I'm pretty sure a lot of the "improvements" in price attributed to international trade over the last ~4 decades have more to do with the lowest end of the current product range simply not existing before, i.e. the worst versions of a product are worse (and cheaper) than the worst version that was available decades ago. Those products take over—for reasons that may include consumers legitimately preferring them but also probably includes difficulty consumers have finding reliable information about products other than price—and the nicer version that used to be the norm might actually get more expensive as new market segments develop and production scale drops.

This is a good point - some of what we are calling cheap crap just wasn't being made before.

Besides there being more stuff of every type of buy, the purchasing power of the dollar has declined, so maybe people can't afford a toaster that's as good any more?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R

I guess you'd have to multiply this by whatever the average wage was for each year.

"can't afford"

I don't think that's right. I think it's less expensive to make stuff that doesn't need to be replaced.

With clothing, I generally find that the less I spend on clothes, the better they are. A $10 pair of Wranglers from Walmart holds up much better than the $100 pair that comes from a name-brand outlet.

Probably the best pairs of shorts I ever bought were some weird brand that cost $8 apiece at Sam's Club...

That's not the case when it comes to certain types of clothing. For instance, I'm thinking of Oxford cloth button down shirts (OCBDs). Mercer makes high quality, heavy weight shirtings and as a result of the cloth and stitching the shirts last a long time and look great: http://www.mercerandsons.com/

Perhaps far brom being the nicest shirts, but the $15 OCBDs I have bought at JCPenney's have lasted more than 10 years with barely any fading. They seem indestructible.

Do you have examples of brands to look at?

for tees ?

it depends what you are looking for.. if the only criteria is quality :

- Maison Cornichon. It is actually a french brand but Japan is by far their biggest market. They use old french machines. the resulting tee is very strong, probably heavier than what you expect. They do have a lot of shrinking when you wash them (and you can expand them again afterwards).

- Merz B. Schwanen : simple high quality german tshirts

- The Real McCoy's : japan brand specifically trying (successfully) to reproduce americana pieces.

- lots of other japanese brands make good tshirts.. it kinda depends what you are looking for. Blue blue japan pieces are often very beautiful but also indigo dyed (so they leak a LOT of pigment the first time they are wet).

- Taylor Stitch actually makes one of the heaviest tshirts I have ever seen.

- Outside of cottons tshirts, there are also tons of merino ones. Outlier would be the most well known in the USA. It is was less resistant to abrasion that a cotton one, but it absolutely does not retain smells (so you could hike 10 days with it if you wished to, it would barely smell anything).

The machines that a lot of these brands use are actually pretty interesting. These are often very old machines. Their use had been almost completely abandoned because they are pretty slow. There are 'lots' of them in Japan in the first place because several decades ago they were pretty standard. The industry has moved to new machines with better yields but some niche brands saw an opportunity there.

E.G. there are some Youtube videos on how a brand like Momotaro makes denim : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek5520fSymY

The Real McCoy's, Tezomeya, Studio D'Artisan, Buzz Rickson, Strike Gold...

Jeez, never heard of all these brands. I favour Fruit Of The Loom for tees. Maybe I'm just not hip.