the end of brands?

  So I'm kinda middle-aged (at least, I sure hope I am!) which means I've been spending my own money on Stuff I Care About for at least forty years.  I had my own money early only through my own efforts; I was an only child of a single parent who hadn't intended on having a kid and didn't have good career options, so I didn't get things bought for me, I had to earn my own money if I wanted a telescope, or camera equipment, etc.  So I did, by delivering newspapers, mowing lawns, raking leaves, shoveling snow from sidewalks, and selling parking space when the nearby university had games at their athletic assembly hall - pretty much every Tom Sawyer money-making enterprise you can imagine that wasn't downright illegal, and I never once tried selling lemonade at any age.

 All of which is by way of expressing that I have always cared about spending my limited funds wisely, from an early age, and from the professional craftsmen in our neighborhood I learned the importance of saving your pennies to buy better quality things, and settling for owning few things in general, provided those things were of greater quality, so that you would own them a long time and not have to spend more money on those things later. In many cases, the idea was that you were buying something for the family to use, with the implication that the kids and grandkids would get to use it too, if you bought high quality things, and took good care of them.

 Of course, one way you learned to recognize high quality things was through brands - companies which you or your peers had good experiences with.

 But over the past thirty years, a major "sea change" has occurred, as small companies go out of business or get absorbed by larger companies.  In the more benign cases, the small company and its facilities and employees continue on under new ownership.  But in all too many cases, companies have simply gone out of business, shuttered their factories, and called it quits entirely.  Whereupon, some enterprising holding company buys all of the rights to that brand name.

 Here is the situation today, observing just one commodity, power tools: 

 Just 18 megabrands control 91 percent of the global power tools market. And of those 18, four companies control 48 percent.

 The problem is that brand name trustworthiness, when it was still something easy to depend upon, is something which takes time to develop.  Parents told their kids to buy Kitchenaid or Black & Decker, or Dodge or whatever.

 But now we have retail giants like Amazon flooding the market with cheap Chinese goods with "brand names" which were created two days before you first saw the product using a random brand name generator web site.  No, really, it's a thing!

 So what is the poor, innocent young consumer - perhaps someone who hasn't been fortunate to have the benefit of some older, more experienced person to advise them - what are they to do when faced with this list of brand names on Amazon?

Deyard, LifeGoo, Syntus, Kingsdun, Protorq, Vastar, Wiha, Apsung, Xool, Jakemy, Gangzhibao, Tekman, and so on...

 Well, there is ONE NAME in that list which is not cheap junk.  I'll give you a hint: it's the brand that costs literally 5X more than all the others, and it's the brand made in Germany... and by the way, it is not in the above chart either, as they're not owned by anybody else...

 So it's hard to know by yourself!  Really, this just underscores the importance of not living in a silo; it's vital to get to know other folks who share your interests, find ways to work with them, play with them, make friends among folks who do the same things you do, so you can find the "Elmers", the "old guard", the experienced folks you can learn from, and who have already found out the hard way which brands you can trust and which ones you can't - that kind of advice is pure gold, since virtually all online reviews you can find these days are highly suspect.

 In short, good quality and good service are not dead, but there is a lot more noise these days, making it harder to find the wheat among the chaff. Networking with others - not reading product reviews - will help you spend your money wisely.