Comment by Dalewyn
>We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices.
There is a line where you really do need to compromise on quality and even reputation to keep costs down, though. If you can't or refuse to do that, you end up stagnant and irrelevant like Japan.
Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain "good enough" threshold.
Yes, there's a lot of crap out there but I also don't want to pay a huge premium for everything so that it lasts a lifetime (and will probably be outdated or out of fashion long before that).