[kube-system]

Or alternatively, the customer simply DGAF about the quality of their $1.25 purchase.

I have $1.25 bulbs in my home. I use them in unimportant locations with infrequent use. They are perfectly serviceable for this use.

> The customer will choose the cheap bulbs because they can't be sure the expensive ones are better quality. They often aren't.

This is a big problem for all consumer products. The root of the problem is that most consumers are wholly unqualified to be a judge of engineering quality themselves, few even know how to effectively obtain trustworthy information about quality, and those who do often value their time more than the effort required to do so. For larger purchases, some people who care to be informed will do some research, but I don't really think there's a solution for products <$500.

[InSteady]

It is so much more difficult than it used to be to get trustworthy information about the quality of products. Seems like you have to already know of a hobbyist turned youtuber/blogger who has ideally done deep dives into a class of products or at least some relevant product reviews (or has a large subscriber base with active discussion threads).

Even trying to find such a content creator on the fly can be dicey since so many of them are doing paid reviews or at the very least are sent free products + incentives. That, or get lucky googling site:reddit.com/r/[subreddit] [product] to find a thread that isn't too recent, isn't overrun by shills and isn't woefully out of date and full of deleted/overwritten content.

[kube-system]

The availability of that information is probably worse than ~10 years ago, but still better than any time in the past before that.

Another problem is that there are just too many products these days. 40 years ago someone might have 5 options for a vacuum cleaner, period. Someone on the internet today might have 500 options. It's just information overload. Someone who really cares to, might go through the 236 options that Consumer Reports has tested [0]

But most people aren't the type of people who would spend a half-hour arguing about consumer product quality on the internet. Most people aren't willing to spend any time to evaluate their options for relatively small purchases beyond the immediate moment of purchase.

[0]: https://www.consumerreports.org/appliances/vacuum-cleaners/b...

Good information for the quality of cheap consumer goods is hard to find because the information is not particularly valued by most people.