Yes, this is quite common and is usually referred to as "it's expensive to be poor". That said, unfortunately these days it's very difficult to know which brands are still actually quality anymore and which are the ones still coasting on previous good engineering reputation while currently shipping substandard crap to make an extra buck for the bean counters in charge before the ship sinks.

This has become a sort of unintentional skill in the ecommerce era. Everyone is using china, either the actual "first party" brand that is really just ordering bulk from china and reselling it stateside, or the various clones of that brand. The skill then becomes feeling out which of these various products and clones are coming from the better option of the couple chinese manufacturing companies everyone is using, then buying whichever of these is going for cheapest and least shipping headaches. Usually also if a product has been out for a couple years, there's an initial version widely available then an actual 2.0 version that solves a lot of the issues in the first, more sturdy at now known failure points, etc. That 2.0 version actually usually circulates in the no name brands for a little while before the "first party" brand eventually picks it up for their own line.

Not always.

I got a pair of T-shirts from These Glory Days. Wore them like 20% of time last two years and they look better then some others after 2 washes (albeit changed from them after coming back to work, and use work clothes at work, so not like they were used THAT much. So it's not always the expensive stuff that's equal to the cheap stuff. And funny thing, got them on a sale because they were pretty cheap, not really because I knew that they were quality.

Though had my wife with me when shopping and she might have "felt" the material and said that it was good for that price. Her mum is a seamstress if I remember the word correctly as somebody who sews clothes.

10x is not a likely number for quality, but for status symbol cost.

For my household I built my own cartoonishly big 200×80×4cm oak desk. The oak was €350 at the hardware store and only needed finishing. The height adjustable legs add some extra cost, but the whole was maybe €700 tops and a day of work.

You have to look at it from an item by item basis. There are different reasons for each product.

You mentioned household items: This is a combination of two things:

1. Improved QA & reduction of parts thanks to the miracle of Moores law. Ex: a TV used to be a huge collection of boards each doing its own function (power, tuning, picture control, audio). Nows its 1-2 board(power + everything else) with typically one big chip doing everything. Less parts = less chance of failure and each part is QA better thanks to software/industrial automation.

2. These things are benefiting from the low cost of living in places like China. As those countries increase their wealth and alternatives are not found this disparity disappears and you finally pay the real cost of the item but you still benefited from Moores law.

TVs deflated insanely, other appliances less so but it averages out to 0 again thanks to Moores law.

Now look at a desk. The only way it benefits from Moores law is possibly via assembly and techniques used to reduce waste. That probably where IKEA's excellent ability to turn sawdust + glue into furniture comes from. That is real value that is returned back to you in the form of similar raw numerical prices as old wood tables from decades ago.

Machinery can automate the creation of a table made out of what is technically "wood" (sawdust was at one point wood wasn't it?) and computer software allowed designers to create appealing designs and more easily optimize them to target that same number people paid in the 70s(even though it isnt the real number inflation adjusted).

An old table used real wood that probably came from an old growth tree that no longer exists because the value came from decades (or centuries) of "work" done by nature. Exchanging money for that same amount of value that would reveal the diminished value of the currency if you were to get that same thing today. You cant exchange the exact dollar amount and you are not feeling that the modern IKEA take is an improvement/equivalent over the old growth wood.

Essentially the free market could not make a 1-to-1 replica/improved product using something like moores law so that same value costs more today. That difference in quality between the Ikea table and the old wood table is still there its just that most consumers dont see it or dont want to see it since they may not be able to afford the old style of table.

>Airline tickets are a very clear-cut example of this. Tickets are cheaper than they were in the ‘90s (even with inflation) but you get a lot less for that ticket than you did 30 years ago

This is a mixed bag in my opinion:

Airlines have benefited from Moores Law. I watched so many "aviation" youtube channels and my god, the accidents from the early days of aviation are truly nightmare inducing and heartbreaking tragedies. Today thanks to computerization(Moores law), pilots are so much better trained, airplanes are so many orders of magnitude better in terms of safety and fallbacks and fuel is reduced as a result of all of this technology as well. This helped cut costs and also allowed Airlines to provide more classes of service. If you fly first class all in, you get service closer to what you got 30 years ago because you are paying for the same value as 30 years ago.

At the same time, fuel itself comes from a non-renewable resource that included dinosaurs, sea algae, and plants that spent a lifetime doing the work to accumulate energy from the sun and then be stored in a format that can be exploited centuries later. You life's comforts comes from all that work done centuries ago and its not unlimited. Thus as fuel becomes harder to get, the numerical dollar amount goes up and is reflected in tocket costs. Its just that the other reductions didn't make it as evident.

As a side note with the Iran war and the loss of companies like Spirit, more are now being exposed to the fact that todays dollar isn't the same as yesterdays dollar. Those low cost options are just going away because finally the free ride given to use by cheap fossil fuels is going away and things like moores law have already reached the limit of where you can add value to keep the number close to the 70s dollar number.

Sidebar: Don't video games have ever growing competition with existing games?

I decided not to buy games until I beat the ones I already have. I am now stuck on NES games and will probably be stuck for the rest of my life.

That's what paid day one DLC, micro-transactions, and loot boxes are for. Ways of raising the price without raising the headline price.

What’s important is total profits. Video game prices fell because distribution costs tanked and there’s vastly more people playing video games so cutting 20% on the price upfront means far more than 20% extra profit.

For videogames I don’t think it really makes sense to try and compare against 90’s prices. It’s gotten so much easier to just make “a game” (in the sense that computers are enormously more powerful, third-party engines and assets exist, generally all tooling is much better, and so on). Expectations in terms of polish and graphics quality are much higher. Distribution is much easier. Videogames are a massive cultural thing these days, so the market is huge, and so is the pool of potential enthusiastic employees.

I mean the arrows are pointing in every direction, I have no idea if prices should have gone up or down or even how to make a comparison. Like we could get into details and talk about comparing a modern AAA game cost to a 90’s AAA games cost… except, even if you adjust for graphics quality generally improving, just the scope of modern AAA games is massive in a way that there doesn’t exist a 90’s equivalent.

That seems like it'll change over the next few years. Lots of people seem to be making video games with AI. Greater supply, same demand, lower prices.

On the other hand, Silksong.

Video games are just another example where the pricing is mostly greed. The market is massively larger than it was in the 90s, digital distribution has massively cut the cost of goods sold, new games are sold with tiered pricing, recuring revenue is now a huge part of a games viability. Game sales aren't the primary income anymore, it's all about keeping whales buying in game items, discounts are only offered when there needs to be a new influx of players to keep whales happy.

The world needs more tariffs until there’s non-chinese ODMs selling top quality

> most) consumers don't even have a clear idea of what "quality" looks like

I think it just requires too much work. Your cynicism is unfair.

Also cheapest is just the simplest option, even though you know it is crap. I sometimes just give up on investing effort and time and money trying for better, because I've been repeatedly stung by expensive failures of top quality/brand items.

If I want a cordless drill, I don't want to have to learn about batteries, brands, or any esoterica relating to the quality of it.

For many goods I used to spend time looking at reviews, and cultivating my knowledge. I'm sick and tired of having to do that.

For cordless, I do like Makita, but I use a battery adapter (because their batteries are NZD250 instead of NZD50). But I usually buy a crappy bigstore brand for most cordless tools (a rebadged Einhell). They mostly work and they do a good replacement warranty.

People want a simple measure of quality.

Price doesn't work. Threadcount doesn't work for sheets (they cheat the numbers). Some brands are still worthwhile, but even that is becoming unreliable.

Some stores seem to have quality standards (in NZ Kmart goods seem mostly useable for the pricepoint, however our local 'The Warehouse' has gone downhill).

Many goods are now so complex that stores can't make a price versus quality compromise. Choosing a mobile phone is frustrating.

Complexity is the killer for choosing quality.

Our cheapest goods are surprisingly complex: e.g. socks.

I had to switch from levis jeans to carhartt pants because my levis would rip after 5-6 months, almost like clockwork.

No, I am not at all overweight. Carhartt just makes more durable pants, and I hate shopping.

In the US, marks from Nationally Recognized Testing Labs (UL, ETK, CSA, and TUV are some big hitters here) do have positive value in terms of safety.

But they're not marks of operational quality. A UL mark on a microwave oven doesn't tell me that it's a high-quality item that will cook my food better than an unmarked item, or that it is something that is easy to use or will stand up to the test of time.

It just means that it's safe to use, according to whatever tests were performed on it. The UL (or other NRTL) mark means that it's extremely unlikely to give anyone an electrical shock or burn a house down, even as the device fails.

As another example: A power supply brick for some manner of widget. The UL mark doesn't mean that it will last for years and years, or that it will power whatever in-spec widget it is thrown at.

The mark does mean that when I short the output terminals together that it won't catch on fire. That's good! But it does not mean that the power supply will ever work again.

An item can fail both absolutely and permanently, and as long as it fails safely then that failure isn't held against it. It can still carry the mark.

The CE mark is worthless, since it is a self-certificaton.

The UL mark is valuable, as are the other test lab marks. However, while an ethical storefront would require it, Amazon does not. I've bought plenty of things that are not listed, and if I want safe products I generally have to include "UL" or "ETL" in my search. Even that doesn't always work, I've seen products on there claiming a listing in the title but photo shopping the place where the UL logo ought to be off of their product images.

Where on earth are you getting that "CE mark" == quality?