Yes that is exactly the problem. Especially with cheap as garbage direct sales from China and internet shopping being the norm, your chances of finding legitimate high quality sellers on amazon or else are practically zero. Even worse, nowadays on amazon you find the exact same product in all the price ranges sold by "different" sellers.

There's a need for legislation here IMO.

Trademarks identify the origin of goods that a business wishes a consumer to believe. We need to expand that law to also indicate _actual_ origin.

For example, this DVD player came from this manufacturer and then got badged as Alpha Inc, but this other DVD had the same technical origin (despite the different case) and got badged as Beta Inc ... consumers should get that information. Capitalism relies on such things so that the best products can be chosen.

Instead, we get things like companies selling the same product code from different factories with wildly different quality. Or, far more egregious companies sending a product to reviewers and early adopters, then making a worse product and passing it off to consumers as the same.

There's much more to do (I should be able to see exactly what a product had done to acquire it's 'country of origin' - another area companies deceive consumers), but this would be a start.

I am surprised that nobody pointed out the obvious : avoid items with the minimum legal manufacturer warranty.

Though this too can become hard in categories dominated by cartels : warranties for (magnetic) hard drives have been going down (not to mention the recent frauds by Western Digital, how they have fallen, sigh...), or, for (non-related) reasons, boycotting Intel and Ryzen CPUs (or Android an iOS smartphones) doesn't leave you many options, though RISC-V (and "real" Linux) have been making great strides in the recent years.

> I am surprised that nobody pointed out the obvious : avoid items with the minimum legal manufacturer warranty.

I have to admit that particular strategy hadn't occurred to me - but it's a good idea. Of course, it has to be an actual part-of-the-standard-deal warranty, not the hard-sell extended warranty that's really just an add-on insurance policy...

(Wondering where I find a box of staples warranted to pierce more than five sheets...)

Unless the company goes out of business, or as may happen more often today, just dissolve the company and re-brand/re-incorporate.

Also the expensive stuff is often built to last a few years instead of decades.

Carefully buy b2b and you can still get to decades of service life for many types of equipment. It is also much more expensive than the most expensive "prosumer" grade offerings you see. But for some of this type of equipment, that's because they staff competent technicians supporting 24x7x365 service calls coming in from shops hiring certified technicians rolling repair trucks any time of the day or night for the right fee.