I was eating some chocolate when I imagined a world where Hershey’s was widely accepted, even by elitists, as the best chocolate.
Is consumer elitism just a facade for pretentious contrarians? Or are there things where even most snobs agree with the masses?
Also, I mean that the product is intrinsically considered to be the best option. I’m not considering social products where the user network makes the experience.
Edit: I was not eating Hershey’s. Hershey’s being the best chocolate is a bizarro universe in this hypothetical.
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.
And the ability to schedule deliveries to happen on a day of the week when you’re likely to be present. And the notifications that your delivery is near, so you can be ready to pick it up (important for expensive items).
Never actually tried that because delivery times are so insane. When I’ve wanted to schedule a specific day, I’ve gotten same day or by 6am delivery, making it moot
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.
Hershey in a sentence with “chocolate” without a negation? This is weird.
When someone offered me a piece of Hersheys “chocolate” ages ago I spit it out and asked if this is perhaps spoiled. No, it wasn’t spoiled, this stuff actually tastes vile. I don’t know how Americans can stand this stuff…
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?
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
Younger me, working in a warehouse job came across one that I found hilarious.
We used pallet sized boxes to move stuff around. But it was really more of a short cardboard tube, square shaped but only flaps on the bottom, there was no actual top or bottom side.
And what was it called? It was a “gaylord”.
I thought for sure that they were pushing me as the new guy, but everyone I came across used the term so naturally and consistently. Even when I worked at a separate site for a while, everyone there used it too. I never looked into it farther, but I eventually accepted it.
I don’t remember if I ever did it with a straight face, but that’s what I called them.
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.
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.
My Skeletool is one of my favorite possessions. I was genuinely upset when it broke (doing something very aggressive with it, not because of any flaw) but it turned out their warranty is legit and I got it back good as new. They even gave me new bits for it when they sent it back.
I used to agree with you, but their prices have gone up and they’ve been transforming themselves into a high end lifestyle brand.
My Charge is now almost 20 years old and still going strong, so I’m nit saying their products are bad, but I’m not seeing real innovation come out of them and I’d honestly say for most people a Wave clone is probably good enough. They’re totally phoning it in on small tools as well, China is way ahead of them on design.
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 did specify that I was talking about plier-based tools in my original response.
I grew up with Swiss Army knives, back before Leatherman was in business. (Yes, I am that old.) I still carry a Rambler with me everywhere I go.
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.
Have you tried the multitool made by Victorinox?
Yes, I have both a SwissTool and a Spirit. They are excellent tools. I’ve carried them both at, at one time or another, but I keep going back to Leatherman after a while. I don’t think they are better or worse, it’s just a matter of what particular uses you have.
My thing is they discontinued a lot of the tools I like. I carry a Skeletool and a Style CS, that pair works out great, but they don’t make any of the Styles anymore. I also really like my Squirt ES, another they discontinued.
That has frustrated me too. The Style PS was my idea of a perfect keychain tool, but they killed it in favor of the older, and less capable, Micra.
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.
Yamaha is amazing. I recently got into playing recorders and their base-level $8 plastic recorder is honestly a great instrument.
I’ve still got my first bass clarinet which is a Yamaha. Still plays great for what my dad paid for it.
Lol recorders are the bane of parents with children in grade school across the US
No offense taken. They are an odd instrument that no one would know about if they weren’t forced on every elementary school music student. I seem to have missed that somehow, probably by changing schools at just the right point.
I like the sound, but I particularly like the sound of the lower-voiced recorders. I am mostly playing tenor and bass, which have lovely rich tones. My wife and a friend are both humoring me, so they’re playing soprano and alto with me. I’m not any good at it yet, but I am having a good time learning.
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.
I always wondered if part of the problem is the long shelf life. I swear I’ve tasted some hersheys that was good. Perhaps it ages safely but rancid?
The aftertaste is very subtle, one might describe it as tangy. If you are an American and have never had foreign chocolate, you’ve probably only ever had chocolate with with milk that has undergone lipolysis; and you’d likely never notice it. For the first 5 years of my life I was raised in foster care by naturalized Europeans, so my formative years involved Swiss chocolate whenever I had it. Swiss chocolate uses milk that has not undergone lipolysis, and their chocolate is very smooth due to a process called conching. Conching is a mixing process with lots of heating and aeration which allows organic acids to evaporate creating a very uniform and smooth textured chocolate without bitter or tangy afternotes.
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.”
Case and Point
Case in Point
Key word there is “for a time”.
Camping supplies, especially backpacking gear (and especially ultralite gear).
But most of the top equipment brands have legitimate, no questions asked, lifetime warranties.
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.
Cpu architecture. X86 is just a lot easier to deal with compared to risc-v a‘em, or Apple.
I’m hopeful it will change though, and I’m rooting for risc-v.
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.
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.
Interesting. What do ARM platforms have? BIOS and friends, as important as they are, always strikes me as a precarious tower of baked-in technical debt.
(I know a Galaxy in particular is a locked-down SoC you can’t really touch, so maybe let’s talk about the Pi)
ARM platforms have whatever the developer of that system that day came up with, same as literally everything except x86.
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.
Actually I think we have IBM and their laziness to thank for it.
The original 5150 PC was pretty much an afterthought by Big Blue’s standards, they slapped it together from off the shelf parts and bought the OS from some pissant upstart company called Microsoft on a non-exclusive license. The only IP that IBM actually had in the machine was the BIOS. Compaq developing a non-infringing yet compatible BIOS made the x86 PC a multi-vendor platform, which made it more attractive to adopt than the likes of Commodore who made a series of incompatible computers even within their own ecosystem. Note how the only thing Microsoft has ever consistently done that was worth a damn was backwards compatibility…it’s the only thing keeping them in business.
From a users perspective everything runs on x86.
Oh, I see.
Probably soda. I think most people enjoy Coke/Pepsi and the other mainstream choices are usually considered superior to the small batch artisan stuff
I’ll allow that with a big asterisk, if you consider Mexican Coke as coke then yes, its one of the best sodas. If not, there are way better options.
Do they make chinotto? I have converted and can’t go back lmao
Yeah, that’s a good one. The alternative stuff that does get popular is usually intended to hit an entirely different market, rather than a higher-end market. Is it Ollie that’s the new hot thing? It’s being marketed as the “healthy option,” and not high-end soda.
I was thinking that the answers here are generally gonna be products that are cheap/synthetic by nature. High quality chocolate has to be high-quality-sourced. High quality soda with the particular flavor that people like exists to the extent that bubbly sugar water can be high-quality.
Good answer.
It’s of course a bit fuzzy what The Best really means, but I’d say that toothpaste would be an excellent example, for I’ve never encountered anyone, be they laymen, dentists or health nuts, arguing that there is some other toothpaste that’s really better in any meaningful way than the offerings from the big best-selling mainstream brands.
Fun fact, aside from the fluoride, you actually don’t need a paste at all. Just the friction does the important part.
Just avoid the charcoal toothpastes and brushes. That’s a stupid trend of its own and you’ll do more damage to your teeth that way.
On the other hand, it doesn’t really matter. As long as it contains flourite, all toothpastes are fine.
Friendly correction for someone who frequently messes it up, it’s fluoride.
Out of curiosity, why?
I’ve always assumed it was some fad, but I never assumed it was harmful (maybe I’m just naive).
It’s harder than tooth enamel and can cause erosion.
Wat? They’re not putting diamonds in there. Charcoal is softer than graphite, which is a soft mineral to start with.
Charcoal ranges from 50-100 on the Rockwell scale while tooth enamel is around 51.
Silica is a common ingredient in most toothpastes.
Cling wrap, the store brand is absolute garbage. The cutting edge sucks and the wrap just tangles up in itself so easily.
Cling wrap, the store brand is absolute garbage
…unless that store is Costco.
Kirkland Signature cling wrap is the best. And the “Easy Cutter” is the best thing to ever happen to cling wrap.
Kirkland isn’t a typical store brand though, most offerings are just a repackaged name brand from what I understand
They actually do co-branding with some of their KS products. I had to go check and see if the cling wrap was co-branded with Reynolds but it wasn’t; I see in their app the aluminum foil is.
I’ve never seen their sliding “easy cutter” on any brand’s cling wrap before. It really is a game changer.
You got a point there. No Costco here, yet at least
Ugh, cling wrap makes me feel like I’m completely fucking up the planet. I hate using it.
Put a little water on the surface you want it to cling to.
