I live in country where shrewd salesmen know that people like me would pay extra for quality so they sell me crappy quality still, just for 3x the price.

So yeah, I started resorting to asking acquaintances with big families and also LLMs to desperately try to separate the wheat from the chaff.

It's not impossible and it's indeed doable, just not very quick.

I have a hard time finding quality stuff, even when I want to pony up for it. Do you have a good resource?

It's hard to know whether moving up in pricing just buys unnecessary features in a checklist, higher quality veneer, brand name, or actual quality.

> Actually good quality stuff is prohibitively expensive for the non-ultra rich, and the rest of the quality stuff is increasingly being hollowed out by private equity and rapidly declining quality. People just can’t afford to pay for quality and things that last due to price gouging, wage stagnation, and increased cost-of-living.

There, fixed that for you.

Yeah, it doesn't seem like people remember how expensive in real terms things were in the 80s.