[_DeadFred_]

Amazon is straight up evil at this point. People have pointed out they are selling fake fuses that have most likely gotten people killed, Amazon has done nothing. I am sure the same is occurring across other product categories like your example.

The 'luxury' you are talking about was called Brands, with the idea being that a company's Brand was worth more than lure of profits/shortcuts that could result in ruining the Brand.

[noduerme]

>> The 'luxury' you are talking about was called Brands

I dunno. Branding was my gig for a long time. I think brands were a weak substitute for artisans / bespoke makers who had to personally stand by their work. Once upon a time there was a guy named Levi Strauss who made sturdy jeans, some guy named McDonald who made good hamburgers, a couple guys named Johnson who sold talcum powder. And that guy Nobel who invented new ways to blow up the coyote. If any of their products failed, it was on them. Then branding came along and quality declined, but people paid for inferior products because they had the name and stamp of the founder on them. The notion that brands have to maintain the quality associated with their namesake is the central illusion that trillions of dollars spent on branding seeks to create. It turns out that it's cheaper to prop up the name with advertising than it is with selling quality products.

And that doesn't even touch on brands like DuPont or Chevron, where all the positive connotations are purely from brand marketing built as a shroud around selling mass death.

[BrenBarn]

> I think brands were a weak substitute for artisans / bespoke makers who had to personally stand by their work.

Another way to say that is "companies are too big". When companies become big enough that they don't have to worry about the repercussions of screwing over their customers, they're too big.

[noduerme]

Right. Absolutely. But then again, everyone can buy jeans now and you don't have to ride your horse across 500 miles of desert and hitch it up to Levi's store. So no one who orders em online now knows what they were worth then. No one's riding horses around in their underwear anymore.

To be serious: I don't think that overpopulation or delivering better things to more people is really the problem. Big companies are indeed a problem. Along with big governments on the other side. They both rely on rent-seeking methods of extracting value while lowering expectations, rather than providing better services. There needs to be a balance of regulation and innovation, that prevents regulatory capture and prevents monopolies without exploding bureaucracies that hamper small businesses. Small businesses are fantastic drivers of prosperity and creativity. That would be the civic ideal I'd implement if I had any interest in getting into government.

[deanishe]

> Small businesses are fantastic drivers of prosperity and creativity

That's a huge generalisation. Plenty are every bit as dodgy as the big ones.

[BobaFloutist]

I mean wasn't the era of bespoke makers the same as the era of traveling sake-oil salesmen that went town-to-town, disappearing just before the ramifications of their poison "cure-all" became clear? There were tons of scams and grifts back in the day.