Price seems to be based a lot more on marketing and brand saturation than quality. And quality brands get bought up all the time and the new company will coast on the brand while outsourcing manufacturing to the lowest bidder.
And you can't trust reviews with affiliate marketing around.
So pretty much the only thing to do to identify quality is to experiment or share info with people you trust.
I've wasted a ton of money on shitty products on the way to identifying quality products.
I'm not even railing against status. I bought a pair of Alan Edmonds specifically for job interviews to signal status but I wear LL Bean shoes and Crocs the rest of the time.
Also, there's other factors besides just durability and status. There's aesthetics, variable utility, ease of replacement, warranty availability, price, etc.
I hate shopping so I think alot about this haha
> Yeah completely agree that price is decoupled from quality nowadays
In the world of physic tools, price and quality are highly coupled.
To your other points, I honestly think fashion is very rewarding and healthy so long as you are focused on making yourself look good to you. And I agree, some fashion conformity is unavoidable. Especially depending upon your career field.
Ive never felt like I was in a more skeezy situation than mattress shopping.
It’s taken my wife and I years to slowly get pieces that will last the rest of our life.
But it's fundamentally worse at being a timepiece than a digital watch synchronized to an NTP time server.
If you're thinking about EMPs or something: well, I'd consider extremely accurate timekeeping to be the least of your concerns if no electronics work anymore...
I think even more accurate is that quality/longevity and price are almost completely decoupled.
Spending more doesn’t guarantee higher quality it mostly gets you exceptional graphic design and deftly nested packaging that makes you feel good when you open it.
But it’s not like all the cheap stuff is better. A Rolex is an incredible engineering marvel and is in fact very high quality and durable. So are Festool tools, and so on.
But like so is G-shock and a random and difficult to pin down subset of Harbor Freight.
The broader point is that none of this really makes a fucking difference most of the discussion is just people preening about their choices instead of admitting it’s mostly a roll of the dice.
And the old stuff wasn’t “better” it was just different. When I was a kid in the 70’s and 80’s garages were full of shoddy junk from the 50’s and 60’s. That stuff is just all gone right now.