[HN Gopher] Selling Lemons
___________________________________________________________________
Selling Lemons
Author : gregwolanski
Score : 181 points
Date : 2025-09-30 14:14 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (frankchimero.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (frankchimero.com)
| james_marks wrote:
| The rise of graphic design tools and digital printing play an
| interesting role in this.
|
| 20 years ago, existing as a brand required an effort and
| resources threshold. Even to have a logo took some level of
| commitment and skill. Minimum production runs on trivial things
| like the box insert meant there were stakes to bringing a product
| to market.
|
| With those barriers gone, we have more brands than ever, and they
| mean relatively little.
| reactordev wrote:
| Can confirm. I went to school for this very purpose. It led me
| down a maze of software engineering jobs and eventually prof
| serv that I'm in now. (Yey?)
|
| The ability for anyone to learn Photoshop or learn how to
| create a website, create a game, create anything, content or
| otherwise, and sell it on the marketplace for a quick cash grab
| has never been easier. I think most people set out to try with
| their best intentions and run into motivation issues and it
| just slips downhill from there - eventually being released
| because they have no choice. Maybe they think some of those
| downhill slides are good things. The issue still remains.
| Quality products get drowned out by inferior ones due to
| letting everyone participate.
|
| There should be some sort of quality control / gate / barrier
| of entry to some of these things. The ultimate issue is
| "quality" is subjective.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Reviews are the filter. They can be gamed, and that's a real
| issue, but it's combatable. And in any case even if you get
| the market down to just 'thing with good reviews' and 'thing
| with good [fake] reviews' that's much more manageable.
|
| So for a developer perspective all you need to achieve is
| that critical mass of early positive reviews, and that's not
| especially difficult if you have something half decent.
| mwkaufma wrote:
| Speaking as an independent gamedev: review-based
| storefronts (e.g. steam, egs, etc) select for the 1% of
| hits, but offers no pathway for the midrange -- everyone
| else gets lumped in with the slop.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Yep. And no entity or group seems really interested in
| moving the needle on this. Instead it just devolves into
| stupid meta-gaming like the article discusses.
| Yoric wrote:
| Historically, this gatekeeper role was held by editors. In
| most domains, though, we have got rid of them, for the
| better and the worse.
| Rooster61 wrote:
| > Reviews are the filter.
|
| While gaming is indeed a concern, I think a bigger one is
| that the power behind reviews is derived from just that,
| the reviewers.
|
| Human beings, playing the part of reviewers, are from my
| perspective becoming rapidly dumber due to a number of
| factors that are discussed ad nauseam here on HN. Or they
| are at least desensitized to the things that would prompt a
| negative review due to the sheer amount of shitty things
| they are exposed to that would prompt said review. If you
| shovel enough shit, the smell begins to not bother you any
| more.
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| Would you say software still has this gate / barrier or is it
| disappearing? From my experience looking at bootcamp
| students, grasping programming is still nothing short of a
| mind switch that some are unable to do (regardless of if they
| have an LLM to assist, that tends to make it worse)
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| > Would you say software still has this gate / barrier or
| is it disappearing?
|
| Not OP, but if you wanna get an idea for how much of a
| barrier there was 30 years ago... Just look through a few
| shareware CDs. So much crap was hastily thrown together by
| someone who read a beginner book on Hypercard or Visual
| Basic - and you'd have to mail $10 to an address, hope they
| hadn't moved, and that your floppy wouldn't get lost in the
| mail.
|
| The general shittiness of most software back in the 90s is
| still a bit nostalgic IMO. It felt like software that was
| written by actual people instead of a faceless corporation
| rchaud wrote:
| I think you'd have to go back further than 20 years. That's
| only 2005, and you absolutely could buy generic design assets
| on CDs, or get a local signage company to do it for cheap back
| then. If you were cheap enough, you could get a whole website
| made through an overseas agency for maybe $300.
| grafmax wrote:
| The brands we do have have declined - while their stocks have
| gone up drastically over this time. Consider the Amazon,
| Google, or Facebook of 20 years ago vs now. The reason is that
| they have made their moats and moved to rent extraction.
| myflash13 wrote:
| People who want the Good Stuff in life acquire taste and
| expertise or rely on the opinion of trusted people who have taste
| and expertise. It's always been like this. Otherwise acquiring
| the Good Stuff is a matter of random chance.
| jp57 wrote:
| _... [W]hile shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO,
| YFONG, WAOAW popped up, .... The long tail of generic brands on
| e-commerce platforms is a textbook lemons market: good products
| get drowned out by these alphabet soup products._
|
| I've found the emergence of these anti-brands to be fascinating,
| if also annoying. They are not really brands at all. The purpose
| of a brand is to signal something about who made the product, but
| these brands deliberately signal nothing.
|
| What's interesting, though, is that these brands typically sell
| things for which we, in the pre-internet days, would not really
| have cared much about the brand. If you were looking for a sleep
| mask, you would likely go to a department store or a store at the
| mall. That store would have at most one or two different brands
| of sleep mask to choose from. What would you, the shopper know
| about these brands? Probably nothing. It was the _store 's_ brand
| that you would trust. The store would do the curation, and if
| customers got a lot of lemons from the store, they would choose
| to shop somewhere else.
|
| With Amazon's "everything store", this entire pattern has been
| distrupted. For a while, their ratings could be trusted, but they
| eventually eroded. Then you could trust "Amazon's Choice" for a
| while, but I've started seeing "Amazon's Choice" on brands like
| "MIEWWO" now. So what to do?
|
| The answer is to go back to shopping at stores you can trust to
| curate what they sell, or for specialty products, buy direct from
| some known brand's website. (e.g. something like Leatherman tools
| or Spyderco knives)
|
| Last summer I had to prep for an outdoors trip, and needed to buy
| a bunch of gear and clothing. Almost everything I bought I could
| have gotten from Amazon or a similar marketplace online, but
| instead I bought from REI and local sporting/camping shops,
| either buying online and picking up in store, or just going to
| the store and shopping, and it really felt worth it to get the
| quality I wanted.
| jstanley wrote:
| The reason this phenomenon exists is because Amazon tried to
| block generic products from their site by saying the product
| must feature the seller's brand name.
|
| Solution: make millions of brand names and write them on the
| product.
|
| It's slightly more annoying and expensive for everyone
| involved, but it circumvents Amazon's policy.
| mystraline wrote:
| Yep, that makes a lot of sense then.
|
| But yeah I call the site Scamazon. Even if you think you buy
| legit, theres a good chance of counterfeit due to SKU mixing.
|
| And weirdly enough, in quite a few areas, Scamazon is like
| 20% more expensive than other retailers.
|
| These days, I ask in discord groups who they recommend. At
| least I can avoid the AI shitfest and get real humans'
| expertise.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The root cause is the unending quest for scale.
|
| This could be resolved by having a human person with decent
| judgment evaluate and approve all products before they can be
| listed. That's how normal retail outfits operate. Everything
| you find on a Safeway shelf has been authorized by someone at
| Safeway corporate. That doesn't mean it's good, but it at
| least means they consciously intend to sell it.
|
| But that scales poorly. This person has to have some sort of
| skin in the game, so you can't just contract it out or
| automate it. Amazon leadership is making a conscious decision
| to allow their store to be flooded with shit in order to
| reduce their costs of curating it. Given how successful they
| are, I have a hard time arguing they made the wrong choice,
| but I certainly don't like it.
|
| It's the same reason it's hard to impossible to reach
| customer service at many of these places. Google would much
| rather lose you as a "customer" than spend the money it takes
| to have a person available who can get your gmail account
| unfucked.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| There is slightly more nuance than that, the brand had to be
| trademarked, and the fastest way to get trademark approval is
| to use an unambiguously bad/random name.
|
| It also means that people have no brand recognition, and junk
| brands just blend in, or if you have to discharge your brand
| for some reason, nothing is lost.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Why don't they just make more plausible sounding brand names,
| especially with the advent of LLMs which can just barf out
| reasonable sounding ones that you can trust even if you don't
| speak English, and is almost as easy to do as smashing MIZOUW
| on the keyboard?
|
| Gemini just gave me these as novel brand names for a sleep
| mask - some are not bad, all are better than random capital
| letters.
|
| Umbra, Somnia, Driftdown, Ocula, Night Plume, Hushcover,
| Stillpoint, Aetheria
| supportengineer wrote:
| Even more frustrating is when you get a GREAT product from an
| anti-brand, but there's no way to buy more from them once
| they're gone.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| I have nothing to contribute to this discussion, but the points
| you brought up had the effect of making me view Amazon's
| private labels in a more positive light, as in theory, it can
| be a good differentiator for quality.
| lemonlearnings wrote:
| Australia Kmart got a good round of applause recently on HN and
| I think it was because of this reason. MZOO prices but with
| Kmart brand curation (they use their own brand name Anko alot
| but under the hood must be different suppliers etc.). Not sure
| how they do it and pay all that staff and rent, but they do!
| metalman wrote:
| the lemon is rotten
|
| no lemonade
| rolph wrote:
| the lemon is so bitter, you lose concern about the gas station
| tequila.
| gitpusher wrote:
| the rotten lemon can still feed your garden
| pembrook wrote:
| I think this is less of a market inefficiency and more a downside
| of "democratization" and the eternal September.
|
| In many fields of human endeavor, there's the passionate or early
| adopters who seek out the best, most innovative, high quality
| producers and pride themselves on that.
|
| But even the most sophisticated/snobbish of connoisseurs doesn't
| have time to be that way about more than a few things. Very few
| wine snobs spend the time to investigate the cost/quality ratio
| on their toilet paper in a similar way.
|
| Most people don't actually care that much about the thread count
| on their sheets and the production value on their TikTok clips.
|
| They care more about spending time with their kids or, heck, even
| their community. Simply clicking buy on the algorithmic Chinese
| slop in the featured slot gets the job done well enough, most of
| the time.
|
| I don't see how digital algorithmic scarcity is any different
| than the battle to appear on scarce shelf-space when everything
| was still in the real world.
|
| The fundamental issue in both cases is still scarcity of human
| attention. The market is pretty damn efficient at giving
| customers exactly what they want, and the hard truth is most
| people want "as cheap and low effort as possible." I think the
| author just wishes other people were more passionate like him in
| the areas he cares about.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| I actually have the Mzoo sleep mask he mentioned and I quite like
| it.
|
| Wirecutter recommends it and Reddit seems to agree.
|
| Doesn't negate the article, but just clarifying for anyone in the
| market who thinks it's a lemon.
| thiele wrote:
| I have the MZOO sleep mask as well and it's the best I've found
| after trying a bunch of different brands. I bought a second as
| a backup and would rebuy in the future if needed.
| toss1 wrote:
| This thread of comments seems like very nice example of "The
| exception that proves the rule".
|
| Both are satisfied to have found good products, and somewhat
| surprised, at least tacitly acknowledging by even finding it
| worth commenting, that the productscape overall is basically
| a sea of lemons.
|
| Cool
| chubot wrote:
| Yeah that is nice, but ironically we can only have this
| discussion because Hacker News itself is not full of lemons
|
| I can click on the profiles, and see "created 2009 or
| 2014", and think "OK this is probably a real person"
|
| Whereas if this were Reddit or Instagram, and the account
| was created recently, I might think "that's AI spam".
|
| So yeah someone has to do real work to create spaces that
| are not lemon markets. I guess people who have experienced
| that have coined "Dead Internet Theory"
|
| (Although ironically, I would trust HN more on non-tech
| stuff like sleep masks, than I do on tech stuff. The tech
| stuff does have a bias towards what CEOs/investors think,
| although plenty of opposing opinions get voiced as well)
| jamestimmins wrote:
| When I research Reddit recommendations I always click
| into people's accounts to see old posts. If they have non
| brand safe posts (nswf, politics, profanity), I view them
| as more likely to be real.
|
| Unclear if this is actually a good heuristic.
| volkk wrote:
| Turns out this entire article is thinly veiled marketing for
| the MZOO sleep mask :D
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| In one of my niche hobbies I run a product recommendations
| website based on buying stuff with our own money to separate
| crap from good stuff.
|
| One of our recommended products is made by a brand called
| DIWANGUS, which always gets a giggle. But they're good!
| evandena wrote:
| There's a "brand" that makes auto seat covers called
| DIKSOAKR.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Amazing how fast I just went from "yeah Amazon does kind of
| suck these days" to ordering something there.
| maxwellg wrote:
| I've bought several of the WAOAW sleep masks as well. They're
| great for the price point - I have a nasty habit of forgetting
| them in hotel beds though. I tend to go through one every few
| years or so. My wife enjoys hers as well.
|
| Has anyone bought the third brand to round out the discussion?
| rusk wrote:
| There's definitely always been vibes of this off the PC market.
| So hard to get one that's "nice" y'know what I mean. There are
| some notable high end PC vendors but they typically sell direct.
| In the high street, it's lemons all the way down. Even reputable
| brands have to get in on the action with a lemon line. Apple's
| whole thing it seems, has always to stay away from being a lemon.
| The only time they came close, incidentally was in the 90s when
| they started licensing their product to other manufacturers. This
| is what solid branding does. Helps you not be perceived as a
| lemon.
| righthand wrote:
| Sure. Apples never made lemons if you completely ignore all
| their failures. What instantly springs to mind is the keyboard
| saga. Those laptops were lemons. Here are some more product
| failures, arguably listed there are plenty of lemons:
|
| https://qz.com/apples-12-worst-product-failures-of-all-time-...
|
| Not listed but I would absolutely list the screen nub a
| usability failure and I consider my work laptop and work phone
| a lemon because of it.
|
| I'd also consider large phones a usability failure. My work
| phone is a Iphone 13 Mini.
|
| Brand capture is powerful but maybe only if you're willing to
| eat the propaganda.
| bitwize wrote:
| The first 2006 Intel MacBook Pros had a bad batch somewhere.
| I knew a bunch of guys who bought one as soon as they came
| out, and within a week every single one of those MBPs was in
| the shop. I bought a $900 Compaq Athlon64 laptop. It still
| works today and never needed repairs.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I'm a bit unclear - are you talking about off-the-shelf
| prebuilds like the sort Dell or HP would sell? Or are you
| talking more gaming-oriented ones? Or are you talking just
| parts?
|
| If you get something more business-oriented, most of them are
| reasonable. They're not _as good_ or _as cheap_ as if you
| assembled it by hand, but they offer good discounts and
| benefits for businesses buying in bulk. They 're often plenty
| powerful and well-specc'd for what you pay.
|
| Gaming is different. 90% of the gaming pre-builts are complete
| garbage, because their buyers only buy one at a time and aren't
| well-informed, nor do they tend to have a lawyer on hand.
| They're poor value for money, sometimes use sub-standard parts
| or proprietary non-standard formats, are poorly configured, not
| well tested, etc.
| gmueckl wrote:
| Who here remembers those old 1000+ pages thick mail-order
| shopping catalogues? This was a (more or less) carefully curated
| collection of items because the catalogs could only have a finite
| number of pages. When Amazon started to accept virtually unvetted
| product listings from third parties, they opened the floodgates
| for lemons.
|
| It's kind of a real world ACME equivalent now. I'm surprised that
| I don't make that duped coyote face more often after ordering
| from them.
|
| The other part of the story is that a lot of formerly respectable
| quality brands now sell much poorer quality goods. I'm not sure
| whether this is adaptation to a lemon market, but it does
| reinforce the information asymmetry. Infindnlywlf thinking, "this
| used to be a good brand once, but can I still rely on them?"
|
| Some of the bad incentives have always been there because they
| are fundamental to capitalism. But I feel that the Internet and
| global trade together have turbocharged a particularly nasty race
| to the bottom.
| gweinberg wrote:
| The sears catalog was all selling sears stuff, there were no
| third party sales. Branding as assurance of quality can
| actually work pretty well.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| what makes you think 1000 pages of catalog 2x per year is
| carefully curated? my experience is that it was also filled
| with random junk
|
| I'd rather rely on online reviews. I'm pretty good at buying
| quality products sight unseen at this point. And with free
| returns, the risk is even lower.
| gitpusher wrote:
| The people making those catalogs would've wet their pants
| with excitement if they could stuff 100x more crap in there.
| Lol
| sonofhans wrote:
| No, they wouldn't -- that's the point of this entire
| thread. A catalog with 100x the pages and items would be
| useless, impossible to organize, and expensive to stock.
| The creators of those catalogs, who lest we forget, were at
| the forefront of their own tech revolution, were keenly
| aware of the limitations and possibilities of their tools.
| gdulli wrote:
| > The other part of the story is that a lot of formerly
| respectable quality brands now sell much poorer quality goods.
|
| I've felt this. A few years ago I bought Eddie Bauer sheets
| online and they pilled up so badly after one washing that I
| couldn't use them anymore.
|
| I can see how they'd be willing to ship off cheap crap to
| Amazon whereas they'd be more protective of what they sell in
| their stores.
|
| Amazon didn't even let me leave a negative review, some AI
| model must have decided I'm fraudulent. That would be
| especially ironic if the reason for my bad experience had been
| counterfeit products commingled with real ones.
| pfitzsimmons wrote:
| I remember flipping through the Sear's Wish Book as child,
| coveting all the toys. You can still find old copies online:
| https://christmas.musetechnical.com/
|
| What's actually happening is that China's manufacturing
| revolution has given us incredible access to cheap manufactured
| goods. So for instance, in the 1991 Sear's catalog an electric
| toothbrush costs $80 (
| https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1991%20S...
| ). There are only brand name options. In terms of prevailing
| wages, that is about $200 in today's dollar. Now on Amazon you
| can get that same brand name toothbrush for $50, one quarter
| the price, or a nonsense-brand-name one for $10, 1/20th the
| price! One man's race-to-the-bottom is another's man paradise
| of inexpensive and abundant goods...
|
| When China started making stuff so cheap, nobody wanted to buy
| a much more expensive brand-name Japanese or American or
| European made product. So even the brand names decided to move
| their production to China. But then gradually people learn
| there is no longer any brand name quality boost, and the
| Chinese manufacturers learn to sell direct to consumers, and so
| then you get the all the weird brand names, and consumers just
| buy those for cheaper since the brand names don't mean anything
| anymore anyways. And even if you wanted to introduce a higher
| quality version, there simply is no way to reliably educate the
| consumer and credibly prove to the consumer that your product
| is four times the durability at twice the price.
|
| Thus the equilibrium is that for most products less than $100
| its all going to be Chinese made, the product will be good
| enough that the consumer won't immediately return it, but other
| than that the quality is going to be mediocre, because there is
| no incentive to develop a brand name that stands for high
| quality products in that price range.
|
| With more expensive goods, there are still are brands that
| pride themselves on high quality, durable products, eg, Toyota
| for cars, Bosch for appliances, Milwaukee for tools, Redwing
| for boots. But you have to do your research to know which
| brands are working to keep their reputation, and which brands
| are selling out.
| munificent wrote:
| _> The other part of the story is that a lot of formerly
| respectable quality brands now sell much poorer quality goods._
|
| I've observed this too.
|
| Somewhere, some marketing genius realized that brand reception
| is sticky, but changes to manufacturing processes can be rapid.
| There is thus an arbitrage opportunity. You start with a high-
| quality product with a beloved brand. You quickly change the
| factory to cheaply produce garbage instead. For some window of
| time, you can get people to buy these shitty products at a
| price commensurate with their brand perception and take a huge
| profit.
|
| Of course, brand perception is sticky but not infinitely so and
| eventually information catches up with reality. Then you've
| permanently destroyed a brand's reputation. But for a brief
| moment in time, you can create a lot of shareholder value at
| the minor expense of making crappy products and disappointing
| people.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The canonical instance of this is, in full irony, one of the
| precursors of the Internet: the Whole Earth Catalog (instituted
| now largely as _Wired Magazine_ ). Its premise:
|
| _The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG functions as an evaluation and access
| device. With it, the user should know better what is worth
| getting and where and how to do the getting. An item is listed
| in the CATALOG if it is deemed: (1) Useful as a tool, (2)
| Relevant to independent education, (3) High quality or low
| cost, (4) Not already common knowledge, (5) Easily available by
| mail._
|
| Save that last, the current iteration of the Internet, the
| _actual_ whole-Earth catalogue, is itself an _anti_ WEC. Rather
| than "access to tools", it is overwhelmingly "access to shit".
|
| (I could also have listed the Sears Catalog, somewhat less-
| credible offerings such as _Sharper Image_ or _Brookstone_ , or
| any number of others. Costco is a current exemplar of this
| strategy, in that it selects _quality_ merchandise, as does (or
| did) Marks & Spencer. Not necessarily _cheap_ , but _high
| value_.
| us-merul wrote:
| The difference between meta and outputs reminds me of Goodhart's
| law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure." Similar to the metricization of research and science,
| for example.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Not just The Internet. All of tech, and likely, other industries,
| as well.
|
| I was told that this was what happened to Etsy.
|
| When it first came out, people with real skills, sold real,
| handmade goods, at fairly high prices.
|
| Then, the mass-produced knockoffs flooded the site, priced way-
| lo.
|
| The legit stuff couldn't keep up; in price or in scale.
|
| I see this happening everywhere.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| I now throw public festivals and it happens in meatspace too if
| you don't actively prevent it. One minute that brand new themed
| festival is all vendors making cool clocks out of old vinyl,
| local glassblowers, local apiarists.
|
| Three years later there are 18 guys selling the same glass
| bongs from Temu.
|
| Curation is the answer.
| hylaride wrote:
| I see the same thing from "handmade trinkets" in tourist
| areas when I travel. All drop-shipped crap that you see
| multiple times, especially if you go to multiple cities.
|
| Now I just find a fridge magnet and not care where it's made.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Isn't that just the nature of capitalism? When a need is
| identified people rush to fill it as cheaply as possible.
|
| It sucks that it drains the soul out of things, and that mass
| produced cheap variants can crush anyone trying to make quality
| things by hand.
|
| On the upside I can get shitty custom art (If I need a
| victorian painting of my dog or something) for like $20. That
| would have been hundreds a few years ago, and maybe thousands
| 20+ years ago.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It is, but that's not a good thing.
|
| Capitalism needs brakes and regulations; Not a popular
| stance, with this crowd.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| I'm torn about online dating. It figures the real market value,
| the real league of possible partners, as we established that real
| life pick up is unwanted and creepy. Our value and league are not
| what we'd want and expect, no surprise.
|
| Honestly tinder shows me profiles of all potential partners with
| comparable wealth, age, and status within my area which I
| recognize from closer and wider circle of acquaintances. Even
| short appearances or breakdowns the apparently have by installing
| and setting up the app for a day or two. Sometimes even have
| moments like "wow, this match would be a romantic comedy plot
| with reunion after a decade". Then... they just swipe me left and
| continue complaining that there's nothing there.
| redleader55 wrote:
| > real life pick up is unwanted and creepy
|
| The act of "pickup" is creepy because it's based on a false
| pretense - establishing a human connection and trust quickly.
| Succes is guaranteed only for the sociopaths. Talking to people
| in real-life, without the help of technology is not creepy and
| doing it casually just for the sake of human contact is what
| all of us should be doing more. We would be able to filter out
| the "creeps" much easier if most people you get in contact with
| are normal human beings that are being nice to other human
| beings.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| There are many countries where on attempt to small talk they
| will death stare and squash you into the ground, or laugh
| off. Actually... most of countries in Europe.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I've yet to find a place in the world where talking to
| strangers at bars is socially unacceptable. Everywhere has
| different rules about where idle chit-chat with strangers
| is allowed or not, but bars are a universal.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| >> The safest, smartest path is also the most mundane: keep the
| main thing the main thing. Outcomes matter, but output literally
| comes first. Outputs are the business to everyone outside it--
| what customers see, buy, and use.
|
| I dont understand how this overcomes the problem. How do you then
| stand out as a candidate in a saturated lemon market of
| candidates for instance?
|
| How you then stand out as an authoritiative website if the search
| results are lemon?
| the_snooze wrote:
| I think "standing out" in a market of lemons is playing the
| wrong game. The winning move is to sidestep the market
| altogether and find a niche where there's a barrier to entry
| that's both high enough to deter most other competitors but low
| enough that you can clear it.
|
| It doesn't scale, but that's the point. Direct competition is a
| loser's game.
| smm11 wrote:
| Because the internet is all about buying stuff. Got it.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| It applies to anywhere you consume content too (search engines,
| youtube, social media)
| fsckboy wrote:
| just a quibble, a lemon market is not a stage of a market, it's a
| market with information asymmetry which affects prices which
| affects market participation.
|
| the Amazon mixing of products from separately sourced vendor
| inventories or luxury goods with counterfeiting competitors, or
| buying jewelry from a jeweler creates lemon markets for those
| products.
|
| used markets do have the nature of lemon markets, and once you
| discovered that you have been ripped off on a purchase, you have
| an incentive to unload what you bought, and you could call that a
| lifecycle stage of a product, but "descending into lemonhood" is
| not a progression of markets.
|
| also, the term lemon refers to the slang "lemon cars", cars with
| defects, and has nothing to do with a market for lemons where
| people seek the sour taste.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Amazon ending commingling is going to be interesting. Instead
| of having 1-gallon Tide laundry detergent we'll have 20
| listings for it? Or will these folks have price authority, no
| one else able to sell Tide 1-gallon except Tide themselves?
|
| This feels like a potential massive shift, seems fated to raise
| prices significantly & flood users with way way way more
| results.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| They can still say "more like this" and group the listings on
| the frontend, but the point would be have a clear chain of
| accountability between what you buy, who you buy it from, and
| what actually arrives.
|
| Like, when I purchased an Apple laptop charger "ships from
| and sold by Amazon.ca" but what arrived was an obvious
| counterfeit, that was... bad.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| The best one I had was when I bought a VR headset, and
| inside of the package was a brick.
|
| No questions asked and they took my return, but man, I was
| sweating that I'd get accused of something.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| > "descending into lemonhood" is not a progression of markets
|
| It takes time for the participants to respond to the lemon
| market conditions, eg buyers to make purchases that are bad, so
| that they come to distrust the sellers, and then sellers with
| quality goods taking them elsewhere because the buyers are now
| pricing everything as if it's going to be a lemon.
|
| The transition from healthy market to lemon market once the
| preconditions have been in place for enough time could
| reasonably be described as a "descent".
| fsckboy wrote:
| markets can fail ("descend") for many reasons that are not
| lemon information asymmetry
|
| lemon markets never stop descending till all honesty is gone
|
| i see a point in maintaining the distinctions.
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's not the traditional economics framework but having read
| Akerlof's paper, I can read the title of this post and
| understand what they mean.
|
| There's a very real phenomena where markets often start out
| functional and then descend into a market for lemons, and it
| has to do with game theory again. _When the market is small_
| and still growing, firms in it can count on repeat
| interactions. Even if your customers don 't buy from you again,
| there are new customers, who often ask the existing customers
| what they should buy, and so you have an incentive to produce a
| good product. The information asymmetry that Akerlof describes
| doesn't exist, because actual experiences with the products
| quickly get conveyed to other market participants and
| incorporated into their purchase decisions.
|
| But when the market matures, those repeat interactions (and
| prospect of future sales) decline. People who have repeated
| needs and vendors they can trust often exit the market and deal
| directly with their vendors. What's left are buyers who are not
| particularly well-connected and don't have a whole lot of
| information on past experiences with the product, but who trust
| the market as a whole. This is the kind of information
| asymmetry that breeds a market for lemons. Eventually all
| products start becoming crap, everyone who knows how to find
| non-crap exits the marketplace, and the market collapses.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Sure, I get it, but I think it's a pretty powerful observation
| that the internet has enabled a proliferation of markets for
| lemons by lowering the bar so much for distribution, and
| raising the bar so much for baseline marketing, that it has
| eroded previous signals for quality across innumerable domains
| and jobs-to-be-done.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Now I wonder did any unscrupulous company secretly perform
| supply chain attack against competition by inserting poorly
| made copies of the competitors products in Amazon's
| comingling... Potentially even a profitable or cost neutral
| venture...
| johnfn wrote:
| > I thought about this last week while shopping online for a
| sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, and these
| seemed less like companies and more like vowel smoke ejected from
| a factory flue hole, then slotted into a distribution platform
|
| I find this ironic. I swear by MZOO eye masks. They are so much
| better than anything you can buy in a pharmacy. They are vastly
| more comfortable, and they do a significantly better job at
| blocking out light. I've recommended them to all my friends, and
| many of them now swear by them as well. And don't just take my
| word on it - Consumer Reports also says they're the top rated
| sleep mask brand.
|
| There is a certain irony (or not?) to talking about how the good
| is indistinguishable from the bad, and then accidentally
| mentioning the best. The Internet did bring me a lot of bad
| knock-off brands, but it also brought me MZOO, so I'm not sure if
| I should be complaining.
| nemomarx wrote:
| they really could try and stand out more as a brand name?
|
| do you know how they compare to manta btw
| johnfn wrote:
| I haven't tried Manta, though it's hard to imagine anything
| that could be improved on MZOO. Probably my only complaint is
| after a year or two of use they tend to lose some of the
| elasticity, but at $10 you could get at least 4+ years of use
| for the same price as a single Manta :)
| rjh29 wrote:
| I don't think it detracts from his point - there are so many
| almost identical brands that you can't tell what's good and
| what's bad anymore.
|
| Hopefully, MZOO will establish word-of-mouth reputation much
| like Anker did.
| johnfn wrote:
| MZOO is the #1 brand that comes up when you search sleep mask
| on Amazon.
| rjh29 wrote:
| Yeah but what does that mean? Does that imply the item is
| better quality?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Yes, but you can't know that the #1 brand is actually good,
| or just chance. Does every #1 brand that shows up actually
| offer the best product? Or is this one instance a happy
| accident?
| _kidlike wrote:
| I still can't believe that Anker has not completely dominated
| the market... I almost always see other inferior brands when
| people pull out their powerbanks.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| Anecdotally I've had a lot of problems with Anker products
| over the years. On two separate occasions my power banks
| died while I was travelling. I had a few Ravpower products
| that were at least as good. And now Ugreen seems to be
| producing good stuff.
|
| I don't think there is any stickiness here, and it's a
| cutthroat market. These things are all at a price point
| where there will never be a winner-takes-all.
| creamyhorror wrote:
| Anker's gone a little pricier compared to other Chinese
| brands. Ugreen and Essager were good value several years
| ago, and Vention more recently.
| Fwirt wrote:
| There's an art to sifting through the "random letter" products
| on Amazon. While there is a lot of bottom-of-the-barrel garbage
| that gets churned out by grey market factories, bought in bulk
| on Alibaba and silkscreened with a random throwaway trademark,
| there are also smaller Chinese brands that have their own
| injection molds, engineers, etc. and are actually making
| quality products, but the easiest way to reach yet another
| global market is to slap together a random brand on Amazon.
| Even a Chinese company that's making good quality stuff isn't
| going to go through all the hassle of setting up a US office,
| hiring a US marketing team, etc, just to sell their coffee
| maker.
|
| As many have noted, this happened in the 1960s-1980s with
| Japan. My specific experience is with guitars: all kinds of
| random companies would buy mass-produced Japanese guitars, slap
| their own label on them, and sell them in their tiny music
| shops. Despite the disparate labels, the guitars were mostly
| coming out of the same handful of factories (Matsumoku et.
| al.). Of course there were exceptions like Yamaha. Some of the
| early examples were mediocre at best, but as the product
| landscape improved, many of the later examples from the 1970s
| and 80s are competitive with much more expensive guitars today.
| The only difference with today's landscape is that the Chinese
| manufacturers are starting to realize they can cut out the
| middleman. Imagine you were in the 1960s, pre-internet, trying
| to decide whether you should get a guitar from a brand name you
| recognized, like Decca, a record company, or some random
| Japanese company called "Yamaha".
|
| Also, after a while you learn to spot the "Alibaba bulk"
| listings and can then decide whether you want to optimize for
| price and just buy the cheapest one that is exactly the same as
| all the others.
| robinkunz wrote:
| awesome - was looking ages for a good sleep mask! and i saw
| mzoo but had the same preassumption. the stuff in europe is so
| overpriced with 70-100 bucks lol
| slg wrote:
| It isn't ironic, that is the whole point of a Market for
| Lemons, the inability to distinguish a good product from bad
| before purchase due to asymmetric information. That is why I
| think the author makes a mistake saying that it has no relation
| to enshittification.
|
| The ultimate problem here is that MZOO's incentive to maintain
| their level of quality isn't very strong. There is little
| preventing them from slowly make their product cheaper and
| cheaper until they are delivering the same quality of those
| other brands. That would be the same process as
| enshittification. The primary difference is that
| enshittification can happen for other reasons such as a
| monopoly while a Market for Lemons is specifically because
| information asymmetry.
|
| MZOO might be good now, but the economic incentives suggest
| they are just in the first stage of this process. It would take
| an owner committed to quality to not succumb to those
| incentives and it's impossible for us to know if MZOO has that
| type of owner.
| aanet wrote:
| Literally, anecdata
| layer8 wrote:
| > Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, and these seemed less
| like companies and more like vowel smoke ejected from a factory
| flue hole, then slotted into a distribution platform.
|
| Obligatory Ryan George video: https://youtu.be/nQpxAvjD_30?t=4
| ruralfam wrote:
| I can relate. Buy a lot from Amazon, and play the "crazy-Chinese-
| brand-name" routlette a lot. Most are low value purchases which
| makes the risk not too bad. Most purchases have me saying, "Damn
| that's good quality (e.g. drill bit sets)." So the China brands
| do a pretty good job overall. Note: One needs to spend a good
| amount of time sorting thru reviews to avoid the obviously bad
| stuff.
|
| So now I want to spend several hundred dollars on a magnetic-
| resistance stationary bike. This is a whole new level of exposure
| vs. my "small-dollar, small-risk" previous purchases. Main brands
| (Peleton etc.) are just way out of my price range. So I have
| spent several days now researching these products. Am confident I
| am going to make a good purchase... Why you say ??
|
| I was looking at a very niche "vote your favorite mansion"
| competition on a football fan forum (chiefsplanet) thread. Some
| very expensive mansion had a photo of the exercise room, and
| there was my current contender for first choice. What a strange
| way to get positive feedback.
| rjh29 wrote:
| Amazon excels in this area - pay more but you have a good
| refund policy. The low value purchases are better done from
| aliexpress. You'll get the same items but pay less for them.
| j1elo wrote:
| > _(and what differentiates it in my mind from enshittification_
|
| Missing a close paren here. My mental Lisp parser gave me a
| syntax error here and I panicked hahah :)
|
| (truth be told I got stuck for an instant in there)
| peteforde wrote:
| For what it's worth, the last sleep mask you'll ever buy is
| Nitehood.
|
| https://www.nitehood.com/
| csallen wrote:
| Call me crazy, but it _is_ possible to distinguish good from bad
| in most of these "lemon markets" the author lists.
|
| When buying physical products, there are tons of high-quality
| review sites like Wirecutter, with journalists who spend months
| testing out products and reviewing them to find the best ones.
| Not to mention the reviews on sites like Amazon itself. And of
| course, just doing internet searches, researching the domain,
| learning what makes products good, seeing what others on various
| forums have liked. It takes some time, effort, learning, and
| taste to do all this searching and to weed out the fake reviews,
| of course, but I think many millions of people are capable of
| doing the above.
|
| Social media is similar. It's not that hard to discern whether
| you're following a low-quality spam account vs an authentic high-
| quality person. And you can curate and build up your list over
| time, to have more signal and less noise. Will most people filter
| effectively? No. Again, it requires time, effort, learning, and
| taste. But still, it's possible.
|
| Etc.
|
| But I don't think it's accurate to say we're in a lemon market.
| We're in a taste market, and the reality is that most people just
| have exceptionally bad taste.
| yummypaint wrote:
| It doesn't matter whether it's possible for a highly motivated
| and educated person to distinguish the lemons. This will
| usually be true. The important thing is the experience of real
| consumers participating in the market as it actually exists. A
| better framing would be "of all products in category X sold
| last month on amazon, what fraction were lemons?"
| csallen wrote:
| > _It doesn 't matter whether it's possible for a highly
| motivated and educated person to distinguish the lemons._
|
| It does though, since the entire premise of the "lemon
| market" idea is that buyers can't differentiate between good
| and bad products. What matters is where the bar is to be a
| good differentiator, and how many people can cross it.
|
| It also doesn't necessarily matter how many lemons are for
| sale, if the good ones are easy to find. Imagine that there
| are 1 million trashy sleep masks on Amazon and only 3 good
| ones, but the 3 good ones are right at the top, with superior
| ratings and reviews.
|
| The better question is: what % of buyers are buying lemons?
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