One massive unmentioned counterexample: High quality Chinese tools continue to proliferate and sucker-punch these brands for being so egregious with quality. They are now the high quality standard if you know what brands to look for, and not because their competition got worse as mentioned here, they are simply iterating and improving and making better tools and designs than they did 10 years ago. Sometimes you are getting the exact same tool as the name-brand but with less warranty for a fraction of the price. "Corporate Greed" is self-correcting in a free and fair market! Vote with your wallet.

Example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/harborfreight/comments/1v1ujxe/hmmm...

Which directly contradicts the blog's post about Knipex never selling-out on quality:

https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-power-tools-got-worse-...

>Knipex is family-owned out of Germany. They make what many consider the best pliers on the planet. Part of a larger group (Knipex Group) but not publicly traded, not for sale.

I recently bought one of the Yukon tool chest / benches and the experience totally flipped my opinion of HF. I've been a customer for a while, but always considered them lower-quality in the back of my mind. The tool chest came in perfect condition, easy purchase. Whereas the Huskies I had bought previously were a hassle that involved returning multiple damaged-in-box units back to the store, driving an hour to another store with stock, dodgily swapping parts (drawer slides and top) to make a good one, etc.

It's of course never just one thing - I had been waiting for the Husky to show up in stock again (it has a 24 inch depth vs 18), but at this point it seems like HD has discontinued the 24 in favor of enshittifying with 18 inches instead. And of course I've been shying away from HD recently because of the F-word. It's like these companies want to self-immolate (or put more technically, they create short term boosts by arbitraging away their reputation).

In my experience in recent years, Oppo and Vivo phones look better, they are more robust and last longer than iPhones and Samsung premium phones.

When giants like Apple and Samsung fail to innovate enough (and when they price their best products beyond the reach of the middle class of most nations), then upstarts will take their throne.

This may be good for industry so there's healthy competition, but it is unfortunate because China's CCP has a policy that Chinese companies must store and share customer and company data in China. So anyone using Chinese electronic gadgets is saying goodbye to their data security and privacy, even if it is an expensive gadget by a bigshot Chinese company (e.g., Lenovo was caught bundling adware on its premium laptops some years ago - search for "Lenovo Superfish" to know more).

https://legioncyber.com/lenovos-security-failures-and-hidden...