While I personally find this kind of thing extremely annoying, to me, the main problem is the _difficulty_ of determining quality. The Donut media guys did a (relatively unscientific) video comparing a whole bunch of products from the 50s to modern day across several price points. What they found was that the things that "looked" the same now were simultaneously worse and also much cheaper. They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price. It was just that the brands and names that used to be quality were now usually not as much.
So it is often the case that today, you can get something for cheaper than you ever could in the past (albeit not at a great quality), and if you are willing to pay higher prices (but often about the same as you would have paid in the past), you can still get good or even better quality.
The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also gotten harder in many cases.
> They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price.
I argue you must evaluate against median purchasing power; it accounts for inflation and (lack of) wage increases.
Comments from your linked video:
> The problem with the “adjusted for inflation” argument is that it does not factor in buying power. The increase in wages has risen at out half the rate of inflation, so sure; $20 in 1975 would be $124 today, but the minimum wage in 1975 was $2.10 an hour as opposed to $7.25 today, giving you half the buying power you had 50 years ago.
> healthcare, housing, and education ... have increased by an insane margin leaving people with less money once that has been paid for (if at all).
> It's even worse when you consider that people are paying 45-55% of their monthly income on a house that cost 20x more than it would have in 1975. Your buying power is fucked from all sides.
This isn't true for median purchasing power. You're looking at the federal minimum wage, not the median. Only about 1% of hourly workers earn $7.25 or less.
Median earnings were $48,070 in 1975, measured in 2024 dollars, and $51,370 in 2024.
I'm really frustrated by inflation numbers because there doesn't seem to be a metric that makes sense.
CPI ignores the reality people feel (and swaps in cheaper items that aren't necessarily on par with the original to keep the number lower), gold isn't really a 1:1 with purchasing power...there must be some sort of useful composite metric that merges multiple data points over time like rental/house prices, CPI market basket, dollar vs hard assets like gold to come up with a more accurate number.
> The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also gotten harder in many cases.
And there's a perverse effect to that difficulty: even if you really want high quality, it can be so hard to be sure you're getting it that you give up and just by the cheapest thing, because at least then you know you're not getting taken advantage of (by buying crappy for premium prices).
Its also gotten harder to trust them to maintain that quality, too.
A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners, or even start selling a slightly different product with the same model number.
Or you find a decent brand that makes good products, they get popular and grow and in come the MBAs with ideas on how to increase profits. Or they get bought by Private Equity and carry on only by brand momentum.
> A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners
I think this is true, but for far less malicious reasons. Favourable reviews lead to popularity, which increases production pressures, which makes it harder to source quality materials and maintain a quality process while satisfying demand.
I have heard of several indie makers who, faced with sudden popularity, have to make the tough choice of speeding up the process at reduced quality (and thus dissatisfy customers) or be unable to fill orders (and thus dissatisfy customers). Everyone handles it differently but it's not pleasant for anyone.
It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available. It means that people who couldn't in the past afford something at all, are now more likely to have some path to getting it.
And even if you could afford the higher quality, you may not need it anyway. I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater.
But you're right, when you do need the higher quality, it can be tough to differentiate.
> I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater.
I've been burned too often with this thinking. All too often the cheap tool isn't just light duty so it breaks, it is not good enough to do the job at all. If the motor is too weak the tool won't do the job. If the wrench isn't precise enough it will round the bolt - this is worse than breaking: you can't fix the thing at all anymore with any quality of tool.
I don't need the best tools, but I need one that is enough quality to do the job, and the cheap tools generally fail.
Anecdotally my experience is the opposite. I bought an angle grinder from Harbor Freight for something like $10 on sale. It's not something a pro could use every day but it has absolutely been fine for what I do with it: cutting the occasional piece of metal stock, sharpening the lawn mower blade once a year, etc.
> It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available.
The problem is that there is no way for consumers to know whether they are getting the good version or the shit version. This creates a structural incentive to not produce good versions since consumers will assume that the good version is just an over-priced shit version (because the expensive version is often just an over-priced shit version)
I agree that it is nice to have the option when you don't need the quality. It is also nice to have the option when you are trying something new and don't know if you want to invest in quality. Yet the article goes further than that. They are suggesting that companies are capturing a significant fraction of the market, so there is less pressure to produce quality goods. Whether this is resulting in lower quality goods overall, people are debating over. On the other hand, it does seem to be making it difficult to determine what goods are higher quality.
I watched some comparison videos like that, but the old product was always more expensive than what you'd tend to buy today.
Same seems to be true in that video you linked. And when you buy an equivalently-priced product today, it's better than it was 50 years ago. I only skipped through the video though.
The problem I have is that there's no easy way to go to an ecommerce marketplace and pick "I want to spend more for higher quality". You have to do your own external research.
>there's no easy way to go to an ecommerce marketplace and pick "I want to spend more for higher quality".
It's not just that it's difficult for a purchaser to determine the balance between price and quality on a given product, that difficulty is deliberate. It goes well beyond the Boots Theory of Economic Unfairness[1]. Vast fortunes are extracted from a public who would make different (and arguably better) purchasing choices if they were not deceived by those who profit from the deception. It's become normalized, which does not change that the process of wealth transfer via deception (fraud under color of law) is destructive to law, society, and pretty much any sort of real public good.
That is what I miss the most from the old stores. I knew when I went to Sears I'd get a good enough thing. I could often find the exact same thing under a different name for less elsewhere if I looked (Sears made no secret that their house brands were someone else's product with the Sears name on it). I knew I could often find better if I looked. However I could trust that it was a good enough product for my needs and so only a few people had any reason to try elsewhere. (the above used to apply stores like J.C. Pennies, and Wards - though Wards was already failing when I was a kid)
Amazon has everything, but I don't want everything. I want someone to the comparisons for me so decide what is good enough. Reviews are worthless - even when not a scam (which many are), most people buy one and so they can only report it works they don't know how it compares to some other model that they didn't buy.
> The problem I have is that there's no easy way to go to an ecommerce marketplace and pick "I want to spend more for higher quality".
Not even isolated to ecommerce, really. This is everything now. The cars you shop for, half on the lot were made by a different OEM and are rebadged and sold by this one. Clothing is a fucking mess, both in terms of quality and sizing. Corporate consolidation is a ludicrously under-discussed issue and one of the bigger reasons everything just kind of sucks now.
It's one of the things that keeps me with Apple really, for all the warts, at least I know what I'm fucking buying.
With some product categories there are independent testing laboratories that do a fairly good job of determining quality. The automotive industry comes to mind.
It seems it's a revealed preference that most people really don't care that much about quality, or there would exist a host of companies like Consumer Reports to meet the demand. Complaining on social media about enshittification and evil corporations does not put skin in the game.
I myself constantly complain about the atrocious quality of most consumer software products, but I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to pay for a subscription to an independent testing report.
Akerlof famously wrote about this in 'The Market for Lemons'.
"Suppose buyers cannot distinguish between a high-quality car (a "peach") and a low-quality car (a "lemon"). Then they are only willing to pay a fixed price for a car that averages the value of a "peach" and "lemon" together (pavg). But sellers know whether they hold a peach or a lemon. Given the fixed price at which buyers will buy, sellers will sell only when they hold "lemons" (since plemon < pavg) and they will leave the market when they hold "peaches" (since ppeach > pavg). Eventually, as enough sellers of "peaches" leave the market, the average willingness-to-pay of buyers will decrease (since the average quality of cars on the market decreased), leading to even more sellers of high-quality cars to leave the market through a positive feedback loop. Thus the uninformed buyer's price creates an adverse selection problem that drives the high-quality cars from the market. Adverse selection is a market mechanism that can lead to a market collapse."
I find that the cheaper option is often so much cheaper that buying several replacements is better than buying the better one. Ninja blenders vs Vitamix for example. Adding in the fact that I have no trusted evidence that Vitamix is actually better, I’d be fine replacing my Ninja every year vs amortizing the Vitamix over five or more years. And for the record my Ninja has been great so far.
> They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price
This is what so many don't understand, especially among the youth / reddit crowd. They expect their $25 jeans to be equivalent quality to the $25 or even $100 jeans from 60 years ago, for some reason. There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
There's also very few people who understand just how expensive things were back then, likely a result of having infinite cheap crap available. They don't know that in 1970, in today's money, a fridge was ~$4000, a burger and fries was $17, and a typical dress was $350. The only thing that has changed is that there are now options for cheap shitty things. You can still buy a very nice $4000 fridge if you want to.
> There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
But so many things did become cheaper and better: computers, availability and quality [1] of the music I can physically buy, the energy efficiency of modern fridges, the speed and safety of modern cars. Even my milk lasts impossibly long without spoiling.
If the replacement laptop battery I can buy today for ~$50 is leagues ahead of anything available in the 70s, then why aren't jeans and backpacks also miles ahead of what was available back then? No wonder the younger crowd is confused.
[1] Yes, CDs are objectively better than vinyl. Whether the audio mastering has kept up is a different topic.
I bought some $100 jeans a few months ago, hoping they would be better than the $25 I used to buy 30 years ago. They are not better than the $25 jean I can buy elsewhere today.
"a burger and fries was $17"? That doesn't seem right.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mcdonalds-old-photos/ shows a menu at McDonalds from the early 1970s. A hamburger and fries was $0.63 or (assuming 1970 and adjusting for inflation) $5.36 now. A quarter pounder and fries was $1.27, or $10.81 now. Add $0.15 or $0.20 for a soda ($1.28 or $1.70).
Perhaps it's gotten harder to determine by eye, but Google will still point you towards trustworthy brands in 2 minutes. The problem is people don't care or can't be bothered to Google.
> Perhaps it's gotten harder to determine by eye, but Google will still point you towards trustworthy brands in 2 minutes.
One of the main points of the article is you cannot rely on the brand to determine quality. The marketers know how to exploit a reputation for quality and information asymmetries to push crappy goods, for instance:
> Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to.
And this:
> People who do get warranty replacements report receiving bags that are worse than the one they sent in. Thinner fabric. Cheaper hardware. You mailed back a 2016 JanSport and got a 2025 JanSport, and those are fundamentally different products.
When you Google, are you reading a rave review of a 2016 bag, when the 2026 model has been crapified? Is the bag you're looking at on Amazon the Walmart JanSport or the REI JanSport?
I care and can be bothered, but Google is now itself a worse product than it used to be.
It pushes sponsors links and garbage top-ten lists with Amazon sponsored links and other seo optimized content and none of it can be trusted.
People commonly use a reddit tag to search for products, so companies started creating accounts to shill for their products there too, make it look organic and all.
You can't find the best of any product in two minutes on Google, not with any confidence.
> Google will still point you towards trustworthy brands in 2 minutes
On what criteria are you evaluating trustworthiness? Because if you are finding it on google, you are effectively judging on SEO and marketing spend.
Sure, there are some more-or-less trustworthy review outlets, but those too often go to shit when editorial priorities change from on high (i.e. newwire cutter is a pale shadow of its former self)
If you don't know a reviewer who is trustworthy, how can you find one? There's enormous amounts of slop (both human and generated -- this was already a problem before the last couple years), and when some channel has signal, it attracts more noise generators. The subreddit or review site is only useful until it's well known, and then there's increasing pressure on mods or owners to cash in.
The immediately obvious path here is paying for the reviews or recommendations directly, like Consumer Reports, but there are two major problems with that:
first, the amount consumers can afford to pay doesn't support the additional cost of actually buying all the units and exhaustively testing them, when CR and similar sites are competing against supplier-supported sites, and
second, if you care about specific features or aspects of a product, it's unlikely that the reviewer tested that specifically.
I wish I knew of a good solution. In reality, what's probably going to mitigate in the short term is having your agent scour all the available information and make recommendations, at comparatively great expense.
I think Google has turned to garbage and especially for product reviews there is a flood of affiliate marketing grifters in every category. It takes effort and sometimes payment to find good reviews these days.
If you're looking for a backpack, I can't recommend Osprey enough. They are still a independent US company with a lifetime warranty they actually stand by. I had to call their customer service just last week after I ordered the wrong size bag. I was connected to an actual human immediately, and he sent me a prepaid return label, even though it was my fault and I was fully expecting to pay for return shipping myself. I own several of their bags and have never had a single issue with any of them.
I wonder if there's an advertising law angle here. If a company sells multiple products in the same product category, they really shouldn't be allowed to have them branded so that they seem like multiple companies. The main name/logo on these products should be required to have something that makes it clear that they're all from the same company.
They can pick one of their backpack brands to keep (and eliminate/sell off the rest), or they can tack "VF" onto the front of each brand name, or something like that. A customer shouldn't have to dig into the fine print or do research to know whether two products are from the same manufacturer.
The slow realization this whole article was AI prompted was such a disappointment to me. I'm fascinated by the subject matter, and it seems like the person who prompted it is aware of specifics at least... But I also don't want to feed myself LLM-induced pollution that might make it into my own writing or thinking patterns.
> Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.
> That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above
> None of this shows up on the shelf. The colors are right. The logos are crisp. The product photography is excellent. You discover what you actually bought three months in, when the stitching pulls apart at every stress point.
Its thing X. Its thing Y. Its thing Z. And now I'm going to tell you about thing Q in a longer sentence.
More generally it's pure info dump. Everything is lists of things, all given the same weight, even if not literal bullet point lists or numbered lists.
Some other common things (not present in this article) that are dressed up lists are short titled paragraphs, and sequences of sentences that go "blah blah blah: blah blah blah."
Very little opinion added anywhere, but the punchy writing style where everything is given an overdone monotone overimportance masks it a little.
Pure infodump is not terrible for some things but I'd much rather it be less heavily processed by the LLM, and be upfront about the fact that it's a dressed up infodump with an LLM involved.
Its not proof, but its certainly a smoking gun. Even when humans use that literary device, we don't typically do it every other paragraph. It feels like a pretty safe bet that an LLM wrote most of this.
LLMs really like the "it's not this, it's that" framing. The short punchy lists/sequences also feel off to me.
I think it's also the reuse of the same strategy repeatedly throughout the article. I think most human writers often feel put off if they use the same literary device too much.
Also from the guidelines: "HN is for conversation between humans." Granted, it's under comment guidelines, but I think it's acting in the spirit of the rule to point out AI output.
If you think it's AI slop, just flag the article and move on. Of all the stupid reasons people flag articles unfairly on HN, finally we have a good reason to flag them, and instead people comment.
Thank you. By the end of 2026, the same snarky "This article was written by LLM" comment is going to be posted on every single article on HN. It's becoming pointless to point out.
Not going to happen. This is the new meta to get one’s vapid middling commentary toward the top of the comments. Will it outpace complaining about the CSS of the page? Only time will tell.
Basically, all the old brands that had great quality were killed by private equity and have become skin suits worn by low-cost imitators trying to squeeze another penny out of customers. There are still good brands, but they are increasingly niche and you certainly pay a large premium for them.
I bought a north face backpack for college in 1998. It cost $60. It was an extravagant expense for me at the time and I felt horrible about it for weeks.
That backpack is currently at college with my son, who used it all through high school as well. It is by far the oldest and most durable daily-use object I’ve ever owned.
A cheap backpack ended up being the most expensive backpack I have ever owned.
In 2004 I was very young and all my income came from summer jobs, so I got a backpack from Walmart. It was one of their nicer models, had a lot of features and looked pretty good. IIRC it cost $20. I had worked all summer to save for an MP3 player, and 2 months after getting that backpack I getting off a bus, when I realized there was already a hole in the bottom of the bag. My MP3 player (a creative zen micro) had slipped out of the bag, and someone had already picked up my MP3 player and walked away with it. Adjusted for inflation I spent over $500 on that MP3 player. Even as an avid backpacker, I have not spent that much on fairly nice packs.
In 2007 I splurged and paid $100 for a backpack from Deuter, and I also felt a lot of guilt as that was a huge amount of money for me at the time for something like a backpack. It's been nearly 20 years, it's not just that the backpack is still working, it still functions virtually like new. None of the seams are stretching, even though it's been through incredible overstuffing and abuse. All of the zippers are smooth as silk, and even the cushioning on the straps and airflow offsets on the back are still supple and supportive.
It mentioned in the article that their higher end models are still well made. I bet you can still get nice NF or JanSport bags if you’re careful. If I had to guess, I’d say the models at REI are decent (or else they’d get yanked) while the ones at Target are the chintzy ones.
Yeah, I went to work for a law firm when I was 22, and I bought myself a 3/4 length cashmere-wool overcoat, and it was $750, and my parents thought it was ridiculous to spend that.
I'm 48 and not only do I still have it, it still looks like new, with no real care taken of it - wear it, put it away. The only issue I had was the liner in one arm pit started to unstitch a couple of inches, and a tailor took care of it in 20 minutes for $10 a decade ago.
First day of my college freshman year, I purchased a Targus backpack for the heavy ass gaming laptop I had back then. I still use it decades later. It has carried stuff inside it for tens of thousands of miles, seen lots of abuse, weathered all sorts of conditions, and is still in really good shape. Not a single tear. Every compartment, every feature works the way it did on day of purchase. I'm honestly amazed every time I use it.
There are so many examples of this. Processed food, sweets and so on. Cadbury, Toblerone, etc live on the brand recognition, but have come objectively worse over the years. Often they are owned by the same mega corp that have a strategy of milking the brands for as long as possible.
It's bait and switch on global, organised scale and it's almost impossible to fight except on an individual level.
We always see consumers blamed for choosing price over quality. How about retailers taking the blame for dumbing down or removing product specs? If two items look identical but one costs more than the other how can consumer be blamed for choosing the cheaper ones? Especially in the age of LLMs, it you are building a quality product you need to include a spec sheet of what makes your product better than the competitor. Not dumbed down marketing speak like "lasts longer" but specific details justifying the premium, like "zippers made in Japan" or the stitching density, fabric specifics, etc. Consumers who care can use LLM to understand what it all means and make informed choice. But when the information is hidden consumer will choose the cheapest option.
Every backpack I've ever bought I was able to easily find all the relevant specifications I needed in order to choose a quality a pack. If you're looking at a pack which doesn't provide such specifications then that's an immediate giveaway that it's a low quality pack. It's not difficult, the average person really just does not care to do research. They instead just choose the cheapest one with the advertising that hooked them the best. But the information is there if you want it.
As much as the result for consumers sucks, is this just a result of the quality backpack business not being a very profitable business to be in anymore?
The reason they were able to buy all those backpack brands is because each of those brands were not making much money running a backpack company selling quality at a reasonable price. The purchaser makes some money leeching value out of the brand reputation, but then that brand value falls because of the crappy product, and they sell the brand because they leeched all the value out of it.
This is only possible because you can’t make much money selling quality for a good price. Consumers will pick lower quality for the cheapest price every time.
It's much more likely to be a result of the modern drive for companies to keep growing. This leads to a need to maximize profit endlessly, which in turn leads to cutting corners as much as you think you can get away with, or just ballooning prices. And this problem goes up and down the supply chain, of course - even if you want to run a non-growth business manufacturing quality backpacks, if your suppliers want to run growth businesses, they will eat up your margins and force your hand.
This obsession with ever increasing revenue is a major source of our worse and worse consumer economy.
The onslaught of far east imports is also a factor. They weren't very relevant 30 years ago outside of discount merchants. Now you pop on to Amazon and choose something that looks appealing from dozens of mystery meat brands.
That's not going to change though. Cheap asian manufacturing and wall st efficiency maximizing changed industry in America. Maybe there could be changes to how public markets are regulated to change BigCo incentives, but it will be hard to change consumer behaviour if they like buying cheap disposable crap for the lowest price.
There is still plenty of competition in the backpack market if you just visit an outdoors store instead of walmart. That's a higher end market though, which is where most high quality small/medium businesses flourish.
In theory, competition is what prevents this. If these small companies can sell products that provide more value then consumers buy the alternative.
I think the problem today is that it's extremely difficult to tell when you're buying quality or a brand. If there's a 40$ and a 100$ backpack, often the 100$ version does not actually have meaningfully improved quality - just better marketing.
The same goes for tons of products - brands nowadays are something companies build while they're young and relentlessly smash into the ground as they age because the value you're destroying isn't obvious. Shareholders get good results, and objectively it's probably the correct financial decisions for the company - doesn't make it any less shit.
Absolutely this. I am sure there are recorded cases where companies have gone out of their way to make things break early but I think it’s more times than not simply that cost matters and consumers are the voters and for the majority cheap wins. The average consumer is not very thoughtful and will opt to buy the cheaper good. For sure there are many economic constraints and not everyone has the luxury of buying quality but that’s not always the issues.
This comes up a lot with washing machines and I sympathize with parts of it, why not standardize control boards more or other components in the machine but one of the biggest issues is simply the cost of labor in places like the US is high enough that it’s hard to make it cost effective to repair.
As easy as it is to blame customers, I don’t think it is irrational to just buy the cheapest. So many times the more expensive one isn’t any better and you are paying for branding and marketing, and just wasting your money.
At least if you buy the cheapest one you know you are at least saving money up front.
The high cost of labor has nothing to do with reusable parts of the washing machine. If it was all standardized, you could do a lot of repairs yourself.
It actually plays a pretty large role in the problem. This is like when people complain about not having enough small cars in America, they simply don’t sell well. Similarly, the average consumer does not want to be doing their own repairs. A lot of appliance repairs are already pretty darn easy.
When the base labor charge is already 10% or more of the total replacement cost it becomes hard to justify the repair.
Agreed. You can also say that they are better engineered for most use, nowadays. With the adage that anyone can build a bridge that doesn't fall over, an engineering team is needed to build one that has the minimum resources to stay up.
In particular, how durable do people think backpacks need to be? If you are going through them particularly quickly, maybe you are over loading compared to what they were designed for?
That's the end result of capitalism squeezing all disposable income from the people. Wage suppression, rent-seeking subscriptions, shrinkflation. When people barely have enough money to survive, they can't afford to buy things!
I spent way too much money on a Peak Design backpack. 4 years in, the zipper broke. They honored the lifetime warranty, and swapped me for a brand new one.
That was my first time ever dealing with such a high-end product and a lifetime warranty.
Gonna echo that I love my Peak Design backpack. Only backpack I’ve ever owned that delighted me so much I told others and showed it off.
The design is a little dorky, especially now that every techbro in SF has one, but my god that thing has pockets and little details in all the right places. Been using mine for years and looks almost new.
One downside of high quality gear: Velomacchi (motorcycle bags/backpacks) seems to have gone out of business. Been using their stuff for almost 10 years. Feels indestructible, works great, but I’m never getting a replacement and I guess any warranty lasts only as long as the company …
Peak Design is the rare travel backpack I could find that has one massive storage compartment instead of 5+ small compartments. So you can really pack that thing efficiently.
And the 45L variant is the biggest thing you can use as a carry-on.
I've never spent $300 on a backpack before. It kinda stung. It's well-thought-out though. I've had it five years and it's been through a lot.
The FAQ says to hand-wash it which is annoying though. There's no way you're gently washing out the sort of grime that my human oil leaves on the straps from real use, like clinging to your bare shoulders during a long sweaty trip through Mexico.
So I feel a lil mischievous tossing the thing into the washing machine every year. Same way I feel using an alcohol wipe on my Macbook screen.
Echoing the efficiency. I just returned from a 1mo trip living out of the 45L, including a supply of dead-tree books.
That said, I've only had it a year and it's clearly not new anymore. Paint wear on the rivets, for example. I expect it'll be in rough shape when it's accumulated as many miles as the travel bag it's partially replacing.
My strategy with pretty much everything I can is to deeply research to find any Made In USA variant of whatever it is I’m trying to purchase, and buy whatever that is regardless of price. I’ve never had that fail me.
For backpacks, my Waterfield pack has held up fantastically across several years of regularly absolutely stuffing it with gear for my work travel.
Thread counts and Denier are poor metrics for items that employ technical fabrics, seam glues and other modern improvements that legitimately lower these sorts of simple measurements. People don't want to buy the same heavyweight waxed backpacks their grandparents used.
There definitely are BOM- and manufacturing reduction movements in these mature products but backpacks honestly don't seem nearly as bad as (eg) walking boots.
The Worse On Purpose article on power tools follows a similar tack. Offshore manufacturing, corporate consolidation and cheaper processes don't actually make the overall picture worse when we have affordable tools packing modern lithium batteries and brushless neodymium motors.
The sale of the high quality brand allows the original entrepreneurs to exit their business to someone that thinks they can run it more efficiently. The decline in quality allows for innovative upstarts to try new things.
I've got a story of this but backwards. I know a guy, a hiking guru, moderately famous for his backpacks. He's an ultralight long distance enthusiast who designs much of his own equipment. I went to his house for a weekend session with a few people to learn to make our own, and I'm still using the one I made. For a few years he made and sold them out of his living room. Then he sold his brand to an outfit that scaled it up into a decent business.
But the lightweight hiking guru made ultralight backpacks, with thin material and very minimal extras. It was designed to be light by a guy who could sew, so he was happy to fix it as needed on the trail. To him that was a feature not a bug. Meanwhile the company that bought the brand and design necessarily made it more robust, feature-full, and twice as heavy. They were pretty much forced to by the number of returns they were getting.
So now I treasure my old backpack that worseonpurpose would probably deplore, and keep it repaired so that I don't have to make another or go buy one that worseonpurpose would probably like better.
Yep. Ultralight hikers are industrious and good maintainers. They take pride in lightweight bags and making them or acquiring them. Those hikers will deal with a defect on the trail or after they get to port and expect to do so with their pack.
Your average backpack consumer is a different breed. Cosmetic designs, logos, colors, and generic pockets are key marketing traits of consumer backpacks and small rips or tears are seen as reasons to replace the backpack.
Speaking of “worse on purpose,” I immediately tried to subscribe to this site’s RSS feed — none. Unthinkable on any blogging platform for most of the past twenty years.
I think this is more of a case of the product getting worse incidentally. Contrast with leaders who are actually making things worse on purpose. Apparently, for no other reason than to be ugly and mean about it. I've been on this earth long enough to discover that monsters are real.
Windows 11 comes to mind as an example of something actually being made worse on purpose. Making it impossible to associate the original notepad.exe with text files is certainly not linked with business outcomes in any direct way. This seems to be purely about antagonizing the user base as much as possible. The only theory I can arrive at is that there is a secret cortisol harvesting scheme that results in better financial outcomes for Microsoft.
It helps to differentiate these cases. I don't like capitalism taken to the extreme, but the other thing is significantly worse. Intent makes all the difference. Engineered to suck vs sucks because it wasn't engineered are two completely different levels of evil.
> A $35 JanSport that dies in eighteen months: $23 per year. […] A $200 bag that lasts ten years: $20 per year. Already cheaper.
If it is, it isn’t by much. The difference between $200 paid now versus 7 times $35 = $245 over a period of ten years is about 5 years of interest over $200. At 4% interest, that’s about $40.
Don't forget to account for your time buying each new one and writing your name in it. If you don't replace soon enough also account for the lost value of things that fall out the holes.
Got me an Osprey ~12 years ago. Light as a feather, tough as nails. But it's not the kind of thing you can just sling over your shoulder like my old North Face bag (which was stolen). But yeah, the moral of the story is, as always, "If you want durable, don't buy it from Wal-Mart" (or Target, or Kohls, or Amazon)
On the flip side, a really good bag, and these have lasted so long I can not recall when I purchased them, are really expensive [https://www.tombihn.com/].
What is really irritating is that sometimes we see the same thing within a single brand (we have a garbage entry-level item and a top tier item which is good).
Tom Bihn sold recently, and doesn't do everything in the US any more. Also I don't know that they were ever "expensive" so much as priced to reflect the economic reality of being made in America and (from what I've read), treating their employees well.
- here is an idea for the next post: AAA gaming got worse on purpose. Dont forget to mention anti consumer practices by EA and Ubisoft when you are at it
I'm waiting for this to happen to Tom Bihn's bags now that they have new owners who're starting to outsource the smaller bags to Vietnam instead of sewing them in-house in Seattle. Luckily for me, I've got what I need from them and expect it to last for quite some time
They're still making a lot of things in the US, there's a list on this blog post from last fall (https://www.tombihn.com/blogs/main/fall-2025-factory-update-...). The "materials and transparency" section of each bag's page tells you where it's made. But the process has begun and you should probably grab anything you've been coveting before that list grows.
I swear by Swiss Gear nowadays. However, it's been several years since I purchased one. I don't know if they've maintained the same high quality.
But I had a Swiss Gear backpack that was fantastic, and it lasted me nearly a decade. It was originally purchased at a Target. It was versatile and I could take it anywhere. It had little grommets to pass-through earphone cords and such. It survived even through several washes in a washing machine.
Then at a thrift store, I found a Swiss Gear suitcase. It has wheels and a telescoping handle. It expands very nicely. I have it stored away and still haven't found occasion to use it.
I also picked up a Swiss Gear laptop bag with a "messenger bag" shoulder strap. These I found at Office Depot. It's really nice. It has a velcro fastener to secure the laptop itself. It has mesh pockets for all kinds of accessories. If I don't put in a laptop, it can carry documents, folders, or binders. It's been very durable.
The Swiss Gear backpack I used daily in college in 2008 is sitting beside me right now. I've put it through its paces over the past 18 years. I jogged here in the rain this morning with it weighed down with my laptop and a water bottle and other things.
Minus some fraying at the base of the front pouch, it's as good as new. I've been very happy with it.
I was gifted a Swiss Gear backpack when I went off to school (over fifteen years ago now). It was good – albeit very heavy – for the first two or three years. Then the soft surfaces started wearing through, the mesh water bottle pocket on the side wore through, and finally one of the straps snapped. I started trying to figure out how to make a claim against their legendary warranty process... and found that at that time (2013 or 2014), in Canada, their backpacks had at most a 1-year limited warranty. Nuts!
It does seem like Swiss Gear are now directly represented in Canada (rather than being represented by a third party, like they were a decade ago), and their backpacks now have a five-year warranty. But I guess my point is: if you don't live in the US, make sure that the things that a brand is famous for hold true in your region, too.
The math that makes this intentional
Price of a bag divided by years it actually lasts. That's your cost per year.
A $35 JanSport that dies in eighteen months: $23 per year. Add the shipping cost
when you try the warranty. Add the replacement cost when the claim gets denied.
Add your time.
A $200 bag that lasts ten years: $20 per year. Already cheaper. At fifteen years,
which the well-built ones consistently do, you're at $13 per year.
As much as people gripe about subscriptions, people forget there's an equivalent internal subscription rate to every product with a lifespan. And beyond that there's the opportunity cost of a large outlay with a FUD component around the longevity. Humans are, as far as i understand, hard-wired for irrational choices around shortermism vs long term bets, you basically have to externalize your thinking to accomplish better. (This could be by writing down your thoughts and then analyzing them externally as a critic, or by passing it off to an AI, etc).
The $25 bag compared to the $200 bag, has $175 worth of free cash flow for other (potentially unexpected) purchases, can be replaced when trends/use case changes (or it gets dirty, or lost...), the capital could be invested in the market to generate ~$1 a month of passive income, and as far as the human can tell it's roughly the same. Basically all the thoughts of a JIT marketplace but on the personal scale...
I've been using an Ikea Varldens for the past 6-8 years. Very efficient for my use case (2 work laptops, groceries, travel luggage, documents and earbud case, tools). It has a couple of nice small compartments and a single large one so it's very light for the size and material. Until now the only thing that's annoyed me was the long straps when riding a motorcycle, so I ran cable ties through the loops to stop them from slapping my hands and sides. It's seen quite a bit of abuse and it's still intact. It's even practically waterproof.
I'll jump in: I was stuck in layover many years ago and bought a Topo Designs backpack -- Google says it's a 30L Apex Global travel bag.
I use it every week, it shows no signs of degradation over approximately a decade. Huge beefy zippers, tons of pockets and organization for those who are into that.
I paid like $200, but seems like they're cheaper now. Hopefully not because of the reasons in the article. At the time, I believe they were a small company from the state my layover was in--maybe Colorado.
I gritted my teeth and bought a GoRuck GR1 a year ago. If it fell into a volcano, which is what it might take to destroy it, I’d buy another one. It’s still possible to find “buy it for life” backpacks but be prepared for eye-watering price tags.
Yep. I like that the care instructions are literally to hose it off in the back yard and let it dry. This thing will outlive me.
But I main got it because I’m a relatively large guy with broad shoulders and other bags pinched my neck. I was given a Timbuk2 pack from work that I otherwise liked, but the straps were too close together. I could either wear it high on my back and have them mash my neck all day, or low on my back wear it’s much harder to carry weight.
(Side note to everyone: wear your backpack as high as possible when it’s even moderately loaded. When I see someone on BART with a huge backpack slung down by their hips, my back aches sympathetically. You want the heaviest load up between your shoulders.)
Edit: I also keep glancing at the 40L GR2, but it's just FOMO. Great bags, but huge. I don't want to schlep something that size to the office, and definitely not on some of the trails we hike.
Chicago School assholes backed by the conservative/"pro-business" think tanks that boomed in the post-war era managed to place some judges and influence some lawmakers to completely break our anti-trust enforcement in the '70s, by shifting from a standard of "enormous corporations may be assumed harmful" to "specific harm that's very expensive to prove must be demonstrated", all but entirely eliminating anti-trust action.
Their lifetime warranty used to be taken extremely seriously, and I really don't know what lifetime they were referring to. I had an old external frame pack that was my grandfather's back when my father was a Boy Scout. That pack outlived its buyer, and I was still using at Philmont where they had the same model as a museum piece. One of the zippers broke, and the back mesh was disintegrating, and pretty much as a joke we made a warranty claim. They honored that, circa 2012 or so.
Their schoolbags were pretty great in the 2000s, too. Withstood some serious abuse, though their zippers were notably on the decline. But that was covered by warranty, so it was fine. By the mid 2010's, they were in full decline, and that's about when I stopped recommending their stuff.
When I was a kid everyone knew that JanSport was the one to get if you actually wanted your bag to survive. Absolutely one of those things where you'd spend more replacing the cheaper bags over and over compared to buying the JanSport once.
Similar thing happened to the Linus Tech Tips backpack, it was supposed to have double bottoms, but chinese suppliers cheaped out. This is a very common chinese trick where they try to get away with something cheaper than specified. This is actually even expected when ordering stuff in large quantities from china, the supplier is guessing what parts they can cheap out on without anyone noticing, it’s not even considered fraud, but a kind of optimization.
Make sure your bag has YKK zippers (if it has zippers).
I used to sell outdoor equipment. If a brand cheaps out on zippers, I wouldn't trust it.
I really like my Patagonia Black hole mini MLC. Awesome access. Fits under an airplane seat. Generous laptop padding. Excellent zippers. Water bottle pocket. Lovely warranty (Patagonia store nearby often gives new product when I try to get product repaired).
I have a columbia backpack i bought like 20 years ago that doesnt have a ykk zipper but it's still in perfect condition, i've abused it a lot and the only thing broken is a rubber thingy it has for the headphones cable to go through.
This is a little late for your nice jacket, but a lot of zipper damage comes from dirt getting into the teeth and then the zip grinds everything up. Outdoors shops sell a zipper lubricant to keep the dirt from sticking.
First thing that entered my mind while reading this. I have been saying this to my familiy for some time now. Never mind the price point; those unknown brands are really quite good. I still have my bag from Ali from 6+ years ago.
The trend of making articles out of sequences of pithy three-word soundbites rather than proper sentences is infuriating. It's super LLMy, yes, but it feels like even human-written content is like that these days.
Pure LLM, and it's a shame. The message and the content they are trying to pass are good and should be read by everybody out there. But god, the LLM writing, it feels like an Apple PR applied to a critique of capitalism.
I mean. If the cost per use of use is only slightly worse with these cheaper goods, you could just view that as a slight premium for the ability to switch styles every few years. It's also a smaller upfront investment, so taking account inflation it might not really be a big difference even considering that?
Clearly most people choose to buy cheaper stuff and producing higher quality, more expensive things makes you a niche company
Anecdotally this rings true with me. I have a 15 year old (at least) Samsonite backpack. It has zero signs of wear and has been on many trips, jammed under my feet in economy or on a dirty train floor. It was relatively expensive at the time at about $120.
It was looking a bit sad and dusty so I upgraded to a fancier looking Bellroy that cost twice as much. When it arrived I instantly knew it was going back. It felt cheap, it looked cheap, and the compartment layout did not feel at all utilitarian.
Private equity, and computers, optimized all the profits which drove profit quality down. We all have lower quality products to enrich a few finance individuals
Or more likely consumers vote with their dollar and cost matters over quality. PE is just a bad scape goat, there are obvious outliers but largely companies make products that consumers want.
Companies are incentivized to sell the worse, most expensive version of a product that they can convince someone to buy. Many companies sell with huge margins, meaning there is significant slack to allow quality to increase for the current price point - there just isn't enough competition to matter. Many manufacturing companies also have complex supply chains, making this problem worse as everyone along the chain tries to maximize their own margin.
It's not at all rare for a company to sell a quality product at a low margin for some years, building up a reputation, and then start decreasing quality to increase profitability once the quality branding is established.
Of course, optimal companies maximize for margin. Buyers have their own optimization mental model and maybe is surprising but a vast majority are thinking mostly on cost. Buyers and sellers do a dance and in the perfect long run you hit the optimal balance.
Consumers/buyers still play a large role in this, it is easier to put all the blame on PE or Big business.
This is the conventional thinking, but it ignores a huge factor - marketing. The major function of the gigantic advertising industry is to deceive consumers about the real qualities of a product, leaving price as the only only signal that they can detect through the noise, in most cases.
And advertising works in multiple ways to promote slop. Sometimes, it is directly by marketing bad products as cheap but high quality bargains. Sometimes it is, as I said, by using previous high quality products to sell low quality ones at the same prices. Sometimes it works by creating a huge pressure to consume more (such as the pressure on fashion trends), wiping out any care about durability (if it's considered poor taste to wear the same T-shirt two seasons in a row, why pwuld you buy a durable T-shirt?). Sometimes it works by mudding the waters, making consumers distrust any reviews that praise the quality of a product, leaving price and directly visible looks as the only signals that rational consumers can base their decision on.
So, overall, the blame for this state of affairs lies far more with the way the modern market was designed, than with consumers specifically.
It’s a dance between consumers and business. Sure some markets are heavily influenced by ads or simply what’s in fashion but ultimately it takes two to tango.
The issue here isn’t quality or market segmentation. The issue here is a de facto monopoly and the illusion of competition. Ok there’s also the issue of well known brand names now being entirely different companies and entirely different manufacturers.
I just bought an Eddie Bauer fleece. I own three, well four. The fourth is going straight back. It is garbage. Eddie Bauer is one of the brands that got bought and now rents out the label.
> The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.
I can't speak for everyone else but this isn't what I'm doing when I compare two backpacks. I'm comparing two different backpacks for their features and design. I don't really consider the brand name attached or care who owns it.
The enshittification of all things. It’s happening in the service industry, too. A lot of contractors like roofing and plumbing are being absorbed into private equity megacorps.
Just because I don't want them to go out of business. I bought a backpack goruck gr1 26l nearly 10 years ago in Feb of 2017.
I was a consulting and traveling heavily for many years and a digital nomad for others. I've carried that bag everywhere, it is good as new, I can hold a week of clothes in it, I recently got a vacuum pouch for winter thermals so that applies even for ski trips now. Its design lets me fill it up, zip it almost totally shut then compress it down to fit toiletries at the very top.
As much abuse as I've put it through it is still perfect. If moths or something don't get to it it may actually outlive me at this point I see so little wear.
Frankly I wish I could offer companies that make stuff that lasts forever a subscription fee or something to keep them using the same build quality, I mean cheap fast fashion/manf/etc seems to exert massive economic pressure to enshittify everything.
Capitalism ends up being owned by single companies across goods families. Private equity buys, strips, and bankrupts. Materials are engineered to fail near the end of their warranty. Companies lie about details hard to identify or prove. Companies use historical goodwill to loot the current landscape.
Well, guess what... since its all just plastic, the 2 posts that provide the downward force when turning get sheared off when you fucking use the thing.
We ended up going to an antique/flea market and found a all-metal juicer. It fucking works. And it likely will for the next 50 years.
Capitalism itself is the scam. It was sold to us of "innovation, innovation, innovation!" And its just "worsening, extraction, destruction".
I would argue not everything, just the things we remember. Those brands got popular, got sold and enshittified.
We remember these brands fondly (personally I had a JanSport bag all through elementary school) and that's why it sucks that they suck now but what we forget is now is there are 1000X more brands to choose from, some from megacorps trying to cut corners at every step. Some from small shops that genuinely want to make a great product.
The problem is visibility. Those good brands you have to go look for, you can't just go to WalMart or Target like in the early 2000's and expect to get a quality product. All the quality products now live on small websites scattered across the internet.
I remember even 26 years ago, stuff you bought was better crafted and could get parts to repair.
Now? Its non-replacable batteries. Ultrasonic welded casing (destroy-open only). Glues, glops of glues. Plastic/nylon gears instead of metal. Thinner/worse materials. Scams online everywhere (like the legitimate company XYZZY). Every online corporate presence whores it names out to fly-by-nights.
If I want to buy durable goods, its mostly not even for sale. Or I end up having to buy from Europe, or a boutique dealer in the States... that is if you can find them.
And even the boutique dealers like Tom Bihn sold out, and is now making their bags in some sweatshop shithole with lowering and lowering standards.
I am okay with these big American corporations getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded, only to exist as a brand in a private-equity backed holding company.
This is because other companies come along to fill the niche occupied by the established brands. Since they can't cheapen the products any more than the behemoths can, they need to innovate and evolve.
As for the backpack product, I wish the likes of Eastpak and whatnot would just die, since they have not innovated in a very long time.
I don't disagree in principle. But, as a consumer, this makes purchasing a bit more complicated. BITD, I could just buy an EastPak or JanSport and be fairly sure it was a good bag. Not much thought or analysis required. Today, I have to dig through 100s of brands I've never heard, with most of their ad budget spent on influencers who maybe can't be trusted. It's not a recipe for a healthy market.
If you feel like spending several hundred dollars on a backpack (big if, I know), I can personally vouch for https://www.seventeenthirtythree.com/. It's more or less a one man show, and the guy is very obsessive about sourcing materials & assembly. Advertising is all word-of-mouth as far as I know. I at times feel anxious about his long term prospects for the exact reasons mentioned in the OP article - I have a backpack from this shop that's about a decade old and has zero visible wear. I think, in order to make this business model work, it's pretty much impossible to scale.
The issue is it reduces information availability to customers: if a customer finds a brand that produces high quality products that they know from experience they can trust, that trust can't propagate forward in time because the incentive it to abuse it for short-term profit, which is a net negative overall because the customer needs to find the new high quality product on the market, something that costs time and comes with risks itself. It's a market inefficiency.
These brands earned the consumers' esteem because decades ago their products pushed the envelope in the respective markets. By having their product quality severely degraded, this also lowers the bar for the niche brands. They no longer need to push the envelop to get a competitive advantage. They just need to replicate what was already possible. I.e. no real innovation is happening any more.
Also, for every 2 niche brands that are trying to get it right, you will get 1 that is sketchy: send designs to the cheapest manufactury in China, hire a few influencers to post on instagram, and you're done. Basically capitalizing on the misperception that "niche == better".
So, we are left as consumers to have to dilligently research every purchase, just to get the quality that was the standard a few years back. There's nothing to enjoy here.
Not to mention that at the bottom, this is just another manifestation of "fast fashion" and "planned obsolescence".
That's idiotic. As a consumer I'd prefer the same company to keep making the same good products forever. I don't have time to research which of the new brands is just as good.
I have a pair of Mountainsmith Lumbar packs, both either over or pushing 30 years old (I have two because I misplaced and replaced my first, but later found it).
It's an excellent pack, cinches up tight, mount it front or back, strap it to something else, you can pack the straps and use it as a simple satchel, or use the shoulder strap.
Very high quality materials and zippers.
It's for I'd consider "urban travel", great as a carry-on. Paperback books, tickets, meds, passports, journal, snacks. They've been in "the wild" but I don't drag them on rocks or things like that.
They're over $100 today, so not cheap, but at a glance on the website, they look pretty much identical to what I have (and I know my second has slight differences in design from my first).
Were I in the market, I wouldn't hesitate to drag and drop one into a cart and get another. I've not used their larger packs, and over time they've expanded their lumbar line. But I would completely expect their other products to be similar quality as the ones that I have.
The essay show the timescale for "getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded" is 20 years or more, dating from the Eagle Creek purchase to the current "potentially up for sale."
That's a long time.
That means Theodores is also okay with the same decades-long process happening to "your power tools, your boots, your sunglasses, and about a dozen other product categories where a company you trusted quietly got absorbed by a corporation you've never heard of."
And after a new company X gains market share for its quality, we should expect the vulture capitalists to come swooping by again.
On the environmental side, every one of these packs is plastic waste after 18 months rather than 10 years.
It also means the methods people use to assess quality, despite omnipresent supercomputer phones and video-quality wireless networking, is ineffective, and manufacturers worsen their products knowing that. Why hasn't it gotten better?
So no, I don't see how Theodores comment about the chain of events should make anyone else also feel okay with it.
So it is often the case that today, you can get something for cheaper than you ever could in the past (albeit not at a great quality), and if you are willing to pay higher prices (but often about the same as you would have paid in the past), you can still get good or even better quality.
The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also gotten harder in many cases.
edit: found the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4C62HC1HSo
I argue you must evaluate against median purchasing power; it accounts for inflation and (lack of) wage increases.
Comments from your linked video:
> The problem with the “adjusted for inflation” argument is that it does not factor in buying power. The increase in wages has risen at out half the rate of inflation, so sure; $20 in 1975 would be $124 today, but the minimum wage in 1975 was $2.10 an hour as opposed to $7.25 today, giving you half the buying power you had 50 years ago.
> healthcare, housing, and education ... have increased by an insane margin leaving people with less money once that has been paid for (if at all).
> It's even worse when you consider that people are paying 45-55% of their monthly income on a house that cost 20x more than it would have in 1975. Your buying power is fucked from all sides.
Median earnings were $48,070 in 1975, measured in 2024 dollars, and $51,370 in 2024.
CPI ignores the reality people feel (and swaps in cheaper items that aren't necessarily on par with the original to keep the number lower), gold isn't really a 1:1 with purchasing power...there must be some sort of useful composite metric that merges multiple data points over time like rental/house prices, CPI market basket, dollar vs hard assets like gold to come up with a more accurate number.
And there's a perverse effect to that difficulty: even if you really want high quality, it can be so hard to be sure you're getting it that you give up and just by the cheapest thing, because at least then you know you're not getting taken advantage of (by buying crappy for premium prices).
A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners, or even start selling a slightly different product with the same model number.
Or you find a decent brand that makes good products, they get popular and grow and in come the MBAs with ideas on how to increase profits. Or they get bought by Private Equity and carry on only by brand momentum.
I think this is true, but for far less malicious reasons. Favourable reviews lead to popularity, which increases production pressures, which makes it harder to source quality materials and maintain a quality process while satisfying demand.
I have heard of several indie makers who, faced with sudden popularity, have to make the tough choice of speeding up the process at reduced quality (and thus dissatisfy customers) or be unable to fill orders (and thus dissatisfy customers). Everyone handles it differently but it's not pleasant for anyone.
It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available. It means that people who couldn't in the past afford something at all, are now more likely to have some path to getting it.
And even if you could afford the higher quality, you may not need it anyway. I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater.
But you're right, when you do need the higher quality, it can be tough to differentiate.
I've been burned too often with this thinking. All too often the cheap tool isn't just light duty so it breaks, it is not good enough to do the job at all. If the motor is too weak the tool won't do the job. If the wrench isn't precise enough it will round the bolt - this is worse than breaking: you can't fix the thing at all anymore with any quality of tool.
I don't need the best tools, but I need one that is enough quality to do the job, and the cheap tools generally fail.
The problem is that there is no way for consumers to know whether they are getting the good version or the shit version. This creates a structural incentive to not produce good versions since consumers will assume that the good version is just an over-priced shit version (because the expensive version is often just an over-priced shit version)
The result is that I, like others, spend too much on crappy products.
Same seems to be true in that video you linked. And when you buy an equivalently-priced product today, it's better than it was 50 years ago. I only skipped through the video though.
The problem I have is that there's no easy way to go to an ecommerce marketplace and pick "I want to spend more for higher quality". You have to do your own external research.
It's not just that it's difficult for a purchaser to determine the balance between price and quality on a given product, that difficulty is deliberate. It goes well beyond the Boots Theory of Economic Unfairness[1]. Vast fortunes are extracted from a public who would make different (and arguably better) purchasing choices if they were not deceived by those who profit from the deception. It's become normalized, which does not change that the process of wealth transfer via deception (fraud under color of law) is destructive to law, society, and pretty much any sort of real public good.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
Amazon has everything, but I don't want everything. I want someone to the comparisons for me so decide what is good enough. Reviews are worthless - even when not a scam (which many are), most people buy one and so they can only report it works they don't know how it compares to some other model that they didn't buy.
Not even isolated to ecommerce, really. This is everything now. The cars you shop for, half on the lot were made by a different OEM and are rebadged and sold by this one. Clothing is a fucking mess, both in terms of quality and sizing. Corporate consolidation is a ludicrously under-discussed issue and one of the bigger reasons everything just kind of sucks now.
It's one of the things that keeps me with Apple really, for all the warts, at least I know what I'm fucking buying.
Actually the speeeed guys, now. They left because Donut went to shit after getting purchased by Private Equity. Surprise, surprise.
It seems it's a revealed preference that most people really don't care that much about quality, or there would exist a host of companies like Consumer Reports to meet the demand. Complaining on social media about enshittification and evil corporations does not put skin in the game.
I myself constantly complain about the atrocious quality of most consumer software products, but I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to pay for a subscription to an independent testing report.
"Suppose buyers cannot distinguish between a high-quality car (a "peach") and a low-quality car (a "lemon"). Then they are only willing to pay a fixed price for a car that averages the value of a "peach" and "lemon" together (pavg). But sellers know whether they hold a peach or a lemon. Given the fixed price at which buyers will buy, sellers will sell only when they hold "lemons" (since plemon < pavg) and they will leave the market when they hold "peaches" (since ppeach > pavg). Eventually, as enough sellers of "peaches" leave the market, the average willingness-to-pay of buyers will decrease (since the average quality of cars on the market decreased), leading to even more sellers of high-quality cars to leave the market through a positive feedback loop. Thus the uninformed buyer's price creates an adverse selection problem that drives the high-quality cars from the market. Adverse selection is a market mechanism that can lead to a market collapse."
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
This is what so many don't understand, especially among the youth / reddit crowd. They expect their $25 jeans to be equivalent quality to the $25 or even $100 jeans from 60 years ago, for some reason. There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
There's also very few people who understand just how expensive things were back then, likely a result of having infinite cheap crap available. They don't know that in 1970, in today's money, a fridge was ~$4000, a burger and fries was $17, and a typical dress was $350. The only thing that has changed is that there are now options for cheap shitty things. You can still buy a very nice $4000 fridge if you want to.
But so many things did become cheaper and better: computers, availability and quality [1] of the music I can physically buy, the energy efficiency of modern fridges, the speed and safety of modern cars. Even my milk lasts impossibly long without spoiling.
If the replacement laptop battery I can buy today for ~$50 is leagues ahead of anything available in the 70s, then why aren't jeans and backpacks also miles ahead of what was available back then? No wonder the younger crowd is confused.
[1] Yes, CDs are objectively better than vinyl. Whether the audio mastering has kept up is a different topic.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mcdonalds-old-photos/ shows a menu at McDonalds from the early 1970s. A hamburger and fries was $0.63 or (assuming 1970 and adjusting for inflation) $5.36 now. A quarter pounder and fries was $1.27, or $10.81 now. Add $0.15 or $0.20 for a soda ($1.28 or $1.70).
That's a lot less than $17. Add $1.28
To double check, in 1983 a hamburger and fries was $1.82 - https://archive.org/details/ucladailybruin92losa/page/n542/m... .
That corresponds to $6.03 now.
What sort of hamburger places were you thinking of that charged 3x the price of McDonald's, and do they only charge $17 now?
Read More: https://www.tastingtable.com/1817109/big-mac-price-compariso...
One of the main points of the article is you cannot rely on the brand to determine quality. The marketers know how to exploit a reputation for quality and information asymmetries to push crappy goods, for instance:
> Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to.
And this:
> People who do get warranty replacements report receiving bags that are worse than the one they sent in. Thinner fabric. Cheaper hardware. You mailed back a 2016 JanSport and got a 2025 JanSport, and those are fundamentally different products.
When you Google, are you reading a rave review of a 2016 bag, when the 2026 model has been crapified? Is the bag you're looking at on Amazon the Walmart JanSport or the REI JanSport?
It pushes sponsors links and garbage top-ten lists with Amazon sponsored links and other seo optimized content and none of it can be trusted.
People commonly use a reddit tag to search for products, so companies started creating accounts to shill for their products there too, make it look organic and all.
You can't find the best of any product in two minutes on Google, not with any confidence.
On what criteria are you evaluating trustworthiness? Because if you are finding it on google, you are effectively judging on SEO and marketing spend.
Sure, there are some more-or-less trustworthy review outlets, but those too often go to shit when editorial priorities change from on high (i.e. newwire cutter is a pale shadow of its former self)
If you don't know a reviewer who is trustworthy, how can you find one? There's enormous amounts of slop (both human and generated -- this was already a problem before the last couple years), and when some channel has signal, it attracts more noise generators. The subreddit or review site is only useful until it's well known, and then there's increasing pressure on mods or owners to cash in.
The immediately obvious path here is paying for the reviews or recommendations directly, like Consumer Reports, but there are two major problems with that:
first, the amount consumers can afford to pay doesn't support the additional cost of actually buying all the units and exhaustively testing them, when CR and similar sites are competing against supplier-supported sites, and
second, if you care about specific features or aspects of a product, it's unlikely that the reviewer tested that specifically.
I wish I knew of a good solution. In reality, what's probably going to mitigate in the short term is having your agent scour all the available information and make recommendations, at comparatively great expense.
They can pick one of their backpack brands to keep (and eliminate/sell off the rest), or they can tack "VF" onto the front of each brand name, or something like that. A customer shouldn't have to dig into the fine print or do research to know whether two products are from the same manufacturer.
I doubt it, you didn't write about this! You prompted it and signed your name to it.
Good to know they hire that kind of incompetence at Palantir. It makes them less effective.
Pretty ironic on an article about quality products being replaced by cheaper ones.
If the author _were_ aware of specifics, they could have just written the article. A list of bullet points would be better.
It's almost as if they made the article Worse, on Purpose.
> Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.
> That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above
> None of this shows up on the shelf. The colors are right. The logos are crisp. The product photography is excellent. You discover what you actually bought three months in, when the stitching pulls apart at every stress point.
Its thing X. Its thing Y. Its thing Z. And now I'm going to tell you about thing Q in a longer sentence.
Some other common things (not present in this article) that are dressed up lists are short titled paragraphs, and sequences of sentences that go "blah blah blah: blah blah blah."
Very little opinion added anywhere, but the punchy writing style where everything is given an overdone monotone overimportance masks it a little.
Pure infodump is not terrible for some things but I'd much rather it be less heavily processed by the LLM, and be upfront about the fact that it's a dressed up infodump with an LLM involved.
It quite well can be (and I think it is) stylistic writing, hammering the message home by repetition of blows.
I think it's also the reuse of the same strategy repeatedly throughout the article. I think most human writers often feel put off if they use the same literary device too much.
Also from the guidelines: "HN is for conversation between humans." Granted, it's under comment guidelines, but I think it's acting in the spirit of the rule to point out AI output.
My rule is: If you can't be bothered writing an article, don't expect me to read it.
That backpack is currently at college with my son, who used it all through high school as well. It is by far the oldest and most durable daily-use object I’ve ever owned.
In 2004 I was very young and all my income came from summer jobs, so I got a backpack from Walmart. It was one of their nicer models, had a lot of features and looked pretty good. IIRC it cost $20. I had worked all summer to save for an MP3 player, and 2 months after getting that backpack I getting off a bus, when I realized there was already a hole in the bottom of the bag. My MP3 player (a creative zen micro) had slipped out of the bag, and someone had already picked up my MP3 player and walked away with it. Adjusted for inflation I spent over $500 on that MP3 player. Even as an avid backpacker, I have not spent that much on fairly nice packs.
In 2007 I splurged and paid $100 for a backpack from Deuter, and I also felt a lot of guilt as that was a huge amount of money for me at the time for something like a backpack. It's been nearly 20 years, it's not just that the backpack is still working, it still functions virtually like new. None of the seams are stretching, even though it's been through incredible overstuffing and abuse. All of the zippers are smooth as silk, and even the cushioning on the straps and airflow offsets on the back are still supple and supportive.
I'm 48 and not only do I still have it, it still looks like new, with no real care taken of it - wear it, put it away. The only issue I had was the liner in one arm pit started to unstitch a couple of inches, and a tailor took care of it in 20 minutes for $10 a decade ago.
Good lightweight backpacks are not that durable. I have 12 years old 1.5 pound osprey, still in use, but age really shows.
It's bait and switch on global, organised scale and it's almost impossible to fight except on an individual level.
The reason they were able to buy all those backpack brands is because each of those brands were not making much money running a backpack company selling quality at a reasonable price. The purchaser makes some money leeching value out of the brand reputation, but then that brand value falls because of the crappy product, and they sell the brand because they leeched all the value out of it.
This is only possible because you can’t make much money selling quality for a good price. Consumers will pick lower quality for the cheapest price every time.
This obsession with ever increasing revenue is a major source of our worse and worse consumer economy.
There is still plenty of competition in the backpack market if you just visit an outdoors store instead of walmart. That's a higher end market though, which is where most high quality small/medium businesses flourish.
It leads to enshitification due to short term thinking but in the short term seems like a good decision.
I think the problem today is that it's extremely difficult to tell when you're buying quality or a brand. If there's a 40$ and a 100$ backpack, often the 100$ version does not actually have meaningfully improved quality - just better marketing.
The same goes for tons of products - brands nowadays are something companies build while they're young and relentlessly smash into the ground as they age because the value you're destroying isn't obvious. Shareholders get good results, and objectively it's probably the correct financial decisions for the company - doesn't make it any less shit.
This comes up a lot with washing machines and I sympathize with parts of it, why not standardize control boards more or other components in the machine but one of the biggest issues is simply the cost of labor in places like the US is high enough that it’s hard to make it cost effective to repair.
At least if you buy the cheapest one you know you are at least saving money up front.
When the base labor charge is already 10% or more of the total replacement cost it becomes hard to justify the repair.
In particular, how durable do people think backpacks need to be? If you are going through them particularly quickly, maybe you are over loading compared to what they were designed for?
That was my first time ever dealing with such a high-end product and a lifetime warranty.
Just sharing because it was a good experience.
I love their camera straps and clips too, everything just works nicely together.
The design is a little dorky, especially now that every techbro in SF has one, but my god that thing has pockets and little details in all the right places. Been using mine for years and looks almost new.
One downside of high quality gear: Velomacchi (motorcycle bags/backpacks) seems to have gone out of business. Been using their stuff for almost 10 years. Feels indestructible, works great, but I’m never getting a replacement and I guess any warranty lasts only as long as the company …
And the 45L variant is the biggest thing you can use as a carry-on.
https://www.peakdesign.com/products/travel-backpack?Size=45L...
I've never spent $300 on a backpack before. It kinda stung. It's well-thought-out though. I've had it five years and it's been through a lot.
The FAQ says to hand-wash it which is annoying though. There's no way you're gently washing out the sort of grime that my human oil leaves on the straps from real use, like clinging to your bare shoulders during a long sweaty trip through Mexico.
So I feel a lil mischievous tossing the thing into the washing machine every year. Same way I feel using an alcohol wipe on my Macbook screen.
That said, I've only had it a year and it's clearly not new anymore. Paint wear on the rivets, for example. I expect it'll be in rough shape when it's accumulated as many miles as the travel bag it's partially replacing.
For backpacks, my Waterfield pack has held up fantastically across several years of regularly absolutely stuffing it with gear for my work travel.
If it isn’t, I know there’s a good chance they’re cheaping out on other places as well.
There definitely are BOM- and manufacturing reduction movements in these mature products but backpacks honestly don't seem nearly as bad as (eg) walking boots.
The Worse On Purpose article on power tools follows a similar tack. Offshore manufacturing, corporate consolidation and cheaper processes don't actually make the overall picture worse when we have affordable tools packing modern lithium batteries and brushless neodymium motors.
The sale of the high quality brand allows the original entrepreneurs to exit their business to someone that thinks they can run it more efficiently. The decline in quality allows for innovative upstarts to try new things.
But the lightweight hiking guru made ultralight backpacks, with thin material and very minimal extras. It was designed to be light by a guy who could sew, so he was happy to fix it as needed on the trail. To him that was a feature not a bug. Meanwhile the company that bought the brand and design necessarily made it more robust, feature-full, and twice as heavy. They were pretty much forced to by the number of returns they were getting.
So now I treasure my old backpack that worseonpurpose would probably deplore, and keep it repaired so that I don't have to make another or go buy one that worseonpurpose would probably like better.
Your average backpack consumer is a different breed. Cosmetic designs, logos, colors, and generic pockets are key marketing traits of consumer backpacks and small rips or tears are seen as reasons to replace the backpack.
Windows 11 comes to mind as an example of something actually being made worse on purpose. Making it impossible to associate the original notepad.exe with text files is certainly not linked with business outcomes in any direct way. This seems to be purely about antagonizing the user base as much as possible. The only theory I can arrive at is that there is a secret cortisol harvesting scheme that results in better financial outcomes for Microsoft.
It helps to differentiate these cases. I don't like capitalism taken to the extreme, but the other thing is significantly worse. Intent makes all the difference. Engineered to suck vs sucks because it wasn't engineered are two completely different levels of evil.
If it is, it isn’t by much. The difference between $200 paid now versus 7 times $35 = $245 over a period of ten years is about 5 years of interest over $200. At 4% interest, that’s about $40.
What is really irritating is that sometimes we see the same thing within a single brand (we have a garbage entry-level item and a top tier item which is good).
https://www.tombihn.com/blogs/main/fall-2025-factory-update-...
- here is an idea for the next post: AAA gaming got worse on purpose. Dont forget to mention anti consumer practices by EA and Ubisoft when you are at it
But I had a Swiss Gear backpack that was fantastic, and it lasted me nearly a decade. It was originally purchased at a Target. It was versatile and I could take it anywhere. It had little grommets to pass-through earphone cords and such. It survived even through several washes in a washing machine.
Then at a thrift store, I found a Swiss Gear suitcase. It has wheels and a telescoping handle. It expands very nicely. I have it stored away and still haven't found occasion to use it.
I also picked up a Swiss Gear laptop bag with a "messenger bag" shoulder strap. These I found at Office Depot. It's really nice. It has a velcro fastener to secure the laptop itself. It has mesh pockets for all kinds of accessories. If I don't put in a laptop, it can carry documents, folders, or binders. It's been very durable.
Minus some fraying at the base of the front pouch, it's as good as new. I've been very happy with it.
It does seem like Swiss Gear are now directly represented in Canada (rather than being represented by a third party, like they were a decade ago), and their backpacks now have a five-year warranty. But I guess my point is: if you don't live in the US, make sure that the things that a brand is famous for hold true in your region, too.
https://www.savotta.fi/collections/backpacks
They're expensive, but last a lifetime or more.
The $25 bag compared to the $200 bag, has $175 worth of free cash flow for other (potentially unexpected) purchases, can be replaced when trends/use case changes (or it gets dirty, or lost...), the capital could be invested in the market to generate ~$1 a month of passive income, and as far as the human can tell it's roughly the same. Basically all the thoughts of a JIT marketplace but on the personal scale...
I've been using an Ikea Varldens for the past 6-8 years. Very efficient for my use case (2 work laptops, groceries, travel luggage, documents and earbud case, tools). It has a couple of nice small compartments and a single large one so it's very light for the size and material. Until now the only thing that's annoyed me was the long straps when riding a motorcycle, so I ran cable ties through the loops to stop them from slapping my hands and sides. It's seen quite a bit of abuse and it's still intact. It's even practically waterproof.
I use it every week, it shows no signs of degradation over approximately a decade. Huge beefy zippers, tons of pockets and organization for those who are into that.
I paid like $200, but seems like they're cheaper now. Hopefully not because of the reasons in the article. At the time, I believe they were a small company from the state my layover was in--maybe Colorado.
What changed to enable and popularized these bad business practices?
It's been through sand, mud, dust and just shakes the abuse off like nothing.
I do wish half the time though that I'd bought a 40L GR2 though.
But I main got it because I’m a relatively large guy with broad shoulders and other bags pinched my neck. I was given a Timbuk2 pack from work that I otherwise liked, but the straps were too close together. I could either wear it high on my back and have them mash my neck all day, or low on my back wear it’s much harder to carry weight.
(Side note to everyone: wear your backpack as high as possible when it’s even moderately loaded. When I see someone on BART with a huge backpack slung down by their hips, my back aches sympathetically. You want the heaviest load up between your shoulders.)
Edit: I also keep glancing at the 40L GR2, but it's just FOMO. Great bags, but huge. I don't want to schlep something that size to the office, and definitely not on some of the trails we hike.
Their schoolbags were pretty great in the 2000s, too. Withstood some serious abuse, though their zippers were notably on the decline. But that was covered by warranty, so it was fine. By the mid 2010's, they were in full decline, and that's about when I stopped recommending their stuff.
I used to sell outdoor equipment. If a brand cheaps out on zippers, I wouldn't trust it.
I really like my Patagonia Black hole mini MLC. Awesome access. Fits under an airplane seat. Generous laptop padding. Excellent zippers. Water bottle pocket. Lovely warranty (Patagonia store nearby often gives new product when I try to get product repaired).
3 of 4 zippers are broken after few years of usage.
Do you know a better zipper?
Clearly most people choose to buy cheaper stuff and producing higher quality, more expensive things makes you a niche company
It was looking a bit sad and dusty so I upgraded to a fancier looking Bellroy that cost twice as much. When it arrived I instantly knew it was going back. It felt cheap, it looked cheap, and the compartment layout did not feel at all utilitarian.
It's not at all rare for a company to sell a quality product at a low margin for some years, building up a reputation, and then start decreasing quality to increase profitability once the quality branding is established.
Consumers/buyers still play a large role in this, it is easier to put all the blame on PE or Big business.
And advertising works in multiple ways to promote slop. Sometimes, it is directly by marketing bad products as cheap but high quality bargains. Sometimes it is, as I said, by using previous high quality products to sell low quality ones at the same prices. Sometimes it works by creating a huge pressure to consume more (such as the pressure on fashion trends), wiping out any care about durability (if it's considered poor taste to wear the same T-shirt two seasons in a row, why pwuld you buy a durable T-shirt?). Sometimes it works by mudding the waters, making consumers distrust any reviews that praise the quality of a product, leaving price and directly visible looks as the only signals that rational consumers can base their decision on.
So, overall, the blame for this state of affairs lies far more with the way the modern market was designed, than with consumers specifically.
It’s a dance between consumers and business. Sure some markets are heavily influenced by ads or simply what’s in fashion but ultimately it takes two to tango.
PE at work.
I just bought an Eddie Bauer fleece. I own three, well four. The fourth is going straight back. It is garbage. Eddie Bauer is one of the brands that got bought and now rents out the label.
Blue Bell ice cream and Jan-sport backpacks owned by the same company seems crazy to me.
I can't speak for everyone else but this isn't what I'm doing when I compare two backpacks. I'm comparing two different backpacks for their features and design. I don't really consider the brand name attached or care who owns it.
I was a consulting and traveling heavily for many years and a digital nomad for others. I've carried that bag everywhere, it is good as new, I can hold a week of clothes in it, I recently got a vacuum pouch for winter thermals so that applies even for ski trips now. Its design lets me fill it up, zip it almost totally shut then compress it down to fit toiletries at the very top.
As much abuse as I've put it through it is still perfect. If moths or something don't get to it it may actually outlive me at this point I see so little wear.
Frankly I wish I could offer companies that make stuff that lasts forever a subscription fee or something to keep them using the same build quality, I mean cheap fast fashion/manf/etc seems to exert massive economic pressure to enshittify everything.
Capitalism ends up being owned by single companies across goods families. Private equity buys, strips, and bankrupts. Materials are engineered to fail near the end of their warranty. Companies lie about details hard to identify or prove. Companies use historical goodwill to loot the current landscape.
Take for example, a citrus squeezer. We needed what I thought was a decent juicer. https://us.josephjoseph.com/products/helix-citrus-juicer-yel...
Well, guess what... since its all just plastic, the 2 posts that provide the downward force when turning get sheared off when you fucking use the thing.
We ended up going to an antique/flea market and found a all-metal juicer. It fucking works. And it likely will for the next 50 years.
Capitalism itself is the scam. It was sold to us of "innovation, innovation, innovation!" And its just "worsening, extraction, destruction".
I would argue not everything, just the things we remember. Those brands got popular, got sold and enshittified.
We remember these brands fondly (personally I had a JanSport bag all through elementary school) and that's why it sucks that they suck now but what we forget is now is there are 1000X more brands to choose from, some from megacorps trying to cut corners at every step. Some from small shops that genuinely want to make a great product.
The problem is visibility. Those good brands you have to go look for, you can't just go to WalMart or Target like in the early 2000's and expect to get a quality product. All the quality products now live on small websites scattered across the internet.
I remember even 26 years ago, stuff you bought was better crafted and could get parts to repair.
Now? Its non-replacable batteries. Ultrasonic welded casing (destroy-open only). Glues, glops of glues. Plastic/nylon gears instead of metal. Thinner/worse materials. Scams online everywhere (like the legitimate company XYZZY). Every online corporate presence whores it names out to fly-by-nights.
If I want to buy durable goods, its mostly not even for sale. Or I end up having to buy from Europe, or a boutique dealer in the States... that is if you can find them.
And even the boutique dealers like Tom Bihn sold out, and is now making their bags in some sweatshop shithole with lowering and lowering standards.
This is because other companies come along to fill the niche occupied by the established brands. Since they can't cheapen the products any more than the behemoths can, they need to innovate and evolve.
As for the backpack product, I wish the likes of Eastpak and whatnot would just die, since they have not innovated in a very long time.
These brands earned the consumers' esteem because decades ago their products pushed the envelope in the respective markets. By having their product quality severely degraded, this also lowers the bar for the niche brands. They no longer need to push the envelop to get a competitive advantage. They just need to replicate what was already possible. I.e. no real innovation is happening any more.
Also, for every 2 niche brands that are trying to get it right, you will get 1 that is sketchy: send designs to the cheapest manufactury in China, hire a few influencers to post on instagram, and you're done. Basically capitalizing on the misperception that "niche == better".
So, we are left as consumers to have to dilligently research every purchase, just to get the quality that was the standard a few years back. There's nothing to enjoy here.
Not to mention that at the bottom, this is just another manifestation of "fast fashion" and "planned obsolescence".
It's an excellent pack, cinches up tight, mount it front or back, strap it to something else, you can pack the straps and use it as a simple satchel, or use the shoulder strap.
Very high quality materials and zippers.
It's for I'd consider "urban travel", great as a carry-on. Paperback books, tickets, meds, passports, journal, snacks. They've been in "the wild" but I don't drag them on rocks or things like that.
They're over $100 today, so not cheap, but at a glance on the website, they look pretty much identical to what I have (and I know my second has slight differences in design from my first).
Were I in the market, I wouldn't hesitate to drag and drop one into a cart and get another. I've not used their larger packs, and over time they've expanded their lumbar line. But I would completely expect their other products to be similar quality as the ones that I have.
The essay show the timescale for "getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded" is 20 years or more, dating from the Eagle Creek purchase to the current "potentially up for sale."
That's a long time.
That means Theodores is also okay with the same decades-long process happening to "your power tools, your boots, your sunglasses, and about a dozen other product categories where a company you trusted quietly got absorbed by a corporation you've never heard of."
And after a new company X gains market share for its quality, we should expect the vulture capitalists to come swooping by again.
On the environmental side, every one of these packs is plastic waste after 18 months rather than 10 years.
It also means the methods people use to assess quality, despite omnipresent supercomputer phones and video-quality wireless networking, is ineffective, and manufacturers worsen their products knowing that. Why hasn't it gotten better?
So no, I don't see how Theodores comment about the chain of events should make anyone else also feel okay with it.