> If your product or service has an unacceptable quality, demand will decrease and you will lose money
I challenge that assumption. If whole markets are dominated by companies who have downgraded quality to the minimum, then customers have no choice but to keep buying from you or someone else doing the same thing. If they don’t buy from you because of their most recent bad experience, someone else (who bought their jeans that ripped in a month from someone else) will. The only alternatives would be to make your own clothes or to seek out very specific high-quality artisanal sources. Both options are out of the reach of at least 75% of the market.
I don't agree that this is a challenge my assumption. You are talking about the lack of information and of alternatives; factors in how the demand for poor quality products can exist. That naturally affects where the balance point is, but I don't think that rebuts or even addresses my fundamental assumption. In my view there is such a balance point regardless of how the demand has come to exist.
A market without perfect information and where consumption isn't necessarily driven by rational needs is ripe for exploitation. Why should a business create higher quality clothes if they can instead manipulate consumers into thinking they're losers for not replacing their wardrobes every year, flood the market with thousands of labels to create brand uncertainty and pay people to "review" them favorably to further make it hard to be an informed consumre? They can can condition consumers into believing that poor quality is acceptable, so why shouldn't they if it ultimately results in higher profits?
Let me be clear, I didn’t mean I disagree with the rest of your comment in general or to disprove you somehow with my comment. Even with perfect information though most people have to purchase crap, because good stuff is so rare and expensive (though not all expensive stuff is even any good, most actually good stuff is expensive).
It’s interesting when you think of clothes vs appliances though. I don’t think anyone wants to replace their washer every 5 years for fashion, but it’s nearly required. You’re right with clothes though, fashion is geared to promote discarding. I wonder though, wasn’t fashion also a thing in the 1940s? Yet then, clothes still lasted longer.
> Even with perfect information though most people have to purchase crap, because good stuff is so rare and expensive (though not all expensive stuff is even any good, most actually good stuff is expensive).
I'm talking about "perfect information" in the ideal, economic sense: in this case knowledge of every piece of information that could affect a consumption choice. With perfect information you would of course know which brands gave the best value for the money. All brands would necessarily compete by being the brand that gave the most value for the money for different segments of consumers with different ideas of what exactly "the most value" entails. A company that could produce equivalent goods and sell at lower prices would leave competitors in the dust, because you would know about it and have no reason to consider other options.
Of course, the $100 dress that lasts for 10 years might still be less valuable than a $9 dress of similar appearance that lasts for one year in those terms, depending on how much of a cost there is to making the purchase in itself and disposing of the broken dresses.
> I wonder though, wasn’t fashion also a thing in the 1940s? Yet then, clothes still lasted longer.
There certainly was a fashion industry and an awareness of ongoing trends, but I don't think the pace of dissemination and proliferation of new trends was nearly as high then as it is now. I don't know, but I'm betting that the pace picked up when television became a commonplace household item and then again with the advent of social media.
I also don't think they could have produced a $9 1/10 durability alternative to the $100 dress. The difference in production cost between shoddy products and high quality products may have been smaller with the state of the art of the 1940s in terms of production chains, alternative materials, labor, time.
I challenge that assumption. If whole markets are dominated by companies who have downgraded quality to the minimum, then customers have no choice but to keep buying from you or someone else doing the same thing. If they don’t buy from you because of their most recent bad experience, someone else (who bought their jeans that ripped in a month from someone else) will. The only alternatives would be to make your own clothes or to seek out very specific high-quality artisanal sources. Both options are out of the reach of at least 75% of the market.