[paulryanrogers]

I do wonder how this all shakes out now that many brands are selling out as glorified drop-shippers of increasingly poor quality products.

When brand is meaningless what other signals will consumers use to filter? Will we all need test machinery to vet every purchase?

[DubiousPusher]

Brands have been meaningless for a long time. Open an applicance made by Whirlpool, Amana, Kitchen-Aid, Jenn-Air or Maytag and you'll find nearly identical internal components. They are all owned by Whirlpool. Yet this has no effect on people swearing by or swearing at any one brand.

Buying a car, you can try to shop by brand but surveys by Edmunds and Consumer Reports have the car companies trading places frequently year over year. Even perennial favorites Lexus and Toyota have model/year combinations that perform worse than other brands.

I'm not even sure that drop-shippers are hocking lower quality items. The items are so similar to name brand kit that I'm pretty sure they're using the same supply chains to source a lot of that stuff.