I spent hours comparing dozens of options while my Nanna patiently read her book in a corner of the store. I had never deliberated over a decision with such intensity. I can still tell you the exact moment the search ended.
A Gibson Les Paul Studio came off the wall and onto my shoulder. Its weight settled into the strap like it was made for my frame. The lacquer was so thick it looked wet. I knew nothing about tone woods or pickup winding at sixteen. I knew this was the one.
Guitarists will tell you that wood opens up as it ages, that the resonance frees up over decades. I can't prove the physics. I can tell you the guitar sounds better today than it did in the store.
Everyone owns something like this: the old pair of boots, the battered wrenches, grandma’s cast iron pan, the 400,000 mile truck that will not die, etc…
Objects that wear in instead of wearing out. The ones whose quality you can feel the moment you pick them up.
Now try to explain what it is you feel.
Some quality lives in the guitar, the boots and the pan. You are able to detect it intuitively within seconds. But try to put to words precisely what it is you detect and you’ll discover a dilemma.
Your first instinct is to point at the materials. It's mahogany. It has real humbuckers, a set neck, the best nitro lacquer. But that answer collapses the moment you notice the description fits every guitar on that wall. Two instruments leave the same factory in the same month, matching spec for spec down the line, and one sings while the other sounds weak. Every guitarist knows this, which is why nobody buys the model, they buy the individual guitar, only after noodling on it for a while. The spec sheet names everything the guitar is made of, and whatever quality is, it is not on the list of materials.
Fall back on "I just like it" and you sell the knowledge short, because standing in that store I wasn't just voicing an arbitrary preference, I was detecting something. “This is a thing of quality. It is the one I want.” Fifteen years of ownership keep proving my instinct that day right.
That gap, between knowing good on contact and being able to say what good is, is one of the oldest open problems in Western philosophy. It is also the fundamental question this newsletter is attempting to answer.
Every investigation I've published documents the same story: a product stripped of what made it good while everything a shopper can check stayed intact. Same logo, same spec sheet, same four and a half stars, same price or higher. What got swapped out, the steel gauge, the stitch count and the years of service life, sits in the parts you can't check from the aisle.
That gap between what you can verify and what actually matters is the whole game, for them and for you. They use it to slowly diminish the quality of the products you once loved without tripping an alarm. You can use it to watch the theft happen.
So this essay is about what quality is and where it actually lives, which makes it the philosophical foundation under every investigation this publication will run.
Teachers had been passing and failing students on the basis of quality for centuries without a definition. The problem ate at him for fifteen years, ultimately driving him to insanity. Pirsig’s best thinking on the nature of quality was eventually set down in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It stands alone as the most formative book I have ever read.
To illustrate the problem, Pirsig relays an experiment he ran with his students. He read four student papers aloud and had everyone rank them by quality on slips of paper. He ranked them himself, collected the slips, tallied the results on the blackboard, and set his own ranking next to the class average. His ranking and the students’ matched almost every time, across classes and semesters. A room full of undergraduates who could not define quality independently agreed on where it lived and where it didn't.
So Pirsig landed on this problem statement:
"Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined."
Then he added the sentence that should be nailed above the door of every product team in America.
“Even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is.”
by Keyana Sapp, Worse on Purpose | Read more:
Image: Gibson Les Paul Studio/© Future/GuitarWorld
[ed. Nice site. See also: Your Appliances Got Worse On Purpose (WoP):]
Your first instinct is to point at the materials. It's mahogany. It has real humbuckers, a set neck, the best nitro lacquer. But that answer collapses the moment you notice the description fits every guitar on that wall. Two instruments leave the same factory in the same month, matching spec for spec down the line, and one sings while the other sounds weak. Every guitarist knows this, which is why nobody buys the model, they buy the individual guitar, only after noodling on it for a while. The spec sheet names everything the guitar is made of, and whatever quality is, it is not on the list of materials.
Fall back on "I just like it" and you sell the knowledge short, because standing in that store I wasn't just voicing an arbitrary preference, I was detecting something. “This is a thing of quality. It is the one I want.” Fifteen years of ownership keep proving my instinct that day right.
That gap, between knowing good on contact and being able to say what good is, is one of the oldest open problems in Western philosophy. It is also the fundamental question this newsletter is attempting to answer.
Every investigation I've published documents the same story: a product stripped of what made it good while everything a shopper can check stayed intact. Same logo, same spec sheet, same four and a half stars, same price or higher. What got swapped out, the steel gauge, the stitch count and the years of service life, sits in the parts you can't check from the aisle.
That gap between what you can verify and what actually matters is the whole game, for them and for you. They use it to slowly diminish the quality of the products you once loved without tripping an alarm. You can use it to watch the theft happen.
So this essay is about what quality is and where it actually lives, which makes it the philosophical foundation under every investigation this publication will run.
***
In the late 1950s, a rhetoric instructor at Montana State College named Robert Pirsig noticed that his contract required him to teach "quality". He asked around the faculty at the university and discovered that nobody could tell him what the word meant. Teachers had been passing and failing students on the basis of quality for centuries without a definition. The problem ate at him for fifteen years, ultimately driving him to insanity. Pirsig’s best thinking on the nature of quality was eventually set down in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It stands alone as the most formative book I have ever read.
To illustrate the problem, Pirsig relays an experiment he ran with his students. He read four student papers aloud and had everyone rank them by quality on slips of paper. He ranked them himself, collected the slips, tallied the results on the blackboard, and set his own ranking next to the class average. His ranking and the students’ matched almost every time, across classes and semesters. A room full of undergraduates who could not define quality independently agreed on where it lived and where it didn't.
So Pirsig landed on this problem statement:
"Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined."
Then he added the sentence that should be nailed above the door of every product team in America.
“Even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is.”
by Keyana Sapp, Worse on Purpose | Read more:
Image: Gibson Les Paul Studio/© Future/GuitarWorld
[ed. Nice site. See also: Your Appliances Got Worse On Purpose (WoP):]
***
Cheap parts and efficiency rules often take the blame, but consolidation is the real cause. The decline came on deliberately, built into the machines one brand at a time, as the companies that once competed on quality stopped having to.A handful of holdouts still build appliances that last for decades, and that is telling. Durability is clearly still possible. Most of the industry just decided it was worth less than the next sale.
One company, four price tags
Start with Whirlpool. It owns brands on every rung of the price ladder.
Amana sits at the bottom as the budget badge. Maytag plays the dependable workhorse, KitchenAid the premium brand for people who care about their kitchen, and JennAir the luxury tier. Every one of them is Whirlpool, which the company lists plainly in its own corporate materials. They share wash systems, motors, compressors, and control boards across brands, built in the same plants. A Maytag and a Whirlpool of the same class are often the same machine in different sheet metal. The higher tiers add real materials and features, but you're still buying up a ladder one company controls end to end.
Kenmore takes the trick further. It never built a single appliance, not one, in its entire history. For decades it was a Sears nameplate bolted onto whoever won the contract that year, Whirlpool or LG or Frigidaire. Today it survives as a licensing shell owned by the hedge fund that picked Sears apart.
***
[ed. And there's this: Monopoly Round-Up: Living in an Age of Cheating Means Having Your Time Stolen Constantly (BIG).]
