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.
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.