When my father was in college (in the late 50’s) he would occasionally drive the roughly 400 miles back to his home. He says that he considered it a good trip if he only had to change one tire. Today I consider it a disaster if I have to change a flat tire before the tread wears out.
Some things are better, some things are worse. I’ve seen no evidence that things are overall worse today.
Quality assurance wasn’t even introduced into industry until the 80s, as I understand it. The advantage that eras bygone had was that the engineering was worse. Tolerances were much wider and there was a lot of needless overbuilding. They didn’t have modern computers to design and simulate hardware. To get something that worked most of the time, after coming out of a factory with low tolerances and a lot of hand-construction, they had to make it more durable than necessary. Even then, probably a good percentage of any production run would die immediately. But for every one that immediately died, you’d also have one that would just keep on chugging for 50 years – far longer than necessary. Since people trash the things that break quickly, an evolutionary process would create the situation that nearly everything in their kitchen is stuff that’s far more durable than it should be for the price.
These days, if you get two identical products, created in the same factory, and put them to the same amount of use, you’re probably going to get nearly the same useful life. It’s engineered to specific durability and manufactured to specific tolerances which let them target a specific usability without any need to waste material. You won’t have any duds, but you won’t have any superstars either.
Preach it. I was the third and last kid in my family. Lots of toys, most of them broken, missing pieces, etc. It was a great day when my older cousin got too fat for me to wear his hand-me-down clothes…though the real Japanese silk PJs were pretty cool.
Really? I have original Tom Swift book from 1910 - 1920 which are in excellent shape, and which weren’t exactly kept in a temperature controlled room. I have an American rip off of a Jules Verne book from the 1870s which is also in great shape, and some Mr. Dooley books from the turn of the last century which are fine. All of these were mass market books and not especially expensive.
Well, I can only point to the Wiki article as a cite, and maybe I am exaggerating a little bit when I say “every”. But I do think a majority of the pre-1950 books I’ve read have been in various stages of decay. A lot of the old books I’ve read have been cheap sci-fi paperbacks from the “Golden Age”, which were probably printed on the cheapest pulp available. Most of those you can’t dog-ear the pages without the corner coming off and if you lay them down while open to hold the place, you’ll snap the glue and large chunks of pages will fall out.
I’m just saying, it’s a real problem and there are analogues with other cheap products back then as well. Not to mention safety. How many kids’ fingers were chopped off by those metal-bladed, guard-less electric fans before they wised up and stuck some bars around it? It wasn’t really a good thing that those stuck around as long as they did.
Count me in with the group who says the stuff that sticks around is the cream of the crop as far as products from the past are concerned, and stuff we are throwing away today is a lot more memorable than stuff we threw away long ago and forgot about. And if we compare the crap we’re throwing away today versus the things that have stuck around for 50 years, obviously the trash is going to come up short. But it isn’t really a fair comparison. We should compare the trash of today to the trash of yesterday to make any meaningful conclusions.
[sarcasm]No, I’ve NEVER heard of that. First time it’s even been mentioned to me.[/sarcasm]
Have you ever heard of nostalgia making people misremember the good old days? Selection bias? Observation bias? I mean, you do realize that the old books that weren’t well made just aren’t around anymore? You inherited quality books because those were the only ones it was possible to inherit.
When I go into my grandmother’s retirement home almost every resident is skinny; there are very few overweight people, very few smokers, and none that are both. That doesn’t mean people in her generation were never fat or smoked; It just means the fat ones and smokers are dead. It’d be rather stupid to look around and say “I guess no fat people were born in the 1920s, and I guess those people never smoked, because I see none here.” Same with products; the poorly made ones are dead. The fact that you don’t see them anymore is because they’re in landfills, not because they were never made.
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I didn’t know they let you use an email address as a username here. Boy, that’s gotta be a bad idea. Think the OP has had to close that account yet? I mean, it’s gotta be all over the crawlers by now…
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I was halfway on board with at least *some *of the OP until I got to “No wonder our country is such a mess…”
There’s gotta be a name for the phenomenon of when someone takes a semi-legit complaint about a specific, concrete, but rather small issue (cheap printers die quickly) and then balloons it out until they’ve blamed war and an unstable economy and AIDS and everything else on those poor cheap printers.
What did those printers ever do to you? (Except poop out quickly.) 
BTW, there’s quite a bit of truth to that line you were given about how they “don’t talk to people. Their job is to manage people.” I’ve worked in corporate jobs where I was a zillion degrees removed from the actual product being produced. If you’d gotten my phone number, I couldn’t have helped you either.
I have a lot of sf paperbacks from the 1950s, and they are generally in good shape, with those from the early '60s being in excellent shape. However the pulp magazines from the 1940s are showing wear. The digest sized magazines, especially F&SF, have stayed in quite good shape - much more than some of the cheaper, pulpier ones. So it really depends on the publisher.
Not true. First, my wife was the quality control director of a vegetable cannery starting in 1978, and it’s not like she was a pioneer. She headed a lab which checked incoming cans for adherence to spec, and you had better bet they the can manufacturers had quality assurance, not wanting to get a railroad car full of cans returned - which did happen.
I started working in a quality related area for Western Electric in 1980, and the Bell System spent a bundle on quality. Phone switches even back then were highly reliable. However a lot of manufacturers traded off cost and quality more on the cost side. I heard an engineer from the Teletype factory say in 1981 that they had to record lot numbers of incoming parts, because certain suppliers would try to send them lots back that they had rejected. Demming taught quality to the Japanese long before this also. In the early 1980s people started listening to their quality assurance organizations (especially after the Japanese told them that their products were crap) but quality assurance was around long before this.