Every time I read takes like this I think people forget why big brands exist?
Small business (or “lifestyle business”) vs big brand is often framed about being high quality vs cheap price, because in practice it often is. But in theory the two things are completely unrelated.
Yes fixing stuff is good for the planet. But big brands could offer customer service just fine if people wanted it.
Small business vs big brand is a problem of predictability. If you have many independent small businesses, NOT all of them will be good. It will be a mixed bag what you get in your area. OP has felt so fortunate with his local highly-skilled asian-owned small business that he felt compelled to write about it on the internet. Not everyone will be this lucky.
And in a world where information travels very fast (this is really the key point) this system is unsustainable, as there are really only 2 options: either people accept the fact that some neighbourhoods are served worse than others, or the take the car and make the travel up to the nice asian shop they read about on the internet, because that’s apparently worth it.
But, surprise, this second option doesn't scale. Because as soon as the nice asian shop goes viral, they realise they can’t keep up with the demand at all. And so they will probably refuse lots of customers. (Note, I’m not even considering the option they might increase prices)
In this sense, the derogatory “lifestyle business” comment makes sense, since I think it’s meant to highlight how elitist it is. It doesn't scale in the sense that it creates a race for who is able to cop the best option. When I need a sofa, I want to be able to “just” get a sofa. Simple and predictable. If the sofa is good quality, even better.
The point of the article is that the big business model is "continued growth", which depends on constantly increasing sales, which means products necessarily get shittier so that they must be replaced more frequently. Small "lifestyle" businesses do not operate under this principle and encourage reuse and renewal. They represent opposing philosophies.
Whether you can "just" get a sofa from big business or not, that is precisely what they hope for, and ideally you should be purchasing a sofa more frequently than you already do to further support this notion.
'The point of the article is that the big business model is "continued growth", which depends on constantly increasing sales, which means products necessarily get shittier so that they must be replaced more frequently.' - Sorry to interject here, but this is extremely wrong and nowhere did I find this take-away from the posted article. There are massive businesses that do sell extremely high-quality products - in fact, Japan went through a transition where their businesses went from producing absolute junk (i.e. just like the stuff we import from China today) to producing extremely high quality products (see Juran, Crosby, and cost of quality measures etc...). The key point of the article is that consumers today choose low-priced products since the market gives it to them. If you allow a person to buy a $800 sofa which looks great on the outside and is made in China albeit with extremely low quality materials vs. a sofa which looks almost exactly the same but is priced at $1500 but is of much higher quality - most consumers will obviously choose the $800 dollar sofa vs the $1500 since that's how the free-market functions. Is this rational though?
Well - the consumer will need to buy 4 of the $800 dollar sofas just from having to replace them throughout a 20 year period vs. having the ability to buy one (the $1500) one but that's not obvious to the consumer and it's not clear how to even make this type of judgment. Which sofa really costs the most to you given the information I just provided? The high-quality $1500 one or the $800 dollar one? To a rational person having all of the above information - the more costly one is cheaper - but to an average consumer not having this information the clearly cheaply made product is the better choice. People also are prone to more short-term thinking in many societies which also doesn't help things but the takeaway in general which you posted there is very wrong: mass production and scale usually result in higher-quality products not lower quality ones.
The problem isn't just short-term thinking. You alluded to another point yourself:
Consumers aren't often equipped to evaluate quality, partly due to skill issues, partly because the corners are cut in places which are hard to spot before purchase. Price doesn't work as a discriminating factor (except to filter out a portion of the worst inventory) because of the number of brands explicitly trying to pass off junk as high-quality luxuries.
If you really can't tell which one is better, and you're as likely to get scammed buying something expensive, why not put less money on the line for something that has a chance of being good enough?
This is a key factor: businesses have learned to “optimize” by cutting corners wherever people can’t perceive the deficit. The product just has to last long enough.
In the off-chance this is a good place to ask, how does a consumer (or, ideally, the existing governing body) fight back? I'll briefly walk through a hypothetical scenario to have something concrete to talk about, then ask about the normal alternatives?
Say you have an IoT device. It's marketed as a device capable of doing a task (e.g., scanning car OBD codes). That task can be done offline. The device initially does that task offline. The app had a backdoor, and the owning company used that backdoor to force logins on previously happy users. Later, they restrict functionality-which-could-be-completely-offline-and-used-to-work to people who pay for a monthly subscription, or maybe they go out of business or otherwise just decide to shut down the servers (see the recent Spotify debacle).
With that backdrop:
- The ToS usually ban class actions and require arbitration.
- The fraud in question is on the order of $20-$200 -- not worth being pursued for most people.
- The ToS are somehow magically invoked when you buy the product, regardless of whether you even saw a warning message suggesting that there might exist a legal agreement which you should read.
The usual outcomes are (1) you get a default judgement and are unable to exercise it because the company goes bankrupt or does some sort of shenanigan which requires a lawyer costing more than the damage in question (a common solution is spinning off a subsidiary owning all the bad debt and responsibilities, keeping the assets elsewhere, kind of like what Johnson and Johnson tried after the talc/cancer debacle), (2) despite the company's best efforts you get a class-action judgement, and the company settles for much less harm than they inflicted, happily pocketing the difference, (3) other more complicated and/or less desirable situations.
What does an individual do to limit their liability in a world where that sort of fraud seems to be condoned, and what options do we have as a society to reduce the overall problem?
Maybe, maybe not. But regardless, in parallel to this, we have corporations whose modus operandi is at worst to lie to consumers about quality, and at best to mislead. And not just about specific products, but about quality as a general concept.
I'm pretty sure we're in total agreement.
E.g., with the right training you can tell the difference between the sort of particle board flooring that will balloon up and be destroyed when a drop of water lands on it, the sort of particle board flooring that resists minor water infiltration, and various grades of "real" floors, but most people don't have that training.
Separately (and I _think_ my messaging was clear about this -- talking about the corners being cut being ones that are hard to discover and describing the companies doing that shit as scammers), yes I totally agree; corporations are absolutely not passive participants in consumers being unable to make educated decisions. Even major brands will actively defraud consumers (e.g., Garmin revoking a bunch of lifetime licenses on Navionics software and trying to whitewash public opinion by claiming it was for the customers' own good, or Atlassian blatantly ignoring the CCPA because it's a fairly toothless law), and there exists a plethora of maybe-legal-but-obviously-wrong behavior from most successful companies, including but not limited to "lies, or at best misleadings."
This is rarely the choice though. In my experience, the choices tend to be the $800 low quality sofa, the $3000 low quality but with a name brand sofa, and the $6000 low quality but with an even fancier name brand sofa.
Presumably there are some manufacturers that still produce furniture that's actually made of massive wood rather than cardboard and veneer, but it's becoming increasingly rare.
A high-quality leather sofa these days is closer to $15K than $1500, ouch.
I don't disagree with you - but this also explains the determining factor in which product wins and why today's markets or sofas are lower quality than they were 30+ years ago. If price doesn't matter - what's going to be the driving force in buying behavior? Consumer behavior in other words is no longer driven by quality or long-term cost: today, people will simply choose the lowest cost items and deal with the pain of having to replace it every X years. This drives the market to place a premium on what then? LOWEST COST. Lowest cost = the manufacturers that cut corners and reduce quality, so the market driving force (consumers) lead to a game where the lowest cost producers win and thus saturate the marketplace with junk.
There are loads of manufacturers that still do this. Go to any furniture row, you’ll see the Ikea parking lot is full, the rc willey parking lot less so, and the premier quality furniture brands parking lots nearly empty.
I bought a sofa from a local builder a few years ago for around $2500. The frame is well built but the cushions lost their original shape within 6 months. All told, I'd rather have the sturdy sofa that looks a bit sloppy over a sofa that will break if more than three friends sit on it but I'd really rather have a sturdy one that still looks great after five years.
Maybe next time.
The problem is that sofas haven’t come down significantly in price. These shittier products aren’t actually much cheaper than, for example, a custom made sofa. I know this because I just bought a custom made sofa.
But the quality is incomparable.
Yes but this is once again where the free-markets and economics come in: if the mass-produced ones match the custom-made ones in price, consumers will start switching to custom-made sofas. The mass-production suppliers will either have to 1) lower the price of their sofas or 2) increase the quality of production to match the quality of the custom-made ones. Both 1 and 2 are great for consumers and this is why competition is so great :). Notice that all of this is driven by the choices the CONSUMER (me and you) make.
That’s not quite true, because many people don’t have good custom sofa makers near them. Moreover, because they are small businesses, they don’t have the same capacity for marketing as big brands; most of their business is word of mouth.
Also, custom sofas take time to build - not much, but 2-4 weeks or so.
So there are a lot of reasons big brands are convenient. But you pay for that convenience in quality.
Not sure about sofas but when I bought a bed and some bookcases and nightstands last year all from national retailers, the lead time was 4-12 weeks depending on the product. Getting a custom sofa in 2-4 weeks would beat the competition in many cases. Again, the market constraint lies in knowing about the small vendor in the first place and having a way to purchase it conveniently.
This is a very theoretical argument but I don't think it happens that way in reality, because of all the ways that real human beings are not economically perfect agents. Particularly the information asymmetries - it's much harder to gauge the reputation of a small business vs. a big one.
So, how often do you eat at McDo?
(whose entire value proposition is "just" get some calories, simply and predictably)
Just because you want to "'just' get a sofa" it does not follow that you "'just' get some food" as well. Or at least not always: sometimes you may 'just' want to, and sometimes you'll want something more that 'just' calories.
And you may not care about sofas as compared to other things: you may 'just' want a sofa, but if you're really into cooking then you may want more than (say) 'just' some random knife, perhaps going for hand-forge Japanese steel.
Further, the cost of making a mistake with food (a few (dozen) dollars) versus a mistake with a sofa (hundreds/thousands) are on two different levels.
I think the point is that McDonald’s is literally all over the world, but that doesn’t mean the food is consistent.
McDonalds may have the most consistent food product in the world.
Eh. I have terrible taste, so I've eaten McDonalds around the US as well as in Paris and Bangalore.
Within the US, yeah, it's very consistent. I've not seen much variation, other than the one or two specially decorated locations and the menu is very consistent.
Internationally, the branding is very consistent, but the product isn't that consistent. The fries in Paris were very different (and not very good; my feeling is they probably used the same procedure but very different potatoes), but the burgers were pretty similar. In India, they don't serve burgers, but at least when I was there, they did have the delicious old school chicken nuggets that they replaced with 'all white-meat' bleh nuggets in the US. I didn't try any of their chicken sandwiches, because why when I could have the nuggets of my youth?
I understand there's significant regional differences in all the territories they operate in.
It is remarkably consistent, tourists go to McD's very often when short on time because they know almost exactly what they’re getting, even though they might be a 10h flight from their home.
They could but they won't. Because they realized (and probably all agreed) that it's far more profitable to sell the customer a new product, rather than fixing the old one. And since they are the big brands, and they have practically a monopoly (think about big tech companies) they make the rules. They even have the power to sue the crap to which small business tries to fix their products, like Apple did multiple times.
The repair culture is not something sustainable for a big business, that to stay in the market has to increase year after year their sales, and the only way to do so is... making consumers buy new products, even if they don't need them. How to do so? Decrease the quality of the products, make them impossible to repair. No big business would stay alive if they sold you a couch that lasts a century.
I must have hallucinated that I went to an auto dealer for warranty service last week.
Enterprise software companies have consulting and support services.
At the consumer level though, most people aren't willing to pay for the cost of the manufacturer or retailer repairing clothing and other relatively low cost items. As in this article, there are local businesses that do such things but it can be really hard to justify for lower cost items. I have had shoes resoled and otherwise repaired but haven't done it in years and probably most recently a pair of very expensive custom hiking boots that were made to be repairable. (And the repair was probably $200 or so.)
At the consumer level it frequently doesn't make sense to repair an item. My son had a part fail on his luggage last winter. It might be covered under warranty (the manufacturer wouldn't commit until inspecting the product) but the repair would require shipping the suitcase to them and paying for return shipping. It was going to cost about $150 minimum to have it repaired on a piece that is already a decade old and could be replaced for $200 on sale. I have seen this repeated many times across products.
I've had minor clothing repairs/alterations done at a local dry cleaner for a fairly nominal sum. (Maybe $10-15) But if you can't just easily do something yourself, yeah, you tend to be looking at a floor of at least $100 and at least a certain amount of hassle.
Things I might have taken in to be repaired 25 years ago like a laser printer just don't make sense to do so today.
While i do take your point, i think a big problem with discussions about "big businesses" is that they are completely different most of the time. A sofa =/= a car =/= enterprise software. But then how do discussions happen? A sofa is just a thing to sit on at home, you undoubtedly have other things to sit on. Needing to repair a sofa is not catastrophic to survival. Needing to repair a family car can be catastrophic to an individual or family. Needing to repair enterprise software can be catastrophic to a large business itself. There's hugely different consequence scales here, which i guess correlates with how willing a "large" company is to provide the desired support
I was thinking the same thing.
So, how is that story going to help me? Apparently, I can't buy a sofa of this quality any more, and if I want it fixed, I apparently have to go to Canada.
You can actually buy sofas of quality. The easiest way is to go to the local design center (most cities have one and if you’re not in a city you can drive to the closest and visit) and you’ll often find many retailers selling high quality furniture. It’s the stuff that’s kind of expensive but not so heavily styled as to incur a crazy premium just for looking expensive. You will be able to see it as it’ll look like Tim’s sofa but costs 2x or more what said sofa would cost on Wayfair. They’re often but not always made in the North Carolina region stateside, other locales seem to be Ohio and Pennsylvania.
We bought such a sofa per advice from a friend that’s an interior designer, and it’s amazing. At 10 years it looks like it was brand new and has withstood the first 10 years of baby life including playdates and kids drawing on it, etc (we got it with a special treatment to make it not absorb such things and it actually worked). Kids jumping off the back frame, throwing all the cushions around, etc. Literally unblemished and the internal frame is rock solid.
But also the single most expensive piece of furniture I’ll ever buy. I’ll never need to buy a replacement for it though. I expect to be using it for the rest of my life and passing it onto my descendants.
Read the Dwell article referenced in the article to learn that the whole ecosystem of the North Carolina furniture industry is dying out rapidly due to the onslaught of cheap, light, shippable, assemble-at-destination flatpack furniture.
We have a 20-year-old quality sofa from a major NC company that we got reupholstered by them last year, just before they went out of business.
I don't know, assuming you agree with the article's conclusions couldn't you just buy second hand and refurbish when possible?
The article mentions a canadian refurbisher, but I don't think it implies they don't exist elsewhere.
What's better: having to do a few minutes of research to find a good sofa repair shop in your city or having to buy a new sofa every 5 years?
Further: what's better for you personally, and what's better for the planet? Are they compatible?
Why is it important for every type of business to scale? Is "scale" a virtue we must judge every business by?
When the sofa refurbisher can only handle 100 sofas a year, the 101st customer doesn't have any where to go. Perhaps the market will then lead a second refurbisher to set up shop but that only moves the constraint somewhere else in the supply chain. By its very nature, these small shops can never serve "everyone" the way the big box retailers and flat pack builders can. It's not really a solution to the problem at hand.
Aren't those "constrants" and having people set up shop to solve them literally the most important and critical basic block of our western economies and are critical for social wellbeing? Why do you keep trying to paint this as a negative in response to essentially command economy the monopolies create?
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/07/19/stupidity-scales/
I think the article made a great point why big brands exist -- to deliver on the promise of unbridled growth, often leading to enshittification.
The experience suggests that they usually offload that to a third-party vendor to cut costs and we all know that does not track as good as small, family owned, locally sourced, your trustworthy shop.
True. Probably does not have to. A sufficiently wide distribution of such businesses is just as good.
A key problem is that when people make purchasing decisions, price ranks extremely high on the priority list, even when it will be costlier and worse for the consumer in the long run. Capitalism has found a thousand ways to exploit that inherent trait we all share, and we have to work damn hard to counteract it—-and most people won’t even know they should be making that effort.
A lifestyle business isn’t elitist, nor necessarily for elitist customers. It is in most people’s interest to invest in quality, but not everyone can afford it and even among those that do, the final price tag has an undue weight in the equation. (Not to mention that big brands are removing quality as an option even in the higher price ranges)