Selling Lemons

The ability for anyone to learn Photoshop or learn how to create a website, create a game, create anything, content or otherwise, and sell it on the marketplace for a quick cash grab has never been easier. I think most people set out to try with their best intentions and run into motivation issues and it just slips downhill from there - eventually being released because they have no choice. Maybe they think some of those downhill slides are good things. The issue still remains. Quality products get drowned out by inferior ones due to letting everyone participate.

There should be some sort of quality control / gate / barrier of entry to some of these things. The ultimate issue is "quality" is subjective.

Solution: make millions of brand names and write them on the product.

It's slightly more annoying and expensive for everyone involved, but it circumvents Amazon's policy.

One of our recommended products is made by a brand called DIWANGUS, which always gets a giggle. But they're good!

Has anyone bought the third brand to round out the discussion?

https://qz.com/apples-12-worst-product-failures-of-all-time-...

Not listed but I would absolutely list the screen nub a usability failure and I consider my work laptop and work phone a lemon because of it.

I’d also consider large phones a usability failure. My work phone is a Iphone 13 Mini.

Brand capture is powerful but maybe only if you’re willing to eat the propaganda.

If you get something more business-oriented, most of them are reasonable. They're not as good or as cheap as if you assembled it by hand, but they offer good discounts and benefits for businesses buying in bulk. They're often plenty powerful and well-specc'd for what you pay.

Gaming is different. 90% of the gaming pre-builts are complete garbage, because their buyers only buy one at a time and aren't well-informed, nor do they tend to have a lawyer on hand. They're poor value for money, sometimes use sub-standard parts or proprietary non-standard formats, are poorly configured, not well tested, etc.

I'd rather rely on online reviews. I'm pretty good at buying quality products sight unseen at this point. And with free returns, the risk is even lower.

What's actually happening is that China's manufacturing revolution has given us incredible access to cheap manufactured goods. So for instance, in the 1991 Sear's catalog an electric toothbrush costs $80 ( https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1991%20S... ). There are only brand name options. In terms of prevailing wages, that is about $200 in today's dollar. Now on Amazon you can get that same brand name toothbrush for $50, one quarter the price, or a nonsense-brand-name one for $10, 1/20th the price! One man's race-to-the-bottom is another's man paradise of inexpensive and abundant goods...

When China started making stuff so cheap, nobody wanted to buy a much more expensive brand-name Japanese or American or European made product. So even the brand names decided to move their production to China. But then gradually people learn there is no longer any brand name quality boost, and the Chinese manufacturers learn to sell direct to consumers, and so then you get the all the weird brand names, and consumers just buy those for cheaper since the brand names don't mean anything anymore anyways. And even if you wanted to introduce a higher quality version, there simply is no way to reliably educate the consumer and credibly prove to the consumer that your product is four times the durability at twice the price.

Thus the equilibrium is that for most products less than $100 its all going to be Chinese made, the product will be good enough that the consumer won't immediately return it, but other than that the quality is going to be mediocre, because there is no incentive to develop a brand name that stands for high quality products in that price range.

With more expensive goods, there are still are brands that pride themselves on high quality, durable products, eg, Toyota for cars, Bosch for appliances, Milwaukee for tools, Redwing for boots. But you have to do your research to know which brands are working to keep their reputation, and which brands are selling out.

I've felt this. A few years ago I bought Eddie Bauer sheets online and they pilled up so badly after one washing that I couldn't use them anymore.

I can see how they'd be willing to ship off cheap crap to Amazon whereas they'd be more protective of what they sell in their stores.

Amazon didn't even let me leave a negative review, some AI model must have decided I'm fraudulent. That would be especially ironic if the reason for my bad experience had been counterfeit products commingled with real ones.

I've observed this too.

Somewhere, some marketing genius realized that brand reception is sticky, but changes to manufacturing processes can be rapid. There is thus an arbitrage opportunity. You start with a high-quality product with a beloved brand. You quickly change the factory to cheaply produce garbage instead. For some window of time, you can get people to buy these shitty products at a price commensurate with their brand perception and take a huge profit.

Of course, brand perception is sticky but not infinitely so and eventually information catches up with reality. Then you've permanently destroyed a brand's reputation. But for a brief moment in time, you can create a lot of shareholder value at the minor expense of making crappy products and disappointing people.

The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting. An item is listed in the CATALOG if it is deemed: (1) Useful as a tool, (2) Relevant to independent education, (3) High quality or low cost, (4) Not already common knowledge, (5) Easily available by mail.

Save that last, the current iteration of the Internet, the actual whole-Earth catalogue, is itself an anti WEC. Rather than "access to tools", it is overwhelmingly "access to shit".

(I could also have listed the Sears Catalog, somewhat less-credible offerings such as Sharper Image or Brookstone, or any number of others. Costco is a current exemplar of this strategy, in that it selects quality merchandise, as does (or did) Marks & Spencer. Not necessarily cheap, but high value.

Three years later there are 18 guys selling the same glass bongs from Temu.

Curation is the answer.

It sucks that it drains the soul out of things, and that mass produced cheap variants can crush anyone trying to make quality things by hand.

On the upside I can get shitty custom art (If I need a victorian painting of my dog or something) for like $20. That would have been hundreds a few years ago, and maybe thousands 20+ years ago.

The act of "pickup" is creepy because it's based on a false pretense - establishing a human connection and trust quickly. Succes is guaranteed only for the sociopaths. Talking to people in real-life, without the help of technology is not creepy and doing it casually just for the sake of human contact is what all of us should be doing more. We would be able to filter out the "creeps" much easier if most people you get in contact with are normal human beings that are being nice to other human beings.

It doesn't scale, but that's the point. Direct competition is a loser's game.

This feels like a potential massive shift, seems fated to raise prices significantly & flood users with way way way more results.

It takes time for the participants to respond to the lemon market conditions, eg buyers to make purchases that are bad, so that they come to distrust the sellers, and then sellers with quality goods taking them elsewhere because the buyers are now pricing everything as if it's going to be a lemon.

The transition from healthy market to lemon market once the preconditions have been in place for enough time could reasonably be described as a "descent".

There's a very real phenomena where markets often start out functional and then descend into a market for lemons, and it has to do with game theory again. When the market is small and still growing, firms in it can count on repeat interactions. Even if your customers don't buy from you again, there are new customers, who often ask the existing customers what they should buy, and so you have an incentive to produce a good product. The information asymmetry that Akerlof describes doesn't exist, because actual experiences with the products quickly get conveyed to other market participants and incorporated into their purchase decisions.

But when the market matures, those repeat interactions (and prospect of future sales) decline. People who have repeated needs and vendors they can trust often exit the market and deal directly with their vendors. What's left are buyers who are not particularly well-connected and don't have a whole lot of information on past experiences with the product, but who trust the market as a whole. This is the kind of information asymmetry that breeds a market for lemons. Eventually all products start becoming crap, everyone who knows how to find non-crap exits the marketplace, and the market collapses.

do you know how they compare to manta btw

Hopefully, MZOO will establish word-of-mouth reputation much like Anker did.

The ultimate problem here is that MZOO's incentive to maintain their level of quality isn't very strong. There is little preventing them from slowly make their product cheaper and cheaper until they are delivering the same quality of those other brands. That would be the same process as enshittification. The primary difference is that enshittification can happen for other reasons such as a monopoly while a Market for Lemons is specifically because information asymmetry.

MZOO might be good now, but the economic incentives suggest they are just in the first stage of this process. It would take an owner committed to quality to not succumb to those incentives and it's impossible for us to know if MZOO has that type of owner.

As many have noted, this happened in the 1960s-1980s with Japan. My specific experience is with guitars: all kinds of random companies would buy mass-produced Japanese guitars, slap their own label on them, and sell them in their tiny music shops. Despite the disparate labels, the guitars were mostly coming out of the same handful of factories (Matsumoku et. al.). Of course there were exceptions like Yamaha. Some of the early examples were mediocre at best, but as the product landscape improved, many of the later examples from the 1970s and 80s are competitive with much more expensive guitars today. The only difference with today's landscape is that the Chinese manufacturers are starting to realize they can cut out the middleman. Imagine you were in the 1960s, pre-internet, trying to decide whether you should get a guitar from a brand name you recognized, like Decca, a record company, or some random Japanese company called "Yamaha".

Also, after a while you learn to spot the "Alibaba bulk" listings and can then decide whether you want to optimize for price and just buy the cheapest one that is exactly the same as all the others.