I'm pretty sure a lot of the "improvements" in price attributed to international trade over the last ~4 decades have more to do with the lowest end of the current product range simply not existing before, i.e. the worst versions of a product are worse (and cheaper) than the worst version that was available decades ago. Those products take over—for reasons that may include consumers legitimately preferring them but also probably includes difficulty consumers have finding reliable information about products other than price—and the nicer version that used to be the norm might actually get more expensive as new market segments develop and production scale drops.
This is a good point - some of what we are calling cheap crap just wasn't being made before.
Besides there being more stuff of every type of buy, the purchasing power of the dollar has declined, so maybe people can't afford a toaster that's as good any more?
