I’ve thought this, too, and like you I don’t have a compelling explanation. It’s true that the middle class is dwindling, but even the poor today have more _stuff_ than the middle class used to. But it is, as you say, mostly crap.

I’m not sure what you mean by consumer min-maxing, but perhaps this — one thing I’ve thought is that the amount and variety of crap you own in this culture is more important than the quality. And not from a utility perspective, rather because our dominant entertainment reinforces it. It’s a given that you must own a dishwasher, so you get a cheap one — yet it’s literally worse than hand-washing dishes, and needs to be replaced every 5 years. You can’t own one good kitchen knife, you must get a wooden knife block like the chefs have, even if all seven knives are crap.

Many of the cheap tools you buy at Harbor Freight will literally break the first time you use them as intended. This is all told a shocking waste of human effort — every scrap of resource and moment of time spent creating this crap is wasted, burned forever. When often just making something 20% better will leave it “good enough.”

That’s an interesting idea, essentially that media teaches us to aspire to goods we can’t afford, thus as a result we buy knock offs instead of humble yet quality.

Min-max’ing refers to an idea that instead of having evenly OK kitchenware (for example) you pinch pennies on the flatware and dishes and so forth so you can buy & enjoy an exotic Damascus steel knife, or fine teak cutting board. It actually dovetails quite well with your idea about being taught to aspire to things we can’t really afford.

A bit late but a coffee-loving tea drinker here who's struggled to buy a water kettle for their mother and found it completely exasperating.

Part of the problem too is fraud and its downstream effects on purchasing decisions.

I haven't bought a new kettle in about 12 years. Ours at the time was about 70 USD and now costs 250. In that time I've noticed counterfeits of our kettle become a problem everywhere.

A kettle is a simple thing. My wife's kettle she got for a tiny amount somewhere before it rusted out after years.

The first kettle we recently purchased for my mom, a well respected brand, rusted profusely within two weeks.

If you read reviews of kettles, they're filled with comments about them falling apart, rusting, the enamel chipping and the the steel rusting, and so forth and so on.

I doubt the company making this recent kettle wanted this spec; it probably is being produced under spec fraudulently.

What happens is, you buy an expensive kettle, and its a fraud, either because it's a knockoff, or because it's authentic but the actual production models are different from bidding prototypes. So now you're out the same as if you bought a cheap one. Is buying more expensive worth it?

After awhile it becomes pervasive because it's everywhere. It's hard to separate signal from noise in purchasing.

I completely agree about problems in the race to the cheapest, but sometimes I think even when the consumer is willing to pay a bit more for higher quality, if you can't discriminate anymore because of fraud it becomes rational to save your money.

(FWIW, we returned the kettle and got an even more expensive one — we'll see how this one goes.)

Koken man myself. But I appreciate your points and the points of the subcomment.

There is definitely an aspiration to own more crap. My family is a key example of this and I used to be the same. Now I'm happy with my 1 good kitchen knife.

As for the gutting of the middle class, it feels like there has been a point sometime in the last 10 years where the ship sailed. Those on board with a house and life setup are destined only to get richer while the rest are left on the shore, paying rent for their lives.

IMHO is just the usual capitalist pressure to maximize profits. You can't make stable profits year-in year-out selling the same widget with the same profit margin, nope - you have to grow. So you either push volume, which inevitably drives quality down; or you push price, which drives quality up but inevitably restricts the audience.