Begs an interesting question : some people can still afford quality items that last (namely, the people that sell throwaway shit to everyone else ; or, more precisely, the people who earn rents from companies that sell throwaway shit etc...)
Are things getting shittier for them, too ? Are luxury brands immune to "energy is getting expensive, and corporate needs to buy shares back and increase dividend, so we have to cut costs everywhere" ?
In other words, are growing inequality going to end up having billionaires who functionally live the same quality of life as upper-middle-class from the end of 90s ?
> clothes are unrecognizable after the second wash
What clothes are these? I don't buy any kind of expensive brands. I don't take any care when washing. I don't own a lot of clothes so I wear each item weekly. And my clothes last me for several years at least. The dyes have gotten noticeably better than when I was a child - when was the last time you had colors run in the wash?
This article is really trying to gaslight us into believing it is only pessimism, when decline in quality is very real. The best example is that ikea no longer sells solid wood tables, they are particle board with wood grain stickers. The exciting part is they are more expensive than the original hardwood versions.
It's called inflation guys. Most innovation is selling an inferior product for a lower price. Most of us can only afford that. It's the same old inflation, but repackeged to keep the official inflation number down.
Maybe you shouldn’t elect politicians who increase your public debt perennially by printing money like there’s no tomorrow. Perhaps that way the money you earn would be worth something and you would be able to afford quality products. It’s hard, I know.
I think it's inevitable that businesses will optimise for profit at the expense of quality as far as they are able without tarnishing their brand. Sports shoe companies, for example, have proven that you can take this to extremes so long as your brand is well-established.
In inflation calculation, is quality taken into account? I guess not, given the inherent problem stated in the article.
If that's the case, even if it's true that we can say "sure, quality is declining, but it's fine, just fine", it would follow that inflation is actually much higher than reported.
When you buy a fridge today, it buys you the "fridge service" for a much shorter time span, forcing you to invest a lot more money into that service over a given time span. That's a steep inflation of fridge price that isn't counted in official statistics.
This should be taken into account in inflation calculation. If this was, it would give a much fairer view of the decline in purchasing power.
> According to a 2024 report by the software company Salesforce, 62% of these services in Spain are already automated. Today, it’s easier to converse with a machine than with a real person.
Whats adorable is that the author thinks this has anything to do with AI. Shitty AI is an excuse to get rid of customer service. It's a move that most of tech made a long time ago.
How many times BEFORE AI have you heard the lament from someone that "Thank fully I am internet famous, or blew up on social media. because other wise google/etsy/ebay/Facebook would never have fixed their automated decision to pull the rug out from under me"
> The conclusion is clear: society isn’t adapting to the pace of technological advancement.
Uhhh, the change already happened, in the attention economy the only thing that matters is your social clout (credit?).
> packaged foods with more preservatives than ingredients.
Heirloom tomatoes in the grocery store. Avocado year round, Brussel sprouts that dont taste like ass. Whole Foods, and other more 'local' choices.
> According to the expert, the main factor driving this criticism is that the great promise of capitalism — if you work
The problem is that there are lots of people all over the globe who are willing to do MORE for LESS and we are in a global marketplace. Adapt or die.
> The real problem isn’t buying pants that don’t last or traveling in an uncomfortable plane. The real problem is that, with each purchase, we support two of the most polluting industries on the planet.
The author could have done a far better job in highlighting all the waste that goes into a pair of pants. Oil for synthetics, Waste from fabric making and dying. Scraps from the cutting process only to have them thrown away after a year to make another pair. Instead we got a bunch of "feel good" talking points that you can nod along to even if they are misinformed.
It's called "lowest cost technically acceptable". Publicly traded companies are driven by quarterly earnings and increasing net margins. You do that by selling products at the lowest cost possible where buyers will still buy it.
A bigger decline is coming if we let "vibe coding" and what we call AI replace human workers at scale. The technology isn't there yet for full automation but everything is blindly surging ahead due to the allure of it and the same reason as the first paragraph above.
You don't get ahead by focusing on quality and caring about your customers. The guy who cuts corners gets ahead.
Maybe someone will respond "why should a business care about you?" and that just proves my point. We've created a zero empathy, greed-driven society and then we wonder why quality is declining.
I'm not sure if this is quite related, but I can't help but feel that a lot of the ills of society that we're witnessing is simply coming down to the fact that we're living a lot longer as people.
I feel like knowing that we might live well-beyond our working age has caused all sorts of odd/irrational behaviours in the way we approach life. I think for example, having to save for retirement makes us rethink how we spend our money. Which then means people are ultimately spending less on other things i.e. clothing. Then it becomes a kind of vicious cycle of hoarding wealth, but then expecting everything else to be cheap (at any cost).
Whereas it's like, if you expected that you would die in your 50s/60s you'd probably be happier spending your money on stuff that you felt served you better, irrespective of the cost, cause you're still working and able to service that lifestyle.
This article's thesis is all over the place, but the discussion here brings up an interesting topic: the decline in quality is relative to your evaluation function.
If you want long lasting products, then maybe the cheaper furniture is of lower quality. If you want something light weight and affordable, then ikea is higher quality.
Assuming there is a uniform product evaluation function seems like lazy journalism. The addition of AI was also odd
It’s tough to trust ratings when the details tell a different story. Using something like HiFive Star to track and compare reviews across sites helped me get a clearer picture before booking. Made choosing a place less stressful and more reliable.
Quality has improved across many dimensions in nearly every domain I’m familiar with. In fact, I’d argue there are very few products or services that couldn’t be made today to a higher standard than at any point in the past, if we chose to prioritize that.
But what’s often mistaken for a decline in quality is really a shift in priorities: toward affordability, efficiency, and accessibility. And that’s fantastic. Products that were once expensive and exclusive are now available, at good-enough quality, to billions more people around the world.
Yes, that trade-off can mean shorter lifespans or less repairability. But on balance, widening access is a moral win, and one made possible by the very progress the article seems to mourn.
"Following his reasoning, it cannot be stated in absolute terms that an iPhone 15 is of “better quality” than a 2003 Nokia."
This statement suffers from either viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses or from total cultural relativism in the most pejorative sense.
I'm not sure about 2003, but around 2009, I owned a Nokia N900, which was arguably the flagship Nokia phone at the time. I can confidently state that current iPhones are _way_ better than that phone. On paper, the N900 phone was amazing: it had GPS, Wi-Fi, multitasking, a camera, a touchscreen, and (!) a hardware keyboard, and more. It had a desktop-class browser, on paper. But nothing quite worked well. It was far too bloated for the hardware capabilities of the time. When you came home, it never damn switched properly to WiFi, or it took forever. The same applies to switching off WiFi and switching to cellular when you leave home. The GPS always took minutes to establish a location and easily lost connection due to small obstructions. I recall that I compared it to a friend's iPhone at the time; the N900's GPS was embarrassingly bad and slow.
I can confidently say that today's flagship iPhones (or even Androids) are significantly better quality than the N900, in every way possible.
For public services, every year people get older, more of the economy has to be reallocated towards looking after them. More spending on pensions rather than education, more old people using all the health services (since they use up so much more than young people).
The upper-middle class in the US is also bigger than ever, and all those upper-middle interests are getting saturated: AMEX lounges, expensive resorts. Air travel is also a lot more affordable for the common person than back in the golden age.
Capitalism is the reason for declining quality. The incentive isn't to make quality products and services - the incentive is to monopolize an industry, and then squeeze every last cent from the captured consumers. Line must go up!
> ...that the great promise of capitalism — if you work, you can have a decent life, buy a house, and go on vacation — is no longer being fulfilled;...
That's... not capitalism at all? Socialism maybe, but absolutely not capitalism. In average, those that work will have a good life (or at least, in average, better life than those who don't), but there is no guarantee on a single case, or even that this life will be good enough.
> Many products are hard to compare due to the enormous price difference
Well that explains a lot, doesn't it? The article is right overall but occasionally glances over the importance of the "quality/price" ratio. As the price went down, buying habits changed, and by extension the manufacturing habits. When things are cheap nobody wants to keep them forever, they get exchanged sooner to "keep up with the times".
My anecdote, when I bought my first fridge (a tiny 70-100l I think) it cost 2.5x the average net salary in my country, and it still broke down often, but it could be repaired so it lasted 20+ years. I think today a fridge costing 2.5x the average salary - for the US this would be a ~$10-12k fridge - will be more reliable but unrepairable so when it's done, it's done.
> For some consumers — although we know there won’t be many — the Nokia’s extreme durability may be more valuable than the iPhone’s technological innovations
I still use a phone of the generation after Nokia - it must be 20 years old now. The thing is, for everyday use voicemail and SMS are enough for me. I don't need more technology. And certainly not the kind of technology that make people walk like zombies on the street. If you remember the old Youtube video about viewers not noticing a gorilla in the middle of basketball players because viewers were instructed to count something, this is exactly that.
> there’s another, lesser-known but even more effective method: convincing consumers that a product is outdated for aesthetic or symbolic reasons, even if it still works.
Long story short, durability is the greatest enemy for businesses. They have decades of experience of fighting against it. IIRC Europe introduced laws against planned obsolescence, but businesses probably did start to switch to "perceived obsolescence" when consumers proved the existence of planned obsolescence.
It's not even something evil to do for some categories of products. Good household appliances use less energy, even good ICE cars probably are more efficient than they used to be, etc. It seems that it defines a different metric for product quality, total cost of ownership.
> However, Rodríguez argues that, generally speaking, automation does improve customer service. [...] The initial investment in technology is extremely high, and the benefits remain practically the same. We have not detected any job losses in the sector either.
If companies really are investing in order to improve their customer service, that's big news.
128 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 78.6 ms ] threadAre things getting shittier for them, too ? Are luxury brands immune to "energy is getting expensive, and corporate needs to buy shares back and increase dividend, so we have to cut costs everywhere" ?
In other words, are growing inequality going to end up having billionaires who functionally live the same quality of life as upper-middle-class from the end of 90s ?
What clothes are these? I don't buy any kind of expensive brands. I don't take any care when washing. I don't own a lot of clothes so I wear each item weekly. And my clothes last me for several years at least. The dyes have gotten noticeably better than when I was a child - when was the last time you had colors run in the wash?
If that's the case, even if it's true that we can say "sure, quality is declining, but it's fine, just fine", it would follow that inflation is actually much higher than reported.
When you buy a fridge today, it buys you the "fridge service" for a much shorter time span, forcing you to invest a lot more money into that service over a given time span. That's a steep inflation of fridge price that isn't counted in official statistics.
This should be taken into account in inflation calculation. If this was, it would give a much fairer view of the decline in purchasing power.
Whats adorable is that the author thinks this has anything to do with AI. Shitty AI is an excuse to get rid of customer service. It's a move that most of tech made a long time ago.
How many times BEFORE AI have you heard the lament from someone that "Thank fully I am internet famous, or blew up on social media. because other wise google/etsy/ebay/Facebook would never have fixed their automated decision to pull the rug out from under me"
> The conclusion is clear: society isn’t adapting to the pace of technological advancement.
Uhhh, the change already happened, in the attention economy the only thing that matters is your social clout (credit?).
> packaged foods with more preservatives than ingredients.
Heirloom tomatoes in the grocery store. Avocado year round, Brussel sprouts that dont taste like ass. Whole Foods, and other more 'local' choices.
> According to the expert, the main factor driving this criticism is that the great promise of capitalism — if you work
The problem is that there are lots of people all over the globe who are willing to do MORE for LESS and we are in a global marketplace. Adapt or die.
> buy a house
Except you can have all this. Plenty of people do: "buying a house" is very literally the same as it ever was: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
> The real problem isn’t buying pants that don’t last or traveling in an uncomfortable plane. The real problem is that, with each purchase, we support two of the most polluting industries on the planet.
The author could have done a far better job in highlighting all the waste that goes into a pair of pants. Oil for synthetics, Waste from fabric making and dying. Scraps from the cutting process only to have them thrown away after a year to make another pair. Instead we got a bunch of "feel good" talking points that you can nod along to even if they are misinformed.
And this does not result in the health service having lower quality for the individual?
This is a very funky way to frame this.
A bigger decline is coming if we let "vibe coding" and what we call AI replace human workers at scale. The technology isn't there yet for full automation but everything is blindly surging ahead due to the allure of it and the same reason as the first paragraph above.
Maybe someone will respond "why should a business care about you?" and that just proves my point. We've created a zero empathy, greed-driven society and then we wonder why quality is declining.
I feel like knowing that we might live well-beyond our working age has caused all sorts of odd/irrational behaviours in the way we approach life. I think for example, having to save for retirement makes us rethink how we spend our money. Which then means people are ultimately spending less on other things i.e. clothing. Then it becomes a kind of vicious cycle of hoarding wealth, but then expecting everything else to be cheap (at any cost).
Whereas it's like, if you expected that you would die in your 50s/60s you'd probably be happier spending your money on stuff that you felt served you better, irrespective of the cost, cause you're still working and able to service that lifestyle.
If you want long lasting products, then maybe the cheaper furniture is of lower quality. If you want something light weight and affordable, then ikea is higher quality.
Assuming there is a uniform product evaluation function seems like lazy journalism. The addition of AI was also odd
I looked at this hotel made from containers recently:
https://www.booking.com/hotel/de/tin-inn-montabaur.html
I thought it is an interesting concept. And it has a rating of 8.5 out of 10 on booking.com, which means "Very good".
But then I read through the details and the reviews (sorted by new) and see:
You can hear your neighbors.
You cannot open the windows.
Staff enters the room before your checkout time.
The rooms and the stuff inside the rooms are dirty.
Lots of broken amenities, including the air condition.
For check-in you have to enter your passport-id (where does it end up?).
And on and on an on ...
How is that "Very good"?
What threshold should one assign to book something on booking.com these days? 9.9/10?
People are going to maximize short term profits.
But what’s often mistaken for a decline in quality is really a shift in priorities: toward affordability, efficiency, and accessibility. And that’s fantastic. Products that were once expensive and exclusive are now available, at good-enough quality, to billions more people around the world.
Yes, that trade-off can mean shorter lifespans or less repairability. But on balance, widening access is a moral win, and one made possible by the very progress the article seems to mourn.
This statement suffers from either viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses or from total cultural relativism in the most pejorative sense.
I'm not sure about 2003, but around 2009, I owned a Nokia N900, which was arguably the flagship Nokia phone at the time. I can confidently state that current iPhones are _way_ better than that phone. On paper, the N900 phone was amazing: it had GPS, Wi-Fi, multitasking, a camera, a touchscreen, and (!) a hardware keyboard, and more. It had a desktop-class browser, on paper. But nothing quite worked well. It was far too bloated for the hardware capabilities of the time. When you came home, it never damn switched properly to WiFi, or it took forever. The same applies to switching off WiFi and switching to cellular when you leave home. The GPS always took minutes to establish a location and easily lost connection due to small obstructions. I recall that I compared it to a friend's iPhone at the time; the N900's GPS was embarrassingly bad and slow.
I can confidently say that today's flagship iPhones (or even Androids) are significantly better quality than the N900, in every way possible.
There is a fetishistic cult surrounding the N900.
Mainly comprised of people who were too young or broke to own one.
I am an old man who owned an N900.
Simply and concisely: the N900 was a half-baked, poorly thought out, frustrating piece of "exercise in box-ticking" junk.
The upper-middle class in the US is also bigger than ever, and all those upper-middle interests are getting saturated: AMEX lounges, expensive resorts. Air travel is also a lot more affordable for the common person than back in the golden age.
Or maybe just don't buy cheap thrash?
I bought some T-shirts while in Covid from a sports brand and 5 years later they are still as if they were new :shrug:
Of course price =/= quality, but when almost everyone is ordering their new clothes from Shein then what do you really expect?
That's... not capitalism at all? Socialism maybe, but absolutely not capitalism. In average, those that work will have a good life (or at least, in average, better life than those who don't), but there is no guarantee on a single case, or even that this life will be good enough.
Well that explains a lot, doesn't it? The article is right overall but occasionally glances over the importance of the "quality/price" ratio. As the price went down, buying habits changed, and by extension the manufacturing habits. When things are cheap nobody wants to keep them forever, they get exchanged sooner to "keep up with the times".
My anecdote, when I bought my first fridge (a tiny 70-100l I think) it cost 2.5x the average net salary in my country, and it still broke down often, but it could be repaired so it lasted 20+ years. I think today a fridge costing 2.5x the average salary - for the US this would be a ~$10-12k fridge - will be more reliable but unrepairable so when it's done, it's done.
I still use a phone of the generation after Nokia - it must be 20 years old now. The thing is, for everyday use voicemail and SMS are enough for me. I don't need more technology. And certainly not the kind of technology that make people walk like zombies on the street. If you remember the old Youtube video about viewers not noticing a gorilla in the middle of basketball players because viewers were instructed to count something, this is exactly that.
> there’s another, lesser-known but even more effective method: convincing consumers that a product is outdated for aesthetic or symbolic reasons, even if it still works.
Long story short, durability is the greatest enemy for businesses. They have decades of experience of fighting against it. IIRC Europe introduced laws against planned obsolescence, but businesses probably did start to switch to "perceived obsolescence" when consumers proved the existence of planned obsolescence.
It's not even something evil to do for some categories of products. Good household appliances use less energy, even good ICE cars probably are more efficient than they used to be, etc. It seems that it defines a different metric for product quality, total cost of ownership.
> However, Rodríguez argues that, generally speaking, automation does improve customer service. [...] The initial investment in technology is extremely high, and the benefits remain practically the same. We have not detected any job losses in the sector either.
If companies really are investing in order to improve their customer service, that's big news.