Anyone else fed up of mass-produced, disposable carp?

FoxEye

FoxEye

FoxEye

Caporegime
Joined
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Location
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Modern life: "You can have a lot of stuff, as much stuff as you want.*"

"*Most of it will be cheap and nasty, barely fit for purpose and will fall apart within a few months."

I don't know about you, but I'd rather have less stuff - better quality, made to last. I'd also end up throwing less stuff away as it breaks quickly and nobody can repair it anyhow.

The trouble is we seem to have lost the skills, lost the artisan workforce, lost all the people who made small numbers of high quality items (heck I'd take medium quality tbh!).

Instead we have slave-labour force (or machines) making the cheapest, least durable, most replaceable/throw-away tat human beings could conceive of and create for next to nothing.

And this has flooded the marketplace across the board, to the point where if you want anything better you need to pay ridiculous sums to have something custom-made by the only person in the UK who offers the service anymore.

Why? Why have we ended up here?

Does nobody want well-made any more? Does everybody want to replace their stuff on a (very) regular basis? Does everybody want cheap and nasty?

From a set of spanners to a pair of leather work gloves, all I see is an endless stream of mass-produced garbage (readily) available to buy.

It really saddens me :( We've made so much scientific advancement, and we appear to have used this knowledge to simply lower the quality of the stuff we produce, so everybody can have everything, but most of it will be trash-tier.
 
[FnG]magnolia said:
It's possible to have very well made stuff and also have, and produce, lots of them. Scarcity of product is mostly due to not being able to afford it from a consumer angle.
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But you also can quite easily end up spending more replacing the crap stuff (frequently), than you would if you had spent more on (or could find for sale) a better-made product.

You spread the cost around more, but you could well end up spending more in total.

I guess actually that's a plus in the eyes of the manufacturers. Why make a great product when you can potentially earn more making a shoddy one that people have to replace often.

I just find it immensely frustrating how much utter garbage is on the market. Stuff that we all know will fall apart after a couple uses.

ezekial said:
Carp
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My threads are always carp, thank you for noticing ;)

Think you can do batter?
 
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chroniclard said:
Hasn't this always been the case, there are always levels of quality.

The phrase "buy cheap buy twice" has been around donkeys years.
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Most of my frustration is not being able to find anything but the trash-tier for sale.

Take most of (all?) the stuff on Amazon, for instance. Yes it's not the only place to look for things, and neither is Google.

I guess finding the good stuff is a skill in itself. Probably requires some of that awful "networking" I try hard to avoid :p
 
FoxEye said:
Most of my frustration is not being able to find anything but the trash-tier for sale.

Take most of (all?) the stuff on Amazon, for instance. Yes it's not the only place to look for things, and neither is Google.

I guess finding the good stuff is a skill in itself. Probably requires some of that awful "networking" I try hard to avoid :p
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Steps to buy a Toaster.
1. Start googling Toasters.
2. Shortlist your chosen Toasters.
3. Carefully spend 4 hours finding reviews of shortlisted Toasters.
4. Refine shortlisted list to chosen Toaster.
5. Spend 4 hours finding the cheapest possible price for Toaster.
6. Look for Toaster on cashback places.
7. Purchase Toaster.
8. Spend the 2 days waiting for delivery regretting picking that Toaster as you saw one bad review on some obscure review site.
9. Toaster delivered, toast is provided to family, bask in glory of saving £2.45 and having a highly rated Toaster.
10. Consider if spending 15 hours purchasing a toaster was worth the cost.
 
chroniclard said:
Steps to buy a Toaster.
1. Start googling Toasters.
2. Shortlist your chosen Toasters.
3. Carefully spend 4 hours finding reviews of shortlisted Toasters.
4. Refine shortlisted list to chosen Toaster.
5. Spend 4 hours finding the cheapest possible price for Toaster.
6. Look for Toaster on cashback places.
7. Purchase Toaster.
8. Spend the 2 days waiting for delivery regretting picking that Toaster as you saw one bad review on some obscure review site.
9. Toaster delivered, toast is provided to family, bask in glory of saving £2.45 and having a highly rated Toaster.
10. Consider if spending 15 hours purchasing a toaster was worth the cost.
Click to expand...


£100 might seem like a lot to spend on a toaster, but it's nothing compared to the cost of a new Ferrari.
 
chroniclard said:
Steps to buy a Toaster.
1. Start googling Toasters.
2. Shortlist your chosen Toasters.
3. Carefully spend 4 hours finding reviews of shortlisted Toasters.
4. Refine shortlisted list to chosen Toaster.
5. Spend 4 hours finding the cheapest possible price for Toaster.
6. Look for Toaster on cashback places.
7. Purchase Toaster.
8. Spend the 2 days waiting for delivery regretting picking that Toaster as you saw one bad review on some obscure review site.
9. Toaster delivered, toast is provided to family, bask in glory of saving £2.45 and having a highly rated Toaster.
10. Consider if spending 15 hours purchasing a toaster was worth the cost.
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Thanks for that.

By way of a serious reply, tho..

A cheap toaster from (eg) ASDA is quite likely to fail in some utterly ridiculous manner within a few months. Say, for example, the buttons stop working. The buttons being fairly non-essential, and most of us wouldn't really mind at all if the "cancel" or "reheat" button stopped working tomorrow. But again it's trash-tier goods making its inevitable way into our lives. And we accept it - we really don't expect any better, do we? We expect toasters to be cheap and we expect them to be trash-tier.

We expect that in 6 months time we'll be sending our broken toaster to land-fill and buying another trash-tier toaster from ASDA again.

Now I'm not going to start going on about "artisan toaster makers", because that's too far even for me :p And I know why the toaster fails. It fails because it means cheaper design and manufacturing costs and more frequent toaster sales. It's still wrong tho, on a fundamental, environmental, and philosophical levels. Here we are, capable of great works, and we make trash-tier goods that break as often as possible, for profit.
 
I agree and disagree. Lets go down the toaster analogy. THe Artisan toaster will only be as good as the artisan resistor and artisan capacitor on the artisan circuitboard. Its simply not worth it and stagnates design and proggression.

Im immoral but id rather have to buy 10 cheap toasters in my life than 1 for 10x the coast that might last as long as 10 cheap toasters.

Yeah it is messed up but life is too short and i dont earn enough to aspire to the Gucci Toaster.
 
What people want and they'll pay for are very different things. I agree with the sentiment but for many products now they are only needed while either in fashion or until the next model comes out, then they are binned and the next latest shiny thing is consumed by the masses.

Loads of supposedly British made product companies will just do the design work here and then outsource the manufacturing. They'll then put a load of blurb in the product description saying how British it is but the reality is it's made in the same factory as all the cheap tat and you'll probably find it's been ripped off by a chinese brand at a fraction of the cost.


Companies are increasingly concerned of IP theft in China and now they can directly access the UK market its seen more a threat but if they made it here the costs would skyrocket.
Automation may allow some of these products to be made here at an acceptable cost but wont result in new jobs.

There are some successes though, there is made in the uk podcast that is quite interesting.
 
Efour said:
Yeah it is messed up but life is too short and i dont earn enough to aspire to the Gucci Toaster.
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I'll confess I didn't really have toasters (artisan or otherwise) in mind when I made the thread :p

Take something like a leather work glove, as an alternative example, and one I'm more familiar with :p

Mostly what you'll find listed for sale (Google/Amazon) is cheap, thin leather, with really poor stitching, and it will break apart with only a few weeks of moderate use.

I've spent days (on-and-off) trawling Google for something half-decent. Gunn cut, pigskin or goat leather, pull-tab or knitted wrist, abrasion resistant. I've bought several pairs of these things and can testify first hand how most of them are absolute carp. My last pair fell apart within days. Days! And they were £20.

The trouble is, *all* the work gloves seem to be made at the same place and just stamped with whatever brand you fancy. De Walt, Kinco, Briars, blah blah... they're all the same awful design, the same low-quality stitching, the same thin-ass leather. Oh and they mostly all cost the same too. And so you will probably wear them out in weeks if not days.

I will have to try finding a local leather merchant. Or making my own.
 
I partly agree. Buy cheap, buy twice etc.

Generally I will buy something cheap the first time so that I can check whether I want one of those products. Then when it needs replacing I know it will add value to my life so will buy a much higher quality one.

e.g. cheap hoar the first time. Expensive higher grade hoar the next time :D
 
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While it's not a direct fit, this thread reminds me of the Sam Vimes "boots" theory of economic injustice:

At the time of Men at Arms, Samuel Vimes earned thirty-eight dollars a month as a Captain of the Watch, plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots, the sort that would last years and years, cost fifty dollars. This was beyond his pocket and the most he could hope for was an affordable pair of boots costing ten dollars, which might with luck last a year or so before he would need to resort to makeshift cardboard insoles so as to prolong the moment of shelling out another ten dollars.

Therefore over a period of ten years, he might have paid out a hundred dollars on boots, twice as much as the man who could afford fifty dollars up front ten years before. And he would still have wet feet.

Without any special rancour, Vimes stretched this theory to explain why Sybil Ramkin lived twice as comfortably as he did by spending about half as much every month.
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I agree it rankles when you're actually quite prepared to pay for the quality item instead, but it doesn't exist for you to purchase.
 
The really annoying moments though are when you fork out for the better product - but then find it isn't the peak product you had hoped for.

A personal example which comes to mind is a camping stove we bought. Paid extra to get one which was clearly far better made, had it's own stand, could toast as well.

All well and good, and it was clearly much better produced. But the gas rings were so unadjustable that it was an absolute pain to cook anything on, and we'd have been better off with the basic version that cost a third as much.
 
Maybe another factor is that, unlike the little local tradesmen of yore, modern factor workers aren't putting their reputation on the line.

Who cares if you're making a *** product? You're (probably) in Bangladesh making something for a faceless multi-nat. You're not John the bootmaker, who lives and dies on his reputation for good boots.
 
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