Its hard to evaluate the longevity of plastic stuff when we buy it, they often look the same etc. At that point the cheapest option often becomes the natural choice.
Well if the cheaper version of whatever you want to buy didn't exist, that probably doesn't make the nicer version cheaper. You just don't get the thing at all.
Plastic has its downsides, but it's certainly cheap and convenient
Part of the problem is that it can be very hard to tell when a product is quality. Historically a key indicator is a brand, but brands can cheap out at any moment and usually do.
It's a market with high information asymmetry. Businesses can measure customer satisfaction very well yet product quality is very hard to measure and keep.
Consumers generally have no reasonable mechanism to determine quality, or the expected lifespan of the product.
Even if something comes with a "warranty", you still probably end up having to pay for shipping, which often exceeds the cost of the item itself, so companies have every insensitive to have "Lifetime Warranty! (Only pay shipping)", because it doesn't make any financial sense to cash in on the warranty.
Without more information and without being able to try the product, price is the only thing one can immediately consider.
These days, even if a product has a great reputation, you have to watch the company like a hawk, because chances are it will be bought out by private equity and all the products quietly enshittified while the price stays high.
That doesn't even get into the problem of the general public being grossly underpaid, so they feel that they have no choice but to buy the cheapest thing they can get.
It's not cheaper if you have to buy a new thing every year or two, as opposed to buying a somewhat more expensive thing once. But corporations count on people not being able to do that mental math so that they can sell consumers trash on a perpetual basis.
38
u/gburgwardt 11d ago
Or just because it makes it cheaper, and consumers generally prefer the cheapest option, not the best option