Information asymmetry is also a problem. The $50 blender might be trading on a beloved brand name... but with the metal gears replaced by plastic and glue in place of the fasteners. How can the average person tell?
What you really want to read is reviews from 3 years in the future but you can’t. So you buy the $30 blender because it’s too hard to assess whether the $50 one is worth it.
I really liked the hn article the other day on assessing garment quality. The first step in stemming the tide of garbage is being informed.
In the software world SaaS tends to optimise for growth and customer retention, which is probably better aligned to meet people’s needs than optimising for first sale.
Re:Users hate change
by jackweirdy on Sunday July 28, 2019 @04:59PM
(#20549811)
> I really liked the hn article the other day on assessing garment quality.
I didn’t see this at the time; if you remember the title or still have the link could you please post it?
At the start of our living together, me and my wife bought cheap kitchen appliances. Two years later, straight after the warranty expired, most of them died. One of them actually gave a very close call to a nasty accident. So now we learned. We buy the good stuff, based on brand experience and word of mouth from friends. If we havent the money, a second hand good one is in general both cheaper and better than the bad ones. It takes some time to find them sometimes. I know lots of people doing the same.
So you are right in the short term, but consumers learn. This will bite cheaper brands in the long term.
Call me cynical, but I think it's naive to make this claim.
Manufacturers don't optimize quality, they optimize profits. Even if there's sufficient competition, manufacturers don't race upwards to improve quality, they race downwards to reduce the cost and undercut the competition.
You can see this in kitchen appliances. People complain about how they don't last as long as they used to and are harder to repair. That's because when a customer sees a $30 blender and a $50 blender on the shelf, they will nearly always pick the $30 blender, even if the $50 blender is a higher quality. There was a race to the bottom on pricing, and corners had to be cut.