Lodge and Pyrex are probably not the best examples - Lodge cast iron has gone down the tubes recently, making thinner pans with worse factory coatings, and Pyrex switched away from the high quality borosilicate glass they had used for decades to a cheaper formulation recently.
Patagonia has even lowered their standards somewhat - I know a guy who bikes to work every day in Seattle and has used the same Patagonia waterproof panniers for something like 15 years, and I would be willing to bet that new ones are more cheaply made and less waterproof, while costing more.
Didn't Pyrex move to some cheaper glass formula? I don't use cast iron, but I heard that Lodge quality has declined a lot in recent years?
Patagonia also isn't particularly high quality (I own dozens of their clothes because I like their environmental activism, but many fray out of the bag, fit poorly, have crappy zippers, etc.). Arcteryx and European brands often make much higher quality clothing. Patagonia's on par with REI store brand clothing, IMO. But at least now they're wholly owned by a nonprofit!
I'm not sure any company can avoid this fate long term if they need to keep growing.
And these days, with everything from electronics to materials science to coatings to additives all changing so fast, maybe fast and cheap and easily replaceable is just what the market bears, for consumer and manufacturer alike?
> I'm not sure any company can avoid this fate long term if they need to keep growing.
I wonder why “if they need to keep growing” is so important to literally everyone? I’d die for a meaningful business that predictably spit out cash due to extreme customer loyalty. Why did growth itself become the prize everyone reaches for?
> Why did growth itself become the prize everyone reaches for?
That's literally capitalism. The hamster wheel. A closed loop.
If you take out a loan from a bank, the bank expects 5% annual return on that loan. Where do you get the additional 5% that you owe? You need to take it from someone else (who themself took out a loan, maybe even from the same bank).
While the bank can and will almost literally create (digital) money from thin air.
> If you take out a loan from a bank, the bank expects 5% annual return on that loan. Where do you get the additional 5% that you owe?
This has a lot of implicit assumptions which don’t hold true in reality. The 5% would have to be the same as the return on equity prior to the loan, and the loan would have to be for the full amount of the equity.
What I said above is that you can have a stable business with a decent return without needing to grow the business.
Say you have a business with $10 million in sales, and a net profit margin of 15%, so you take out $1.5 million per year. In my mind this is a great business.
1. To your specific point re a loan, this could easily support a $4 million load at 8% without demanding the underlying business grow revenues at all.
2. Lots of people would be tempted to grow the top line to $100 million even if net margins shrank to 5%. This is the point I don’t understand. Is it just greed? The consequence is that, in the aggregate across the economy, businesses and people rarely become businesses like OP points out and usually end up doing a lot of shitty things that destroy any lasting brand value or loyalty. I’m looking at Google Search and Facebook, and a million other businesses in and out of tech when I say this.
I feel there's some thread that links the USPTO, Treasury, and FTC on guaranteeing the integrity of the dollar and commerce. We don't have a gold standard and the OPEC cartel is a weak substitute. It is some basis for the dollar that in the year 2020 an Intant Pot costs $150 and is designed and manufactured to certain specs and quality. If you look across the economy at all examples of this perhaps it's possible to create a new peg for the USD. Maybe that could even be accomplished without "blockhain" or "AI" :) and just USPS mail-in satisfaction surveys/warranties of some sort tied to corporate lending/insurance.
Terrible management, and the people in charge probably never lost a dime personally for their poor decision making. No reason a company making a product like the instant pot can't stay in business as long as people want the product. After the initial release when everyone wants one, it should reach a steady state where sales reflect the number of instant pots going out of commission due to damage, wear and tear, etc, and the growing population. Plenty of businesses like that exist and do just fine, like selling toilet paper.
- Subscription service?
- Annual government funding?
- Annual private funding for "best product in category"?
Also how are some companies who make long-lasting tools which are apparently good quality (such as Lodge, PYREX, Patagonia) seemingly doing just fine?