Lawful Prey

"There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person's lawful prey." 

 Attributed to the late John Ruskin, this quote is famous because the Baskin-Robbins ice cream chain displayed it in each franchise for decades. I like the quote, but it turns out probably to not be authentic at all. Several ruskin scholars have been completely unable to find it:

http://victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/quotation.html

There is a corollary to that quote, which is that there is also nothing that can't be made cheaper and sold for _even more_, and that those who consider quality to be determined by price are even tastier prey.

 I always liked Baskin-Robbins ice cream, which is not considered to be all that great by serious ice cream buffs.  They consider it middlebrow, "mid-fi", mediocre. And it is not terribly cheap, although it is cheaper by the scoop than some more trendy places I have visited. I buy it, and it satisfies me.

 I have never made ice cream. I have built some hi-fi equipment and I have a good idea what constitutes good construction practices. Much of what is sold in the high end audio retail emporiums today doesn't quite meet my standards, but is it actually negligent? The fact is that much high end audio equipment constitutes "Veblen goods", and if it lasts a few years that's all the buyers care about. They will come back in a certain amount of time and the salesman will tell them that the new products are so much better-even though they can't be, assuming they were honestly built in the first place, because analog electronics for audio hasn't made any fundamental changes in a quarter century-and they will listen to those salesmen. Such is the way of life.