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

[FoxEye]

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.

 

[FoxEye]

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.

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.

Carp

My threads are always carp, thank you for noticing

Think you can do batter?

 

[FoxEye]

Hasn't this always been the case, there are always levels of quality.

The phrase "buy cheap buy twice" has been around donkeys years.

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

 

[FoxEye]

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.

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 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.

 

[FoxEye]

Yeah it is messed up but life is too short and i dont earn enough to aspire to the Gucci Toaster.

I'll confess I didn't really have toasters (artisan or otherwise) in mind when I made the thread

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

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.

 

[FoxEye]

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.

 

[FoxEye]

I agree to an extent however, as has been pointed out, there's nothing stopping you buying better made items.

Well take my leather work glove example. I'm looking for better ones all the time. I'd be over the moon to find some really good quality ones.

There don't seem to be any.

You can spend £1000 on a pair of Gucci leather driving gloves, but in work gloves there only seems to be one or two designs that all the manufacturers use. They all retail for between £8 and £20 and last about a couple weeks each. That I can see - there is nothing else.

 

[FoxEye]

Don’t have that problem, but cheap, buy twice.

Keep your experiences at the docks out of this

 

[FoxEye]

perhaps leather is the wrong material for the job you want to do in this instance?

The alternative is the nitrile stuff which doesn't last any longer. And is less env friendly. The things you can buy with various safety ratings on them. They degrade pretty fast tho and are designed to be bought in bulk/replaced frequently. Get them wet or use them outdoors and they start disintegrating fast.

Wrt the leather gloves, it's purely the cost-cutting and craftsmanship that is the problem.

I probably need to find a specialist/niche outlet that isn't indexed by Google. People selling quality, hard-wearing leather gloves must exist, somewhere.

 

[FoxEye]

What kind of jobs? How about those Blacksmiths uses?

Just "light" gardening, which is why it irks so much that they fall apart after a couple weeks If I was a rigger or a blacksmith they'd get a real punishing!

There are "rose gauntlets" which are fairly robust but also huge (they go all the way up your arms). Just need a normal sized pair of gloves that seal at the wrist (dirt getting inside them makes them useless), solid construction (gunn cut with winged/keystone thumb), decent quality leather (not suede/split leather)..

Now, if you search for "gardening gloves" instead of "work gloves", you find that most of them are designed as fashion accessories.. I think the "gardener" market is aimed at people who potter around taking flower cuttings, rather than designed for digging with a pickaxe (my kind of "gardening" )

 

[FoxEye]

You can go to any leather maker to make your a pair of gloves? I doubt you will be the first. It will be goos quality leather but it will cost you.

Yeah I might end up doing this. In theory leather should be the best bet; it's normally the stitching on the cheap stuff that lets the whole thing down. The leather tends to still be intact, whilst the stitching unravels if you look at it funny.

Actually, leather working seems like it could be a cute little hobby. Not sure of the costs, but I can imagine worse things to do. Also I love the smell of goats, but that's another thread.

 

[FoxEye]

People want to replace things with the new fashionable item long before they ever stop working anyway. Buying new TVs when the old one works perfectly well, it just isn’t 65” like the neighbours one. I buy clothes at primark for pennies and wear them for years and years until they wear out. Others would buy from primark, wear once or twice and throw away and buy new again. They probably don’t save any money buying this way but they definitely don’t want to buy the single more expensive item that will last them years because they WANT to change their wardrobe/decor/whatever every few days/weeks/months.

It's the dream people are sold.

Look at the example set by the royals.. and celebrities..

Does the queen wear her clothes more than once?
The queen has worn some of the same dresses more than once, but when she does it’s always planned. Like when she wore the same detailed pastel blue coat and matching dress during a visit to Malta at the Eden Foundation in Zetjun as well as Ladies Day At Royal Ascot in 2008.

The Telegraph noted that careful measures are in place to make sure Her Majesty doesn’t repeat outfits. Her dressing actually team logs each piece she wears and on what day to avoid repetition.

Wearing the same clothes more than once is considered.. common! That's the dream we're sold by 21st century society.

Of course it's crap but people just do what their told, following the example set by celebrity, royalty.. the people they look to as their role models.

e: Also have a nice DM link (GD loves them)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/...ren-t-pictured-outfit-twice-social-media.html

"Women desperate not to be tagged wearing the same outfit more than once on social media."

Five years on, I expect a lot of men now behave the same way.

 

[FoxEye]

It's one of the reasons I've stopped using Amazon so much. You search for something and are hit with pages and pages of utter **** for £5 and then occasionally find something for £200. The middle ground seems to have gone, where the £75 option?!

Yeah absolutely.

Also Google isn't any better/more helpful.

The first few pages are all Amazon/Redbrain/Idealo, and the Redbrain/Idealo links just send you back to Amazon...

The next few pages are all for US shops that either don't ship to the UK or would cost £50 to ship (on a pair of gloves, yeah, nope..)

And that's searching on Google.co.UK. Make it return UK results only and ALL you get is Amazon..

And then you're right back to the cheap carp.

Maybe I need to stop using Google and find some local tradesman index or something.

 

[FoxEye]

It happened because the manufacturing industry bosses saw £ signs in their eyes when they could get cheaper items made in India and China instead of paying the workers here a decent wage.

Those countries must be laughing their asses off (at us).

They've witnessed the wholesale destruction of manufacturing around the western world, and now we no longer have the skills (or the will) to take it back. Our leaders and millionaires/billionaires see no benefit in making anything in this country, and continue to support/encourage the decline in manufacturing.

China knows it is almost the only place with the infrastructure, skills, and determination to build stuff anymore. And even when this is not the case, the raw materials and parts are all coming from China..

We can't even build a railway line anymore - there was talk of bringing China in to build HS2 because we can't get our **** together. How the mighty have fallen, eh? Purely in order to make the 5% richer. They would dismantle the entire country if it brought them 10% better margins. Sell it all to China.

 

[FoxEye]

The UK is still the world's 9th largest manufacturer, so it's simply not true that it's irrelevant in the west. The US is 2nd, Germany 4th, Italy 7th and France 8th.

You only have to look around the country to see how much we've lost (in the last couple hundred years). Look at all the abandoned plants, factories, warehouses, mills..

And as said, when we do make/assemble stuff it's mostly made with Chinese raw materials or Chinese parts.

And every year British businesses are saying they can't compete with cheaper imports. Whether that's British steel, British wool, British veg, British farmed meat, yadda, yadda, you name it. It's cheaper to import it than produce it here. There's always stories every single year about it, with x,y,z firm going bust - or selling up to overseas investors (like China, ho ho ho).

Denying that it happens is pointless.

 

[FoxEye]

Yes, but if you're a consumer who needs a washing machine and can only afford one for £200, you're effectively stopping them from being able to purhcase one.

The current law is around 'fit for purpose' and gives leeway. Yes it means there's a grey area and it's less clearcut, but also means that you have a right to expect something expensive to last you for a proportionate amount of time. It isn't really possible to say if it costs 'x' it should last 'y' and give figures for x and y in law, but the concept is there in law.

Are you assuming that's it's not possible to build a £200 washing machine that lasts 10 years? I would question that, tbh.

But as others have said, spending £400 on a washing machine that lasts 10 years is better than buying a £200 washing machine every 2 years..

And, frankly, we have to look at the environmental cost and start weighing that more heavily than simple convenience or ultra-affordability.

After all where do you draw the line? What about consumers that can only afford a £150 washing machine? What about consumers that can only afford a £120 washing machine.. What about..

If we don't start seriously trying to reverse our disposable, throw-away culture we will be the losers in the long run. It's not sustainable and just about everybody can see that now.

Sod "I want cheap", let's start seeing the bigger picture, and what it costs the planet to buy (and throw away) endless quantities of cheap, disposable carp.

(e: In case anybody is wondering.. I've had the same phone since 2012, the same TV since 2012, mostly the same computer since 2012.. I don't go on holiday (since about 2009?), and I try incredibly hard to re-use everything and throw nothing away.

I genuinely feel depressed when I look at the people rushing out to buy new this, new that, for the sake of it.. because they can, because that's what they earn the big bucks for, to have a new sofa every year, new this, new that, and chuck the old stuff away..

Not saying I'm a martyr or anything, it's just consumerism really does not impress me much)

 

[FoxEye]

@Bear (and others)

I don't think this is a purely engineering problem. It's a multi-faceted problem arising from how we've built our societies and economies.

The argument against what we currently have is that it's not sustainable, and it's maximally damaging to the environment.

We throw away vast amounts of materials which are perfectly fine, for the sake of one small failed component.

That means the energy cost of manufacture is largely wasted, as is the (environmental) cost of gathering and refining the components (ie metals, esp rare Earth metals, and plastics, etc).

We view this as normal. We dispose of vast amounts of 90% working items, and we often dispose of them incredibly poorly. Recycling rates in this country are comically bad, and the numbers are grossly fudged by dumping it all in places like Thailand anyhow.

To sum this all up: I don't think it's a problem of pure engineering. It's a problem of western culture. Often this can include greed, both from consumers and producers. The greed of wanting to have too much for too cheap; the greed of putting profits above all ese.

Does anyone here think the status quo is sustainable or the only economically feasible way of producing goods? That there are no alternatives, or that the current system is fine and will not result in major ecological damage? Or that the current status quo can go on indefinitely for much longer? I know people talk a lot about mining asteroids and such but for the sake of this discussion I think that is off topic. We'll run out of oil at some point to (cheaply) create new plastics at least.

And all the while the cost (energy, environmental damage) of extracting new materials is taking a fairly heavy toll. And the haphazard way we dispose of things that are "old" is perhaps an even bigger concern than the cost of making new stuff.

e: Perhaps the reason that the £200 washing machine is "profitable", is that the manufacturer doesn't have to bear any of the cost of recycling or disposing of the damn thing, when a $0.20 component fails and renders the whole thing useless.