I love reading the ads, “now lower prices!!!1!”
So… That was an option all along? Cool. Glad it’s only a product people use to live.
Inflate prices for profit
Give buyer less product
Lower quality
Brag about savings to shareholders
Get higher paying job as CEO of different company
Profit
Replacement CEO at first company: Why did people stop buying my product?
Yeah, at no point do they care about the customer. They have a recipe for profits and CEO bonuses. When they’re done they’re fuck over the next company.
American capitalism is all about killing business for profit right now BECAUSE nothing is more profitable.
Maybe the fashion will change in the future… but there’s nothing the small folk can do about it
They don’t even care about the company. Somehow shareholders keep voting for absurd incentive structures for executives.
It’s as simple as the people making the decisions (executives, directors, etc.) and the people driving their decisions (shareholders) have something that the employees and the customers don’t:
The ability to cash in their chips and move on quickly when the time is right.
Employees can certainly leave and find another job, customers can certainly catch on to lower quality and change buying habits…but both of these tend to be slower processes than the ones that put money in the accounts of the first two groups.
I like this because it references the concept of greed correctly.
Greed is when self interest gets irrational. Greed doesn’t maximize one’s own profit; greed maximizes one’s own profit today.
Real long term self interest means serving others consistently to create those healthy relationships that in turn serve oneself.
Greed is killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Bro droppin Ferengi wisdom
Acquisition Rule.
Rule of Acquisition #10. Greed is eternal.
Unless there’s (close to) a monopoly or all players in the market are acting accordingly. For products where simply not buying it anymore is not really a viable option, that greedy approach works out quite fine unfortunately.
It has been working out fine for the greedy so far, but is that really sustainable in the long term? At some point if greed isn’t checked, there WILL be violence.
Unless the greedy ones are also those with the biggest army and most effective weapons.
Being the most powerful player isn’t sufficient to prevent opposition. A pufferfish is less powerful than a shark, but the shark still has to respect the pufferfish because the pufferfish can hurt the shark even as it dies.
Difficult when you’re in the R&D department and you know that cost-cutting measures are the primary directive, but you still have to do your job in spite of the harm it could cause. I’ve met a lot of people with burnout in the food industry. I’m one of them.
So this is obviously McDonald’s but manufacturing suffers a similar path:
- Make high quality and respected product onshore
- Get purchased by vulture capitalist
- Lower standards to increase profit
- Product is offshored to cover up falling sales
- Quality nosedives
- Once the customer base catches on sales nosedives
- Lower quality even more and brand becomes a joke
- Get purchased by mega conglomerate who collects brands like Pokémon
- Rival product gets made onshore by a small team who used to work for you
See Doc Martin and Solvair or Hunter Wellingtons or any other of a large number of former halo brands. Filson is one going through this right now
Why do they let step 2 even happen? Is it just that the creators don’t actually give a shit about their product/brand, and just want an easy, big pay day? Screw their employees?
Money. The answer is always money.
I think most would gladly retire if they were offered millions or billions.
Let’s say you own a company you work at and made. When do you quit and realize all your wealth? Maybe you keep it forever but your children don’t want it but want access to the money.
At the end of the day people are sell outs eventually
because workers don’t collectively own the means of production.
not to be like that, but once some new hotness graduates from 2 people in a garage, the controlling interest is never the workers who have a vested interest in products, daily work (and a brand) they can be proud of, but investors with only short term profit on their mind. innovators- and inventors-turned-C suite executives jump ship when bought out, leaving the real meat and potatoes, the real work behind the brand, to be offshored, profit prioritized and picked clean.
buy from worker-owned co-ops. buy from local crafters and people deserving of the label ‘artisan’. flat out refuse to buy from brands that are a sad, hollowed out husk of their former selves. more importantly - most importantly - do what you can to keep your retirement investments away from quartly-profit mills who couldnt care less about workers or customers beyond raw sales numbers. and definitely, definitely never agree to work for them.
Craftsman was the first brand that came to mind.
Tool brands were exactly my first thought as well.
Vulture capitalism will continue to erode everyone’s lifestyle till we develop neofeudalism, and it’s all according to plan.
I saw this happen with a local chain restaurant recently. They started cutting on ingredient quality and it was noticeable. Noticeably smaller tortillas; you could no longer opt out of onions because toppings were all combined; chips went down hill. They started losing profits, had to close a few locations, and the negative reviews started rolling in.
The end result was positive though. They saw the response and reversed the changes. They’ve gone back to their previous quality and turned things around at least a small amount. They made good with the customers—the people that are the reason they exist in the first place. I wish more places would have a similar response instead of doubling down on the enshitification.
Not to be pessimistic, but this is also a somewhat common strategy to test how shitty you can make something. Basically, intentionally make things worse to test the impact on revenue. If profits don’t drop keep it that way. If the bottom line starts going down, slowly increase the quality again until they stabilize. It’s likely that changes were not reversed, they were just improved over the trash they made them for awhile. Chipotle has mastered this process. Raise prices, reduce quality, raise quality slightly but not to previous benchmark, repeat.
You’re probably right. It was just such a drastic drop in a short time. I’m sure some of those cuts stuck around elsewhere. It was just nice to see things bounce back at a place we otherwise frequent.
I mean, sure. If a drop in “quality” doesn’t result in a drop in sales, then that quality wasn’t something the consumer actually cared about.
That’s true, but that’s not what a drop in the bottom line means in this context. If you reduce quality, you also reduce your cost of production. So you’re right if there’s no change in sales numbers at all, you were spending too much on something you didn’t need, and you made a good adjustment. But more often, these adjustments weigh the drop in sales vs the increase in profit that results from the lower cost. If the expected drop in revenue is offset by the increase in take home, they don’t care and keep it that way. What’s really shitty is that once the revenue trend stabilizes and customers adapt to the new lowered quality, there’s nearly always a price increase.
Customers tend to view quality more holistically than that, though. Not a lot of people are going to flip their conception of product quality on a single change, but will after a long series of changes. Once a company gets that reputation for poor quality, it’s not as simple as reversing the last corner they cut. It’s a hole that takes a lot of changes to dig out of. More than most companies are willing to reverse.
Funny, the more I learn about corporate greed the even less I like it, in fact, I strongly dislike it.
Then don’t buy the product
If you are talking about low competition industries that’s a different story
I’ll make my own graphics cards thank you!
Can someone help me make the chip things and the pcb?
Low competition industries
Like most of them?
Yup. Every industry that does business in the US (especially agriculture) has been getting fucked since Bork decided that businesses could lie to get merger approvals and avoid trust-breaking.
Food worldwide is controlled by mostly four megacorps, so, maybe some awareness of the topic you decided to comment on?
gotta love corporations making everything shittier, smaller and more expensive and then wondering why people aren’t buying their stuff
It’s because they’ve gotten away with decades of consumer abuse and just figured we were acclimitized to it.
Yep. HP sauce did this. Used to be ubiquitous on restaurant tables in Canada. Then they changed the recipe, white vinegar instead of malt, no rue flour, orange juice concentrate instead of tanarind puree, new version was sharper, more astringent, less sweet n smoky. Everyone just quit buying it without even really noticing why. Then the old recipe started showing up in “ethnic food” aisles in areas with high dutch and English immigration.
I think that’s because the HP franchise their recipes, and different locations have “regional” variants. Here in the UK, it’s never significantly changed so you’re probably getting the English import - so, of course, there’s a shipping cost on top.
That’s what I said. In the late 90s, the recipe for Canada was changed. Lately the original has been appearing in the Import aisles. What Kraft was selling as original HP since then is closer to the UK “fruity” HP variant.
It is a bit different to say, “HP changed their recipe” versus “some dumb ass redistributor changed HP’s award winning recipe and suffered the consequences” :-D
Either way, I’m glad to get the original. Nothing better with some sausages or bacon…
They did. HP sauce changed their recipe, someone gave permission. Redistributors aren’t producers, I can be a pedantic ass too.
Do people really buy less though?
That’s the best part: they don’t!
This is irrational cynicism. They absolutely do.
Got a source for that?
I’m lovin’ it
It ultimately harms them in the long run. I can’t really feel bad for them.
I dunno. I feel like the missing slide is “retire on beach at age 35 and give 0 fucks” or “pivot to new exploitive model for profit”
You still don’t need to subscribe to companies. Just use a product that works good and is the right price. If it stops being good move on.
I’ve mostly stopped buying middle isle grocery store items for this very reason. On the plus side I have been cooking more to make up the snack deficit. Tastes better for sure.
When I started low carb I began to realize just how much of the middle store aisles are just different forms of starch and flavorings at a ridiculous markup.
I’ve started buying precut, frozen hash browns (loose, not patties). Take a few minutes to cook them but I can have a big old plate of hash browns with salt, pepper, and ketchup any time I want. It’s like having a diner in my kitchen.
But they made those changes over two years, and the last one was months ago. Clearly it can not be those executives’ decisions. There must be someone else to blame.
I bet it’s the workers’ fault.
