Your toaster dies the second you unbox it. Pants rip on day one. The quality of everything is trash now. This is what bigheaded people call enshittification. Companies deliberately design products to break right after the warranty. This is due to the so-called “Hunt for Infinite growth.” Steady profits ain’t enough. They need MORE, so they skimp, shrink packages, and shove everything behind subscriptions. Infinite growth is a plague, and it hurts your personal finance.
Disclaimer: This video is satirical commentary and for entertainment purposes only. It does not constitute financial, legal, or investment advice.
A while back I was at an event with a huge coffee urn. At the end of the event I took home a mostly empty plastic container of Folger’s coffee. Instead of throwing it out when I was done, I kept it and used it for years to hold tea bags. It finally died when I left it on the stove and the open fire melted it.
About the same time I brought a plastic measuring cup. That thing exploded the first time I dropped it.
Under capitalism, garbage is eternal, and things you pay for self-destruct.
…empty plastic container of Folger’s coffee… …I kept it and used it for years to hold tea bags.
Off topic, but WTF? How did the tea taste?
Fine.
I washed the container out before I used it.
Are you still confused?
Are you still confused?
Yeah, how’d you manage to finish a whole can of Folgers?
"empty plastic container "
It was in your own message.
Don’t you read your own posts?
I think, that was another person’s message
Whatever.
Make cold brew with it.
Actually my wife used to work at a Vietnamese restaurant and they’d fill a pot with probably 1/3 of this Folgers container and do a slow drip through it in the morning to make Vietnamese coffee base for the day. Shit was delicious despite its roots.
“FOLGERS…it’s brown…Just shut up and drink”
Rememberers will miss the superior tin cans they were massive and our parents used them to store all means of things.
Costco still sells coffee in huge tin cans.
That reminds me, I need to go get one. Need a new in kitchen compost bin.
True story.
I was on vacation recently. After a tour our guides gave us coffee and cookies. I took the cookie tin home with me, because I hadn’t had a proper sewing kit for a long time.
Huh?
I get the feeling that there are many, many times every day that you ask that question.
The curse of being on a tail end, top or bottom 🤣🤣. I’m blissfully in the middle!
Companies don’t make anything new anymore. All the amazing leaps in design and technology we’ve enjoyed over the last multiple decades are finished. They cost too much…a negative expense on quarterly report.
What’s cheap and effective? Shrinkflation. Cutting employee benefits. Stagnating wages. Decreasing quality. Removing employees and replacing them with AI or other automation. Cutting customer service. Forcing people to use apps. Finding new ways to unbundle, insert fees, or force another middleman between customers and what they want.
It’s a perverse Matrix, the “coppertop” is us, and they’re extracting everything they can from us to keep their system going and the line moving up.
SaaS
It’s become “Life as a service”, and they’ve tied everyone’s retirement/pension to the continued existence and success of the system so everyone is too afraid to do anything about it and/or complicit.
Well, when people couldn’t afford to work and were being paid in scrip, and the babies were hungry, they not only decided to strike, but also shed blood and died for it, and everyone fortunate enough to have 9-5 40s that pay the bills and look down their noses at everyone else, and are loss adverse might possibly consider the reason they have 9-5 forties are because of the people who worked dirty jobs and died for them.
Not sure how much of this channel is AI generated but they do seem to use a fair bit of it at least.
Unbelievably ironic given the topic of the video…
We let MBAs, who have no skills other than “buy low, sell high”, take over everything.
Story time:
I used to work at a place that sells exclusively to local factories. We had an insane warehouse that may very well have had the Ark of the Convenant in the back, and small shops in each factory. Workers could get gloves, drive belts, fans, and other day-to-day stuff right there at the factory or order from the warehouse. The big Fortune 500 plant manager (engineer, nice guy, smart) tells me that he’s retiring and the New Guy (MBA) wants to have a meeting. Ok.
New Guy immediately starts making demands, “I want to know how much we are buying off your shop”. Well, we send a weekly update every Monday and each month a full report that tracks trends and notes any major purchases.
“I want the full report TODAY”. Ok, here is the most recent report.
“No, run it for today”. Sir, it’s the middle of the month so all the metrics will be skewed comparing two weeks to previous months.
“I don’t want your opinion, I want the report. Now.” To which I think I’m this guy’s supplier and he talks to me this way, I can only imagine what employees hear. So I print the report and leave.
Start of next month I get a call “You’re robbing us blind!” Well good morning to you too, what is the problem. “This report you sent says you’re charging us way too much. We’re going to fix this.” After some back and forth, it’s clear he was using the two week report as the baseline for what he thinks our services should cost. I try to get him to look at literally any other monthly report or grasp the basics of how time works. Nope.
Then he says the greatest thing a human in charge of a factory has ever said. “It looks like the maintenance guys are the ones spending the most money…” I pause trying to figure out what he is getting at since of course the people replacing parts are the ones buying parts. “…the maintenance department doesn’t even make us any money!” It was at this moment I realized I wasn’t dealing with an asshole, I was dealing with an idiot asshole.
They also moved most of the maintenance guys over to the line. Soon after, our shop was kicked out. Idiot Asshole would bulk ordered parts, usually incorrectly. Parts, tools, and safety gear kept disappearing from their new storage room which he tried to make my problem, somehow. They ran up absurd levels of delivery fees over the following months because the line would shut down so they had to emergency order the replacement from the warehouse instead of walking to the shop. Lots of wrong parts ordered because while the shop had the most commonly replaced parts for that factory handy, the warehouse list had a million billion almost identical parts and good luck figuring that out looking at a part list.
My last week I had to emergency deliver ($$$) some fuses over and they had a team of suits there trying to figure out why productivity had cratered. I caught a smoke on the way out with one of the remaining maintenance guys who informed me the first thing the suits did when they walked in was fire his boss, the miracle worker who kept the place somewhat running with Idiot Asshole in charge. The maintenance boss didn’t say a word when he was fired, just got in his truck to drive across the street where they hired him on the spot.
This was a few years ago. The plant is still down more than it runs. The company has done two huge stock buybacks in recent years, so the stonks is way up even with their largest facility barely operating. The Roaring 20s keep on roaring.
It’s okay to use their real names here. Some people deserve privacy, some don’t.
I think this is due less to planned obsolescence than people want to believe. I’d argue it’s as much due to market pressure. People want to buy cheap things so companies start making things cheaper.
Naww… it’s about the infinite growth. “Shrinkflation, planned obsolescence, and enshittification” all describe aspects of it.
There are very few (you can probably count them on your hands) companies that don’t do it, such as Arizona tea. The worst offenders are publicly traded companies because they need to show that “infinite growth” to investors.
I think it’s both. Otherwise trash shipping companies like TEMU wouldn’t have become so incredibly popular. A lot of people are basically NPCs which like to mindlessly consume stuff. The cheaper the better.
Shopping is a hell of a drug
Because they were conditioned to be that way.
It’s true. My own husband looks at cheap garbage and thinks it’s “nice”. I’m just like, you can tell you were raised on cheap Walmart furniture. I was poor but we thrifted real wood. I wasn’t allowed to buy cheap clothes (only made to buy less of them) because they didn’t want my clothes to look like shit after a wash.
Don’t buy your kids crap clothing crap food or have them sleep in a room of crap. Buy them high quality just buy them less.
In case of real, immediate need, buy what you can afford. My parents love that awful store and I have a deep loathing of it, but in a pinch, I surely will. But people should know Walmart name brands are of lesser quality, because Walmart negotiates very low wholesale prices, and don’t really pass along the savings, anymore.
Salaries are so low it’s a race to the bottom for every product. Anyone can design a toaster that works, but it takes an enshittification engineer to make one that barely works.
Salaries are low, but this is a trend that’s been going on for decades. Since long before the current affordability crisis.
Wealth inequality has also been a long slow march. The fact is almost nobody can afford a basic standard of living from minimum wage in the 70’s: American-made cotton clothing, appliances that last 30 years, real local food that doesn’t make us sick, on and on… It’s not even that the products are cheaper it’s that they’ve also become less ethical. If you shop for a regular organic cotton USA-made T-shirt it’s like $80. What was once within reach is now a luxury with a cheap surrogate.
Thankful for someone else using the tshirts. I tell people this and they get so mad. $80? They say. I’m like… yea think of how much goes into that shirt! How much would it cost if you made it? If you want good quality that lasts even a tshirt will cost you $100. Our dollar is near worthless.
Yea well, they are trying to hide how badly our money has deflated. Can’t buy cotton clothing only plastic. Can’t buy real chicken only chicken that went through a chemical wash.
In fact you can buy both cotton clothing and air-chilled chicken. Those are two things I focus on buying. And not because the chlorine level in water-cooled chicken is dangerous, it’s because the water retention prevents better browning.
Agree. People buy shit for close to nothing and are then shocked that it’s worth nothing.
Look them right in the face and use the broken shit.
My phone is not physically on fire? I’m still using it.
My pants are ripped? Don’t look.
You can’t MAKE shit obsolete enough that I won’t suffer through using it out of sheer spite.
I do that already and my friends call it “living in squalor”. I don’t really mind tho
Maybe not all Adolfs are bad #notalladolfs
HAHAHAH
Im taking the name back. Michael Jordan tried to bring the mustache back but the world wasn’t ready for it.
I say it EVERY DAY now, and my family is sick of it, but they know it’s true: NOTHING works any more. Products, systems, etc., nothing works the way it’s supposed to, including customer service, which is worse than it has ever been. These days, corporations consider an AI chatbot to do ALL of their customer contact to be high quality customer service.
I work for a small (nearly big) company and we still do things with actual people. I’m fully prepared to push back as soon as that becomes an idea. They’re already leaning towards AI bullshit for data crunching, which is fine as it is, it’s helpful, but I can see the writing on the wall. I will not be words on that wall. I have faith the people I work with will do the right thing, but it’s not unshakeable.
Does the book hold up or does a new book talk about it better? I’ve been trying to slowly convince some of my wife’s friends that no, you don’t really need to buy 100 trinkets everywhere you go just because they’re there. I think I’ve at least gotten through to their nephew that a few cool things and time with friends is enough.
Pretty well, but it’s definitely dated. It could probably use a modern update, but anyone with a modicum of sense should be able to extrapolate.
There’s a secret code built in too that if you buy the extended Warrenty, it lasts just beyond it
This is why, you don’t need a whole video to explain it: 🖕
McDonalds sells hamburgers for $7
I can beat that. Let me sell you a hamburger for $1
Capitalism approves… the government does not
I’m not allowed to sell you a hamburger. Not without a permit, and an inspection, and a place designated as a business to sell that hamburger from. What, you think you can just cook a hamburger on a grill and sell it to someone?
So I get a business license, find a place of business, get my permits, get my inspection, and open the doors… except all that cost money so I have a $12k loan and a building that costs $3k a month and I still need electricity, water, and wifi. Once all that is paid for I still need to earn enough money that I can go home and pay my own bills and survive
At $1 a hamburger, I’ll never sell enough hamburgers to survive so I have to raise the price. My hamburgers are now $9
McDonalds knows this. They got a stranglehold on the market and while anybody could technically compete and that competition is suppose to keep product quality high and prices low people can’t actually compete
Now McDonalds can make their burgers smaller, the quality worse, and jack up the price… what are you going to do about it?
You think Wendys will save you? Burger King? Nah, they do the same thing
Now apply this to literally everything. Clothes, washing machines, dish washers, etc… I guess in theory I could make a better TV that doesn’t come with a bunch of bullshit advertisements built into it and sell it to you for less, but the government won’t let me
An early-2000s talk radio host in consumer advocacy & economics coined the term, “death of the pricetag”. Big business will strategically hide the true $1-$9 hamburger excess cost and successful sell a $0.99 hamburger. It’s far worse today. Not just hiding cost across other menu items – they implement: peak\demand pricing, seasonal \holiday pricing, they barrow huge loans and hold debt, and the worse discharge\writeoff debts.
I love your comment because it still holds evermore true today. Who even has huge capital, huge advertising, on-call debt lawyers, and teams of accountants. The big businesses whom all are standardizing and normalizing these “strategies”. Leaving zero chance small business survival. And permits, rent, employee pay, tax, etc would be nominal instead of impossible.
Disclaimer: This video is satirical commentary and for entertainment purposes only.
Really lets you know the veracity of the information contained therein.
My friend got me this alarm clock for my birthday last year or the one before. Big battery that charges automatically, you can set your own alarm audio file, sounds good right? The display is already non-functional.
Meanwhile, the LCD display in my alarm clock from the 80s is still as bright as ever…
Quick question, what does the d in LCD stand for?
Liquid crystal display
So LCD display is redundant.
What does pedantry mean?
Let’s go to an atm machine and you tell me the pin number of your credit card and I’ll tell you 🙃
This hasn’t really been my experience, even as someone who often buys the cheapest available product. There’s some notable exceptions but for the most part all my basic tools and appliances have just worked as they are supposed to and still work after years of use, and are as good or better than what was available in the past (love my lithium battery drill, mower, staple gun, plumbing tech that lets me do basically any upgrade or repair without soldering, air fryer, silicone cooking utensils, etc).
There are aspects of the typical design of old products that are objectively worse than what is standard now, for instance comparing my drill to the decades old one my parents have, aside from the clear improvement not needing an extension cord, it has a button on the top of the handle that can be pressed from either side to switch modes between clockwise, counterclockwise, and locked, which is directly next to where your thumb and index finger are. This is really good design imo and most modern drills seem to use it, but the old one does it a worse way, iirc there is a switch on the side in a less accessible area that you need to use your other hand to reach. It was also much more expensive. There are lots of subtle improvements like this that have gotten standardized, including safety features (ie. space heaters that will turn off if they tip over).
Enshittification is real, but I think it mostly applies to online services, and the products most affected are the ones that rely on them.
I like how in the video they still want to shit on communism. If thats the case then we will never improve. Capitalism is the problem. Everything these days is half truths. Still kinda funny.
AI slop
