There's a push surfacing to bring quality back as a baseline expectation

The distinction between quality as standard versus luxury is rooted in how industrialization fundamentally reshaped production economics. Before mass manufacturing, most goods were made locally by craftspeople who owned their reputation directly. A cobbler made shoes for people they knew. Bad work meant immediate visibility and lost business. The incentive structure was built into the social relationship itself. When production moved to factories serving distant, anonymous markets, that direct accountability dissolved. A manufacturer could now produce thousands of units for buyers they would never meet. This opened the door to what economists call the principal-agent problem: the maker's interests no longer perfectly aligned with the user's interests. That misalignment became the structural foundation for a century of quality variance. The post-World War II era accelerated this dynamic dramatically. Industrial capacity ramped up, consumer demand exploded, and retail competition became primarily about price and availability rather than durability or craft. The concept of planned obsolescence emerged not as a conspiracy but as an economic strategy: products designed to fail or become unfashionable within a predictable timeframe created repeat purchases. This became embedded in business school thinking and manufacturing philosophy. Companies could justify lower material standards, simpler construction, and shorter design lifespans because they solved the fundamental business problem of how to keep revenue flowing. Quality became decoupled from expectation. A $20 shirt expected to last one season was somehow more rational than a $50 shirt meant to last five. The 1980s and 1990s saw globalization intensify this calculus. As supply chains stretched across continents and labor costs became the primary variable, the pressure to strip down costs at every layer became relentless. Retailers discovered that consumers, when given a choice between five cheap options and one expensive durable option, often chose the cheap option. Visibility of price is immediate; the cost of replacing something five years later is abstract and belongs to future you. Consumer behavior rewarded the system, and manufacturers optimized for that behavior. This created a feedback loop where quality degradation became self-reinforcing: fewer people expected durability, so manufacturers invested less in it, so durability became rarer, so expectations stayed low. But awareness of this system's costs has accumulated unevenly across different groups. Some consumers began tracking the true lifecycle cost of ownership. Environmental consciousness raised the profile of waste and resource depletion tied to constant replacement cycles. Supply chain visibility improved, making it easier for people to see what shortcuts looked like. Digital connectivity allowed communities to share experiences and expectations across geographic boundaries. Simultaneously, some makers began inverting the econo