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iamwhatiseem
Something changed around 1975 or so.
Prior to that date service and quality meant something. Today it is a very distant 3rd place to the importance of cheap price and availability.
Another sacrifice Americans readily accept is poor quality and poor craftsmenship. 30 years ago if someone bought a coffee maker and it stopped working after a couple years they would never buy that brand again - today almost all small appliances are considered disposable.
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The reason for that is because, adjusted for inflation, and as a percentage of our disposable income, most small appliances have become cheaper than anyone in the 1970s ever dreamed.
While not a small appliance, consider the example of gasoline. In inflation adjusted dollars, due to restrictions on exploration, production, and refining capacity, as well as formulation regulatiosn the price of gas at the pump is about what it was at its historic peak in the late-1970s/early-1980s, and yet as a percentage of disposable income it is still substantially below what it was then (evidence that people who believe income has been stagnate or declined since then are fools, and the reason the price of gas still hasn't had a substantial impact on our economy as it did 25-30 years ago)
I can buy a coffee pot for under $20. Care to figure out what that is in 1975 constant dollars, and whether you could have found any small appliance for that price back then?
Quote:
iamwhatiseem
But the biggest sacrifice Americans made is their children. In the 1980's when people started buying cheap and VERY inferior foriegn products - the ones who paid deeply is the current generation.
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I agree with you on this, but not for the reason you presume. When measured as a factor of price, foreign products were not "very" inferior, they were of lower quality, they were of lower price. To compare the quality to that of substantially more expensive products is to compare apples and oranges. In fact, it was a great thing for society that these lower quality, lower cost items expanded market choices (you could still spend more and get higher quality, just like I could go into Walmart today and buy a dress shirt of low cost, low quality, or I can go to Brooks Brothers and buy a higher cost, higher quality shirt). This expanded consumer choice, and resulted in bringing down the costs of even higher quality goods due to the competition, and also gave access to goods to lower-income people that they were priced out of the market for when the only option was the higher quality.
It used to be that the ONLY way you could get a book, was to pay what in today's dollars would be a king's ransom for a hand written, hand bound volume. Even today you can get hand-bound books which are of substantially higher quality and craftsmanship than commerically printed and bound publications, but it is hardly a bad thing that lower quality, lower cost machine printed and bound books made such products available to the masses.
Now, I do agree that this has been to the detriment of the younger generations, but not because of any decline in quality, no it is because they have been spoiled rotten and have a rather pathetic sense of entitlement. But that is a result of poor parenting, not of the poor manufacturing.
Because television sets became relatively cheap, they started to become something no longer confined to one room of the house, children started having televisions, phones, stereos, computers, etc. etc. in there own rooms.
Hell, compare the percentage of teenagers today who have cars that are for their primary use compared to 10, 20, 30 years ago.