The article itself easily gives light to what drives certain declines in longevity (if that's your only measure of quality, since there are others too):
"Psychologist Albert Vinyals, author of El consumidor tarado (The Disordered Consumer) (2019), recalls that years ago, the first thing car ads highlighted was their longevity. “Now we don’t even consider it,” he notes over the phone. “My grandmother, when she went to buy clothes, looked at the type of fabric they were made of. Now, no one knows what their pants are made of. Why would they? In a year, we’ll stop wearing them because they’ll no longer be fashionable.”"
People don't care. As sheer product diversity and sourcing increased across the last several decades, so many products have become so much cheaper as a percentage of disposable income that people just stopped caring about how durable they are. The logic is sound from the standpoint of a consumer for most products for which durability isn't an absolute must: Just accept a cheaper thing because it's not too cumbersome to replace it sooner rather than later.
This has slowly worn down a general tendency towards careful thriftiness that previous generations had internalized and made the latest generations internalize that durability doesn't matter as much.
That many products marketed as high quality and sold at such prices also end up being poorly made doesn't help either: If you can't even trust the outcome when you make an effort to be careful, why bother?
"Psychologist Albert Vinyals, author of El consumidor tarado (The Disordered Consumer) (2019), recalls that years ago, the first thing car ads highlighted was their longevity. “Now we don’t even consider it,” he notes over the phone. “My grandmother, when she went to buy clothes, looked at the type of fabric they were made of. Now, no one knows what their pants are made of. Why would they? In a year, we’ll stop wearing them because they’ll no longer be fashionable.”"
People don't care. As sheer product diversity and sourcing increased across the last several decades, so many products have become so much cheaper as a percentage of disposable income that people just stopped caring about how durable they are. The logic is sound from the standpoint of a consumer for most products for which durability isn't an absolute must: Just accept a cheaper thing because it's not too cumbersome to replace it sooner rather than later.
This has slowly worn down a general tendency towards careful thriftiness that previous generations had internalized and made the latest generations internalize that durability doesn't matter as much.
That many products marketed as high quality and sold at such prices also end up being poorly made doesn't help either: If you can't even trust the outcome when you make an effort to be careful, why bother?