I would love for someone who knows more about this to also explain to me why goods sold on Amazon, which 20 years ago would be something I need to replace once per generation seem to universally break within 1-2 years.
Has Amazon sneakily enforced planned obsolescence somehow? Does the cutthroat market create conditions where only low-quality products can survive? Is it just that the rise of planned obsolescence happened to coincide with Amazon's takeover?
They sell many outdated models. I've experienced it enough times I rarely use Amazon anymore. The difference in the latest model and the outdated one can often be drastic like a major improvement. It's a sneaky system of dumping inferior products on consumers.
On some things however you can burn Amazon. I bought a commercial leg press last year that weighted over 500 lbs. Everyone else wanted to charge shipping of almost $200. Not Amazon. Free shipping and for the same price as everyone else. SOLD!
It’s part of a broader trend of enshittification that has hollowed out the middle. I blame the concentration of market power in the hands of a few large companies, mostly privately held. So you can pay far more for something good, or you can resign yourself to replacing the garbage everyone sells these days in the rapacious pursuit of shareholder value extraction.
I've found most of the shitty garbage I buy has a single point of failure that can be replaced with a quality part. A plastic gear replaced with brass or steel. A capacitor. Sometimes just a dodgy USB port. A slowly degrading OS that is eventually discontinued.
I've extended the life of several devices by decades through simple repairs. It is no wonder that these same companies that want you buying a new washer/fridge/oven every 4 years are opposing right to repair. They love adding walled gardens to their products. Even our BBQs are getting electronic garbage added that can't be fixed normally...
Personally, I found that if the product is heavy, don't buy it on amazon. Everything is relentlessly based on shipping costs. If you buy wire shelves on amazon, they cost slightly less but the entire unit is far less durable.
Naw, I'm just cheap. My washer had to literally fall apart before I replaced it. Cheap galvanized cast iron junk that vibrated itself to death.
Our family motto is "I can make it cheaper than that!" which tells you how often we fall victim to the IKEA effect. Lately I like to budget out my projects so I know if I'm actually saving any money. Especially considering labor. Most of my projects lately are stuff I can't get for hook or crook from anywhere.
You are totally right about heavy stuff on Amazon. To your door freight is SO expensive. The problem is all the stores are setting their prices to Amazon's prices.
> the rapacious pursuit of shareholder value extraction
It's always the fault of greedy corporatists here on HN -- honestly, that is just lazy thinking. Sure, they want to make money. But also, the average Joe wants stuff cheap. Made in China, lots of plastics replacing metal, lower-density materials, fewer fixable/replaceable parts, limited quality control. You can't really blame companies who build their products like this when it's shown over and over and over that cheap stuff is what sells.
This explains the growth in the low end but not the lack of decent mid-range options. We no longer have good/better/best. We only have shitty/best and one is 10x the price of the other. Of course Joe Blow isn’t going to spring for the 10x option; he can’t afford it. In the min-maxing of profit margins, we’ve lost the pretty ok. Also I didn’t blame the corporations man; I specifically blamed market consolidation, greedy investors, and the output of HBS.
Either you need the item onceish so you buy the cheap option, or you use it a lot so you buy the expensive option. Those in between can find a used expensive option on marketplace/craigslist/etc. Not a lot of demand left in between after that.
> We only have shitty/best and one is 10x the price of the other.
Such as? Every product I've considered buying in the past few years has more price points and options than ever before. Yes many of them are ultra-cheap, but plenty of mid-priced options as well. For example a new top of the line GoPro Hero11 is $550. However you can easily find other action cams anywhere from under $99 to $450, some of which are other GoPro products.
I think it's the opposite of Market consolidation. It is Market diversification to the point where most brands mean nothing. When you have a hundred or a thousand brands for a good, being Middle Market means very little.
It’s the same problem…short term thinking. However it’s lopsided - the consumer can’t think long term because they are increasingly squeezed financially, so companies Race to the bottom for penny pinching consumers - driving wages further down or outsourcing altogether.
Part of the short-term thinking is because reviews can be gamed. Why would I buy an expensive thing, if I don't have a reliable signal that it is higher quality and worth the extra cost? Price is a clear signal, reputation for quality is not.
If you can handle the object you can also judge quality. I buy hand tools at specific stores and I pick the tool up and examine it for failure modes. I’ve broken cheap sledge hammers and framing hammers before so I try to be careful. It’s really important to look at the grain of the wood in the handle
CAD software is also to blame. The proliferation of CAD means we know exactly when a part will fail (subject of course to a statistical distribution). Things are not overbuilt anymore and manufacturers have precise control over an item's lifecycle.
Is there data on enshittification? I suspect people are overstating this. In theory making a product simpler and cheaper and lighter and easier to manufacture is better. The downside is (if it’s even true) reliability and “feel”.
Cheap goods that break and need to be replaced not only end up costing more through replacement and repair but also harm the environment through greater pollution and energy use due to more items being manufactured
Almost right. Manufacturing a greater number of items does not necessarily use more energy. For example, manufacturing 1,000,000 paperclips probably uses less energy and material than 1 car.
Let's say you have a sturdy product with a 1% defect and replacement rate. You make 1000 of them. You have to replace 10 of them, so you've manufactured 1,010 of them in total. Let's say they each use 100 grams of material. You've used 101,000g of material.
Now you redesign it to save 1 gram of weight, but it doubles the defect rate. Again, you make 1000 of them. You have to replace 20 of them, so you manufacture 1,020 of them. But because of the 1g material reduction per unit, you've used less material overall – 100,980g.
These are just easy numbers to work with, but it's not hard to imagine many products might work like this. And the same calculation can be done for either energy or materials.
Planned obsolescence and "they don't make em like they used to" has been a thing long, long before anyone posting on HN was born.
Requiring data to prove that concepts are a thing is disingenuous -- what products? what timeframe? what metrics? what profit margins vs. outcomes?
I don't need a 2 million strong Postgres DB to tell me that Ikea furniture is more prone to breaking than the heavy Amish furniture they sell a county over.
It’s obviously not disingenuous to try to figure out if something is true. Otherwise, you can just believe whatever makes you feel good about yourself or angry at the right other people.
There is no data and that is intentional. This is lazy activism, meant to prey on people's feelings and biases rather than actually propose concrete improvements.
The problem, is that as a consumer, it's become harder to know what a reliable product is. There are few reliable reviewers and companies change models constantly and change manufacturing processes of existing products.
As a result, as a consumer i generally buy cheap because if I pay more I still may end up with a cheaply manufacturered product.
I run a pretty large online retail business, and the reality is that cheap tat sells an order of magnitude more in volume compared to higher quality, more expensive items.
Consumers are impulsive[1], and get a genuine rush from spending money and receiving pretty packages.
Things like listing rank (ie, being the top item in Best Match), eye-catching pictures and low prices, in that order, matter far more than how useful the product is, because the utility of the product itself is irrelevant to this kind of consumer.
[1] Or, more specifically, the consumer dollar is impulsive. Non-impulsive people are far less likely to fritter away their money on cheap retail purchases.
> [1] Or, more specifically, the consumer dollar is impulsive.
This exactly. When folks buy the idea that their primary identity is as consumers, they loose the ability to resist all the psych-ops marketing constantly thrown at them (at least at those living in Occidental countries).
In contrast, people who consider themselves first as creators---those who work to produce something of value, out of a desire to serve others through one's work (this is broader than just the 'creative class')---may be much more restrained and selective in their purchases. "Will this tool enable me to work more effectively?" "Will this item last long enough?"
>In contrast, people who consider themselves first as creators---those who work to produce something of value, out of a desire to serve others through one's work (this is broader than just the 'creative class')---may be much more restrained and selective in their purchases. "Will this tool enable me to work more effectively?" "Will this item last long enough?"
In my experience this is just the lie those people tell themselves to justify indulging in the same impulsive consumerist behavior albeit usually higher price points than the unwashed masses.
Look at how HN and Reddit, examples of places dominated by upper middle class culture, fawn over the products and brand those demographics consider to be befitting them. It's the same exact kinds of statements and praises that you see the bluer collar crowd applying to different classes and price points of products in other filter bubbles.
20yr ago the full stack (engineering concept to slapping the shipping label on the box bound for the customer) cost of actually getting a product into buyers hands was sufficiently higher that it made lower quality versions of many things simply not economically viable to produce and sell.
The range of options for any given consumer product has grown substantially on the low end.
I would love for someone who knows more about this to also explain to me why goods sold on Amazon, which 20 years ago would be something I need to replace once per generation seem to universally break within 1-2 years.
That's better than what I have been experiencing. About half of the stuff I buy breaks right away. I leave them 1 star and comment on what happened. Amazon approves the reviews to my surprise. Some of the vendors will physically mail me a card offering $30+ for 5 stars. I find it interesting they are able to send me physical mail.
I would avoid Amazon but I live in the middle of nowhere. That is one of the trade-offs I accepted by moving here. I try to utilize the local stores as much as I can.
"Now [Uber] employs ex-cab drivers at half their old wages to drive passengers at twice the old fares."
At least for where I live (New Jersey) this is completely untrue. Uber fares today are still far cheaper then Taxi fares were even in 2009. A 12 min ride home in a taxi from my local train station was $20 in 2008... Today in Uber it's $12.
I’m not sure what city the author lives in, but, while Uber is pretty bad, Uber is still better than taxis. Better service, better fares, and better pay for drivers.
Taxis were like the biggest racket around with usually sleazy companies owning the car and paying immigrants and literal slaves from human trafficking poor wages to drive.
There’s this mythical owner/operator that I never encountered.
So I think that’s why Uber is tolerated because they are still better than the worlds shittiest industry, taxi. Maybe the only more hated industry would be debt collectors or hospital administrators or telemarketers.
It isn't necessarily, but cab companies often operated on The Medallion system. Medallions going to cost upwards of a million dollars and be required to operate a cab. Cab companies would hold the medallion and charge enormous rent for drivers to use their cabs and medallions.
Originally they cost much less but demand / supply has caused the spike. The sensible thing would be to increase Medallions but that reduces the profit from the first group plus increases traffic
There is also a desirable number of cabs to be driving. Having cabs lined up idling on the side of every street, even if they are profitable, isn't optimal for the city. So there is a legitimate reason to provide a limit. Of course it is clear that the medallion system has other problems like raising barrier to entry. Maybe it would make more sense if the city rented/auctioned the desired number directly on relatively short timeframes.
Nonsense. Near north side, Lincoln park, Gold Coast, all the way up to Rogers park and everywhere in between cabs were all plentiful. I took them regularly. Same on the west side all the way out to oak park.
South side I don’t know, never went there on purpose unless you count Chinatown which is at a red line stop. South side has always been an island.
It sounds like they were fine if you were within a mile of the lake on the north side. I wonder what... else... is notable about that... area... but I just can't quite... put my finger on it....
South side isn't an island, it's half the city's land area and population. To the extent it's cut off from the rest of the city that's an intentional policy choice supported and justified by comments like yours.
Please continue to tell us what Uptown, Edgewater, and Rogers park are notable for? Dead bodies in dumpsters outside of your condo? Because that's what was in the dumpster outside mine. I worked for years at the Men's shelter in Uptown - I doubt this area is what you think it is.
This is a weirdly aggro response. I lived in Uptown for a couple years. It's not "random dead bodies in dumpsters" territory. My apartment there was expensive.
I lived for a bunch of years in Lakeview and hung around in Lincoln Park, Lincoln Square, and Rogers Park, and my experience trying to reliably get cabs in those neighborhoods was not great. I live in Oak Park. Cab to Oak Park? Fucking forget it.
He's wrong about Uber and, in my humble opinion, has been wrong about Uber for a long time. Albeit while making claims that are very interesting. For the longest time, he claimed Uber could never possibly be profitable. I almost believed him despite the obvious evidence of taxi companies surviving for decades before Uber even existed. To me the worst case for Uber was always really large but marginally profitable taxi company. It's debatable but I think they've exceeded that.
From the investor perspective, I wonder if that's good enough-- the people chasing unicorns and 500% IPO paydays would probably be angrier watching it become a low-margin but functionally useful company, than seeing it close up shop.
Over time, there's a lot of pressure on Uber's margins. The technology and business idea are obvious enough that the moat is pretty low. There's little reason for drivers to not be on every available platform, and you can do a splashy "Download our app to get $20 in credit" to growth-hack a new competitor. So you're always at the risk of someone launching a price war, and even if you can drive them out of the market, you'll have a hard time resetting customer expectations.
> There's little reason for drivers to not be on every available platform
So yes and no. Yes in the sense that switching costs for a driver are very low, but no in the sense that not all platforms provide the same value to drivers. A platform that reduces wait times, batches deliveries, plans better routes, etc. can provide drivers better income per-minute/mile compared to competitors.
Having a second/third/fourth platform that provides you with a positive probability of getting a ride while you have a wait time on your primary platform provides drivers better income per-minute/mile
Originally drivers, but the point stands for both - especially something time sensitive which a taxi journey tends to be.
For the record I have been stranded, messing around with drivers accepting then rejecting fares and then given up and taken either a street hail taxi or another app. I have even gulped down the fee for cancelling on a driver who drove off in the other direction for 20 minutes.
Conversely, circa 2016-2018 it was around $25-30 USD to Uber from far northwest Austin to the airport (excluding, or perhaps including, the weird time where Uber and Lyft left Austin out of spite for their local ordinance which was subsequently preempted by the state legislature). This is around 20-30 minute ride depending on traffic. Now that same ride is minimum $50 USD, usually closer to $70 USD.
So those numbers absolutely match up in my city, at least from the rider’s perspective. STILL better than taxis, however. Of course there is inflation, but that doesn’t nearly account for this discrepancy. I can’t provide exact driver numbers but I sometimes have the courage to ask the driver what they are making and on average when I do ask it’s about 1/3 of what I am paying. Never more than half.
Uber receipts in Washington will tell you the drivers share. I recently had a $55 fare and the driver received $31 of it. That appears to be representative of my other receipts.
Interesting. Does that include any optional tip or was that base fare only? A ride I had back in Corpus Christi last summer was a $36 ride that the driver received $12 for. Similar numbers in San Antonio
Base fare only, drivers keep all of the tips. Interestingly, in other states, I don't see the same reporting - only total amount that I paid, not what the driver received.
Isn't the root of this problem bigger than Amazon? If we had a fixed money supply and the federal government wasn't printing money all the time, Amazon (and other mega corporations) wouldn't have such a compelling target for regulatory capture, which bestows on them the Cantillion effect of access to lots of newly-created money... while downstream of them everybody else ends up holding the bag through higher prices and cheaper quality.
The real source of the enshitification Doctorow writes about is the fiat US dollar, not necessarily Amazon. Amazon is just one of the more successful at sucking up that monetary creation. Remove the money creation and the opportunities for regulatory capture, and competition becomes a much more viable option to prevent the abuses Doctorow describes.
If we had a fixed money supply and a growing population, we wouldn't have to worry about Amazon as we'd all have bigger problems, as seen in documentary The Grapes of Wrath.
When they officially launched in the Netherlands a few years ago the prediction of some retail experts was that they would take over the market but their local competitor Bol.com has weathered the storm perfectly.
Brand power, convenience and speed- Amazon is not unbeatable.
This article is thinly-veiled activism disguised as factual claims, and it is a bit sad how far Cory has gone in this direction. Notice, if you will, that there is no evidence provided that any of his claims about pricing are true at all, and in this very thread people are saying that in their experience they are not.
Amazon still has mostly lower prices than other retailers. Uber is still cheaper than cabs. Whether those prices are sustainable or not is a different issue, but simply claiming that they are actually _higher_ without providing any evidence other than "I saw a $55 Uber fare once" is not responsible writing.
I want to believe Cory is just devoted to the cause of protecting people from unchecked Big Tech power (which is a legitimate cause I do not oppose) and he is letting his confirmation bias get the best of him.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadHas Amazon sneakily enforced planned obsolescence somehow? Does the cutthroat market create conditions where only low-quality products can survive? Is it just that the rise of planned obsolescence happened to coincide with Amazon's takeover?
On some things however you can burn Amazon. I bought a commercial leg press last year that weighted over 500 lbs. Everyone else wanted to charge shipping of almost $200. Not Amazon. Free shipping and for the same price as everyone else. SOLD!
I've extended the life of several devices by decades through simple repairs. It is no wonder that these same companies that want you buying a new washer/fridge/oven every 4 years are opposing right to repair. They love adding walled gardens to their products. Even our BBQs are getting electronic garbage added that can't be fixed normally...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
Personally, I found that if the product is heavy, don't buy it on amazon. Everything is relentlessly based on shipping costs. If you buy wire shelves on amazon, they cost slightly less but the entire unit is far less durable.
Our family motto is "I can make it cheaper than that!" which tells you how often we fall victim to the IKEA effect. Lately I like to budget out my projects so I know if I'm actually saving any money. Especially considering labor. Most of my projects lately are stuff I can't get for hook or crook from anywhere.
You are totally right about heavy stuff on Amazon. To your door freight is SO expensive. The problem is all the stores are setting their prices to Amazon's prices.
It's always the fault of greedy corporatists here on HN -- honestly, that is just lazy thinking. Sure, they want to make money. But also, the average Joe wants stuff cheap. Made in China, lots of plastics replacing metal, lower-density materials, fewer fixable/replaceable parts, limited quality control. You can't really blame companies who build their products like this when it's shown over and over and over that cheap stuff is what sells.
Such as? Every product I've considered buying in the past few years has more price points and options than ever before. Yes many of them are ultra-cheap, but plenty of mid-priced options as well. For example a new top of the line GoPro Hero11 is $550. However you can easily find other action cams anywhere from under $99 to $450, some of which are other GoPro products.
It’s a vicious cycle
Let's say you have a sturdy product with a 1% defect and replacement rate. You make 1000 of them. You have to replace 10 of them, so you've manufactured 1,010 of them in total. Let's say they each use 100 grams of material. You've used 101,000g of material.
Now you redesign it to save 1 gram of weight, but it doubles the defect rate. Again, you make 1000 of them. You have to replace 20 of them, so you manufacture 1,020 of them. But because of the 1g material reduction per unit, you've used less material overall – 100,980g.
These are just easy numbers to work with, but it's not hard to imagine many products might work like this. And the same calculation can be done for either energy or materials.
Requiring data to prove that concepts are a thing is disingenuous -- what products? what timeframe? what metrics? what profit margins vs. outcomes?
I don't need a 2 million strong Postgres DB to tell me that Ikea furniture is more prone to breaking than the heavy Amish furniture they sell a county over.
Nah. Privately held means that they don't need to pander for next quarter's numbers. Publicly traded is always a race to the bottom.
As a result, as a consumer i generally buy cheap because if I pay more I still may end up with a cheaply manufacturered product.
Consumers are impulsive[1], and get a genuine rush from spending money and receiving pretty packages.
Things like listing rank (ie, being the top item in Best Match), eye-catching pictures and low prices, in that order, matter far more than how useful the product is, because the utility of the product itself is irrelevant to this kind of consumer.
[1] Or, more specifically, the consumer dollar is impulsive. Non-impulsive people are far less likely to fritter away their money on cheap retail purchases.
This exactly. When folks buy the idea that their primary identity is as consumers, they loose the ability to resist all the psych-ops marketing constantly thrown at them (at least at those living in Occidental countries).
In contrast, people who consider themselves first as creators---those who work to produce something of value, out of a desire to serve others through one's work (this is broader than just the 'creative class')---may be much more restrained and selective in their purchases. "Will this tool enable me to work more effectively?" "Will this item last long enough?"
In my experience this is just the lie those people tell themselves to justify indulging in the same impulsive consumerist behavior albeit usually higher price points than the unwashed masses.
Look at how HN and Reddit, examples of places dominated by upper middle class culture, fawn over the products and brand those demographics consider to be befitting them. It's the same exact kinds of statements and praises that you see the bluer collar crowd applying to different classes and price points of products in other filter bubbles.
The range of options for any given consumer product has grown substantially on the low end.
That's better than what I have been experiencing. About half of the stuff I buy breaks right away. I leave them 1 star and comment on what happened. Amazon approves the reviews to my surprise. Some of the vendors will physically mail me a card offering $30+ for 5 stars. I find it interesting they are able to send me physical mail.
I would avoid Amazon but I live in the middle of nowhere. That is one of the trade-offs I accepted by moving here. I try to utilize the local stores as much as I can.
At least for where I live (New Jersey) this is completely untrue. Uber fares today are still far cheaper then Taxi fares were even in 2009. A 12 min ride home in a taxi from my local train station was $20 in 2008... Today in Uber it's $12.
I’m not sure what city the author lives in, but, while Uber is pretty bad, Uber is still better than taxis. Better service, better fares, and better pay for drivers.
Taxis were like the biggest racket around with usually sleazy companies owning the car and paying immigrants and literal slaves from human trafficking poor wages to drive.
There’s this mythical owner/operator that I never encountered.
So I think that’s why Uber is tolerated because they are still better than the worlds shittiest industry, taxi. Maybe the only more hated industry would be debt collectors or hospital administrators or telemarketers.
South side I don’t know, never went there on purpose unless you count Chinatown which is at a red line stop. South side has always been an island.
South side isn't an island, it's half the city's land area and population. To the extent it's cut off from the rest of the city that's an intentional policy choice supported and justified by comments like yours.
That said I’m a Lyft customer to this day because when Uber started they geofenced the southside out.
From the investor perspective, I wonder if that's good enough-- the people chasing unicorns and 500% IPO paydays would probably be angrier watching it become a low-margin but functionally useful company, than seeing it close up shop.
Over time, there's a lot of pressure on Uber's margins. The technology and business idea are obvious enough that the moat is pretty low. There's little reason for drivers to not be on every available platform, and you can do a splashy "Download our app to get $20 in credit" to growth-hack a new competitor. So you're always at the risk of someone launching a price war, and even if you can drive them out of the market, you'll have a hard time resetting customer expectations.
> There's little reason for drivers to not be on every available platform
So yes and no. Yes in the sense that switching costs for a driver are very low, but no in the sense that not all platforms provide the same value to drivers. A platform that reduces wait times, batches deliveries, plans better routes, etc. can provide drivers better income per-minute/mile compared to competitors.
For the record I have been stranded, messing around with drivers accepting then rejecting fares and then given up and taken either a street hail taxi or another app. I have even gulped down the fee for cancelling on a driver who drove off in the other direction for 20 minutes.
So those numbers absolutely match up in my city, at least from the rider’s perspective. STILL better than taxis, however. Of course there is inflation, but that doesn’t nearly account for this discrepancy. I can’t provide exact driver numbers but I sometimes have the courage to ask the driver what they are making and on average when I do ask it’s about 1/3 of what I am paying. Never more than half.
The real source of the enshitification Doctorow writes about is the fiat US dollar, not necessarily Amazon. Amazon is just one of the more successful at sucking up that monetary creation. Remove the money creation and the opportunities for regulatory capture, and competition becomes a much more viable option to prevent the abuses Doctorow describes.
When they officially launched in the Netherlands a few years ago the prediction of some retail experts was that they would take over the market but their local competitor Bol.com has weathered the storm perfectly. Brand power, convenience and speed- Amazon is not unbeatable.
Amazon still has mostly lower prices than other retailers. Uber is still cheaper than cabs. Whether those prices are sustainable or not is a different issue, but simply claiming that they are actually _higher_ without providing any evidence other than "I saw a $55 Uber fare once" is not responsible writing.
I want to believe Cory is just devoted to the cause of protecting people from unchecked Big Tech power (which is a legitimate cause I do not oppose) and he is letting his confirmation bias get the best of him.