【海外の反応】今どきの『高品質』って、ただ『壊れてない』だけじゃね？→海外でも同じ現象が起きてる件

For real. I bought new snowboarding gear (pants, jacket gloves, etc) two years ago and they’re already showing signs of being on their way out. The gear I had before this stuff, I got 12 years out of before it was time to replace. Definitely going down hill.

Also, with the increased number of tech bros wearing things like arc’teryx, and carrhart, instead of people who actually go out in the mountains or work blue collar, these companies are realizing they can make lower quality products and sell the same amount if not more at the same price or higher.

r/enshittification

> or are companies just collectively lowering their standards because they can?

Yes, that. It's corporate greed and it's going to kill us all. Everything is simultaneously getting more expensive and also crappier.

Because the consumer. Most people opt to buy stuff from Amazon, SHEIN and harbor freight. 

Snapchat and TikTok a filled with “fashion” influencers peddling plastic clothes made in sweat shops. 

Because it hides the decline in your purchasing power.

Decades ago, countries manufacturing were desperate for your currency, because its purchasing power was high. Input resources, in local currency wages and export costs were low so products can be of a high quality, to attract your money.
Western economies, benefitting from decades if not centuries of their own exports and the value of their currency, closed their manufacturing so that businesses could.make more.momey taking advantage of folks. We lived off the value provided by previous generations, while other economies built value in their own.

Now your money is worth less, so the manufacturing has to be cheaper.

As long as the more profitable careers are "hedge fund manager" and "investment banker" this will only get worse, but it will not be linear in scale, the folks at the bottom will find themselves confined to wage slavery in ever decreasing quality housing, while tbe folk towards the middle and top will take take one less overseas holiday, not realising they are sliding down the scale.as time goes by.

I think it depends on what you buy. Part of the issue is that many “legacy” brands have been acquired by larger conglomerates, venture capitalists, etc, who are using the brand as marketing.

I think part of it is the increased complexity of newer products which means more things can go wrong.

And there is also constant pressure to cost costs in order to compete in global markets.

But I also think that quality is still there if you look for it. We remodeled our kitchen 18 mos ago and replaced the refrigerator and stove, which were 25 and 28 yrs old respectively. The newer models are far superior to the older ones in every conceivable way. About 5 years ago, we replaced the dishwasher, which was also 25 years old. The “new” one works flawlessly and still looks brand new, even though it is used almost daily.

I am hard pressed to think of any major purchase I have made in the past 5 years—car, major appliance, etc—that isn’t far superior to what it replaced. You do have to do your homework, however. The only exceptions would be some gadgets/tools that I bought more on impulse online.

We often blame this on enshitification or planned obsolescence. But we overlook what is happening to our own expectations and buying patterns.

The engineering quality of car engines today is utterly insane compared to where we were 40 years ago. The features we expect from our cell phones weren’t even remotely possible 10 years ago, let alone 25.

Our expectation of products has gone up, our demand for lower prices has gone up, our discretionary income feels like it’s gone down. Our demand for companies to maintain profit margins so that our IRAs and 401ks make a retirement possible goes up. And yet the majority of Americans vote in favor of trickle-down economic experiments that drive debt up, and household buying power down.

We live in a completely unsustainable lifecycle of expectations, demands, buying patterns, and voting patterns that was never going to go anywhere but where we are now. And we are desperate for someone to blame for having “done this to us.”

Corporations owning more brands than they should.
They want to increase their margins so they drop quality.

Because it is physically impossible to meet the quality standards with the same cost and efficiency as we could a decade ago.

Yes. We bought a new dual power recliner sofa, but the tops of the armrests are thinner than cardboard. In fact, when the arm rests break through, the field fix is to reinforce them with cardboard.

I think this enshittification is especially evident in products that traditionally were considered to have a 10 to 15 year lifespan, like furniture and major appliances. Those products had a high markup because they were rear purchases.

Now the lifespan is 2 to 5 years and the price is high as ever.