All this post is missing is a “this post made by metalhead gang” watermark

It might be going stale, my cat is always super excited for the first few meals out of a new bag.

I’ve had the non internet connected one for a few years, and overall I like it a lot. There’ve been a couple of maintenance issues, but all in all I was able to fix them myself with youtube tutorials.

Mine tends to go about a week and a half to 2 weeks between emptying it out, and it does smell a bit by 2 weeks. I’ve thought about rigging it up to have a larger bin, but then I’d have to carry a larger bag of refuse out.

Agree with nylon repair tape generally, but I think this is the shoulder strap’s lower attachment point, which would be a very different story to random interior damage.

Is this the lower shoulder strap attachment point?

There is a decent chance North Face will be willing to repair it.

I think if you just patch it, unless you fix it in a stronger way, whatever wear pattern that caused this will probably reappear in this area again. Maybe that buys you a couple years or however long this took and that would be worth it to you. It looks to me like that spot is a pretty complicated area with lots of panels meeting up. So it might not be very easy to fix strongly in a way that looks nice. If the stylishness of the bag is pretty important to you, it might not be a great beginner DIY project.

Something I haven’t seen mentioned in these threads is economies of scale. Most cars are kind of engineering and machining marvels especially for their price, with a huge amount of their manufacturing being automated to a very high level. Fancy bikes probably do not have the production volume to justify that kind of automation. Their price represents their actual production being less efficient, not being able to amortize the R&D costs over as many units, and general luxury premium.