This the argument I have with clients on a daily basis, in regards to all kinds of manufactured goods. People are astoundingly awful at understanding and visualizing inflation and the value of a dollar over time, even people who are specifically educated on this point and even work with it as part of their jobs. Everyone has some threshold beyond which they absolutely won’t countenance paying more than $X for Y, but this is always arbitrary and whenever the course of events drives the median price of whatever-it-is past that line they lose their minds.
Durable goods manufacturing is a race to the bottom because it has to be in order to overcome everyone’s moronic preconceptions about what a product “ought” to cost. This isn’t just a capitalist greed thing, although it’s certainly that, too – corners have to be cut, panels have to be made thinner, it has to contain more plastic and less metal, because otherwise it’ll never be cheap enough for 99% of the population to agree to buy it and even then they’ll all still bitch about how shoddily made it is. Year over year every manufacturer has to figure out how to make it cheaper to slide under MSRP. The manufacturers who take the opposite strategy inevitably wind up as niche players, because as much as people spout that they’d happily pay more for a better built thing, the flat out truth is they’re all full of shit and to the nearest decimal point, none of them actually will if given the opportunity.
The problem is it is rarely an easy proposition to just “pay more and get a better product” especially when it comes to home appliances.
In most big box stores every option will be shit. Companies know that there are consumers at every price point and so they have a product for every price print.
The problem is the expensive isn’t really better, it’s the same fridge with the same compressor as a cheap one except it has a wifi dongle or a tablet in the door.
Of course there are the Vikings and Thermidors and whatever but those are Velben goods that priced so high that you could get 5 to 10 of the cheap options for the price of one.
Yeah you have to do research but thankfully we also live in a time when most people have high power computers connected to the Internet on their person at all times. You can buy a cheaply made expensive wi-fi enabled “smart” appliance that costs even more than a well built “dumb” appliance and will fail incredibly fast because of all the computerized parts. You just have to do some research.
This the argument I have with clients on a daily basis, in regards to all kinds of manufactured goods. People are astoundingly awful at understanding and visualizing inflation and the value of a dollar over time, even people who are specifically educated on this point and even work with it as part of their jobs. Everyone has some threshold beyond which they absolutely won’t countenance paying more than $X for Y, but this is always arbitrary and whenever the course of events drives the median price of whatever-it-is past that line they lose their minds.
Durable goods manufacturing is a race to the bottom because it has to be in order to overcome everyone’s moronic preconceptions about what a product “ought” to cost. This isn’t just a capitalist greed thing, although it’s certainly that, too – corners have to be cut, panels have to be made thinner, it has to contain more plastic and less metal, because otherwise it’ll never be cheap enough for 99% of the population to agree to buy it and even then they’ll all still bitch about how shoddily made it is. Year over year every manufacturer has to figure out how to make it cheaper to slide under MSRP. The manufacturers who take the opposite strategy inevitably wind up as niche players, because as much as people spout that they’d happily pay more for a better built thing, the flat out truth is they’re all full of shit and to the nearest decimal point, none of them actually will if given the opportunity.
The problem is it is rarely an easy proposition to just “pay more and get a better product” especially when it comes to home appliances.
In most big box stores every option will be shit. Companies know that there are consumers at every price point and so they have a product for every price print.
The problem is the expensive isn’t really better, it’s the same fridge with the same compressor as a cheap one except it has a wifi dongle or a tablet in the door.
Of course there are the Vikings and Thermidors and whatever but those are Velben goods that priced so high that you could get 5 to 10 of the cheap options for the price of one.
Yeah you have to do research but thankfully we also live in a time when most people have high power computers connected to the Internet on their person at all times. You can buy a cheaply made expensive wi-fi enabled “smart” appliance that costs even more than a well built “dumb” appliance and will fail incredibly fast because of all the computerized parts. You just have to do some research.