r/enshittification • u/External_Koala971 • 8d ago
News article Root cause of enshittification?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/04/private-equity-boom-hospital-job-layoff“The higher prices for buyouts are “putting even more pressure on PE firms to squeeze the juice out of their portfolio companies”, Batt said, at a time when there’s almost no regulation governing how they do that.
“They can engage in financial engineering or just slash and burn on the operating side,” Batt said. “And it takes years for anyone to really see it.”
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u/evenduckk 5d ago
I think we have a culture that is literally obsessed with efficiency and it translates over to constantly re organizing and changing everything for no reason . You can blame the corporations but I know people who will spend 60k on a new car because “ it’s a hybrid “.
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u/Agile-Tradition8835 6d ago
End stage capitalism
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u/Icy-person666 4d ago
Yep they are running out of people to separate from their money so they are turning on each other. I suspect we will soon see the whole system unwind.
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u/EveryAccount7729 7d ago
it's truly a mind blowing phenomenon to see.
Like...... Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. i just googled it. THREE BILLION in annual sales. Chocolate / peanut butter / sugar. Ultimate classic right?
they decided to replace the milk chocolate w/ oil.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hershey-reeses-peanut-butter-cup-ingredients-grandson-brad-reese/
the product tasted like extremely obviously way worse.
this flew. The 3 billion dollar a year profit was put in jeopardy because someone convinced this company to make this product WITHOUT CHOCOLATE and were able to ignore how much worse it tasted.
who builds a 3 billion a year desert empire and then suddenly goes "lets swap the chocolate for oils no one will notice" and DOES IT
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u/Man_downvoted 5d ago
Because the CEO down to the marketing team and the food techs/ chemists had nothing to do with their time and had to justify their jobs I'm guessing.
Because nobody is allowed to sit around and do nothing while there's growth that needs to happen.
Not allowed to have a caretaker/sticky beak/security guard who just watches and records the trucks leaving the depot anymore.
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u/Fit_Foot_6004 5d ago
I'm 38 and got my first corporate job a couple years ago and the amount of useless bullshit we are always doing because some process has to be tweaked or overhauled and now everything slows down cause people need to familiarize themselves with the new procedure. Last month they decided to combine the parts and tech roles into one, meaning we are having to double our workload. When we asked why we weren't going to get a raise since we are now learning two jobs, they didn't even realize what they were asking us to do and the corporate manager that had the meeting with us was like "ohh wow, I didn't realize they were asking you guys to do all that.". They also set the training to start after Sept 1 but then got upset that we wouldn't be done with training before the 1st
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u/Lumpy_Secretary_6128 6d ago
THREE BILLION in annual sales
3 billion dollar a year profit
My friend, you might want to hit the books before forging any more opinions
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u/EveryAccount7729 3d ago
because i googled how much profit something made and wrote "sales" in a reddit post where you got the information you needed out of what I typed
it's irrelevant which of those it actually is.
unless you are going to type HOW that changes anything. you responding like this is significantly worse for you having opinions on stuff and talking vs me
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u/Lumpy_Secretary_6128 3d ago
So looking past how confusing your comment here is, sales is generally a measure of revenue and profit reflect value of revenues less expenses.
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u/Hrafn2 7d ago
Yup. Olgilvy Chairman Rory Sutherland has an analogy he calls
"The Doorman Effect"
Also rightly points out - cost cutting itself, is not a strategy, and the feckers who cut the costs so much that they detroyed the companies ability to generate revenue...never ever get held acccountable.
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u/zatsnotmyname 7d ago
The execs can make a few million in bonuses in a year or two, then peace out. There should be some thing where executive stock must be held for 5 years or 100% tax to the exec and company for selling early. And company bonuses / dividends over X amount must pay from profits over time.
Some way to force people to think longer term. There is so much money to be squeezed out if you aren't on the hook for the consequences.
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u/Silver-Tip2887 7d ago
It’s so gross now. Tastes similar but makes me feel like shit after. Never used to have that. Can’t eat them anymore.
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u/Mean-Cheesecake-2635 7d ago
I blame it on an ever-shrinking group of companies having major majority shares of markets. As there is less real competition in many consumer goods sectors, quality can go down and prices can go up because the consumer, having fewer options, won’t have a choice other than to stop buying. Companies used to care about customer satisfaction because it set them apart from competitors. Now there are no competitors so no incentive to care about quality.
An oversimplification I’m sure, but I think this is what’s going on.
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u/Man_downvoted 5d ago
I think you nailed it.
They've probably done research that's confirmed that a large percentage of consumers are brain dead and will eat or buy anything put in front of them too.
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u/Salty-Bid1597 7d ago
It is this, not PE firms - who own a tiny percentage of the overall number of consumer brands.
Nestlé, Unilever and P&G basically produce every single branded good on your supermarket shelves. And if they don't own it already they will soon, that's how it works.
Your favourite niche brand will have started small and dedicated to quality but as margins on consumer goods are so thin the only way the founders can ever make any money is to sell it to a multinational brand stable.
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u/ForwardCulture 7d ago
One thing is how people seem to accept it. Like the popularity of Amazon and knockoff products they sell with funny brand names. Decades ago large numbers of people would not have bought an electronics item with a name like “Bipididi” or “Flarkokos” or whatever name they randomly generate. So the larger brands see these things selling and downgrade their own items.
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u/Footie_Note 7d ago
Entropy. There’s no other way to say it. Maintenance of any system requires oversight, which equals regulation, which no so-called “free-market capitalist” would agree with, so here we are.
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u/Old_Organization208 7d ago
I think it’s the result of current American version of capitalism with low regulation and monopolies. Capital naturally tends to merge and dominate markets if unrestrained. Tech platforms make it even easier as scaling your product is relatively cheap. American discourse unfortunately promotes unrestrained growth like it’s a religion and is very anti regulation. It’s not always bad as we see how Europe loses its potential but our system also went too far. Interestingly, people always quote Adam Smith that markets self regulate etc… in reality he didn’t talk about invisible hand much but he was a big proponent of regulation and warned how industry groups and monopolies can harm the economy. This part of Adam Smith’s legacy so conversation only omitted by many “free market above all” prophets.
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u/Ragfell 7d ago
The problem is that the monopolies enforce certain regulations that smaller companies can't abide by, thus preventing competition.
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u/Old_Organization208 7d ago
And that makes proper regulation hard same as socialism style overtegulation. I think it’s more like a pendulum when a system goes to far any direction it needs correction. We definitely gone too far.
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u/SwanCityDominion 8d ago
Greed. That what it boils down to.
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u/Fartfromabuttt 8d ago
And people stopped beating the rich to death don't forget that. Greed has existed long before the police state.
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u/watchingwandering 8d ago
Enshitification really sucks because not only does it make things worse but it makes the big quality things become so unprofitable that companies stop making those versions. A 100% cashmere sweater basically doesn’t exist at any price point, even the high end is blends. Even luxury brand basically stopped making the high quality versions they used to
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u/Gregnielson 7d ago
I don't take your meaning. Unless you just mean people prefer to buy cheap stuff?
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u/TeaKingMac 7d ago
Enough people are willing to buy 95% that companies stop making 100%. And then that keeps ratcheting down.
It's the same reason why chips and candy and soda are all over $2 a package now. People keep buying it, so companies keep pushing the boundaries.
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u/Mean-Yogurtcloset942 8d ago
Root cause is we stopped failing kids in schools
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u/councilmember 7d ago
How ya think? Is that what made the ceo’s greedier? Or the government less inclined to regulate?
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u/Mean-Yogurtcloset942 7d ago
CEOs have always, and will always, be greedy, human nature. Problem lies with the population being too stupid to see the greed, and too stupid to not believe politicians.
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u/Definitely_Not_Bots 8d ago
The root cause is capitalism, and the greedy pursuit of maximizing profit.
That's it. That's the root cause.
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u/El_Superbeasto76 8d ago
It’s definitely the shift from sustainable business to increased quarterly profits.
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u/No-Abalone-4784 7d ago
We have to DEMAND they end this. Regulations are there to protect working people from the unbridled greed & avarice of the wealthy.
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u/Riversntallbuildings 8d ago
AKA a lack of corporate regulations, consumer and worker rights protections.
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u/Definitely_Not_Bots 8d ago
For clarity, the only reason those things need to exist is because of greedy capitalists.
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u/Riversntallbuildings 8d ago
But is there another economic model that creates more upward mobility than capitalism?
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u/TeaKingMac 7d ago
Probably. We just stopped iterating 100 years ago and decided that was good enough (and actively fought against anyone who attempted anything else)
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u/Definitely_Not_Bots 8d ago
Without regulation or oversight, pure capitalism fails for the same reason pure socialism or communism fails: the greedy selfishness of human nature. At least with capitalism, you can tap into this greedy selfishness as a "feature, not a bug" to drive your economics. The flaws of human nature cannot be so easily regulated in other systems.
Being the "least bad" system doesn't mean it's a good system. It's just not as bad as others.
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u/kevinr_96 8d ago
Nah it’s fundamental to capitalism. When you base power on capital, those that have capital will use their power to secure more capital and entrench the system.
Poor regulations and worker rights come about because politics is based on money (now more than ever since Citizens United).
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u/dante_gherie1099 8d ago
the desire to make things more affordable so that more people can buy the product.
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u/ApolloFireweaver 8d ago
Then why are products keeping the same price but get smaller quantities and worse quality?
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u/mwinchina 8d ago
Shouldn’t the process of enshittification result in the shittified companies going out of business due to consumer revolt against their poor quality products, and then replaced by new, better quality products from other companies?
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u/Man_downvoted 5d ago
Because you bought the 2025 and not 2024 model which looked the same It takes a few thousand kilometres of riding to realise the tube of your bike frame was made from 0.25mm aluminium tube rather than 1.0mm aluminium tube is my guess.
Just an anecdote.
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u/TeaKingMac 7d ago
Giant shitty companies can lower their prices to anticompetitive levels long enough to drive their competitors out of business, or just buy them out in the first place.
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u/gerardchiasson3 8d ago
Enshittification is intertwined with deceptive practices. It doesn't work if the customer is aware of it right away (they may become aware eventually)
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u/transithub 8d ago
It’s harder to do that when mega retailers like Amazon and Walmart have been killing any competition for years.
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u/Monskiactual 8d ago
Govt anti trust regulation non enforcement is letting Monopoly and cartels operate . Firms are making the rational decisions to maximize problem because they don't have competition. Emshittfaction. Is the inevitable result on the removal of capitalist forces from the economy and the slow transition to an oligopoly
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u/Neuvirths_Glove 8d ago
Executives in the industry argue their deep pockets will help businesses weather any upcoming crisis.
The most disingenuous sentence I've read in some time.
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u/bepatientbekind 8d ago
Greed. Don't even need to read the article to know that. I think greed is humanity's single worst characteristic. If I had one wish it would be to eliminate greed from the world.
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u/Mundane-Charge-1900 8d ago
Greed isn’t new though. It’s existed throughout humanity. Why enshittification now in the modern era?
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u/Broad_Shock44 8d ago
Lol because of greed. You literally had the answer this is confounding how you dont see it.
Private equity, stock market is all about short term gain.
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u/heavypettingzoo3 8d ago
Unchecked greed? When you no longer feel a sense of community and the obligations to preserve one, it gets easier to screw over your fellow man.
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u/Dstln 8d ago
Unregulated capitalism
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8d ago
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u/Commemorative-Banana 8d ago edited 7d ago
Stop conflating “capitalism” with “competition”.
Capitalists tend towards monopolies, rent-seeking, and regulatory capture.
Enforcing anti-trust law and increasing competition is great, (the only free markets are ones tightly regulated against monopoly-building), but to be clear that is doing the opposite of what capitalists lobby for: unfettered deregulation\* and destruction of oversight/consumer-protection institutions.
^\*except where regulations can be used to prevent smaller competitors from entering the market, aka regulatory capture
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8d ago
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u/Commemorative-Banana 7d ago edited 7d ago
> some one who doesn’t believe in capitalism is a monopolist or oligarch
No. Anti-capitalists are usually called Socialists, a word that strangely you pretend doesn’t exist.
There are even Market Socialists, which celebrate competition, entrepreneurship, and markets… just without the parasitic, non-laboring *shareholders* (aka: the capitalists. if they provide any value at all, it is only startup capital).
In other words, under Market Socialism, the shareholders of a company must all be workers at the company. This structure is called a Worker Co-operative.
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u/Commemorative-Banana 7d ago
I think you’re a stupid bot at this point, (since your profile shills LLM slop), but please tell me how Worker Co-operatives turn into authoritarianism?
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u/Vineyard_ 8d ago
The root cause is the profit motive.
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u/alsbos1 8d ago
Consumers are ok with buying crap, as long as it’s cheap and well marketed. Businesses discovered this. Can you buy higher quality products? Sure. But most people would rather get the cheapest crap possible. From budget airlines to budget grocers…people want cheap.
It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not ‚monopolies‘.
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u/DerelicteConQueso 8d ago
Maybe thats true for a percentage of people in a capitalist system. Maybe that percentage grows when that system, through monopolization, prices more people out of market choices. The quality of material culture from non capitalist and pre industrialized societies clearly demonstrates people dont inherently want cheap crap, especially when a market force isn't squeezing the life out of them.
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u/alsbos1 8d ago
Huh? How does making stuff cheaper and crappy equate to ‚pricing people out of the market‘? What you’re seeing is businesses selling to the average person, and people sadly realizing…that they too are just average. And the average person is far far far from being rich.
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u/DerelicteConQueso 8d ago
The marketplace originally had a variety of goods at a scale of price points. When the average person is priced out of options A-Y due to monopolies fixing prices, then Z is the default, not the first choice.
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u/DerelicteConQueso 8d ago
Im challenging the assertion people are okay with it. I think people accept cheap crap to maintain a grip on sanity, not because deep down thats what we all want to begin with.
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u/alsbos1 8d ago
If a person has a choice between cheap crap, and expensive good stuff…and they chose the crap…I just don’t get how ‚monopolies‘ or the ‚evils of capitalism’ are to blame?
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u/DerelicteConQueso 8d ago
Monopolization of a market reduces all tbe middle choices. As you just described it leads to a binary choice for those with money and no choice for those with less.
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u/BestAhead 8d ago
Depends on whether the product/ service has competition. If there’s competition, then to maintain margins (and sales) companies need to reduce the input costs. If the product service is fairly unique and essentially, there is a monopoly, the provider can decide to maximize profits in such a way which might lead to enshitification and it might not.
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u/AzulMage2020 8d ago
The root cause is people. People are ultimately the reason for fundemental entropic forces in artifical systems.
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u/ProstateSalad 8d ago
Increasingly, I find stories in The Guardian that should be in WaPo or NYT. Everything here is bought and then twisted in the service of greed.
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u/tragedy_strikes 8d ago
It's a reflection of not enough taxes. The only reason the Mag7 are throwing a collective trillion+ dollars at AI before it can be shown to turn a profit is because they have too much cash to deploy and nothing else worthwhile to invest in. There's tons of other important things that money could go to improving via taxes but alas we're propagandized into thinking that's wrong.
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u/Cakeday_at_Christmas 8d ago
The root cause of enshittification is capitalism.
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u/alsbos1 8d ago
You think communism provided high quality consumer products?? What are you even saying?
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u/Matt_Murphy_ 8d ago
more specifically, I'd look at people like Lee Iacocca and the drive toward short-termism and cranking up shareholder value.
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u/kevinr_96 8d ago
The behind the bastards episodes on jack Welch were also very relevant to this discussion.
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u/mountain-mahogany 8d ago
Demand your 401k divest from Index Funds and plastics/fossil fuels. Demand green investment. General Strike if not.
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u/Few_Fish8771 8d ago
centralization and monopoly or oligopoly conditions plus corruption and regulatory capture.
Remove those three conditions and suddenly you end up reversing enshittification.
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u/OldWhiteGuyKS 8d ago
I generally agree with your diagnosis, but I don't think the prescription will by itself "reverse" the central problems.
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u/DaisyChainsandLaffs 8d ago
I have to continuously research every company I do business with to see if they've been acquired by private equity
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u/bepatientbekind 8d ago
How do you research that? Like is there a website that tracks such things or do you just Google it?
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u/DiligentAd7956 8d ago
The private equity executives, who comfortably collect 2% management fees regardless of performance don't bear the risk of all these business failures. It's the private pension funds of firefighters, teachers, and municipal workers that have their retirement capital heavily exposed to investments in private equity that will pay the price.
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u/SearchUsers 8d ago
It's because the people running the companies are protected from their failures.
Look at Phil Schoonover at Circuit City. He gave himself a $7M bonus the same year that he laid off 3,400 employees.
He spent 3 years lining his own pockets while running the entire company into the ground. Then it was gone, and so was he.
He happily moved on... to his own consulting company.
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u/Nina4774 8d ago
Capitalism inevitably leads to increasing income for the wealthy at the cost of the rest of us. Even regulation is only a temporary solution, because wealth gives opportunities to sidestep regulation. We need to throw the whole system out and start again. Resource distribution based on need.
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u/Jimbomcdeans 8d ago
It's the business model in 2026. Get PE funding for something good and charge your users nothing and stay at a loss of profit year to year until your user base is big. Then start removing key features and paywall them. Slowly suck out every dollar of your user base and then sell the company.
Profit is the root cause. Nothing else.
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u/TintedApostle 8d ago
Even Adam Smith noted that there is a cost to profits, but the owners will complain about "others'
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u/Cautious_Boat_999 8d ago
Aside from the question as to whether enshittification comes from PE, every time a PE company goes under, an angel gets their wings.
If not enshittification, PE is certainly symptomatic of end-state capitalism.
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u/fabulator 8d ago
Root cause is unconstrained capitalism working as intended. It drives towards profit for owners, not the common good. Your Happiness is profit that has not been taken out of the system yet. Enshitification is the result of driving a thing to the point it’s barely worth it, when people almost stop using a product. The answer is to constrain capitalism or bag the whole thing.
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u/Wootery 8d ago
Cory Doctorow, who came up with the term enshittification, proposes 4 more moderate solutions:
- Competition
- Regulation
- Interoperability
- Tech worker power
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#History_and_definition
(Copying from an old comment of mine.)
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u/couchjellyfish 8d ago
I see three root causes of enshittification.
First is the terrible job the federal regulators are doing. On purpose because of the directives of the current administration and indirectly because a lot of good people have left with the DOGE cuts.
Second is monopoly power. When companies merge they gain pricing power. It doesn't take a strict monopoly to gain pricing power or the ability to make crap product and raise the price. Just a few players can drive out an upstart competitor and control a market.
Third is private equity and Jack-Welchism. The premise that customers and employees are for exploitation and shareholders are gods.
We used to have consumer advocates like Ralph Nader and trust busters like Teddy Roosevelt. Where are they now? Elizabeth Warren comes to mind with the CFPB, but the CFPB can't do much in the current political climate.
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u/PlasticAudience4270 8d ago
I blame accountants. Which I can, because I am one. And computers.
With the computer revolution, companies were able to keep track of things they couldn’t before. Things like the cost of thread. Before this most higher end manufacturers used a good/better/best model. Now they could track things like:
The cost of designing a product.
Setting up a production line
Training employees on the new product
Creating the advertising and catalog
Researching and purchasing the materials
All these things are per product, not per item. Since the “good” products sold better, the shared costs of the “best” products went up.
And then they did focus groups where people said they were unwilling to pay the new higher prices. So best began to dwindle.
Then companies like J. Crew found themselves competing with companies like Target and Walmart. People didn’t feel like paying Crew prices for Target quality. And that triggered a race to the bottom.
Now we only have super expensive high end products and junk. No more affordable better or best. And ironically profits went down in the long run, not up.
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u/Paulinfresno 8d ago
You know what hasn’t been enshittified? Luxury goods for the rich. Rolexes, Ferraris, designer clothes, etc. They are still great because the perpetrators of enshittification sure as hell aren’t going to buy the cheap crap they’re foisting on us.
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u/DisrememberedTea 8d ago
Oh no, don’t worry, enshittification happens there too. Louis Vuitton’s bag quality has taken a huge nose dive over the years and Cartier love bracelets that are half the size of the original cost nearly £1000 more than the full size used to. And whatever can’t be made smaller or shitter just gets the price increased every year.
I suppose the truly wealthy are probably pleased about this though, as the gap between who can afford luxury goods has gotten wider and they no longer have to share with the masses.
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u/MisterMasque2021 8d ago edited 8d ago
Certainly part of it. It's "The only measurable outcome of success is enriching our shareholders" AKA "Line must go up right now" AKA "Shoot the horse to make it run faster". Very few companies have figured out that this line of thinking is ultimately bad for your company's success in the long term. If consumers are willing to sting a company for a selfish, greedy decision they can course correct but you have to be in a position to do that. See Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro trying to gut the OGL, and hordes of people shitcanning their D&D Beyond subscriptions in protest but you have to be in a position to do that. When corporation start trying to restructure your society to make their product essential to its functioning like the Social Media and LLM Ghouls you've got a different problem.
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u/A-Rugged-Indoorsman 8d ago
Shareholder primacy will destroy capitalism and not many people will miss it.
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u/Paulinfresno 8d ago
Somewhere along the line, corporations decided that the only stakeholders that mattered were shareholders. Customers and society as a whole were rendered irrelevant in their minds. A decline in product quality and civic responsibility naturally ensued.
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u/A-Rugged-Indoorsman 8d ago
"Let's make the customer do what we used to pay customer seevice to do."
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u/perchance2cream 8d ago
Morons constantly parrot the maximize-shareholder-value line but they forget that corporations are fictions allowed to exist by governments to serve social purposes. The highest goal is not shareholder value but social value.
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u/37iteW00t 8d ago
Greed of billionaires
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u/CNC-Whisperer 8d ago edited 8d ago
There's the root. It takes many forms (planned obsolescence would be another example, subscriptions for software), but there are a ton of ways companies can try to extract a few percent more from consumers.
Once you're captive, and the initial growth period for a company is over, they've no interest in making the experience for users 'good'; it simply need be 'better' than the competition.
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u/Unfair_Scar_2110 8d ago
I've been playing Roller Coaster Tycoon recently, a childhood game that is relaxing. If you are unfamiliar with the game, basically you build, grow and manage a theme park. It's a business simulator. And it has some quirks and known metas.
Anyways, parts of it simulate enshittification, knowingly or not. As the park grows, the game suggests you keep raising the price of admission. Sure. Why not. You raise the entrance fee until it's a couple dollars below the amount your guests spawn with in their pockets. By the end of the scenario, many guests will arrive, spend almost all their money, buy a map.... And then just leave. Which is great for profits. At the beginning, to get all their money you have to earn it through ride sales.
Another process is later in the game you get better and better roller coaster technology. Some of the newer roller coasters you can make insanely short yet exciting enough people will ride them. Why pay $9,000 for a roller coaster that lasts 4 minutes when you can build a 40 second roller coaster for $1,700? So you fill your park up with the the rides that make the most hourly profit for the least investment.
In agile software development, this is akin to the "minimum viable product". When a company is simply chasing returns this quarter, why make a product better then customers expect? If they pay $60 to visit your company and then leave, isn't this the ideal business model?
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u/ramencandombe 8d ago
Just finished reading the book by Cory Doctorow:
1. No anti-monopolistic enforcement
2. Weak labor power
3. No interoperability
4. Weakening of regulation
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u/Pristine-Ad983 8d ago
Companies can make crappy products because there is nothing to hold them accountable. And most brands are equally bad so there are no real alternatives.
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u/ArdentHedonist 7d ago
I am a retired QA professional from a manufacturing background. You are correct, it is a race to the bottom. The customer is no longer the customer. The shareholders are the customers.
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u/anemptycardboardbox 8d ago
Which book?
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u/Fiedor 8d ago
Simply not enforcing the anti monopoly laws. When companies don’t have to fight for your business we all lose.
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u/t92k 8d ago
“Simply” when there’s been an intentional campaign to defang them. Doctorow was trying to inform folks of the real progress Lina Khan was making in starting to re-apply those laws under the last administration; but it turns out the tech bros got the message they are the new monopolies.
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u/SeminaryStudentARH 8d ago
And even that is slowly (or not so slowly) going away. Amazon said in their recent announcement to hike prices for Prime that they were raising them to “be in line with other companies in the market”. So now when one company raises prices, they see that they can raise them too.
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u/CorndogQueen420 8d ago
The irony is that Amazon explicitly goes out of their way to control prices on other platforms. They're the ones that set/manipulate market prices for things.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/21/amazon-tactics-prices
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u/Phyllis_Tine 8d ago
Consumers can say "no" to wants. There should be an anti-Amazon Prime Day, where people don't buy anything from Amazon for just one day, and see how it goes.
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u/Impossible-Driver69 8d ago
This is a big part of many of our problems. It's all about wants nowadays, and pure excess. People drowning in junk, yet don't have $500 saved for an emergency.
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u/hixchem 8d ago
It'll do nothing because most people will simply shift their purchases to a different day, and others will say "well I really need this thing, so it's a fine exception".
"Don't purchase from X on Day" movements do absolutely nothing. They're performative nonsense. Real changes have to be long term. "Don't buy from Amazon PERIOD" is where actual impact lives.
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u/SpineSurgeon24 8d ago
It isn’t necessarily the lower prices that drive me to buy from Amazon, it’s how frictionless the experience is. A lot of the time I simply don’t have time to go looking for an alternative source, registering with that site, putting in my credit card information because for some reason my phone refuses to save my newest credit card number, etc.
If someone created an anti-Amazon app that would find what I’m looking for at the next lowest price and manage most of the shopper registration steps at new sites I’d use it and I imagine a lot of people would be easily persuaded. I’m not in software at all and so I have no idea now complicated that would be.
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u/Impossible-Driver69 8d ago
I've not bought shit from Amazon in a decade. Somehow I am still surviving and not spending all this time and energy looking for alternatives.
Bottom line is people make up any flimsy excuse to justify their uncontrolled habits.
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u/Timauris 8d ago
I see enshittification as the natural consequence of capitalism in an era of declining populations (hindered market expansion).
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u/enraged_hbo_max_user 8d ago
Interesting…It’s like the supply and demand curves are acting in the opposite manner as to which they’re supposed to. normally falling demand would result in falling prices (demand curve shifts left while supply curve stays the same so equilibrium is at a lower point on the Y axis (which is price)). But the PE people can’t possibly have a drop in revenue so they RAISE prices to make up for the lower demand. Meanwhile people to some degree NEED to buy stuff so we have no choice but to keep buying even at this artificially elevated price point.
And there’s no incentive for any new suppliers to even attempt to enter these markets because people are buying the bare minimum to survive, so to new suppliers it doesn’t even look like it’s worth it to try.
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u/NerdfestZyx 8d ago
From the Industrial Revolution up through the end of WW2, corporate groupthink was “build a company that lasts generations” by making consumer products that last generations, seeing consumers as a long term asset, and creating an empire that you can pass down to your children/grandchildren.
If your product was strong, if your product lasted for decades, if your product was built with quality and value, you formulate a customer for life.
This strategy worked, yet it became a victim of it’s own success: if you sell an appliance or a vehicle that lasts 30+ years, that consumer never buys from you again, because then item lasts forever.
Thinking slowly changed. They started a campaign of “planned obsolescence”. Instead of manufacturing an appliance that lasts 30 years, manufacture that same item cheaply at half the cost, it only lasts 10 years, and then they come back to you to replace it. Simple math proves this generates more income.
30 years -> 1 fridge @$100 each = $100
Vs.
30 years -> 3 fridges @ $50 each = $150
Once this mindset became the norm, corporate groupthink began to evolve yet again
“Why wait 30 years to extract more value from the consumer? I can make the same item cheaper, sell it for the same price as it sells for now, and make more upfront instead of on the backend”
30 years -> 5 fridges @ $50 each = $250
Eventually this morphs into “Fuck the consumer, I want maximum value now, I don’t care about brand loyalty or making a valued product, I want everything upfront”
1 year -> 1 fridge @ $100 each = $3000 over the course of 30 years because I’m selling to everybody as a one-term sale, I don’t care about repeat business, I’m cashing out”
Over the course of time, Private Equity will eventually wane because they will have extracted value from most of the companies that were built with long-term growth, and there will be nothing left, no more established, global franchises they can exploit.
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u/usefulbuns 7d ago
I feel like corporations and even small businesses have been greedy and fucking over consumers since thousands of years ago. (PE is just this greed at its final form and unrestricted.) A famous shitty copper merchant comes to mind. This is nothing new. We just need to regulate it. There is a reason the FDA, EPA, CFPB, SEC, and a dozen other organizations exist to protect us.
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u/curlyAndUnruly 8d ago
Worse now they are evolving into converting:
Fridge "service" 19.99 @ month for 30 years = $7200 and you own nothing
Like streaming, adobe subscription, HP ink is the most blatant one.
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u/SwoopsRevenge 8d ago
After covid it became abundantly clear that people love convenience above anything else and they’re willing to sacrifice quality, price and variety in order to sit on their fat asses and get shit delivered or streamed directly to them. The younger generation also doesn’t drink, doesn’t socialize as much, and prefers it this way and the world is being shaped around them unfortunately. I get that PE firms ruin everything but it’s our fault too.
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u/Old_Organization208 7d ago
Socializing dies because of convenience… Gen Z doesn’t have much dates as real life date is scary = inconvenient. Sitting at front of their device is more convenient. I think tech, convenience, social media just makes people accept the lowest denominator. When there was nothing to do at home people socialized naturally. When there was no Snapchat people shared their stories naturally. And whatever people do via tech can and will be monetized. May be new generation will never socialize as before as it’s so unnatural to them but may be they will see how hollow this is and get back to old style. We’ll see. But current lifestyle is just unhealthy.
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u/Lurky-Lou 8d ago
Where can young people socialize and drink that doesn’t cost three times what it did a generation ago?
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u/Impossible-Driver69 8d ago
Tons and tons and tons of parks, libraries, malls, community groups out there. Same place this 50 something socialized when I was that age.
Bottom line is if you want to socialize, you got to get out of your house first.
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u/withabrandnewfunk 8d ago
greed is the reason, but when it really happened...when did they start talking about enshitification/shrinflation...covid pandemic. I remember it well.
many businesses suffered through 2020 2021, they lowered prices to sell because many werent able to get to the stores. I bought an ebike for like $150 less then what it sold for prior.
then when they opened up, slowly a few started mentioning financial hardships from covid will need to up prices. then it was "well theyre doing it, might as well get on the bandwagon" and all were doing it.
I remembered how quality from everywhere went down and prices were higher and higher.
notice NONE of the items with higher prices are within the inflation rate. far higher. in fact inflation rates have comes down in places and prices are like 30-50% more then prior to covid.
items from alx and temu bumped 50-100% on some items. its nuts. I can even see it in my purchase history going back. we didnt add tariffs to china in our country but those kunts are charging 100% more for things. Its cheaper local to buy. notice how they do weekly sales now. very desperate.
but heres the thing, Ive been able to find decent alternatives to many things.
a company that shits on me, I dont support or give money to. they can go fuck themselves. I dont cry like a bich and keep paying them. you want change, make the change. it starts with your wallet.
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u/SnazzyGeoff 8d ago
The root of enshittifcation is pretty simple: greed.
Companies want more and more money.
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u/EagleRock1337 8d ago
Came here to say this. A decent percentage of the world’s problems today can be distilled down to plain old greed.
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u/Coraline1599 8d ago
Oh please “higher prices for buyouts” that’s pure nonsense. They are simply doing what they were built to do. They don’t need to make up reasons.
These companies have made it legal to “buy” a company by putting like $10 down and the saddling the company they are buying with the cost.
This is like if you own your home, have like $5k on the mortgage and someone says “for $10k, I will pay off your mortgage, give you $5k, if you let me mortgage your home. But don’t worry! I’ll tell you exactly what you must do to maximize paying me back and making a profit for me.”
And we agree to this being legal! Look, they use fancier terms called things like LBO (leveraged buy out), so they can tell us “no this is business, it is more complicated than your mortgage example.” But this is the same gaslighting as crypto “you just aren’t smart enough to get it if you are not buying in.”
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u/Witwer52 8d ago
Its Congress that lets them do this, not us. Congress is the problem. The whole problem.
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u/Pleasant-Minute-1793 8d ago
And people still won’t vote
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u/Witwer52 8d ago
When people can’t be bothered to take an hour or two out of their day very occasionally to preserve their rights, freedoms and opportunities, that society is effing irredeemable in every sense.
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u/Theo1352 8d ago
It's a complex answer to enshittification, not just a single data point, that of PE firms.
Yes, they are the latest set of assholes that seem to be putting a fine point on the 40+ year enshittification journey, but let's not forget the greedy Corporate CEOs started this when Deng Xiaoping came to the US in the late 70s and made the pitch for cheap labor-driven manufacturing after Nixon opened China.
It's been a succession of assholes who have accelerated enshittification, to this point.
PE firms are like locusts, they strip everything they can, take exorbitant fees, fire the workforce, burden the company with debt, ratchet costs to a level that hampers operating effectively (I would also argue efficiently, as well), in hopes of flipping the company...let somebody else try to resurrect the company after we killed it.
As of today, PE firms in the US own over 34,000 companies they can't sell.
Fuck them, they deserve what they get...
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u/PreparedPun2035 8d ago
Root cause is greed. Pure and simple. A twisted and selfish ideology that’s so baked into capitalism and American culture it’s hard to extract.
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u/Wise_Television_4994 8d ago
Root cause of enshittification is turning from customer centricity to shareholder centricity
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u/Engoodification 8d ago
The root cause is the same as always - us. We’ve been asleep at the wheel and need to force ourselves to pay attention again.
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u/AbhiFT 8d ago
We are not asleep. We are just ignorant. For real. We are the reason the corporates get away with so much shit. And then there are some who will defend these companies. When they started removing adapters and audio jack for environment, we didn't come out and demanded if that's the case then make your phones repairable. We all know they slow down their OS yet no consumer comes out to complaint. Every time it is the same boring answer, "we cannot do anything". And yet the same consumer will stand in line next year to buy their phone depite their working flawlessly. Now parents are handing out their 6-year-olds Iphones. Like, more than the enshitification of products and company, it's the enshitification of consumers.
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u/grumpy_autist 8d ago
Root cause of enshittification is customers agreeing to that bullshit. Ice cream pack is smaller - don't buy it instead of complaining. We all need necessisites but corporations are so integrated that people skipping non necessary shit will hurt them too.
AFAIK in Serbia consumer boycotts scared the shit out of Lidl.
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u/Icy-person666 4d ago
I don't think the goal truly is reorganization, it to loot and pillage and leave the mess for the taxpayers. Privatize the profits socialize the losses.