Your favorite brands got worse on purpose
by neon_electro on 4/21/2026, 2:19:49 PM
https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-favorite-brands-got-worse-on-purpose
Comments
by: vharuck
I (or really, my parents) were burned by something like this recently. They bought my kid an FAO Schwarz marble run tower for Christmas. It's made of terrible plastic, with rough seams, and every play session ends when a marble gets stuck somewhere nearly impossible to reach. It requires partial disassembly, bending, and a screwdriver to pry things out.<p>I was shocked that an FAO Schwarz toy sucked so much. I looked at reviews on Amazon to see if anyone else had these problems, and they had. The FAO Schwarz brand had been bought by the ThreeSixty Group in 2016. Now it's just a way to polish the image of cheap toys.
4/21/2026, 3:58:57 PM
by: AlexB138
Funny baader-meinhof moment for me reading this. My wife recently bought me some Brooks Brothers polo shirts that essentially dissolved the first time they were washed. I had never seen a shirt that was such poor quality. We were both flabbergasted, and the employees apparently gave her a bit of a hard time when she tried to return them.<p>I suppose I now know why.<p>What this company is doing is taking advantage of, and really creating, adverse selection. They buy a brand for its reputation, destroy everything that made it worthwhile and abuse the information asymmetry of the public still believing they're buying the now non-existent brand. It could be seen very easily as a form of fraud.
4/21/2026, 4:10:00 PM
by: thatmf
Private equity destroys everything it touches
4/21/2026, 3:57:05 PM
by: logotype
Support brands with values and local manufacturing. For example: American Giant, Origin, Crye Precision, Randolph Engineering, American Optical, and many more.
4/21/2026, 3:34:05 PM
by: gniv
Same with household appliances. Most of the familiar names are shadows of their former selves. Unlike in clothes though the quality alternatives are usually really expensive.
4/21/2026, 4:12:47 PM
by: sandinmyjoints
The ledger seems useful, I expect to consult it when making future purchases: <a href="https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/" rel="nofollow">https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/</a>
4/21/2026, 3:53:06 PM
by: dostick
The author of website will be flooded with submissions about almost every known brand. Instead of ledger of bad brands it should track brands that remain, - it will be a lot easier and less work.
4/21/2026, 4:17:16 PM
by: blakesterz
I'm glad they had the "Brands That Still Make Their Own Stuff" list, that was my first thought. What other brands are still decent?
4/21/2026, 3:33:36 PM
by: rsingel
Love Pendleton but they have moved some production to Mexico and other spots. Check before you buy<p>For example, Pendleton Ganado Matelassé Blanket | Belk <a href="https://share.google/0QaaEXgLnNu0EKClr" rel="nofollow">https://share.google/0QaaEXgLnNu0EKClr</a>
4/21/2026, 3:59:07 PM
by: krustyburger
Italicizing every hyperlink makes this strange for the reader as italics are typically used to indicate emphasis.
4/21/2026, 3:17:15 PM
by: habosa
When people talk about AI replacing jobs, this is what it will look like. Companies that care about quality will use AI to make humans more productive and enhance their overall offering. Companies that only care about profit (read: most) will fire people, add in AI, and ship garbage. Other CEOs will see the results (read: profits) and copy this. We'll end up with shittier products and services than before and not much else.
4/21/2026, 4:07:29 PM
by: torvoborvo
Buy the cheapest thing available. They won't have the money to screw you and they can't mismanage any extra money you want to give to charity if you don't let them touch it.
4/21/2026, 4:24:15 PM
by: neurobashing
one thing to note (I didn't see it in the article or the comments as of this moment) but a thing that happened a lot with eg LL Bean was, people were buying old Bean stuff from yard sales and so on, then returning it for a new one, under the lifetime warranty. The implicit "customer for life" cycle was thus broken, and they were giving all-but-free stuff to people who had little intention of ever buying new.
4/21/2026, 4:26:08 PM
by: dkarl
In the business of apparel, I think this is a natural consequence of high-end buyers turning their noses up at long-lived brands, and working to differentiate themselves from mainstream middle-class buyers. It's a revolt against modernism making more and more goods accessible to people outside the economic and cultural elite.<p>If you're fancy, what do you do when mass production and the internet make the markers of fanciness accessible to the very people you're trying to be fancier than? For one, you stigmatize mass production and elevate artisanal handmade goods. Those are inherently impossible to democratize. Another thing you can do is replace the appreciation of quality with the act of discovery as proof of elevated taste. Make taste a moving target, so the dirty unwashed masses are always a step behind.<p>Brands like Brooks Brothers or Eddie Bauer have no place in this system. The best the masses can do to imitate the elites is buy cheap fast fashion from brands that go viral and don't live long enough for anyone to know their quality before they're gone.
4/21/2026, 4:22:31 PM
by: seizethecheese
The interesting thing here is that this is about brands being bought out of bankruptcy and licensed. The trademark system in the US exists to prevent consumer confusion, one might think that if a company ceases to exist, the trademark shouldn’t survive.
4/21/2026, 4:01:36 PM
by: AlexB138
Is there a review platform that focuses on brands, rather than on stores? For instance, if I look for Brooks Brothers reviews, I get reviews of individual stores, of their website, and a couple articles talking about the business. It seems like a good way to combat the information asymmetry being exploited here would be a trustworthy (I know, good luck) review platform that focuses on overall brands, rather than specific outlet channels. This seems like it ought to exist, but I'm not aware of where.<p>It seems like that may be partly what this site is trying to build with the ledger, but it looks focused only on the "bad".
4/21/2026, 4:13:45 PM
by: boringg
Super interesting -- outside the premise which we all know to be true. What is their goal here -- to crowdsource information so that we have a public record of note for companies? What are they planning to do with that information etc?
4/21/2026, 3:58:40 PM
by: readitalready
What a lot of these discussions are missing is that designer labels aren't high-quality either, especially newer brands.<p>A lot of the newer brands take time to learn from their experience to ramp up quality, from materials to stitching.
4/21/2026, 3:58:45 PM
by: lamasery
I think there's a <i>lot</i> of hidden inflation in this. Or, if not outright inflation, something similar to it.<p>Look at what it costs to get a work shirt (I mean, for physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s or ordered by the US military in the 1940s, which in neither case could be regarded as <i>super-fancy</i>. You're probably looking at <i>minimum</i> $150.<p>You want a button-up shirt that isn't total shit? Over $100. On clearance.<p>You "can" dress in cheaper alternatives, but those are so bad that their equivalent in the 1930s effectively didn't exist as a new product. You'd be looking at second- or third-hand <i>good</i> (by modern standards, not necessarily anything remarkable for the time, see again those work shirts) clothes, or some simply-constructed homemade garment.<p>On the plus(?) side we now have clothes so cheap that even though they develop holes or split seams within months, they're not worth repairing even for fairly-poor people, which is... something.<p>Dressing yourself in new clothes is a lot cheaper now. Dressing yourself in the <i>same quality</i> of new clothes? Maybe not.<p>[EDIT: This goes for plenty of stuff that's not clothes, and with more-recent products to compare them to. I've learned though my wife buying toys for our kids that modern standard-tier Barbies are <i>trash</i> compared to the ones from the '80s, fewer points of articulation, far worse cloth for the clothes, weaker construction, and fewer pieces of clothing or other accessories included. You have to buy from "fancier" Barbie product lines that are way more expensive, or buy non-Barbie dolls that cost a lot more than a modern entry-level Barbie, to get something that's actually similar to a standard Barbie doll in the '80s. So if you look at just "what did a Barbie cost 40 years ago versus today?" you'll get a misleading idea of how those costs have changed, because the actual comp to a modern standard-tier Barbie is some terrible, cheap Barbie knock-off from the Dollar Tree or wherever, in 1986; the cost to get the same-quality product, regardless of brand, has increased a lot more than whatever the cost difference is between a basic 1986 Barbie and a basic 2026 Barbie]
4/21/2026, 3:20:53 PM
by: somewhatgoated
Just but either professional (as in practitioners of a trade us it) or military products — those tend to be much better than “consumers” products. They cost more but they will last a lifetime. Of course not super applicable to every aspect of fashion, but I’ve been doing this for all kinds of products for years and was never disappointed. For fashion I would recommend to hit up small designers, ideally someone you know personally. It will cost more but look amazing and last many years.<p>Stop buying so much shit in general.
4/21/2026, 3:45:02 PM
by: JohnFen
This is an excellent analysis. It's also why I stopped considering a brand as an indicator of quality (in either direction) a long time ago. That something is a recognizable brand doesn't really mean much.
4/21/2026, 2:38:11 PM
by: refulgentis
Get this: the byline, Keyana Sapp? A Palantir employee in AI strategy. <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/keyanasapp/" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/in/keyanasapp/</a><p>They're iterating AI-written consumer populist blog posts and using us as guinea pigs, until we stop noticing they're AI. Their last one was "Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose", which we did great on. (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777209">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777209</a>, flagged off main page)<p>Don't let them get away with this, they're using a topic that we <i>all</i> appreciate specifically to divide our reactions into "if it's AI, it's good! What's the problem?" and god knows what the actual endgame is. But it's certainly not Palantir maintaining a consumer rights blog.<p>FWIW fact check is great, their RAG stuff works fine. But the unsourced "anonymous anecdotes" are made up, can't find backing for any of them and they're sort of entry-level rage-bait. (ex. DC shoes snowboard boots now designed in Florida by people that never designed snowboard boot)
4/21/2026, 4:01:26 PM
by: trjordan
> Wait for a beloved brand to hit financial trouble. Buy the intellectual property out of bankruptcy: the name, the logo, the trademarks.<p>The alternative is to shut down. That's how this whole system works: the brand can be sold, because the alternative is to cease existing.<p>I hate that the brand is worthwhile on its own. But: that's the point! The company invested in making the brand worth something by having it represent a promise. That promise isn't worth anything when the brand can be sold separately from the process of making the thing. The brand continues to be worth something, though.<p>This mechanism is a core feature of capitalism. Companies can be sold for parts, and those parts can lie to consumers. There's almost certainly a regulatory answer, but the behavior of the roll-up firms isn't unique to any particular firm. It's exactly the kind of value extraction the system is designed to support.
4/21/2026, 4:04:44 PM
by: bilekas
This is entirely by design. From a shareholder's perspective, the only thing that matters is number go up, when you take over a struggling company, they will squeeze every last drop of life from it in order to get some profit.<p>The fact that they are being quite secretive about their outsourcing, or at least not publishing it as a restructuring plan that they lay out to customers, is a little scummy, but makes sense for private equity. Milk as many people as they can while they still trust the brand.<p>From a shareholder's perspective, it's working as expected. And that's the real issue. If brands took more care of not expanding too fast that they require private equity and give away their ownership of the company slowly, then with patience and customer respect, we see its a good mix. But it seems people just get greedy or something and want it all faster.
4/21/2026, 3:33:13 PM
by: paganel
> Billabong board shorts lasted a decade of salt water and sun,<p>I've had a Billabong orange t-shirt last almost 15 years of sun and salt water from time to time, one of the best clothes-related purchases I've ever made. Sad to see that that's now a thing of the past.
4/21/2026, 4:11:15 PM
by: pocksuppet
Betteridge's Law of Trademarks: anything called "Authentic Brands Group" is as far away from authentic as possible.
4/21/2026, 3:18:24 PM
by: shmeeed
I hate to be the guy to say it, but this is just capitalism working as intended.
4/21/2026, 3:44:28 PM
by: furyofantares
The last time this slop blog made the front page, a week ago, it got 400+ points and nearly 400 comments before getting flagged off the front page.<p>Can we catch it quicker this time?
4/21/2026, 4:10:48 PM