So it is often the case that today, you can get something for cheaper than you ever could in the past (albeit not at a great quality), and if you are willing to pay higher prices (but often about the same as you would have paid in the past), you can still get good or even better quality.
The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also gotten harder in many cases.
edit: found the video:
I argue you must evaluate against median purchasing power; it accounts for inflation and (lack of) wage increases.
Comments from your linked video:
> The problem with the “adjusted for inflation” argument is that it does not factor in buying power. The increase in wages has risen at out half the rate of inflation, so sure; $20 in 1975 would be $124 today, but the minimum wage in 1975 was $2.10 an hour as opposed to $7.25 today, giving you half the buying power you had 50 years ago.
> healthcare, housing, and education ... have increased by an insane margin leaving people with less money once that has been paid for (if at all).
> It's even worse when you consider that people are paying 45-55% of their monthly income on a house that cost 20x more than it would have in 1975. Your buying power is fucked from all sides.
For example, the comment you're citing is claiming that because minimum wage has increased only 3x over the same period of time in which inflation has eroded the relative value of a dollar by 6x, that wages overall have increased at half the rate of inflation. But minimum wage is a measurement of a minimum, while inflation is a measurement of /average/ price increase so they can't be compared 1:1 in this way.
The housing argument also seems odd. In New Zealand (where I'm from -- I'm not familiar with the US' housing market, so the commenter could be right about that geo!) house prices have increased by far more than 20x since the 70s, but the houses available are of substantially higher quality due to improved regulations (e.g. all newer homes are subject to healthy homes rules which mandate insulation) so just comparing inflation-adjusted home prices vs income doesn't tell the full story
(Aside from that, a whole heap of items like food, electronics, transportation are all both far cheaper AND higher quality today than in the 70s)
What I’d be interested to understand is whether changes to materials (be that buildings or home appliances) has caused an increase in the cost to manufacturer.
I’d wager most things have gotten cheaper to produce these days because the same improvements in technology that can be integrated into the product also applies to technology used to reduce the cost to manufacturer. Plus if wages are below inflation then any labour costs would have declined (relatively speaking) in that time too.
Median earnings were $48,070 in 1975, measured in 2024 dollars, and $51,370 in 2024.
CPI ignores the reality people feel (and swaps in cheaper items that aren't necessarily on par with the original to keep the number lower), gold isn't really a 1:1 with purchasing power...there must be some sort of useful composite metric that merges multiple data points over time like rental/house prices, CPI market basket, dollar vs hard assets like gold to come up with a more accurate number.
Insofar as gold impacts the cost of things people buy, it’s already included. Adding it directly to the CPI makes no more sense than adding Bitcoin or soybean futures.
The cost of housing is already is a massive component of the CPI.
Now do the same analysis but using median wage not minimum. YouTube comments are for entertainment purposes only.
A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners, or even start selling a slightly different product with the same model number.
Or you find a decent brand that makes good products, they get popular and grow and in come the MBAs with ideas on how to increase profits. Or they get bought by Private Equity and carry on only by brand momentum.
I think this is true, but for far less malicious reasons. Favourable reviews lead to popularity, which increases production pressures, which makes it harder to source quality materials and maintain a quality process while satisfying demand.
I have heard of several indie makers who, faced with sudden popularity, have to make the tough choice of speeding up the process at reduced quality (and thus dissatisfy customers) or be unable to fill orders (and thus dissatisfy customers). Everyone handles it differently but it's not pleasant for anyone.
My parents had silverware they liked, 10-ish years later we had lost or chipped a handful of them and they bought replacements. They look identical and feel identical…. Except the new ones clearly used lighter (read: cheaper) materials and then put a weight inside the handle to make them feel the same. The problem is that the weight is not attached well and can become detached and start sliding around making the handle rattle when you turn/invert it.
Just so irritating to know that effectively every product/brand will do this in the end.
"Suppose buyers cannot distinguish between a high-quality car (a "peach") and a low-quality car (a "lemon"). Then they are only willing to pay a fixed price for a car that averages the value of a "peach" and "lemon" together (pavg). But sellers know whether they hold a peach or a lemon. Given the fixed price at which buyers will buy, sellers will sell only when they hold "lemons" (since plemon < pavg) and they will leave the market when they hold "peaches" (since ppeach > pavg). Eventually, as enough sellers of "peaches" leave the market, the average willingness-to-pay of buyers will decrease (since the average quality of cars on the market decreased), leading to even more sellers of high-quality cars to leave the market through a positive feedback loop. Thus the uninformed buyer's price creates an adverse selection problem that drives the high-quality cars from the market. Adverse selection is a market mechanism that can lead to a market collapse."
And there's a perverse effect to that difficulty: even if you really want high quality, it can be so hard to be sure you're getting it that you give up and just by the cheapest thing, because at least then you know you're not getting taken advantage of (by buying crappy for premium prices).
It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available. It means that people who couldn't in the past afford something at all, are now more likely to have some path to getting it.
And even if you could afford the higher quality, you may not need it anyway. I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater.
But you're right, when you do need the higher quality, it can be tough to differentiate.
I've been burned too often with this thinking. All too often the cheap tool isn't just light duty so it breaks, it is not good enough to do the job at all. If the motor is too weak the tool won't do the job. If the wrench isn't precise enough it will round the bolt - this is worse than breaking: you can't fix the thing at all anymore with any quality of tool.
I don't need the best tools, but I need one that is enough quality to do the job, and the cheap tools generally fail.
Honestly I've not found that to be the case unless you're buying the bottom of the barrel most pot metal tools possible. I've bought numerous wrenches for 5x-10x less than the professional sets that don't slip and I could hang a 5 foot cheater bar off of and nothing broke.
I have a $35 dollar battery powered angle grinder that I've used and abused viciously and it's keeping up with the ones that cost $200+.
Once in a while you get “burned” and immediately end up buying two tools for the same job, but if that happens typically you can return it under retail warranty.
This is definitely the best advice I got way back in the day. I have a small collection of very high end tools I use quite often and abuse at least weekly. Or get use out of having the best quality available to me. But the vast majority of them get used a few times over a decade and sit in storage the rest of the time. I have zero use for a $1500 impact socket set. The $150 one does just fine, and I replace the two commonly used sizes I snap apart with expensive high quality versions while the others I may never use even once.
My power drill and impact driver? Best quality I could find and worth every penny. They bring me value just in the joy I get using them over the cheap stuff.
The result is that I, like others, spend too much on crappy products.
The price tags on tools don't go down with time, but the quality of the tools certainly does.
I'm all for tiering product lines, harbor freight is doing it right by offering their top-of-the-line in the Hercules brand, a "pretty good for non contractor" line with Bauer, and then there's lower tiers for one-offs. But if I look for, and buy, a Porter Cable tool, I'm buying it because I expect a certain performance and quality, but it's in fact a rug pull right now. That should be fraud.
The problem is that there is no way for consumers to know whether they are getting the good version or the shit version. This creates a structural incentive to not produce good versions since consumers will assume that the good version is just an over-priced shit version (because the expensive version is often just an over-priced shit version)
Same seems to be true in that video you linked. And when you buy an equivalently-priced product today, it's better than it was 50 years ago. I only skipped through the video though.
The problem I have is that there's no easy way to go to an ecommerce marketplace and pick "I want to spend more for higher quality". You have to do your own external research.
Amazon has everything, but I don't want everything. I want someone to the comparisons for me so decide what is good enough. Reviews are worthless - even when not a scam (which many are), most people buy one and so they can only report it works they don't know how it compares to some other model that they didn't buy.
It's the opposite of amazon, where not only do I have no trust in anything, everything feels adverserial. If I'm not vigilant, I will get hosed. I find it extremely unpleasant.
Another factor of purchasing in "the old days", particularly for Sears, was that it was usually quite easy to get replacements for faulty products. None of this business of packaging things up, mailing them away and waiting. Walk up to the counter, show that the item was nonfunctional, and a cheery salesperson would go out back and get a new one for you. Sometimes they didn't even ask for a receipt. Sears had products that were "good enough", and they wanted customers to keep coming back. Of course it didn't last, but that wasn't just this particular company.
It's not just that it's difficult for a purchaser to determine the balance between price and quality on a given product, that difficulty is deliberate. It goes well beyond the Boots Theory of Economic Unfairness[1]. Vast fortunes are extracted from a public who would make different (and arguably better) purchasing choices if they were not deceived by those who profit from the deception. It's become normalized, which does not change that the process of wealth transfer via deception (fraud under color of law) is destructive to law, society, and pretty much any sort of real public good.
Not even isolated to ecommerce, really. This is everything now. The cars you shop for, half on the lot were made by a different OEM and are rebadged and sold by this one. Clothing is a fucking mess, both in terms of quality and sizing. Corporate consolidation is a ludicrously under-discussed issue and one of the bigger reasons everything just kind of sucks now.
It's one of the things that keeps me with Apple really, for all the warts, at least I know what I'm fucking buying.
First, it's not an easy question to answer, especially for products with many qualities. For example, qualities of a kitchen knife: looks, ergonomics, steel type, ease of sharpening, edge retention, handle materials, grind, shape, thickness, weight, weight distribution, ease of maintenance, etc. Some qualities are opposed and some are subjective, so you can't "max out" a knife's qualities.
Second, even for unitask items, like a fire extinguisher, a store exists to make money. They'll always push you towards items with highest margins.
Actually the speeeed guys, now. They left because Donut went to shit after getting purchased by Private Equity. Surprise, surprise.
> Someone in the industry pushed back on an earlier version of this piece with a fair point: VF Corp's brands still operate with their own design teams and their own headquarters. The brands aren't literally merged. And the premium tiers within North Face and JanSport still use quality materials. The Summit Series from TNF still has Cordura. You can still find a JanSport with YKK zippers if you know where to look.
> All of that is true. But it actually makes the argument worse, not better.
(emphasis mine)
> The fact that VF Corp kept the premium tiers intact while degrading the entry-level and mid-range products means this was a deliberate segmentation strategy. They still make the good version. They just also sell a garbage version under the same trusted name, in the same stores, to the people who don't know the difference. The brand reputation built by decades of quality products is now being used to move cheap products to buyers who trust the logo.
> Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to.
Admittedly, they still equate higher price with quality, but it doesn't change much about the problem that economies of scale degenerate into market failure when there is no real competition anymore.
This is what so many don't understand, especially among the youth / reddit crowd. They expect their $25 jeans to be equivalent quality to the $25 or even $100 jeans from 60 years ago, for some reason. There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
There's also very few people who understand just how expensive things were back then, likely a result of having infinite cheap crap available. They don't know that in 1970, in today's money, a fridge was ~$4000, a burger and fries was $17, and a typical dress was $350. The only thing that has changed is that there are now options for cheap shitty things. You can still buy a very nice $4000 fridge if you want to.
But so many things did become cheaper and better: computers, availability and quality [1] of the music I can physically buy, the energy efficiency of modern fridges, the speed and safety of modern cars. Even my milk lasts impossibly long without spoiling.
If the replacement laptop battery I can buy today for ~$50 is leagues ahead of anything available in the 70s, then why aren't jeans and backpacks also miles ahead of what was available back then? No wonder the younger crowd is confused.
[1] Yes, CDs are objectively better than vinyl. Whether the audio mastering has kept up is a different topic.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mcdonalds-old-photos/ shows a menu at McDonalds from the early 1970s. A hamburger and fries was $0.63 or (assuming 1970 and adjusting for inflation) $5.36 now. A quarter pounder and fries was $1.27, or $10.81 now. Add $0.15 or $0.20 for a soda ($1.28 or $1.70).
That's a lot less than $17. Add $1.28
To double check, in 1983 a hamburger and fries was $1.82 - https://archive.org/details/ucladailybruin92losa/page/n542/m... .
That corresponds to $6.03 now.
What sort of hamburger places were you thinking of that charged 3x the price of McDonald's, and do they only charge $17 now?
Read More: https://www.tastingtable.com/1817109/big-mac-price-compariso...
The Internet Archive claims to have Sears Catalogues from many years including 1970. If we check out Spring/Summer 1970, we can see that they actually have the first 33 pages of a catalogue that prominently advertises "index begins on page 391".
Disappointing.
That said, a women's dress from those first 33 pages costs $11, or about $100 in today's money.
It's less an implicit feeling, and more explicitly what's being marketed to us. Think about AI. It's being marketed that it will make everything better and cheaper. Computers before that. Machines before that. All kinds of things in between.
I don't doubt this is possible, especially if these technologies are properly democratized, but greed gets in the way, of course. No one wants to sell you just one fridge at a respectable mark up. These tools don't really go into making a better fridge, per se, but finding what you're willing to and how frequently you're willing to replace it and design planned obsolescence around that. They add subscription features. They want you to log into your fridge to track and sell your behavior, etc.
But don't we see this everywhere, all the time? Pull up any of the recent Claude Code threads about the product's declining quality and you'll see at least a handful of well-upvoted comments about how text generators are definitely going to get cheaper while simultaneously getting "better" over time.
It's kind of like China after Tiananmen where the promise is quality of life will go up in exchange for nobody talks/questions.
If capitalism can't deliver on it's promise (more and more people don't feel that it is) then we need to have a talk.
https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/
But it turns every decision into an exhausting research and optimization project.
The other big modern problem would be repair-ability. A lot of the old 1950s products might not be any better once you adjust for inflation but a LOT of them are significantly cheaper and easier to repair.
There was a brief window in time where price would be a useful signal. Among all cheap crap, good quality did cost but also deliver. Then someone figured they can leverage branding to sell crap for the price of good quality items, and now even if you're willing to spend money you can't be sure you're actually getting the good stuff.
Buying not maybe the cheapest but the second cheapest is more expensive overall but unfortunately also more manageable.
People used to study the items they were buying, not look at the brand.
You (probably) live in a hyper capitalistic society where many corporations promote their brands through lies and deception. That is a very strong filter already - avoid the (mostly American) transnational giant corporations and buy from companies that are mostly local and aren’t hyperscaling.
Sure the mainstream brands are shit but there are dozens, hundreds of brands for a fair price point that aren’t for every shitty corporation.
Don’t buy Levi’s, buy Nudies.
I often searched BIFL sub-reddit to find things quality things and it did fail me in the past. After years of broken dishware created a weird collection, I followed the BIFL advice and bought Corelle glass dishes. Only three years later of daily heavy use and dishwasher all the dishes have degraded edge, which looks and feels just like chipped glass.
Looking through specialized forums helps sometimes, but then you are looking at Hermès dishware and doubting what are you paying for - quality or art.
But with the advent and advances of several decades, aren't you supposed to be able to get better quality for cheaper today?
I understand this logic, but the flaw here is that you are only considering bare functionality, not quality of function. This comes up a lot in small appliances and things like power tools, but is especially relevant in the kitchen. It's not only that you can perform a task better with a better quality product, it's that the result of the task is better for you. What do I mean by that? Well most cheaper products heavily utilize plastics, and shed microplastics due to friction wear during operation, where-as better quality products typically have more metal and glass construction and are designed with more isolation between the result of the task and the machine performing it.
The attitude you have here is common, and not necessarily incorrect from one perspective, but it is driving things like fast fashion and the proliferation of plastic on plastic contact in food prep in home kitchens, two of the highest contributing factors to microplastics ingestion, which is a problem that has strong correlations to population-scale hormonal imbalances, as well as key growing diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Our society is literally contributing to killing ourselves in order to shave a few pennies per-unit off basic everyday tools and conveniences.
The vitamix has been thoughtless for me in 6 years of daily use other than sharpening the blade every so often and replacing the bearing for the blade once (both easily done by me at home). I wake up bleary eyed, throw my stuff in there, and let it eat for a minute while I get my coffee going. The ninja on the other hand did a consistently worse job, required me to remove it and shake the contents of the blender, and then randomly fried itself one day in a way that I had no chance at fixing and scrambled my breakfast plans for multiple days. What's daily frustration worth for a half decade of my life? At least to me, a lot more than the premium to get the better tool.
It seems it's a revealed preference that most people really don't care that much about quality, or there would exist a host of companies like Consumer Reports to meet the demand. Complaining on social media about enshittification and evil corporations does not put skin in the game.
I myself constantly complain about the atrocious quality of most consumer software products, but I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to pay for a subscription to an independent testing report.
If that is so - the rest of your points become invalid.
The second sense is more insidious. Sometimes companies deliberately obfuscate the source and identity of products, making it difficult to even know if a product you saw a review of is the same product you'll get if you buy it now. I believe companies also do this simply to make price comparison impossible.
This is an abominable practice, and in my view should be extremely illegal. I'm very much a free market guy, but clearly labeling and identifying the products you sell should be a bare minimum requirement to gain access to any market.
One of the main points of the article is you cannot rely on the brand to determine quality. The marketers know how to exploit a reputation for quality and information asymmetries to push crappy goods, for instance:
> Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to.
And this:
> People who do get warranty replacements report receiving bags that are worse than the one they sent in. Thinner fabric. Cheaper hardware. You mailed back a 2016 JanSport and got a 2025 JanSport, and those are fundamentally different products.
When you Google, are you reading a rave review of a 2016 bag, when the 2026 model has been crapified? Is the bag you're looking at on Amazon the Walmart JanSport or the REI JanSport?
It pushes sponsors links and garbage top-ten lists with Amazon sponsored links and other seo optimized content and none of it can be trusted.
People commonly use a reddit tag to search for products, so companies started creating accounts to shill for their products there too, make it look organic and all.
You can't find the best of any product in two minutes on Google, not with any confidence.
On what criteria are you evaluating trustworthiness? Because if you are finding it on google, you are effectively judging on SEO and marketing spend.
Sure, there are some more-or-less trustworthy review outlets, but those too often go to shit when editorial priorities change from on high (i.e. newwire cutter is a pale shadow of its former self)
If you don't know a reviewer who is trustworthy, how can you find one? There's enormous amounts of slop (both human and generated -- this was already a problem before the last couple years), and when some channel has signal, it attracts more noise generators. The subreddit or review site is only useful until it's well known, and then there's increasing pressure on mods or owners to cash in.
The immediately obvious path here is paying for the reviews or recommendations directly, like Consumer Reports, but there are two major problems with that:
first, the amount consumers can afford to pay doesn't support the additional cost of actually buying all the units and exhaustively testing them, when CR and similar sites are competing against supplier-supported sites, and
second, if you care about specific features or aspects of a product, it's unlikely that the reviewer tested that specifically.
I wish I knew of a good solution. In reality, what's probably going to mitigate in the short term is having your agent scour all the available information and make recommendations, at comparatively great expense.
I'd echo what one of the other commenters here said about AER and Cotopaxi. Although I have to say wearing my Cotopaxi Alppa 35l feels like a small child is trying to drag me to the floor compared to the comfort of having the AER straps on my back for the travel pack. I still love both though.
But I feel like Aer also tends to include features or materials that are just not designed for BIFL longevity. Two that jump to mind are the PU coatings on a lot of their zippers and their use of elastic straps as the main way to secure water bottles (but they might be moving away from the elastic on their newest bags). Both of those feel like they have a much more limited lifespan (relative to some of the other aspects of the bags).
My year-ish old backpack gave out so I recently committed to extensively researching and buying a new set of travel + tech bags that will last me basically forever, and I've been very happy with my purchases from these brands.
The Farpoint is a case in point. I have an older one where the mini-backpack actually zipped onto the bigger one, and had a proper lifting handle integrated for lifting when it's lying flat (among other niceties). I accidentally left butter in it, and the smell was so bad that no amount of cleaning would expunge it. I just bought another one.
Absolute SHIT quality compared to my old one, the mini backpack now buckled rather pathetically to the big one, and no more solid handles (except the top one). Structural integrity is WEAK.
Needless to say I spent a LOT of time and effort cleaning up my old Farpoint, which I'm now using again. The "new" one? Sitting in storage along with the rest of my buyer's remorse.
I wonder if that coincides with their purchase by Helen Of Troy.
I'm also a Red Oxx guy. Love my Sky Train backpack when I'm flying out. They quote a "no bull" warranty, and their CEO suggests to "be sure to include them in your will."
https://www.redoxx.com/products/sky-train-convertible-backpa...
Top 1st-level comment tree involves passionate, math-based analyses of several decades of economic adjustments. Redefinitions of inflation adjustments ad nauseum; a math geek's approach to social sciences - which is not the subject of the article at all.
2nd 1st-level comment is a response to the title alone: a current, good backpack brand, with really no relevance to the subject of the article at all.
I doubt it, you didn't write about this! You prompted it and signed your name to it.
Pretty ironic on an article about quality products being replaced by cheaper ones.
Don't you find it incredibly grating that every paragraph grinds to a halt while 3 sentence fragments are repeated? Same rhetorical devices. Same tone. Same pointless constructions.
That's not good writing. It's cheap parlour tricks.
The rhythm continues almost as though the writing is in verse—with the effect of hypnotizing the reader so they don't notice nothing is being said at all. The result? Skimmable prose. Digestible reading. Shareable content.
It's not just bad style. It's actually rotting your brain. And if you can't notice that, maybe you weren't reading at all.
Good to know they hire that kind of incompetence at Palantir. It makes them less effective.
LinkedIn:
> Strategic Partnerships @ Palantir | AI Strategy
If the author _were_ aware of specifics, they could have just written the article. A list of bullet points would be better.
It's almost as if they made the article Worse, on Purpose.
> Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.
> That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above
> None of this shows up on the shelf. The colors are right. The logos are crisp. The product photography is excellent. You discover what you actually bought three months in, when the stitching pulls apart at every stress point.
Its thing X. Its thing Y. Its thing Z. And now I'm going to tell you about thing Q in a longer sentence.
Some other common things (not present in this article) that are dressed up lists are short titled paragraphs, and sequences of sentences that go "blah blah blah: blah blah blah."
Very little opinion added anywhere, but the punchy writing style where everything is given an overdone monotone overimportance masks it a little.
Pure infodump is not terrible for some things but I'd much rather it be less heavily processed by the LLM, and be upfront about the fact that it's a dressed up infodump with an LLM involved.
It quite well can be (and I think it is) stylistic writing, hammering the message home by repetition of blows.
I think it's also the reuse of the same strategy repeatedly throughout the article. I think most human writers often feel put off if they use the same literary device too much.
That backpack is currently at college with my son, who used it all through high school as well. It is by far the oldest and most durable daily-use object I’ve ever owned.
In 2004 I was very young and all my income came from summer jobs, so I got a backpack from Walmart. It was one of their nicer models, had a lot of features and looked pretty good. IIRC it cost $20. I had worked all summer to save for an MP3 player, and 2 months after getting that backpack I getting off a bus, when I realized there was already a hole in the bottom of the bag. My MP3 player (a creative zen micro) had slipped out of the bag, and someone had already picked up my MP3 player and walked away with it. Adjusted for inflation I spent over $500 on that MP3 player. Even as an avid backpacker, I have not spent that much on fairly nice packs.
In 2007 I splurged and paid $100 for a backpack from Deuter, and I also felt a lot of guilt as that was a huge amount of money for me at the time for something like a backpack. It's been nearly 20 years, it's not just that the backpack is still working, it still functions virtually like new. None of the seams are stretching, even though it's been through incredible overstuffing and abuse. All of the zippers are smooth as silk, and even the cushioning on the straps and airflow offsets on the back are still supple and supportive.
I think Targus stopped making this model (maybe a trend towards smaller laptops), hopefully this one will keep working for a while before I need to find a good replacement.
I'm 48 and not only do I still have it, it still looks like new, with no real care taken of it - wear it, put it away. The only issue I had was the liner in one arm pit started to unstitch a couple of inches, and a tailor took care of it in 20 minutes for $10 a decade ago.
Good lightweight backpacks are not that durable. I have 12 years old 1.5 pound osprey, still in use, but age really shows.
The reason they were able to buy all those backpack brands is because each of those brands were not making much money running a backpack company selling quality at a reasonable price. The purchaser makes some money leeching value out of the brand reputation, but then that brand value falls because of the crappy product, and they sell the brand because they leeched all the value out of it.
This is only possible because you can’t make much money selling quality for a good price. Consumers will pick lower quality for the cheapest price every time.
This obsession with ever increasing revenue is a major source of our worse and worse consumer economy.
The bags I bought 15 years ago were made locally in San Francisco - Timbuk2 and Chrome - and had a reputation for quality. Now both brands are mainly produced overseas, but have been replaced by two other local brands with ties to the originals - Rickshaw and Mission Workshop.
There is still plenty of competition in the backpack market if you just visit an outdoors store instead of walmart. That's a higher end market though, which is where most high quality small/medium businesses flourish.
It leads to enshitification due to short term thinking but in the short term seems like a good decision.
I think the problem today is that it's extremely difficult to tell when you're buying quality or a brand. If there's a 40$ and a 100$ backpack, often the 100$ version does not actually have meaningfully improved quality - just better marketing.
The same goes for tons of products - brands nowadays are something companies build while they're young and relentlessly smash into the ground as they age because the value you're destroying isn't obvious. Shareholders get good results, and objectively it's probably the correct financial decisions for the company - doesn't make it any less shit.
This comes up a lot with washing machines and I sympathize with parts of it, why not standardize control boards more or other components in the machine but one of the biggest issues is simply the cost of labor in places like the US is high enough that it’s hard to make it cost effective to repair.
At least if you buy the cheapest one you know you are at least saving money up front.
When the base labor charge is already 10% or more of the total replacement cost it becomes hard to justify the repair.
In particular, how durable do people think backpacks need to be? If you are going through them particularly quickly, maybe you are over loading compared to what they were designed for?
> A $200 bag that lasts ten years: $20 per year. Already cheaper. At fifteen years, which the well-built ones consistently do, you're at $13 per year.
This ignores the money you would earn by not giving money upfront. A 23$ expense every year is cheaper than 200$ upfront over 10 years, because you will earn 15 euros over that 170 Euro first year if you put it in S&P500. And then 12 nect year and and 10 in third year and you are already ahead of the 200 Eurro bag. And you just dont spend time in warranty. Just throw it away dn buy next one for 35 Euros.
The more expensive choice now is an investment into not buying future bags, and the future returns on that investment should be discounted.
Fwiw, my elementary kid is on year 3 with her Lands End pack (which is way crappier than the Lands End / Eddie Bauer / LL Bean school packs from the 80s-00s), and my two older kids use Osprey Nebula packs in high school -- both also on year three. The Osprey packs are terrific, but would be overkill for a younger kid, and we purchased them mostly because our kids bike to school and needed something that would comfortable carry 20+ lbs of crap.
At various points in my life I've needed:
- A huge backpack, then a small one
- Water bottle holders weren't important, then they were
- Straps I could tighten to hold a yoga mat weren't important, then they were
- A laptop slot wasn't important, then it was critical
Plus my preference in color has changed, as well as my aesthetic preferences.
Paying $200 for a backpack would be insane when I'll have different needs in a few years anyways. I buy cheap-ish backpacks, I've never had a zipper or seam fail on me before I needed to buy a new one for a different reason anyways. Or it was just stolen/lost.
My general life philosophy is to buy the cheapest thing that meets my needs generally, replace as necessary (since I often need to replace/upgrade for functional reasons anyways), and buy a very few expensive high-quality items that I know are actually worth it. Like a mid-tier espresso machine, a good leather jacket, quality boots, a decent home speaker, and... I'm honestly struggling to think of anything else.
It’s like regressive taxation but carried out by capitalists.
That was my first time ever dealing with such a high-end product and a lifetime warranty.
Just sharing because it was a good experience.
I love their camera straps and clips too, everything just works nicely together.
The design is a little dorky, especially now that every techbro in SF has one, but my god that thing has pockets and little details in all the right places. Been using mine for years and looks almost new.
One downside of high quality gear: Velomacchi (motorcycle bags/backpacks) seems to have gone out of business. Been using their stuff for almost 10 years. Feels indestructible, works great, but I’m never getting a replacement and I guess any warranty lasts only as long as the company …
And the 45L variant is the biggest thing you can use as a carry-on.
https://www.peakdesign.com/products/travel-backpack?Size=45L...
I've never spent $300 on a backpack before. It kinda stung. It's well-thought-out though. I've had it five years and it's been through a lot.
The FAQ says to hand-wash it which is annoying though. There's no way you're gently washing out the sort of grime that my human oil leaves on the straps from real use, like clinging to your bare shoulders during a long sweaty trip through Mexico.
So I feel a lil mischievous tossing the thing into the washing machine every year. Same way I feel using an alcohol wipe on my Macbook screen.
That said, I've only had it a year and it's clearly not new anymore. Paint wear on the rivets, for example. I expect it'll be in rough shape when it's accumulated as many miles as the travel bag it's partially replacing.
But the lightweight hiking guru made ultralight backpacks, with thin material and very minimal extras. It was designed to be light by a guy who could sew, so he was happy to fix it as needed on the trail. To him that was a feature not a bug. Meanwhile the company that bought the brand and design necessarily made it more robust, feature-full, and twice as heavy. They were pretty much forced to by the number of returns they were getting.
So now I treasure my old backpack that worseonpurpose would probably deplore, and keep it repaired so that I don't have to make another or go buy one that worseonpurpose would probably like better.
Your average backpack consumer is a different breed. Cosmetic designs, logos, colors, and generic pockets are key marketing traits of consumer backpacks and small rips or tears are seen as reasons to replace the backpack.
I have two proper backpacks, an old UK made Karimor Jaguar from the late 80s and an OMM Classic 32 I bought recently. Although the Jag is pretty good shape considering its age it's the OMM that I reach for now.
The OMM is actually modern take on an old Karimor design from 1973 but if you take all the removable bits off it comes in at around 380g. That's almost 1.5Kg lighter than my old backpack. For short weekend trips that's a massive saving.
I seem to remember a story about Atom Packs and Aiguille Alpine. Aiguille make really tough packs for mountain rescue teams to throw equipment in. Atom Packs was founded to use slightly less robust but lighter materials for through hikers by a lad who did his apprenticeship Aiguille.
I think their merit in both approaches and I like the trade offs depending on use cases.
EDIT: I've just noticed that Aiguille now do "light" weight versions of their packs in 420D nylon. What I like about that is they are actually cheaper instead of charging a premium for thinner materials (hand made prices but still).
Nice. Karrimor backpacks (or rucksacks/daypacks as we called them back then) were the high water mark--I worked in the industry in the 80s and, in the tone of the article, it's very sad to see what's happened to Karrimor and Berghaus today, but back then they drove one another to new heights. I was always a fan or Lowe's stuff, who were the other UK giant.
All three brands were let down by the waterproof layers whcih after about ten years would degrade in horrible ways. Prior to the 90s this was less of a problem.
Aiguille are great. Probably the best bags around now. They will also make them to fit. When I was selling bags, fit was a big issue and if you made out that one size fitted all that would be seen as a sign of cheapness/cost cutting/lack of attention to detail. Karrimor and Berghaus both did their flagship bags in different back lengths, and companies competed hard on the diffent fitting systems.
They can pick one of their backpack brands to keep (and eliminate/sell off the rest), or they can tack "VF" onto the front of each brand name, or something like that. A customer shouldn't have to dig into the fine print or do research to know whether two products are from the same manufacturer.
It reminds me of EIG (Endurance International Group), who at least at one point owned a large portion of major mainstream webhosts (including Arvixe, Bluehost, Hostgator, A Small Orange, Site5...). They "streamlined" them all into one big operation, with reliability and customer support going to shit for every host they bought. But they kept all the brands separate, so people kept bouncing from host to host, wondering why they were all so shit, not realising that they never actually switched providers.
If it isn’t, I know there’s a good chance they’re cheaping out on other places as well.
Anyway, VF also bought Timberland and, by proxy, Smartwool. They absolutely tanked both brands.
Originally created by a bike courier who sick of bags breaking sewed a bag out of the toughest material he could get, marine canvas. To this day they make somewhat indestructible, well designed, trendy well loved bags.
Also they have a lifetime warranty and repair policy that is very hard to beat. Maybe you’re not local, but you can tell these will be well made (and they really are)
https://www.crumpler.com/pages/repair
Not sure if they ship to the US. But worth a look if you are serious about excellent well made well design backpacks.
https://www.crumpler.com/collections/backpacks
I know so many Aussie tech folk who swear by the Crunpler Entity as their laptop bag of choice.
https://www.crumpler.com/products/entity?variant=44393825992...
That bag is built like a tank. Still ticking along, a little scuffed up, but zero issues. If you're carting around a few thousand dollars worth of delicate gear, it definitely offers some serious peace of mind.
I feel like there's another component: that the consumer base has become so detached from making things in general. We are surrounded in ever more stuff, ever more material, but collectively are out of touch with making things, with material, and assemblage there-of.
Our culture's perspective is as critic, as shopper, as buyer. Sure few of us were expect shoemakers or backpack makers, but people around us were industrious, did provide labor to make goods that people around them bought. The cycle of production had been directly apparent.
This is low key one of the things I really had hope for for a while with 3d printers: that they opened up & exposed what is. That they would be a force to spread insight & to regard the little mechanisms and means of the world all around us. I think that's a little bit true, but it's pretty niche, and I expect most prints are for static parts; no movement or dynamic behavior. And it's somewhat the anti-process: crafter in a box. It's still amazing but barring major changes, I have over indexed.
It's also worth noting the role of DMCA anti-cirumvention laws in casting mankind out of ever coming to grasp with what makes up the world. The combined legal and technological destruction of any right to repair is really not just about repair: it's an obstruction to humans understanding the world around them. We cannot become savvy in the world when the government tells us that business's right to keep us from knowing the world outstrips any mankind-the-toolmaker / natural scientist role/title/god-bourne nature, that cutting us off from the universe & living in ignorance is a hard cast legal binding fact. I find this to be as fallen as it comes. How do we stay alive as the race we were when our laws unwind the fantastic graces of inquiry the gods saw fit to give us?
But I had a Swiss Gear backpack that was fantastic, and it lasted me nearly a decade. It was originally purchased at a Target. It was versatile and I could take it anywhere. It had little grommets to pass-through earphone cords and such. It survived even through several washes in a washing machine.
Then at a thrift store, I found a Swiss Gear suitcase. It has wheels and a telescoping handle. It expands very nicely. I have it stored away and still haven't found occasion to use it.
I also picked up a Swiss Gear laptop bag with a "messenger bag" shoulder strap. These I found at Office Depot. It's really nice. It has a velcro fastener to secure the laptop itself. It has mesh pockets for all kinds of accessories. If I don't put in a laptop, it can carry documents, folders, or binders. It's been very durable.
It does seem like Swiss Gear are now directly represented in Canada (rather than being represented by a third party, like they were a decade ago), and their backpacks now have a five-year warranty. But I guess my point is: if you don't live in the US, make sure that the things that a brand is famous for hold true in your region, too.
Minus some fraying at the base of the front pouch, it's as good as new. I've been very happy with it.
When you're first getting into a new craft/hobby and need a specific tool, get the cheapest one you can buy. When you're first starting out, you probably don't really know how to judge quality, and you don't have a good sense for what features/enhancements you actually need (not to mention, you may or may not know you're actually going to stick with the hobby at all).
By the time that first cheap one breaks, or you gain some experience/skill and hit your frustration limit with it, you'll have a much better understanding of what you want out of the tool and will be better position to pick out the "best" version to suit your needs.
If it is, it isn’t by much. The difference between $200 paid now versus 7 times $35 = $245 over a period of ten years is about 5 years of interest over $200. At 4% interest, that’s about $40.
This rhymes. Recently, I took my iPhone 16 Pro in to swap out the screen (there was an ever growing dead spot, and they handled it free of charge). Unfortunately, the screen they replaced it with is much more fragile – hairline fractures within days. I know the replacement screen is of lesser structural quality, but I can't prove it. I've had iPhones since the day they debuted in 2007(?), and this moment connected the dots across years of screen replacements. The original is always much more durable.
But again, sadly I can't prove it.
It's hard to not feel like the durability is decreasing.
Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
Metal hooks, lace-weave and thread, leather, glue - I wonder how much they save, but I have bought my last pair.
VIBRAM boots and soles.
There definitely are BOM- and manufacturing reduction movements in these mature products but backpacks honestly don't seem nearly as bad as (eg) walking boots.
The Worse On Purpose article on power tools follows a similar tack. Offshore manufacturing, corporate consolidation and cheaper processes don't actually make the overall picture worse when we have affordable tools packing modern lithium batteries and brushless neodymium motors.
It's been through sand, mud, dust and just shakes the abuse off like nothing.
I do wish half the time though that I'd bought a 40L GR2 though.
But I main got it because I’m a relatively large guy with broad shoulders and other bags pinched my neck. I was given a Timbuk2 pack from work that I otherwise liked, but the straps were too close together. I could either wear it high on my back and have them mash my neck all day, or low on my back wear it’s much harder to carry weight.
(Side note to everyone: wear your backpack as high as possible when it’s even moderately loaded. When I see someone on BART with a huge backpack slung down by their hips, my back aches sympathetically. You want the heaviest load up between your shoulders.)
Edit: I also keep glancing at the 40L GR2, but it's just FOMO. Great bags, but huge. I don't want to schlep something that size to the office, and definitely not on some of the trails we hike.
But granted, I wouldn't want to be hauling that around every day either, it's just more convenient for the overall pack.
I've noticed, without exception, across clothing, backpacks, and appliances that the next iteration is more cheaply made:
- Thinner fabrics
- Less stitching
- And on appliances and other tools, more plastic parts where they used to be metal.
My latest <LredactedG> washer has a newly plastic mounting bracket that appears designed to fail within a decade due to vibration. Even the metal backing is thinner that the previous generation.
What is really irritating is that sometimes we see the same thing within a single brand (we have a garbage entry-level item and a top tier item which is good).
https://www.tombihn.com/blogs/main/fall-2025-factory-update-...
I used to sell outdoor equipment. If a brand cheaps out on zippers, I wouldn't trust it.
I really like my Patagonia Black hole mini MLC. Awesome access. Fits under an airplane seat. Generous laptop padding. Excellent zippers. Water bottle pocket. Lovely warranty (Patagonia store nearby often gives new product when I try to get product repaired).
3 of 4 zippers are broken after few years of usage.
Do you know a better zipper?
I don't see how it could be a surprise to anyone paying attention that a JanSport backpack doesn't deliver on quality. Perhaps there's more to the story but I got to the second AI slop one-liner and gave up.
Why do smartphones barely outlive their warranty period? Check the statistics on how long most people keep their phone before voluntarily replacing it, and it makes a lot more sense. Why invest in the premium components and workmanship to make your phone last 5 years, if 95% of your customers will not use it for more than 18 months? (These numbers are made up, but from what I remember, the reality is not far off from that).
I could totally believe a similar thing being at play for backpacks, jackets, shoes, etc. where the people who keep their stuff long enough to even notice it falling apart are a maybe vocal, but small minority.
https://www.savotta.fi/collections/backpacks
They're expensive, but last a lifetime or more.
Why? Over the last twenty years, many high end backpack designs have moved towards lighter weight materials and construction, because of trends in the world of backpacking.
This means that even in the high end segment of the market, comparing packs to ones from decades ago can be misleading - they are working with different design goals.
None of this eliminates the points about cheaper materials and construction at the lower end of the market, but it does make things a bit more complex than they need to be if a different example was used to illustrate all this.
I've been using an Ikea Varldens for the past 6-8 years. Very efficient for my use case (2 work laptops, groceries, travel luggage, documents and earbud case, tools). It has a couple of nice small compartments and a single large one so it's very light for the size and material. Until now the only thing that's annoyed me was the long straps when riding a motorcycle, so I ran cable ties through the loops to stop them from slapping my hands and sides. It's seen quite a bit of abuse and it's still intact. It's even practically waterproof.
I use it every week, it shows no signs of degradation over approximately a decade. Huge beefy zippers, tons of pockets and organization for those who are into that.
I paid like $200, but seems like they're cheaper now. Hopefully not because of the reasons in the article. At the time, I believe they were a small company from the state my layover was in--maybe Colorado.
Existing products are cheaply made and poor quality, so a new company emerges producing a higher quality product. Eventually word gets out and their sales blow up. But to keep their profits going up, they begin to coast and cut corners. Fast forward a decade or two, and now they're the ones making low quality gear, leaving the market open for a new high quality brand.
In short, high quality leads to recognition and growth, and then cutting corners leads to profit.
It was looking a bit sad and dusty so I upgraded to a fancier looking Bellroy that cost twice as much. When it arrived I instantly knew it was going back. It felt cheap, it looked cheap, and the compartment layout did not feel at all utilitarian.
I get that this says something we might believe, but I don't think it's a good use of our time to engage with engineered nerd-bait that probably wasn't produced in good faith.
I just bought an Eddie Bauer fleece. I own three, well four. The fourth is going straight back. It is garbage. Eddie Bauer is one of the brands that got bought and now rents out the label.
It's bait and switch on global, organised scale and it's almost impossible to fight except on an individual level.
This is private equity in a nutshell, really. This is what every single PE leveraged buyout ultimately ends up doing. Take a beloved brand, or better yet (in this case) a group of related beloved brands, cut costs, and reap the profit margins until the brand dies.
Their schoolbags were pretty great in the 2000s, too. Withstood some serious abuse, though their zippers were notably on the decline. But that was covered by warranty, so it was fine. By the mid 2010's, they were in full decline, and that's about when I stopped recommending their stuff.
OTOH, I haven't thought of Jansport as a go-to brand for a serious backpack in 30+ years ...
For backpacks, my Waterfield pack has held up fantastically across several years of regularly absolutely stuffing it with gear for my work travel.
I can't speak for everyone else but this isn't what I'm doing when I compare two backpacks. I'm comparing two different backpacks for their features and design. I don't really consider the brand name attached or care who owns it.
- here is an idea for the next post: AAA gaming got worse on purpose. Dont forget to mention anti consumer practices by EA and Ubisoft when you are at it
Trust will be arbitraged until there are few information asymmetries to exploit.
The sale of the high quality brand allows the original entrepreneurs to exit their business to someone that thinks they can run it more efficiently. The decline in quality allows for innovative upstarts to try new things.
Shoulder strap failed on insert to main pack after six 1-hour rucks . Got a replacement. Zipper failed at bottom on another one.
Wanted to increase load to 100 lbs, but gonna have to go with a different brand.
The math that makes this intentional
Price of a bag divided by years it actually lasts. That's your cost per year.
A $35 JanSport that dies in eighteen months: $23 per year. Add the shipping cost
when you try the warranty. Add the replacement cost when the claim gets denied.
Add your time.
A $200 bag that lasts ten years: $20 per year. Already cheaper. At fifteen years,
which the well-built ones consistently do, you're at $13 per year.
The $25 bag compared to the $200 bag, has $175 worth of free cash flow for other (potentially unexpected) purchases, can be replaced when trends/use case changes (or it gets dirty, or lost...), the capital could be invested in the market to generate ~$1 a month of passive income, and as far as the human can tell it's roughly the same. Basically all the thoughts of a JIT marketplace but on the personal scale...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47778933
Sam Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness
Literally every product with a lifetime warranty does this same game. It's best to read them as puffery.
I don't know about backpacks specifically, but my general impression with Decathlon and their own brands has been that they somehow manage to be ridiculously cheap, while also being better made and lasting longer than many name brands that cost several times as much.
Blue Bell ice cream and Jan-sport backpacks owned by the same company seems crazy to me.
What changed to enable and popularized these bad business practices?
Are you challenging that idea?
my backpack hasn't shown any major signs of wear or tear in the.. idk, 5 years since purchase?
I left the shoulder sling in an airplane a couple years ago - it was in virtually perfect condition as well, I'm still pretty bummed at its loss.
Clearly most people choose to buy cheaper stuff and producing higher quality, more expensive things makes you a niche company
The same thing happened to me with t shirt and other clothing brands.
Now if I buy something good, I'm rebuying multiple of it even if it's unneeded since apparently we live under the Law of Enshittification of Everything.
Windows 11 comes to mind as an example of something actually being made worse on purpose. Making it impossible to associate the original notepad.exe with text files is certainly not linked with business outcomes in any direct way. This seems to be purely about antagonizing the user base as much as possible. The only theory I can arrive at is that there is a secret cortisol harvesting scheme that results in better financial outcomes for Microsoft.
It helps to differentiate these cases. I don't like capitalism taken to the extreme, but the other thing is significantly worse. Intent makes all the difference. Engineered to suck vs sucks because it wasn't engineered are two completely different levels of evil.
As long as we collectively decide to keep living in a society dictated by shareholders, this shit will just keep getting worse and worse and worse...
PE at work.
I was a consulting and traveling heavily for many years and a digital nomad for others. I've carried that bag everywhere, it is good as new, I can hold a week of clothes in it, I recently got a vacuum pouch for winter thermals so that applies even for ski trips now. Its design lets me fill it up, zip it almost totally shut then compress it down to fit toiletries at the very top.
As much abuse as I've put it through it is still perfect. If moths or something don't get to it it may actually outlive me at this point I see so little wear.
Frankly I wish I could offer companies that make stuff that lasts forever a subscription fee or something to keep them using the same build quality, I mean cheap fast fashion/manf/etc seems to exert massive economic pressure to enshittify everything.
Capitalism ends up being owned by single companies across goods families. Private equity buys, strips, and bankrupts. Materials are engineered to fail near the end of their warranty. Companies lie about details hard to identify or prove. Companies use historical goodwill to loot the current landscape.
Take for example, a citrus squeezer. We needed what I thought was a decent juicer. https://us.josephjoseph.com/products/helix-citrus-juicer-yel...
Well, guess what... since its all just plastic, the 2 posts that provide the downward force when turning get sheared off when you fucking use the thing.
We ended up going to an antique/flea market and found a all-metal juicer. It fucking works. And it likely will for the next 50 years.
Capitalism itself is the scam. It was sold to us of "innovation, innovation, innovation!" And its just "worsening, extraction, destruction".
I would argue not everything, just the things we remember. Those brands got popular, got sold and enshittified.
We remember these brands fondly (personally I had a JanSport bag all through elementary school) and that's why it sucks that they suck now but what we forget is now is there are 1000X more brands to choose from, some from megacorps trying to cut corners at every step. Some from small shops that genuinely want to make a great product.
The problem is visibility. Those good brands you have to go look for, you can't just go to WalMart or Target like in the early 2000's and expect to get a quality product. All the quality products now live on small websites scattered across the internet.
I remember even 26 years ago, stuff you bought was better crafted and could get parts to repair.
Now? Its non-replacable batteries. Ultrasonic welded casing (destroy-open only). Glues, glops of glues. Plastic/nylon gears instead of metal. Thinner/worse materials. Scams online everywhere (like the legitimate company XYZZY). Every online corporate presence whores it names out to fly-by-nights.
If I want to buy durable goods, its mostly not even for sale. Or I end up having to buy from Europe, or a boutique dealer in the States... that is if you can find them.
And even the boutique dealers like Tom Bihn sold out, and is now making their bags in some sweatshop shithole with lowering and lowering standards.
It's not at all rare for a company to sell a quality product at a low margin for some years, building up a reputation, and then start decreasing quality to increase profitability once the quality branding is established.
Consumers/buyers still play a large role in this, it is easier to put all the blame on PE or Big business.
This is because other companies come along to fill the niche occupied by the established brands. Since they can't cheapen the products any more than the behemoths can, they need to innovate and evolve.
As for the backpack product, I wish the likes of Eastpak and whatnot would just die, since they have not innovated in a very long time.
These brands earned the consumers' esteem because decades ago their products pushed the envelope in the respective markets. By having their product quality severely degraded, this also lowers the bar for the niche brands. They no longer need to push the envelop to get a competitive advantage. They just need to replicate what was already possible. I.e. no real innovation is happening any more.
Also, for every 2 niche brands that are trying to get it right, you will get 1 that is sketchy: send designs to the cheapest manufactury in China, hire a few influencers to post on instagram, and you're done. Basically capitalizing on the misperception that "niche == better".
So, we are left as consumers to have to dilligently research every purchase, just to get the quality that was the standard a few years back. There's nothing to enjoy here.
Not to mention that at the bottom, this is just another manifestation of "fast fashion" and "planned obsolescence".
The essay show the timescale for "getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded" is 20 years or more, dating from the Eagle Creek purchase to the current "potentially up for sale."
That's a long time.
That means Theodores is also okay with the same decades-long process happening to "your power tools, your boots, your sunglasses, and about a dozen other product categories where a company you trusted quietly got absorbed by a corporation you've never heard of."
And after a new company X gains market share for its quality, we should expect the vulture capitalists to come swooping by again.
On the environmental side, every one of these packs is plastic waste after 18 months rather than 10 years.
It also means the methods people use to assess quality, despite omnipresent supercomputer phones and video-quality wireless networking, is ineffective, and manufacturers worsen their products knowing that. Why hasn't it gotten better?
So no, I don't see how Theodores comment about the chain of events should make anyone else also feel okay with it.
It's an excellent pack, cinches up tight, mount it front or back, strap it to something else, you can pack the straps and use it as a simple satchel, or use the shoulder strap.
Very high quality materials and zippers.
It's for I'd consider "urban travel", great as a carry-on. Paperback books, tickets, meds, passports, journal, snacks. They've been in "the wild" but I don't drag them on rocks or things like that.
They're over $100 today, so not cheap, but at a glance on the website, they look pretty much identical to what I have (and I know my second has slight differences in design from my first).
Were I in the market, I wouldn't hesitate to drag and drop one into a cart and get another. I've not used their larger packs, and over time they've expanded their lumbar line. But I would completely expect their other products to be similar quality as the ones that I have.