You mean the $9.95 faucets will not last 30 years?
They drove everything down, not just $10.00 faucets but everything.
It used to be that almost everything that you had in your home that was plumbing, from water heaters to faucets, to toilets and bathtubs, to P-traps and angle stops, came from your plumber, and the industry would turn on a dime to stop buying from a maker if a fixture was not high quality.
Plumbers in Dallas, in San Francisco, in Maine, all finding a brand that wasn’t holding up or was causing callbacks would all quit buying it within weeks or months of each other, but today, there is an endless supply of new buyers with no idea of quality or longevity.
Even the old names had to start making junk to sell to Home Depot and introduced cheaper lines of their products.
One beloved plumber’s faucet maker apologized in the 1990s to us in full page ads, saying that they had to meet Home Depots demand, because they couldn’t afford to not sell faucets there.