There's two Henckels listed:

https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/henckels-internatio...

https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/zwilling

The first one is on their watchlist and probably the brand you're thinking of?

> There’s a special place in hell for people who would buy a dog food brand only to make worse dog food…

And yet countless millions of people basically say nothing about how the food they eat is produced.

Something to be said for places like Costco that has an absurdly generous return policy (are they the only major retailer left that does this? REI used to, but they got rid of it).

I believe Costco requires their vendors to eat the return if they want to remain a vendor. Doesn't meant that Costco is immune to bad products, but it severely punishes vendors that sell garbage and protects customers.

A buddy of mine paid a premium to get some fancy umbrella with a lifetime warranty. It had a failure at some point, they replaced it with a worse quality one. Another failure, and he got another step down in quality.

So, the company kinda honored the contract.

Both historical socialism and current-stage capitalism suffer from the exact same problem - lack of competition and limited access to information. They arrived there in vastly different ways but in both cases it's very hard both to know how to obtain higher quality goods, and to actually obtain them once you know how. Compare to 1960s USA where it was quite easy to know which car/drill/grill/TV/pants/table/etc. is guaranteed to last you years.

Everyday I am reminded about these brain dead arguments in my local town by people who can't think one step ahead.

You made this generalized statement probably from some propaganda you've read or some trauma you've experienced growing up. Yet, if you look at the current state of the situation its in clear decline. The only ways forward are to accelerate the decline and live with the consequences (ie. doing nothing) or to consider moving in the other direction(ie. leftist things).

In the US I think there are two sources of this mentality: 50% of the population don't have a passport so they have never seen how people in say Europe/Canada deal with this, EU/Canada/AUS/UK have higher standards and don't tolerate this kind of crap as much

Example: Hyundai removed immobilizers in their cars...but only in the US because Canada/EU had regulations requiring an immobilizer.

End result: Someone on TikTok discovered that you could steal cars with a screwdriver and a USB cable. This resulted in insurance costs shooting up, people stuck without cars due to lengthy repair times and overall lower quality of lives.

The braindead response that comes from people with OP's mentality would be "you should have researched the car better beforehand its all your fault".

Yea ok people with limited budgets and time looked at which cars had good reviews and Kia/Hyundai were winning many of those (likely BS ) awards like "North American Car of the year".

People are already stressed for time trying to survive in this jungle and now the "free market" played games with them and anyone suffering from this might be having a worse life now because of this mess. Why are they having to spend all their miniscule free time just to not be screwed?

Wouldn't it have been better if we had European style regulations that would have established a minimum standard that all cars in this era should have?

NO! We can't have things like that because people like OP (and a lot of conservatives) have these imprinted beliefs from a lifetime of fear mongering, or trauma if they immigrated from some garbage country with poor institutions(ex. Cuban immigrants opposed to Universal healthcare or eastern european immigrants opposed to anything with the word [commun/social]ist)

I've volunteered in the past for Progressive candidates that have a #1 criteria for not taking any corporate money. It is so much of a time sacrifice to get an AOC or Bernie type candidate only to have that progress stymied by endless amount of money pouring in on the other side. Why are we even doing it when day after day people like OP crop up with this nonsense? Whats the point of constantly fighting to enlighten person after person who starts off their beliefs with these 1-dimensional arguments? Its makes me want to just watch it all burn down just as long as people with your mentality go down with the ship. I get why a lot of wealthier people are just leaving the country. The fix requires decades of effort and will just break many people that try to go down that path. If you are wealthy and you have this one and only life, is it really worth it to have to deal with people like OP? Or is it better to just leave and let them wallow in their ignorance. I guess it depends on how important the country is to you. Even that concept of loyalty to a country seems to be eroding in this era of passport wealth.

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A car dealership makes most of their money off of the financing.

> I asked for their cash price and they wouldn't give me one

When I bought a car from a dealer, the dealer told me that what I wanted was impossible. So I walked out and got in my car, and started to back out. The salesman came running out and agreed to my terms.

The trick to making a good deal is a willingness to walk away.

P.S. My accounting teacher used to work at a used car lot. He explained to me that poor people tended to screw themselves by not understanding how financing works. He'd try to explain it to them, and they'd accuse him of trying to screw them, and they'd go for the more expensive option.

I tell this story to people who say that learning math in school is irrelevant.

I also remember a Frontline episode years ago on 401k plans. One company had an identical plan for all employees. The reporters discovered that the higher paid employees had better returns on the 401k plans. Why was it that the lower paid ones did poorly with them? It was they did not understand how to manage investments.

Up in my neck of the woods, it depends.

I paid cash for the last two used cars I bought. As used cars go they weren't particularly expensive and it wasn't a big deal. Both purchases came from dealerships that also sold and serviced things like brand new Hondas or Chevrolets.

For one of those cars, the paperwork was completely finished and I drove off in that new-to-me car without me even giving them a dime. (I did promise in writing that they'd have a check in a few days, and I did make good on that promise.)

There's also used car lots that work with real financing companies. They broker the financing deal and get paid for it. That works, too. (I've financed cars at these places, too; this also went smoothly.)

---

But then, too: There are buy-here, pay-here used car lots. These are traps for the poor, and they love their particular financing game.

At these places: The loans are designed to be very upside down and they therefore hold all of the cards. They'll sell a used car for years of weekly payments of $120, and if/when the payments stop then they just turn the car off remotely and have someone go pick it up.

After that, it's cleaned up and sold to the next guy for $120 a week.

It's a very profitable way to conduct business and nobody of any substantial means and sane mind would ever buy anything there at all.

But they don't check credit, and they don't report credit. So as ugly and expensive as it is, for some folks that's the only way they can get the car they need to try to survive in the society that they were born into.

Even worse: they want people to fail to pay it off, so they get half the debt amount and then get the car back to do it again.

There are two kinds of lots. 'normal' lots will sell a car, and the financing comes from a finance company. could be a bank, could be a credit union, could be a business that provides money to car purchasers. the normal lot has markup on the price, and also gets a kickback from the finance company. the car buyer does not pay, the finance company has a problem.

'buy here, pay here' lots sell a car, and do the financing. They buy cars at auction, fix them if they have to, then sell them. The down payment money usually covers the auction cost of the car. Then every 2 weeks, the buyers drops by with a payment. The buyer stops paying, the car is repossessed. And then it is sold again. The dealer wins in both directions; the buyer pays a lot of money in finance charges, and if it is repossessed then you don't have to buy new inventory at the auction.

Poor people with bad credit way over pay for cars both ways. One a little worse than the other.

In the US, a lot of car dealerships make a good portion of the profits from a car sale from the loan. E.g. the lender gives the dealer a kickback on the loan and that is a good portion of the total profit. It's somewhat analogous to how US airlines make their profits from credit card deals and selling miles.

ive experimented with paying more for a few things and sometimes it's the cheap stuff which lasts forever.

i have a pair of cheap Chinese earbuds that way outlasted all of the expensive ones I ever bought.

The boots are metaphorical, obviously