> There's an increasingly large market of consumers who are tired of getting screwed over by literally every single product they buy.
That number isn't increasing, it is constantly dropping, which is how we got where we are. Boiled frogs, and Overton Windows, etc.
And once you've kept the quality of something low for about 20 years, you start having people enter the market who have never known the quality to be high.
The perception that the number of dissatisfied people is rising comes from a bunch of people getting old and comparing new stuff to 30 year old stuff, and being loud about it. And when we were young, old people were yelling about the quality of dishes, furniture, books, buildings etc. And we just accepted the crappy stuff because it was all that was available.
We buy the crappy stuff now, too, because the people who make the good stuff mark it up like crazy; the good stuff takes tooling and expertise that is now hard to locate and even recognize if you aren't familiar with it. Good stuff ends up being low competition in small markets of knowledgeable people who probably already own the best stuff that they rarely have to replace, and who are more likely to be brand loyal (although not blindly.) When we have to buy the crappy stuff, we complain about it online.
> Surely there must be a way to run a viable business which is 10-20% more expensive than its competition, but which isn't complete crap and willing to back that up with things like extended warranty?
So I say that there's no reason for those people not to mark it up 100-200%, because they're not going to sell any more than if they only mark it up 10-20%. They're not going to throw money away, at least not forever. Somebody smart is going to get in there and mark it up and/or lower the quality and drain the value of the brand (a brand that they can hedge with smart marketing.)
That number isn't increasing, it is constantly dropping, which is how we got where we are. Boiled frogs, and Overton Windows, etc.
And once you've kept the quality of something low for about 20 years, you start having people enter the market who have never known the quality to be high.
The perception that the number of dissatisfied people is rising comes from a bunch of people getting old and comparing new stuff to 30 year old stuff, and being loud about it. And when we were young, old people were yelling about the quality of dishes, furniture, books, buildings etc. And we just accepted the crappy stuff because it was all that was available.
We buy the crappy stuff now, too, because the people who make the good stuff mark it up like crazy; the good stuff takes tooling and expertise that is now hard to locate and even recognize if you aren't familiar with it. Good stuff ends up being low competition in small markets of knowledgeable people who probably already own the best stuff that they rarely have to replace, and who are more likely to be brand loyal (although not blindly.) When we have to buy the crappy stuff, we complain about it online.
> Surely there must be a way to run a viable business which is 10-20% more expensive than its competition, but which isn't complete crap and willing to back that up with things like extended warranty?
So I say that there's no reason for those people not to mark it up 100-200%, because they're not going to sell any more than if they only mark it up 10-20%. They're not going to throw money away, at least not forever. Somebody smart is going to get in there and mark it up and/or lower the quality and drain the value of the brand (a brand that they can hedge with smart marketing.)