[fn-mote]

> You're more likely to see the cocoa content in your chocolate bar drop [...] > many grocery stores also seem to just be ignoring this issue.

I do not believe this is the kind of swap people are complaining about.

We're talking about a box that's labeled applesauce and is actually full of rocks. Grocery stores would kill a supplier who was doing this.

I can't imagine a "real-world" situation happening at the scale of reputation-stealing that happens on Amazon. I suppose it's just an extreme version of "Made In Your Country Tools" building up a good reputation and then quietly outsourcing the work to "Low-Quality Overseas Forge".

Is the problem is that "easy to acquire" reputation for low-cost products (get good rep by using good materials, which don't really cost that much more and eat the cost as a loss leader) is easily transferred to higher-cost products? It's not like you even need to be making bandsaws to get the good rep., then start using it to sell cheap bandsaws? The investment at the start is very low.