> I don't think anyone needs to be especially qualified to judge the quality of products that they do or will use.
In your example, though, what you have done is try multiple models over multiple years, while the use-case hasn't changed one bit. So you have found an example where you could actually test multiple products yourself, and then decide which one you like better.
Many times it's not like that. If you buy a smartphone today, you can't test 4 different models for 2 months and then choose. So you will have to pick one. And in a couple years, when this one is not good enough, you will have to buy a new one. But everything will have evolved: websites will be even bulkier and slower to load, mobile apps will be more Javascript wrappers on top of cross-platform frameworks etc etc that made them faster to write, etc. So the new phone you will buy will not compare to the old one, because it won't live in the same world.
Therefore you end up in the same situation: you need to buy a smartphone, you can test 4 different models for 2 months, and you don't know if the ones that are more expensive are better.
Isn't it a bit puzzling that inferior ladles proliferate, though? You don't need to work in catering or have any particular training to recognise superior ladles, but it's more difficult to buy a ladle of reasonable quality than an inferior one. Why is that? I can think of a few possible reasons:
1) Because a sufficiently large proportion of buyers are too inexperienced to know better? Maybe they'll choose the high-quality option next time. This could explain buyers' behaviour - often including mine - but I don't think it explains the behaviour of retailers or manufacturers with brands to protect.
2) Because people pay so much more attention to big purchases than small ones? You might use a ladle quite frequently, and even an inferior one might last longer than a smartphone, so it might warrant some thought even though it's inexpensive.
3) Because too many buyers are poor? If I correctly understand the comment you're replying to, the inferior ladles were actually actually less expensive, but cost could contribute to other cases of buyers choosing worse value products.
4) Because people are suggestible, and the decision about which to buy is partly made for them? Maybe the inferior ladles are more expensive because of the resources put into putting them in front of so many buyers.
It's just that they won't spend 2 years finding a Korean store. And for manufacturers, it seems like they make more profit by just building worse quality in the first place.
And that's another point: people do care about quality. Manufacturers do not. Manufacturers care about profit. And economists believe that both align perfectly, for some reason I don't get.
I have a prefab solution: avoid shopping at Walmart and their ilk, get familiar with a wider range of stores. "Oh I'm about to go to the big city for the first time in 6 months, time to stock up on puerh tea, because i can't get it locally..."
For something that should last forever, $30 isn’t too bad.
It’s basically impossible to get a quality product at a Target or Walmart type store.
And if you could find one that's just plain stainless steel (with or without a nice wood handle), it was paper-thin steel, stamped into shape, that no one had ever bothered to grind/polish the burrs off the edge.
Then, just a few weeks ago, my wife and I were checking out this tiny little Korean grocery store. And the owner apparently orders everything from some Korean supplier. He had several different sizes of ladels. Stainless, in what must be 3/16ths, all the edges soft and beveled. The shape was nice too, not something rough and rushed, but looking like someone who cared about design actually spent time on that. And the small one was like $3.89 and the large was $7-something. This did not come from a Chinese factory.
Am I a world-renowned ladle expert? Do I have a PhD in ladelology? No. Hell, as a utensil, it's probably one that I only use twice a year. I couldn't design a die to make one of these, I couldn't tell you if the hydraulic press needed to be 50tons or 250tons, I'm not very knowledgeable at all about any detail that matters. I just care (some interesting psychology there... childhood trauma or something).
I don't think anyone needs to be especially qualified to judge the quality of products that they do or will use. Everyday experience should suffice, and the only people who might not manage that are kids who have just recently graduated and mama's not doing their laundry for them anymore.