more costly than the dealer price. My Ariens has been kicking butt on my driveway for four years now.
This formula does not work on everything, of course, but any product that is sold both in box stores and through manufacturer's licensed dealers is always better from the dealer. As Peter Venkman said to Egon, "Good safety tip."
Good tip. A plumber from a big plumbing company in my City told me something similar. He said that if you buy your replacement toilet, faucet, etc, from them it will cost more but will be much better quality. They warranty their work and materials and it was costly to support warranties so all the internal parts of the faucet would be brass not plastic. He was an employee and didn’t have any financial interest in this. The problem as consumers is we don’t know which products have brass parts and which have plastic parts.
Quality of people has gone down as well. Concepts like integrity, honesty, consistency, professional pride, loyalty, customer service sound like anachronism.
To those blaming capitalism, the issue had surfaced during the sad attempts at communism first. I fear return to that evil experiment.
Personally, I believe that the reason lies within cultural lines of different civilizations. That's why some used to be more successful than others. Globalization has mixed it all up and now we are witnessing the decline overall.
Absolutely so true and reminds us that the old shit you use works better and could care less what others think. That's why I drive a 20-year-old vehicle. No payments and it works just fine. No need to be like the pretend clowns in commercials. My electric car I can't afford and the high cost of electricity. The batteries that are toxic and a shelf life for each vehicle. No thanks.
What is even more sad is that so few people realize that we are committing environmental destruction on a greater scale with green energy. See the wind generator blades kill large birds and the blades when they need replacing, are cut into approximately 23-foot sections and buried in landfills to be there for eternity. Solar panels, expected by 2050 to have 250 Million Tons in landfills leaking lead and other elements into the ground. Ethanol that uses fuel to make and costs maybe more per gallon (Gasoline is more efficient than ethanol. One gallon of gasoline is equal to 1.5 gallons of ethanol.) to make than sells for. If it leaks into the ground, it is really, really bad for the environment. But the government subsidizes it.
So, we out-source our production to China and other third world countries with forced labor and crappy labor and environmental laws and procedures. Then wonder why it breaks and falls apart. Raise your hand for that item you opened, and it actually didn't even work. Low cost, shit, throw it away. Well thank you Congress and Senate for your caring. Make sure the corporations' pony-up for campaign donations. Maybe bobble head AOC and her lemmings can figure out how to re-cycle all of the green energy crap that continues to flow into our land dumps. Naw, never mind, the green energy sector has bought the so-called law makers and owns them. So welcome to the new perfect caring world.
A toaster that doesn't toast despite the quality associated with brand name, a door knob with plastic inner parts so the brand name can meet a Big Box store price point, but then breaks, damaging the brand name...but my real complaint is the online reviews. They are paid for reviews, and some read so repetitively across the various sites that I wonder if they aren't all written by the same writer. I'm not even sure if I can believe in the granddaddy of them all, Consumer Reports.
Ive stopped believing in CR. They employ the modern media fear mongering I hate ("is your grocery store meat poisonous?"..."are there heavy metals in your chocolate??"). Their biases are pretty obvious (always proclaiming the wonders of EVs and rarely pointing out the downsides). I was truly disgusted when they came down on the side of artificial Christmas trees. (My 83 year old mom sends me a free subscription every year, haha.)
It helps to know that CR is published in Westchester County, NY or nearby environs.
I'm betting nearly all of that junk was made in China, shipped through California, and ended with profits for New York.
"Capitalism" isn't the problem, the problem is greed and an ignorant population that rewards it.