I miss being able to easily shop for reliable brands.
Today I saw an Amazon ad for back-to-school supplies. The first item was a package of coloured pencils--naturally I'm thinking Crayola, Prismacolor, or maybe Faber-Castell. The brand was "Artistro." What is that? It's nothing.
The second item was a "premium sewing kit" (a mending kit with tiny scissors, tiny spools of thread, a paper tape measure, and a few straight pins, safety pins, and needles--you know the kind). For sewing I'm looking for Singer, Husqvarna, Simplicity, Brother, or possibly Fiskars. The brand for this item boldly stated as if it was something that would appeal to me, was "Yuahuang."
I mean. China has always manufactured a lot of our consumer items. The difference is that brands that had good reputations for quality, based on customer experience and--frankly--pride taken in manufacturing and selling good products, have been left out of the conversation since we shifted to buying even MORE cheaply--directly from Chinese manufacturers. But the standard of quality is much lower on similar items (Crayola pencils--you know exactly what you're getting. Because Crayola has been making art supplies for students for a century or more; "Artistro"--who knows? Very likely nothing like Crayola products, though), and there is no hard-won, years-old reputation with any of these "brands;" they can sell garbage and it doesn't damage the brand, because these "brands" are created to sell a single batch of a single item for a limited time, and if all 5,000 of those items are disliked by the customer, nobody is affected BUT the customers. They have no reason to care whether they are delivering a good product, or building their name.
It is unnecessarily difficult to find standard brands for so many items, now. Really, when I search for "colored pencils," what I'm imagining are Crayola brand and quality, and my search results are serving me mass-produced foreign junk, and maybe I'll find Crayola on page 2. I am willing to pay more for quality items; it has become very hard to find those items in the first place. Scotch tape. Corningware pans or dishes. Doc Martens boots. It's an endless parade of knockoffs and plastic dupes, and getting the real brands you're used to and trust is much harder than settling for the first thing you find. Like a Yuahuang sewing kit.
Everything is terrible.
