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Amazon's delivery time is insane. I use other services like eBay for the most part, but when I need something fast idk who else to use besides Amazon.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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In terms of why some of the "goto" brands aren't the best, it's generally because they were the best, got popular on merit, and then business folk come along to suck the life out of it, spending brand goodwill while gouging customers and cutting costs.
Some food product recipe changes to cheap, more shelf stable crap for mass production and easy logistics. Some device gets locked into a paid subscription. All the helpful service people get fired and replaced with chat bots and offshored/outsourced staff. Metal components replaced with cheap plastic that degrades. Shipping times increased so they can make everything an ocean away and give the boat time to travel. Also run big marketing pushes so it's really hard to find the quality offerings.
There's just so many ways you can have big margins on big revenue by screwing customers while going they haven't noticed the decline in quality. Very hard for investor class to leave good product alone.
I'm thinking about things where the brand name has become "the name" of the thing. Kleenex & Google come to mind. Here in the SE corner of the USA, we say "Coke" instead of soda or pop.
Apparently, there's a name for this. "Generic Trademark". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
Also, I really like Hershey's. Family grew up not far from their site, was always the chocolate we had as kids. So I like your bizarro universe. :D
Lego is the best of the blocks/bricks. Nothing else is close in quality.
used to be, but in the last couole of years Legos quality has only gone down, while the price stayed high. Lego now has the same 'quality issues' that the other manufacturers have at more than double the price. Lego includes ugly stickers in $500+ 'Ultimate Collector Sets', which is just a joke, while the competition has printed bricks in most sets these days (super cheap sets still have stickers).
Explanation: Up until 2010 LEGO had a trademark/copyright on their Bricks, but a EU Court decided that the interlocking design can't be trademarked as a 'functional, technical shape'. Before then, mostly incredibly cheap Chinese knockoffs existed, since then other manufacturers have been improving quality control and in some cases surpassing LEGO now.
Check out: BlueBrixx, Cada, Cobi, Mould King
Some of the others are 90% there on quality, which is enough for me to ditch Lego. I can’t accept their insane pricing anymore and the color consistency is also getting worse.
I'm not familiar with the others. Who's 90% that we should look out for?
Xerox.
Velcro.
And up until a few years ago, Google.
Case and Point: We call the non-brand versions of the products by the mainstream product name and not the object's name. We ended up calling all copies "Xeroxes," all hook & loops "Velcro," and when we tell someone to search for it on the internet, we say "Google it." Becsuse, for a time, these were the best versions of their class.
Case and Point
Case in Point
Leatherman plier-based multitools. They invented the category and they continue to be the top choice. You can get cheaper tools that are adequate, but Leatherman always has some of the best designs, reliably high quality, and outstanding support. I'm constantly trying new tools from all over, but I always end up carrying one Leatherman or another.
Swiss Army knife with tools predates the leatherman by a century, leatherman might have been first with pliers but did not invent the category.
I've found Gerber to be a very close second. Depending on what you're looking for in a multitool, I think some of their stuff is better.
Gerber has made some very good multitools. They have also introduced some significant design improvements over the years. Among other things, they were the first to build one (Legend) where the tools opened outward instead of inward, which seemed like an obvious improvement to me.
My only complaint is that Gerber's quality has been inconsistent. During some periods they've put out cheaply made tools. During others they've produced tools that were the equal of anything else on the market.
That's totally fair. I'm not super familiar with them myself, but some of my colleagues used to ravea about the brand. I also haven't really carried a multitool for the better part of the last five years, since I changed careers and work in an office now lol.
I like their offset driver design and wish leatherman would come up with something similar- it sucks balls to drive a little screw with any of the leathermen I've owned.
Cars.
The more boring, mass produced, commonly available, mass-purchased, bare bones bitch of a second-hand car will probably last the longest because of more spare parts available, cheaper labor and more reliable maintenance due to very common repair processes, and a crazy amount of information available online.
Hershey's chocolate has a vomit aftertaste. Lindt chocolate is so much better.
Does Hershey's have a regional taste shift like coke does, based on where it was made? Atlanta coke vs Toronto coke is night and day. Hershey used to be made from Canadian milk shipped down in trucks.
Hershey has always had a sort of vomit aftertaste. The presence of butyric acid is the culprit. This compound is created when milk undergoes a process called lipolysis, which breaks down fatty acids to extend the chocolate's shelf life. Butyric acid is also found in human vomit, Parmesan cheese, and rancid butter. This is a direct result of Hershey engineering the chocolate to have a long shelf life. During the early 20th century, when refrigeration wasn’t reliable, the chocolate brand Hershey’s adopted a milk-stabilization process involving controlled lipolysis. The method kept milk usable for large-scale chocolate production as it traveled across country, but it also created butyric acid as a by-product. Butyric acid is perfectly safe to consume.
Camping supplies, especially backpacking gear (and especially ultralite gear).
But most of the top equipment brands have legitimate, no questions asked, lifetime warranties.
Also, camping stores. I'll pay a bit extra to get my gear from REI because the employees will spend hours making sure you get a backpack or boots that fit you perfectly.
You can get similar stuff from no-name brands on Amazon, but it's not going to be the same quality.
Yeah, as afflicted by compromises as some popular products become in the name of profit, the random brands on Amazon/temu show how even worse it can be. Usually the big brand shows at least a little restraint to avoid burning their brand value to the ground too quickly, but the no names with their knockoffs go full throttle into the ground.
I’d say musical instruments.
Even an entry-level Fender Squier guitar is going to be more solid, easier to set up and keep in tune, and have better tone than an off brand instrument. Yamaha also makes beginner/student models for a large variety of instruments, all of which are designed to last for years.
I’m hard-pressed to think of any small brand that makes anything widely preferred over the recognizable ones.
I would disagree with this quite strongly. Most brands have several different tiers of products. Often, especially for the budget-level options like Squiers, the manufacturing is outsourced. For example, my first electric guitar was from Cort, a South Korean company whose main business at the time was doing contract manufacturing for Ibanez, Squier, PRS, and G&L, Kramer, Honer, and more. Literally the same wood and parts, just with slightly different shapes and branding.
The highest-end, elitist guitars would be small shops that focus on handmade custom work. Stuff like Dunable or what PRS used to be. Jackson is now owned by Fender, but it used to be a more premium brand. Custom shop stuff is always going to be premium regardless of brand- Schecter, Ibanez, Dean, Gibson, Fender, doesn't matter.
To compare this to OP's prompt, it would be like if Hershey did custom high-quality chocolate options, also sold good quality chocolate, and also sold a decent value option in grocery stores, and also sold the plastic brown goop they sell today as a budget option.
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imagined a world where Hershey's...as the best chocolate
Damn, that would be a sad world, I guess 75% of the chocolate companies must have got destroyed or something, cause Hershey's taste like corn and it's disgusting
Cpu architecture. X86 is just a lot easier to deal with compared to risc-v arm, or Apple.
I’m hopeful it will change though, and I’m rooting for risc-v.
Really? I would have thought that by the easy-to-deal-with metric, anything RISC would win.
It's not necessarily the instruction set, it's the platform architecture, the fact there's such a thing as a standard BIOS. You can run Windows, Linux, Haiku etc on practically any PC. There's Linux for ARM, why can't I run Raspberry Pi OS on my Galaxy S10e? It's because, though the instruction set is similar, the platforms very intentionally have nothing to do with each other.
Strangely enough, we do have Microsoft to thank for it. They didn't want to do the work to enable all that crap nor did they want to enable all the vendors to do their own thing, so they were adamant about standards and if you wanted Windows support, you had to follow standards.
Meanwhile on embedded every little vendor goes wild. In the server space. ARM has taken on a similar scope, but ARM embedded is a mess and ARM server chip makers keep changing as no one gets a foot hold.
If we're referring to battery life x86 doesn't win very often sadly. There's a reason most handheld devices on earth use ARM.
Well, originally it was largely because no x86 implementation implemented decent deep idle behavior. Even as there might be some x86 implementations now that could credibly serve handheld market, the ecosystem is built around ARM so no one has a reason to deviate from that recipe.
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