this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
845 points (96.1% liked)
Microblog Memes
8387 readers
2554 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You won't. You'll get annihilated by the next Chinese competitor who produces a piece of shit machine that breaks in 13 months like clockwork (and has a 12 month warranty), but sells for 1/2 or 2/3 of the price of your machine.
The average consumer is dogshit at conceptualizing the actual value of a product over its lifetime in proportion to its cost. They'll just see that the next machine on display at Best Buy or whatever looks modern and costs less to buy up front, and then they'll buy that one. When it breaks they'll removed and moan on Facebook and Nextdoor and write ranty one star reviews everywhere, and then wheel right back to Best Buy and buy another machine just like it.
At the end of the day these are commodity items. It's reasonable for consumers to buy whatever's cheapest from a reputable physical store and expect at least decent reliability.
The solution can't come from a manufacturer making a better product, because of the information asymmetry; the average consumer just can't be expected to spend hours researching every commodity item.
The solution has to be targeted legislative action with a clear goal of measurably improving the overall reliability of those commodities. Unfortunately lobbyists hate that because more reliability = less margin and fewer sales, and consumers don't often love it either because this kind of legislation directly translates to inflated prices (at least in the short term). There are still people removed that you can't buy incandescent lightbulbs anymore... So regulators would rather play dead and hope nobody notices they are doing fuck-all.
Weirdly enough, the washing machines I've seen here in China aren't that cheap, like 800-1500 USD price range, and they tend to be much smaller than the US ones.
Stuff made in China for domestic use bears little to no resemblance to the stuff that Chinese factories are contracted to make for export.
So much so that two doors down from my work is a place that does a booming business whose sole purpose is to allow people in China to purchase made-in-China stuff that's only sold in the US that they can't get at home and ship it back to China. It sounds absolutely asinine but there's a huge market for it and those guys are busy all day long packing stuff up and cramming into shipping containers to send right back to where it was made... but can't be bought.
Incredibly clever, businessfolk & manufacturers in China. Some will tell you “hoverboards” were essentially invented in the bars of Shenzhen.*
Are external factors preventing them from selling directly to the audience you’re describing?
Edit: *source
Bizarre. I wonder why they go all the way to the US instead of Vietnam or Taiwan.