In theory quality gets balanced with price, but it's too hard to measure the difference in quality between different products. "perfectly acceptable" often means being tricked. And some people will say it was an intentional choice to go with the cheap appliance instead of the industrial one that costs 3x as much, but all they really needed was one that had fewer corners cut and cost 15% more to build. When designs are falling into the quality hole, the percent increase in lifetime per percent increase in build cost is really good but good luck figuring out which companies built better and which companies increased the price for nothing.