Discussion

Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose

parineum: > The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.I can't speak for everyone else but this isn't what I'm doing when I compare two backpacks. I'm comparing two different backpacks for their features and design. I don't really consider the brand name attached or care who owns it.

nekusar: Its EVERYTHING that has gotten worse, on purpose.Capitalism ends up being owned by single companies across goods families. Private equity buys, strips, and bankrupts. Materials are engineered to fail near the end of their warranty. Companies lie about details hard to identify or prove. Companies use historical goodwill to loot the current landscape.Take for example, a citrus squeezer. We needed what I thought was a decent juicer. https://us.josephjoseph.com/products/helix-citrus-juicer-yel...Well, guess what... since its all just plastic, the 2 posts that provide the downward force when turning get sheared off when you fucking use the thing.We ended up going to an antique/flea market and found a all-metal juicer. It fucking works. And it likely will for the next 50 years.Capitalism itself is the scam. It was sold to us of "innovation, innovation, innovation!" And its just "worsening, extraction, destruction".

nslsm: This is some damn irritating writing. This writing irritates me more than a broken backpack seam would.

Sharlin: The trend of making articles out of sequences of pithy three-word soundbites rather than proper sentences is infuriating.

cortesoft: As much as the result for consumers sucks, is this just a result of the quality backpack business not being a very profitable business to be in anymore?The reason they were able to buy all those backpack brands is because each of those brands were not making much money running a backpack company selling quality at a reasonable price. The purchaser makes some money leeching value out of the brand reputation, but then that brand value falls because of the crappy product, and they sell the brand because they leeched all the value out of it.This is only possible because you can’t make much money selling quality for a good price. Consumers will pick lower quality for the cheapest price every time.

darkwater: Pure LLM, and it's a shame. The message and the content they are trying to pass are good and should be read by everybody out there. But god, the LLM writing, it feels like an Apple PR applied to a critique of capitalism.

whalesalad: The enshittification of all things. It’s happening in the service industry, too. A lot of contractors like roofing and plumbing are being absorbed into private equity megacorps.

furyofantares: > I'll be writing about those next.I doubt it, you didn't write about this! You prompted it and signed your name to it.

brainzap: its the normal cycle of sports gear

Theodores: I am okay with these big American corporations getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded, only to exist as a brand in a private-equity backed holding company.This is because other companies come along to fill the niche occupied by the established brands. Since they can't cheapen the products any more than the behemoths can, they need to innovate and evolve.As for the backpack product, I wish the likes of Eastpak and whatnot would just die, since they have not innovated in a very long time.

eesmith: If other companies come along to fill the niche then how is it that the likes of Eastpak and whatnot have not died?

bluGill: They are - the article finishes with them being for sale because they no longer generate money. They are not dead yet, but they are clearly out.

alistairSH: I don't disagree in principle. But, as a consumer, this makes purchasing a bit more complicated. BITD, I could just buy an EastPak or JanSport and be fairly sure it was a good bag. Not much thought or analysis required. Today, I have to dig through 100s of brands I've never heard, with most of their ad budget spent on influencers who maybe can't be trusted. It's not a recipe for a healthy market.

pavl-: If you feel like spending several hundred dollars on a backpack (big if, I know), I can personally vouch for https://www.seventeenthirtythree.com/. It's more or less a one man show, and the guy is very obsessive about sourcing materials & assembly. Advertising is all word-of-mouth as far as I know. I at times feel anxious about his long term prospects for the exact reasons mentioned in the OP article - I have a backpack from this shop that's about a decade old and has zero visible wear. I think, in order to make this business model work, it's pretty much impossible to scale.

rcxdude: The issue is it reduces information availability to customers: if a customer finds a brand that produces high quality products that they know from experience they can trust, that trust can't propagate forward in time because the incentive it to abuse it for short-term profit, which is a net negative overall because the customer needs to find the new high quality product on the market, something that costs time and comes with risks itself. It's a market inefficiency.

Sharlin: If you're looking for a backpack that can survive just about anything, and don't mind a "tactical" look, check out Savotta:https://www.savotta.fi/collections/backpacksThey're expensive, but last a lifetime or more.

taeric: Agreed. You can also say that they are better engineered for most use, nowadays. With the adage that anyone can build a bridge that doesn't fall over, an engineering team is needed to build one that has the minimum resources to stay up.In particular, how durable do people think backpacks need to be? If you are going through them particularly quickly, maybe you are over loading compared to what they were designed for?

egypturnash: I'm waiting for this to happen to Tom Bihn's bags now that they have new owners who're starting to outsource the smaller bags to Vietnam instead of sewing them in-house in Seattle. Luckily for me, I've got what I need from them and expect it to last for quite some time

emtel: I bought a north face backpack for college in 1998. It cost $60. It was an extravagant expense for me at the time and I felt horrible about it for weeks.That backpack is currently at college with my son, who used it all through high school as well. It is by far the oldest and most durable daily-use object I’ve ever owned.

Cider9986: I bought a north face backpack 4 years ago. Looks brand new.

kstrauser: It mentioned in the article that their higher end models are still well made. I bet you can still get nice NF or JanSport bags if you’re careful. If I had to guess, I’d say the models at REI are decent (or else they’d get yanked) while the ones at Target are the chintzy ones.

_fat_santa: > Its EVERYTHINGI would argue not everything, just the things we remember. Those brands got popular, got sold and enshittified.We remember these brands fondly (personally I had a JanSport bag all through elementary school) and that's why it sucks that they suck now but what we forget is now is there are 1000X more brands to choose from, some from megacorps trying to cut corners at every step. Some from small shops that genuinely want to make a great product.The problem is visibility. Those good brands you have to go look for, you can't just go to WalMart or Target like in the early 2000's and expect to get a quality product. All the quality products now live on small websites scattered across the internet.

rubyfan: How can you tell?

josephg: Its got this ... cadence:> Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.> That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above> None of this shows up on the shelf. The colors are right. The logos are crisp. The product photography is excellent. You discover what you actually bought three months in, when the stitching pulls apart at every stress point.Its X. Its Y. Its Z. But then a longer sentence to break it up.

kstrauser: I gritted my teeth and bought a GoRuck GR1 a year ago. If it fell into a volcano, which is what it might take to destroy it, I’d buy another one. It’s still possible to find “buy it for life” backpacks but be prepared for eye-watering price tags.

busterarm: Seriously, I've had my GR1 since 2013 and it's still flawless. It replaced my bike messenger bags (Chrome, Mission Workshop).It's been through sand, mud, dust and just shakes the abuse off like nothing.

kstrauser: Yep. I like that the care instructions are literally to hose it off in the back yard and let it dry. This thing will outlive me.But I main got it because I’m a relatively large guy with broad shoulders and other bags pinched my neck. I was given a Timbuk2 pack from work that I otherwise liked, but the straps were too close together. I could either wear it high on my back and have them mash my neck all day, or low on my back wear it’s much harder to carry weight.(Side note to everyone: wear your backpack as high as possible when it’s even moderately loaded. When I see someone on BART with a huge backpack slung down by their hips, my back aches sympathetically. You want the heaviest load up between your shoulders.)

MostlyStable: While I personally find this kind of thing extremely annoying, to me, the main problem is the _difficulty_ of determining quality. The Donut media guys did a (relatively unscientific) video comparing a whole bunch of products from the 50s to modern day across several price points. What they found was that the things that "looked" the same now were simultaneously worse and also much cheaper. They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price. It was just that the brands and names that used to be quality were now usually not as much.So it is often the case that today, you can get something for cheaper than you ever could in the past (albeit not at a great quality), and if you are willing to pay higher prices (but often about the same as you would have paid in the past), you can still get good or even better quality.The main issue is that _determining_ which products actually are quality has also gotten harder in many cases.edit: found the video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4C62HC1HSo

hombre_fatal: I watched some comparison videos like that, but the old product was always more expensive than what you'd tend to buy today.Same seems to be true in that video you linked. The wrenches today were 1/4th the price of the 50yo wrenches.The problem I have is that there's no easy way to go to an ecommerce marketplace and pick "I want to spend more for higher quality".

elwebmaster: We always see consumers blamed for choosing price over quality. How about retailers taking the blame for dumbing down or removing product specs? If two items look identical but one costs more than the other how can consumer be blamed for choosing the cheaper ones? Especially in the age of LLMs, it you are building a quality product you need to include a spec sheet of what makes your product better than the competitor. Not dumbed down marketing speak like "lasts longer" but specific details justifying the premium, like "zippers made in Japan" or the stitching density, fabric specifics, etc. Consumers who care can use LLM to understand what it all means and make informed choice. But when the information is hidden consumer will choose the cheapest option.

thegrim33: Every backpack I've ever bought I was able to easily find all the relevant specifications I needed in order to choose a quality a pack. If you're looking at a pack which doesn't provide such specifications then that's an immediate giveaway that it's a low quality pack. It's not difficult, the average person really just does not care to do research. They instead just choose the cheapest one with the advertising that hooked them the best. But the information is there if you want it.

enraged_camel: First day of my college freshman year, I purchased a Targus backpack for the heavy ass gaming laptop I had back then. I still use it decades later. It has carried stuff inside it for tens of thousands of miles, seen lots of abuse, weathered all sorts of conditions, and is still in really good shape. Not a single tear. Every compartment, every feature works the way it did on day of purchase. I'm honestly amazed every time I use it.

CWuestefeld: From the HN site guidelines:Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

mfro: Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

triceratops: That's idiotic. As a consumer I'd prefer the same company to keep making the same good products forever. I don't have time to research which of the new brands is just as good.

__mharrison__: Make sure your bag has YKK zippers (if it has zippers).I used to sell outdoor equipment. If a brand cheaps out on zippers, I wouldn't trust it.I really like my Patagonia Black hole mini MLC. Awesome access. Fits under an airplane seat. Generous laptop padding. Excellent zippers. Water bottle pocket. Lovely warranty (Patagonia store nearby often gives new product when I try to get product repaired).

sccxy: I've got quite expensive ski jacket with 4 YKK zippers.3 of 4 zippers are broken after few years of usage.

gaze: I mean I get your argument but it feels like one should adjust for wage growth instead. One labor unit of value converts to a shittier backpack.

CWuestefeld: The other side of that coin is that someone whose units of labor demand less value can still get into the market.

ryandrake: Thank you. By the end of 2026, the same snarky "This article was written by LLM" comment is going to be posted on every single article on HN. It's becoming pointless to point out.

fwipsy: Perhaps it's gotten harder to determine by eye, but Google will still point you towards trustworthy brands in 2 minutes. The problem is people don't care or can't be bothered to Google.

justinclift: AI;Didn't Read (AIDR)

mossTechnician: The biggest giveaway for me was short sentences and the use of sets of three.

delichon: I've got a story of this but backwards. I know a guy, a hiking guru, moderately famous for his backpacks. He's an ultralight long distance enthusiast who designs much of his own equipment. I went to his house for a weekend session with a few people to learn to make our own, and I'm still using the one I made. For a few years he made and sold them out of his living room. Then he sold his brand to an outfit that scaled it up into a decent business.But the lightweight hiking guru made ultralight backpacks, with thin material and very minimal extras. It was designed to be light by a guy who could sew, so he was happy to fix it as needed on the trail. To him that was a feature not a bug. Meanwhile the company that bought the brand and design necessarily made it more robust, feature-full, and twice as heavy. They were pretty much forced to by the number of returns they were getting.So now I treasure my old backpack that worseonpurpose would probably deplore, and keep it repaired so that I don't have to make another or go buy one that worseonpurpose would probably like better.

llmslave: Private equity, and computers, optimized all the profits which drove profit quality down. We all have lower quality products to enrich a few finance individuals

infecto: Or more likely consumers vote with their dollar and cost matters over quality. PE is just a bad scape goat, there are obvious outliers but largely companies make products that consumers want.

tsimionescu: Companies are incentivized to sell the worse, most expensive version of a product that they can convince someone to buy. Many companies sell with huge margins, meaning there is significant slack to allow quality to increase for the current price point - there just isn't enough competition to matter. Many manufacturing companies also have complex supply chains, making this problem worse as everyone along the chain tries to maximize their own margin.It's not at all rare for a company to sell a quality product at a low margin for some years, building up a reputation, and then start decreasing quality to increase profitability once the quality branding is established.

infecto: Of course, optimal companies maximize for margin. Buyers have their own optimization mental model and maybe is surprising but a vast majority are thinking mostly on cost. Buyers and sellers do a dance and in the perfect long run you hit the optimal balance.Consumers/buyers still play a large role in this, it is easier to put all the blame on PE or Big business.

psadauskas: Its also gotten harder to trust them to maintain that quality, too.A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners, or even start selling a slightly different product with the same model number.Or you find a decent brand that makes good products, they get popular and grow and in come the MBAs with ideas on how to increase profits. Or they get bought by Private Equity and carry on only by brand momentum.

CWuestefeld: That's a worthwhile observation.It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available. It means that people who couldn't in the past afford something at all, are now more likely to have some path to getting it.And even if you could afford the higher quality, you may not need it anyway. I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater.But you're right, when you do need the higher quality, it can be tough to differentiate.

eesmith: There are a lot of products which are nowhere near my Pareto frontier, but for the most part I lack the information needed to make that judgement.The result is that I, like others, spend too much on crappy products.

tsimionescu: This is the conventional thinking, but it ignores a huge factor - marketing. The major function of the gigantic advertising industry is to deceive consumers about the real qualities of a product, leaving price as the only only signal that they can detect through the noise, in most cases.And advertising works in multiple ways to promote slop. Sometimes, it is directly by marketing bad products as cheap but high quality bargains. Sometimes it is, as I said, by using previous high quality products to sell low quality ones at the same prices. Sometimes it works by creating a huge pressure to consume more (such as the pressure on fashion trends), wiping out any care about durability (if it's considered poor taste to wear the same T-shirt two seasons in a row, why pwuld you buy a durable T-shirt?). Sometimes it works by mudding the waters, making consumers distrust any reviews that praise the quality of a product, leaving price and directly visible looks as the only signals that rational consumers can base their decision on.So, overall, the blame for this state of affairs lies far more with the way the modern market was designed, than with consumers specifically.

infecto: Feel free to blame whoever you want.It’s a dance between consumers and business.

lowbloodsugar: The issue here isn’t quality or market segmentation. The issue here is a de facto monopoly and the illusion of competition. Ok there’s also the issue of well known brand names now being entirely different companies and entirely different manufacturers.I just bought an Eddie Bauer fleece. I own three, well four. The fourth is going straight back. It is garbage. Eddie Bauer is one of the brands that got bought and now rents out the label.

bluGill: > I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality product in these cases. I'd rather pay a fraction of that price to have something that'll survive the light duty that I put it to because I won't demand anything greater.I've been burned too often with this thinking. All too often the cheap tool isn't just light duty so it breaks, it is not good enough to do the job at all. If the motor is too weak the tool won't do the job. If the wrench isn't precise enough it will round the bolt - this is worse than breaking: you can't fix the thing at all anymore with any quality of tool.I don't need the best tools, but I need one that is enough quality to do the job, and the cheap tools generally fail.

justinhj: Anecdotally this rings true with me. I have a 15 year old (at least) Samsonite backpack. It has zero signs of wear and has been on many trips, jammed under my feet in economy or on a dirty train floor. It was relatively expensive at the time at about $120.It was looking a bit sad and dusty so I upgraded to a fancier looking Bellroy that cost twice as much. When it arrived I instantly knew it was going back. It felt cheap, it looked cheap, and the compartment layout did not feel at all utilitarian.

Jaygles: Product labels should prominently display the parent corporation. Whatever is the top of the chain of ownership.