In fact I normally support my local hardware store for the same reason. It happened I needed an HD-specific item that day. And I “paid” for the experience in time.
I have always made it a point to patronize my local True Value–they are more expensive on everything, but I want them to stay open because I can find someone there who understands my problem and can advise me on what to do. Now that I know about the quality difference I’m going to make more of a point to buy the expensive/premium tools there if they stock it.
sometimes too its just a case of licensing a brand name … Walmart makes a deal for coffee makers and then they just pay Mr. coffee to use the name
Only way you know to look at the box and find “mfd for or by Wal-Mart inc " trademark used under license”
Well, first of all, as you are aware, wages haven’t gone up for most Americans (after correcting for inflation) since the 1970s. While healthcare, housing, and education costs have all skyrocketed. So for most of us, we need to pinch every penny practical. I’m sure you’re more or less in that boat - airline pilots I have read actually make a lot less than the averages were in the past. At least most professions make the same money as before.
The trouble with this kind of down-grading of products is it’s basically a form of fraud. Not illegal, but if a consumer knew that a particular product they wanted from a name brand was of lower quality than the brand normally is, they might make a different decision.
What if you like oreos, but some of the oreos sold on sale at the grocery store have half the cocoa powder of the normal kind? You’d agree that you were cheated, right? Even if technically the UPC code on the box was slightly different, or it said “oreos special edition” or some other nonsense.
And part of the reason wages haven’t gone up is because everyone is looking to pay the cheapest price possible. If Huffy has to manufacture its bikes in China and Mexico to meet Walmart’s price demands, that means it has to eliminate jobs in its American factories. That means more people are unemployed and that drives wages down. Sure, if a single company does this, it’s not going to make much of a difference. But it’s not a single company that does this, and it’s not only manufacturing jobs. People complain that they can’t get the service at Home Depot or Lowe’s that they used to get at the neighborhood hardware store- but they stopped shopping at that hardware store because Home Depot is cheaper and the neighborhood store closed. Or they miss the independent pharmacy that delivered prescriptions- but the pharmacist closed his pharmacy and went to work at CVS because he couldn’t compete with them. I recall reading an interview with a man talking about losing his job in a shoe factory that closed because the company moved it’s manufacturing out of the US - and he saw nothing ironic about the fact that he himself was wearing shoes manufactured in China.
We collectively say we want certain things ( good quality, decently paid manufacturing jobs, good service) and then we collectively act in ways that guarantee the opposite of what we claim to want.
For a lot of these items, there is no such thing as the “normal kind”. Sometimes a company will market nearly identical products with different SKU numbers for different stores to prevent price matching and sometimes a company will manufacture a line exclusively for one retailer but many times, a company offers different product lines at different price points and the reason you find different items at different retailers is because most retailers don’t offer the whole selection. Someone mentioned Calphalon earlier. Which of these is the normal Calphalon? ( and the Wiliams-Sonoma line is likely to be the most expensive, not the least) Which Kitchen Aid mixer is the “normal” kind? There are at least three different lines that I know of (probably more) and I am fairly certain you will not find a $700 plus model at Target or Walmart.
Believe me I’m totally on your side here.
I make a good living by most folks’ standards. But … My Dad did the same job for the same company for almost the same number of years I will. I will earn, corrected for inflation, 1/3rd the lifetime wages and retirement benefits he did. That’s right, a 67% pay cut versus him. So much for Progress in the American Dream.
I agree completely with you that this stealth downgrading of quality or features is fraud.
Just like the incredible shrinking package sizes. As an example: When I was a kid ordinary ground coffee came in 16 ounce cans called “one pound” cans. During the great inflation of the late 60s / early 70s coffee cans silently shrank to 12 ounces. Which for years people still called “a pound of coffee” despite being ripped off by 33% versus a true pound.
Nowadays coffee even worse, coffee comes in packages ranging from 12 to 10 to 9 ounces all physically sized about the same. All carefully chosen to keep the sale price point at $8.99. Or whatever specific number but you get the point: marketers using subterfuge to make the consumer think they’re getting a bargain when they’re not.
As **doreen **says, there’s a chicken and egg feedback loop going on. People bargain-hunt to stretch their own budget and thereby strangle the wages of the people they buy from. Or worst case, export the wages entirely to China or wherever.
To have plentiful high wage jobs requires two things: 1) The willingness to spend your own money buying products produced and delivered and serviced by high wage workers. 2) The ability and will to wrestle enough of the economic system’s total value-add away from the owners of capital.
The American worker has collectively failed at both prereqs for 50+ years now. With the failure aided and abetted by international competition and a political system that has failed to deliver what the worker needs. Which may be due in large part to those same workers actually asking their political system for something else altogether. Which is a whole 'nuther forum full of threads.
I disagree on the feedback loop being the cause. People paying less for the same product incentivizes efficiency and ever greater production for the same resources.
I think the data says overwhelmingly that it’s mainly (2). Over time, the value add of a single worker has more than doubled, yet their pay has halved. Where did it all go? To the growing aristocracy.
What’s the fix? Well, the obvious one, mentioned in another thread, is just an estate tax. The actual problem is inherited wealth. If all the wealth went back to the communal pool with each generation, such that each worker’s earnings are actually proportional to their lifetime production, capitalism would work as intended. Note I’m also against death, I don’t think anyone should die, but if we ever have the ability to prevent that*, we’d have to come up with a new set of rules to prevent those who have large amounts of capital from being able to own everything on the planet eternally.
*In a technical sense, this is achievable and inevitable, at least for timescales of millions of years.
Go buy plumbing supplies at HD in the spring. That is apparently when they switch over their products. During the spring you can go through the cardboard boxes where the inventory is kept and sometimes find a few left-over parts from the previous year. The reduction in quality over even one year is noticeable. I was told by an employee who I know has worked there for years that the reason for the same part, with the same SKU number, is obviously different in quality but not in function is simply the year to year inventory. Obviously this doesn’t happen with all products or every year, but I have seen it a couple of times in the plumbing supplies.
wow.
There is a stark contrast.
As you say, you made a good living. And perhaps the risks your father took accounted for some of the difference, but it sure is a contrast.
I think the reason airline pilots make a lot less must have to do with pricing pressure on the airlines.
The odd thing is, in the ‘golden era’ of airline travel, most of the pilots would have been trained by the military, for ww2 or the korean or vietnam wars. Ticket prices were high, the flight attendants were cherry picked young women who would be fired at the age of about 30, and life was good for the airline captains.
But there would have been more pilots applying for jobs then relative to the number of positions, one would think. Today, there are less air force pilots being trained, and most of the Vietnam era pilots are now retiring.
At what point does this kind of marketing become illegal? Surely selling the inferior product with the superior model number should be illegal, no?
It’s ‘legal’ because it will be a different SKU. And in the long run, it hurts the companies that do it, because consumers will associate the premature failures/poor quality with the brand. This feedback mechanism is especially effective today, where Amazon allows buyers of the product to collectively give feedback. Amazon ratings aren’t perfect, and can be gamed, but if a product has 5000+ reviews and a 4.5+ star rating, I have had pretty good experiences with those products.
[quote=“Orwell, post:56, topic:798483”]
Didn’t your store get paid for warranty work from the manufacturers? I would think your store would have liked the extra service and warranty work, even if you didn’t get the sales.
People for the most part, don’t take very good care of lawn & garden equipment. So too often the equipment failure is not a warranty issue and we’re the bearer of the bad news. Then they hate us on social media and stomp out vowing to never shop with us again.
Also the warranty payments are fixed and low. And if they say it take 15 minutes to say recalibrate a carb, and it takes us 1/2 hour, we just out.
I worked a long time ago at an electronics service shop. We handled warranty work for dozens of companies, and all of them wildly underpaid us for labor. We only took on the work in order to get some small discounts on parts for non-warranty work, for reputation and therefore post-warranty work, and for service information. The actual warranty income was by far the smallest reason to do the job.
As for blaming customer bargain hunting for falling product quality and ESPECIALLY for falling wages, that’s entirely OUTRAGEOUS.
Customers have ALWAYS sought the best deal. It’s included by all who pretend that free-market capitalism is the magic cause of all prosperity, AND by the more rational and honest people who deal with economics of the market place. Supposedly, bargain hunting is in theory, a reason for producers to IMPROVE their products, not to lie about them.
And wages are supposed to RISE when productivity rises. But that element has been altered starting in the late 1970’s, and exacerbated by all sorts of quiet but purposeful moves of the most powerful in the world.
And of course, don’t overlook actual marketplace innovation, periodically causing a MECHANICAL collapse of labor value. I’m referring there to things such as the invention of the container ship system, and the internet. Container ships “saved money” by allowing vast increases of product quantities to be transported across the once expensive oceans, for huge reductions in cost, thus putting American workers in more direct competition for wages with China and India and other places where poverty is the norm. Advances in automated manufacturing and design, has always allowed producers to compete with high paid workers, using vastly more ignorant and inexperienced operators, driving wages down again.
And so on.
So stop with the victim blaming. The reason for falling production quality and simultaneous lower wages for the working class, is that world governments have CHOSEN that road for all of their “solutions” to the challenges of an evolving market place. The people in power CHOSE to respond to the ability of oppressed and poverty stricken people to compete directly with Americans, by lowering trade barriers further, and by ignoring that every product coming from those foreign factories is made by people even more desperate to survive than we are, and who have far less legal right to object.
@ DummyGladHands & Orwell -
In Canada at Home Depot they do not do any warranty repairs whether major or minor products in house. Minor products they just do an exchange or refund, major items like washers, power equipment etc is contracted out to a 3rd party, usually through the manufacturer. Depending on the item, they go to your house or otherwise you bring it in and they ship it out.
Personal experience: My neighbour bought a snowblower at HD a few years ago. On his first use, something went wrong and he was told to return it to the HD store where he bought it. We did (in my van), he was told the 3rd party comes by once a week to collect items for service and it was “yesterday”. They’d collect it the next week. As it turned out they needed a part which took 4 weeks to get, and then another week to return it back to HD for pickup. In the end, almost 6 weeks downtime. He shovelled the driveway all winter.
The reality was that for any problem, no matter how small, count on it being out of commission for at least 2 weeks. Once again, buyer beware. Now I always ask the procedure for warranty work before buying.
- True. Any supposed solution based on consumers not looking out for their own direct interests is hopeless. It wasn’t really the case in ‘the good old days’, and it’s not ever going to be. You can impose restrictions collectively on people’s choices. It’s debatable how often that actually works, in particular national circumstances. But expecting people to spontaneously act against their direct interest, that’s pissing in the wind.
The cheapest product on the shelf isn’t always best, and the consumer doesn’t always buy it. And it’s been validly stated they generally have themselves to blame if they do buy an inferior product. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Generally not so much. Especially not on repeat purchases of stuff.
However, you can just as easily use lower production costs to deliver a higher quality product for less as a lower one. If anything it’s the high cost producers under the most pressure to cut corners to hang on in a market based on a previous brand reputation etc. That was manifest in the US car business for example for a long time. The lower cost base of the foreign brands (whether they produce outside the US or at non-union plants in the US) tended to manifest in the US brands giving less car (less reliable, cheaper materials, genuinely new models less often, etc) for about the same money not the same car for more money or a better car for lots more money. The legacy UAW costs tended to manifest itself in corner cutting. That was eventually washed away to some extent by the bankruptcies but not entirely.
- So I agree less as this goes along, but mainly ‘median person doesn’t make much more’ (or anecdotally, makes less) than decades ago and ‘junk on the shelves’ are not really the same issue. Both are related to some overlapping factors, but one is not a cause of the other. And some median figures are related to social and political change (median household incomes haven’t risen much, but households are smaller now on average; medical costs have soared; but real new technologies have been introduced, and employer or govt subsidies for health care aren’t counted in median wages). But median income growth has slowed. Average wage growth less. The issue is much more a distribution change in rich countries than looking for some process by which ‘poor countries take our wealth’. That is what Trump says. Generally people here don’t agree with him much, though I guess some do
. Populists of left and right tend to come together though in effectively opposing technology and trade as intuitive response to the distributional change. And it’s not that either should be supported for its own sake. It’s just that opposing either doesn’t happen to be a practical solution in any general sense (you can ‘save’ some jobs by restricting either, but you can’t advance general prosperity that way).
Saw an article recently about airline pilots recently, and it has gone from being a dream job to a financial trap. The budget airlines cut prices, and save on the crew. The pilots don’t get paid all that much, and get done out of paid meals and accommodation by their employers, resulting in some very odd scenes behind the scenes. Apart from the low pay, it costs a lost to become an airline pilot. A price of around 200,000 USD was quoted. How long will it take a pilot to pay that off if he is flying for a budget airline? And those who get qualified do not necessarily get a job. Some head off to Asia, where the airlines are expanding, but safety is often a distant second best. In the past the airlines got a lot of ex-military pilots, who of course needed to be retrained, and a lot of experienced eastern European pilots came on the job market in the 1990s.
The article concluded that it will take a major crash to shake up the industry, and the budget airlines are overdue for one due to skimping all along the line.
perhaps this would help?
As I understand it, there were improvements made.
Finding the appropriate point between cheap air fares and crew (both air crew and ground crew) that are paid enough to do a very good job is a constant challenge. Personally, I would much rather err on the side of a very good job, but I buy tickets mostly on the price point like everyone else. But I won’t fly on the deep discount airlines-they are too cheap for me.
This thread reminds me of the Duluth catalogue, which at least for a while - or maybe they still do? - offered the same pair of pants, made in China and made in the U.S.A. with the attendant difference in price point between the 2 pants due to labor & materials costs. Duluth made no attempt to hide the cost difference.
Ballsy move - force consumers who complain about foreign imports to put their money where their mouth is.
Sears used to sell a variety of well-known brand-name guns under their own J.C Higgins brand, and under the Sears brand. So did J.C. Penny. Mossbergs were sold under the New Haven brand for Montgomery Ward and Western Auto.