Because we have unreasonable expectations. Making things work well is hard, and thus expensive.
Take a chair, for example. Anyone can make a chair: just get a bucket, turn it over, and sit on it. Boom; backless chair. Want a backrest, arms? Get a 2x4, a saw, a drill, and some bolts. An hour later: Boom; chair.
You want a chair that works well? How do you even define works well for a chair? Do you need cushioning? Do you need to swivel? Do you need ergonomics? Do you need to sit in it for 15 hours? Do you need it to cost less than $1,000?
To the featured article's point, it's gotten so hard to be able to judge which products will be any good at all that buying expensive things expecting lasting quality becomes a huge gamble.
There's also the huge mental barrier of getting over the sunk cost fallacy. If you buy an expensive thing and a part of it breaks in such a way that it still remains mostly functional, it's really, really hard to admit that it should be replaced. You end up living with a broken thing for a long time, just because you're mentally depreciating the thing.
I've been through this with a lot of furniture. It doesn't seem to matter whether I pay $100 or $500 for a bookshelf, it's a crapshoot whether or not the listing lied about it being made of solid wood and not particle board, or whether the screw holes will align correctly, or been tapped correctly for the screws to actually engage without crossthreading, or even use proper screws and not those damn "lock"-bolts (that never actually lock, so given enough time they always work themselves loose).
My wife and I built our children's bunk bed. It was an expensive, time-intensive, physically painful endeavor, partly because this was the first time we were building something so large. It's not great. But it easily matches or exceeds the quality of any of the other furniture we've bought. I'm very proud of the work we did, but at the same time, I'm furious that I can't count on just buying things.
It's also gotten hard to trust people's recommendations on things, which goes back to the featured article's comments on cultural expectations. Most of the people I know just live with broken furniture. They think IKEA is great stuff. It's not. It's just that it's so impossible to find anything better that you might as well buy IKEA.
I might switch to only buying antique furniture, i.e. use survivorship bias to my advantage. Find the stuff that has survived taking a beating already.
an aeron chair costs about $2000 dollars (give or take). The construction is sturdy, so i expect it to last at least 10 years, if not 20 (you take care of it etc).
So the amortized cost is some 100-200 dollars a year for an excellent chair. If you buy a crappy chair, i bet that the cushion starts failing after a year or so of constant sitting. So you'd probably replace it yearly, or suffer a bad chair for a few years before replacing.
I bet that most people would choose an excellent chair, if they could guarantee themselves the 10 yrs of good operation and comfort.
But there’s a corollary - if you do not need the thing to last, you may be better off with the cheapest one you can find (which may be used - and which may be better than new).
This is the “but it from harbor freight, if it breaks now you know you use it enough to make it worth getting a good one”.
I consciously adopted the "poor young constable Vimes" strategy for footwear last year. I like, and would probably prefer, quality shoes -- but it's such a crapshoot what those are nowadays that I just can't be bothered to buy a pig in a poke yet again. I mean, brands that used to be OK when I was younger... Mostly aren't any more.
So last year when Lidl had trainers for sale at 30 € (or was it 20? 25? 15?) I bought five pairs. Still on the first ones, so definitely financially ahead -- "better" brands haven't lasted any longer than that in my recent experience.
> if you do not need the thing to last, you may be better off with the cheapest one
Well, it's not even sure if you take resell value into account. If you need your good chair for one year, just buy it $2000 and sell it used for $1900.
As a random anecdote, I own a steelcase gesture that runs about $1,100. I also own a 70$ chair from costco and I can "barely" feel the difference. I have all my settings configured correctly. I really don't buy into the the expensive officechair hype. I think it's a level of diminishing returns.
I think a $200 office chairs is about what anyone needs. That'll get you 90%+ of the way.
Where would you say you sit on the physical-dimensions bell curve?
I'd hope that the more expensive chair has better adjustability to suit a wider range of critical dimensions than the cheaper chair. But that may not matter for a lot of people.
I have a more expensive herman miller embody. It... doesn't really have much to adjust. Just the shape of the back. That's kind of an irritating aspect of it to me.
Same for my $70 IKEA chair (which also survived 4 moves). I only stopped using it because my job let us take home the office chairs once work from home started a few years ago.
Well, personally, I have a lot of durable chairs, but I love my Aeron because the adjustability got me out of RSI. I don't mind replacing the chair every year if it would help me avoid RSI. I haven't had to, but I wouldn't mind. Durability in chairs seems to be easy.
I've been out of action due to RSI a couple of times in the past 7 or 8 years. I haven't worked out what the cost was but, sure, it was multiple times the price of a premium chair.
An Aeron is nice but plenty of other chairs last way longer than a year and are maybe a fifth of the price of an Aeron. You also have to consider for a lot of people there are other products that will give them a much better pay off.
Take a chair, for example. Anyone can make a chair: just get a bucket, turn it over, and sit on it. Boom; backless chair. Want a backrest, arms? Get a 2x4, a saw, a drill, and some bolts. An hour later: Boom; chair.
You want a chair that works well? How do you even define works well for a chair? Do you need cushioning? Do you need to swivel? Do you need ergonomics? Do you need to sit in it for 15 hours? Do you need it to cost less than $1,000?