Why is everything in consumer / American life so fucking shitty now - and companies literally just say 'oh bc profit margins' and we're now expected to swallow that and sympathize?
like I went to taco bell and they didn't even have napkins out. they had the other stuff just no napkins, I assume because some fucking ghoul noticed people liked taking them for their cars so now we just don't get napkins! so they can save $100 per quarter rather than provide the barest minimum quality of life features.
That’s the end result of a capitalist system once corporations have superseded governments in power. It will only get worse.
Yeah, we may be at checkmate. Unlike the end of the age of the robber barons, when we reformed capitalism in the late 1800s / early 1900s in the US... this time the capitalists have purchased enough politicians to stop reform completely and forever.
What's funny is that this is entirely unsustainable. If they were in any way a real "capitalist" they would realize that the creeping authoritarianism they're pushing destroys economies long-term. They're laughing all the way to the bank right now because they're not concerned with the future.
However, they should be, because this House of Cards can easily collapse with the right push. They literally can't see past the profits at the end of the next quarter.
They literally can't imagine that all of them choosing to undermine capitalist principles at the same time will result in capitalism failing completely. The only reason it even functioned as well as it did for so long was 1. regulation and 2. raping the third world for resources.
I mean, I'm a fucking leftist, and it makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills that things are so far gone that I'm actually arguing "if we're going to do capitalism, we may as well do it in a way that it actually functions properly" as if that is a fucking fringe idea here.
The wheels are about to fly off this fuckin turkey.
Yep! And their short-sighted greed is going to drive us right to the brink of annihilation. We’re staring down the barrel of environmental collapse and our leaders are generally either old enough they assume they’ll die before it gets “that bad,” and the others stupidly think money makes them immune to the destruction of the biosphere. Anyone under 50 right now is going to live through some incredibly dark times. We are all dogs in a car with the windows closed and the heater on in a Texas parking lot. Business as usual is going to get really ugly, really quickly, really soon.
The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows
The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn
We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death
The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles
It went like this:
The buildings tumbled in on themselves
Mothers clutching babies picked through the rubble
And pulled out their hair
The skyline was beautiful on fire
All twisted metal stretching upwards
Everything washed in a thin orange haze
I said: "kiss me, you're beautiful -
These are truly the last days"
You grabbed my hand and we fell into it
Like a daydream or a fever
We woke up one morning and fell a little further down -
For sure it's the valley of death
I open up my wallet
And it's full of blood
Unfortunately their house of cards is built on a foundation of wealth...and not just fuck you money, but literal centuries of fuck you money.
The fortune 50 I worked for could literally stop doing all business and maintain their current spend for a century and still be solvent.
This isn't unstable at all...it's built to last for 100s of years...the current leaders to their grandkids will be safe.
To further that...the 1% have private armies and well stocked bunkers to ride out any social uprising. That's the really scary stuff.
We are all fucked though. Enjoy the hunger games.
Those armies are going to want to be paid and that'll be hard to do once currency has no meaning. If we are going to go that route. As a matter of fact, a bunch of the 1% have recently had meetings with "experts" on ways to keep their hired mercenaries from turning on them once things truly collapse.
You really think those bunkers are filled with cash Scrooge McDuck style? They'll have food, guns, and likely lots of gold. They'll also very likely be sustainable.
Keeping the mercs fed and happy is a trivial thing.
what future?? why would they think of anything long term?
they are cashing in while earth can still support human life.
That's the thing, though, they don't care about the future. They only want to maximize today's profits.
Tomorrow is someone else's problem.
I don't know how to solve this problem without a massive peiod of hardship for everyone until the societal parasites finally feel the pain , but the cause is pretty obvious.
Money can be an addiction. billionares are basically junkies with mental problems, do not expect them to follow any sense or logic
Thank you! I've been reading the responses and many of them hit the mark, but yours is the only one mentioning the sbortsightedness of it all. My brother and I have had many conversations about this subject and agree that part of it has to be some kind of collective brain misfire for the lack of a better phrase, that happens to organisms that get to the level we're at, since everything that we build moves faster than evolution will allow our brains to adapt to, and while we see all of this as a mistake we've made or a small subset of us being greedy and upsetting the apple cart, I posit that it is just our species finally reaching a bottleneck that all species eventually face. We just artificially pushed the ceiling further and further upward so we didn't see it. I think we are starting to see it though and it's unlikely that we can do anything to stop from hitting it now.
Yes, CIA, this post right here.
Uh, didn't the rich rather famously buy political influence back then as well?
Yes, but not at the same scale. They've become masters at it in the modern age.
I dunno, from what I’ve read about political machines in the gilded age it was really just as bad back then.
People worked 12 hour shifts 6 days a week back then with no minimum wage. A lot of people lived in company towns and didn't even get paid in real money. Child labor was legal and widespread, although some shit hole states are getting back to that.
Things are bad now but anyone who thinks it's as bad as it was in the gilded age is either delusional or extremely ignorant. There's a reason the progressive era happened, people were pushed beyond their limits and propaganda couldn't make up for that anymore.
It helps that the field of psychology has come a long way, and it helps further that being a psychologist to help people pays peanuts, but being a psychologist who helps write ad campaigns to make sure the ads have the most psychological impact pressuring people to buy pays big bucks.
Hey man, the FTC is doing anti-trust like nobody's business for the first time since gods-know-when. It's not a silver bullet, but it's progress for the first time in forever!
Time to sharpen the guillotines again..
Only 45 upvotes, Lemmy be slipping.
We're slowly hemorrhaging users. Pretty much all of us upvoted it.
I have noticed. Imma post even harder now. /s
POST HARDER!
(I've been posting hard for a while. It gets a bit dispiriting tbh)
I'd love to see a rise in quality OC. Migrating and reposting content isn't always the answer.
Other platforms have an undeniable wealth of knowledge and a history that's over a decade long.
That doesn't mean we can't make something great out of this. I just know that I'm not the best content producer.
I mean, hypothetically. That is the end result of the neoliberal, or late capitalism economic philosophy if applied on a model. But economic systems in practice are never the philosophy, and are only there in the first place to support the governance of a nation state. I spend half my time in Italy, for example, where the laws protect both the big international brands and the mom and pop shops.
My point is that we are the citizens that make up the government that designs the governance rules for our nation-state. Capitalism is not a government, or people, or the entire story when it comes to commerce and trade systems. We can shape it and use it, like any other framework.
Likewise, regardless of your economic system, greedy people will try to accumulate power, bend the rules to benefit themselves, and extend those benefits across borders if they can. Powerful egos will warp people and rules around them like gravity. All governance systems that strive to be just, collaborative and promote the quality of life of all its citizens have to both put strong rules in place to check the power-hungry, and constantly monitor and adapt to keep them in check.
"...we are the citizens that make up the government that designs the governance rules for our nation-state."
No we're not. We only have the illusion of control where we are allowed to vote on how to tinker with the outer edges of a system that is in reality controlled by 0.1% of the population.
Much as I love that song, it doesn't really apply to the OP question, which is more about companies exploiting their customers rather than their workers.
Workers are consumers.
That is what people miss. This is "the system". It starts and ends with government and "we" chose this (I'm Canadian, we have similar issues but not as extreme, yet).
By continually voting in sociopathic narcissistic social climbers as both public and private sector policy makers (think of shareholders and corporate governance boards) we ensure the system is rigged for the top dogs.
The truth is the system could work in the average person's favour very easily but it would mean limiting some personal freedoms; mostly of very, very rich people. It also would require the average person to get off the "everyone is exploiting me, so I need to do that to them first" treadmill.
Many people have never been on that treadmill (never had the chance or donate excess income or time to local food banks, etc).
The very, very rich don't care. They simply maximize the profit in any situation. Put them in prison and they'll give out legal advice for cigarettes and turn that into a burner phone they use to call their Cayman Islands broker.
It's the upper/upper-middle people who will feel the pain as income is redistributed to poverty stricken people. And if we just impose ubi without fixing the "CEO problem" it will simply lead to inflation. Sucess of ubi programs is entirely due to it happening in a local market. Expand globally without fixing capitalism and you get inflation.
A socialist approach that still allows significant room for upwrd mobility (e.g. CEO can make up to 10x minimum wage, as a non-expert guess) with some type of employee representation on the board of large businesses (state imposed labour union) would probably do it.
Then make ubi contingent on minor public service with free daycare that you can use when performing said services (exception if you have more than 2 kids under 12, or are disabled in some way) say two days a week (networking, activity, build resume) would be a brainstorming idea to workshop.
That's how our economy works, how it's always worked. Get on the hamster wheel and don't stop for 45 years but take breaks to spend what little money have to keep you in enough debt to stay on the hamster wheel for 45 years.
And it seems that "our corporate masters" don't understand that underpaid or laid off people don't have the purchasing power to buy more stuff.
In their relentless pursuit of profits, they are killing off the ability of people to be customers.
Just give em a subscription then!
They don’t even give them 50% of meals anymore, for a full shift.
I think what this comment is trying to say is that we're headed towards an age that resembles what that song talks about: An age of unfettered capitalism, with a small number of corporation owning so much of the market that they can do what they want with no repercussions.
Okay but that song is from like a century ago and mostly things haven't changed much in that time. Certainly we don't have company stores/scrip anymore, but the grim outlook that song has on the world is still fairly accurate.
Bro. We are already there. The tobacco industry sued Australia for fighting to keep graphic pictures and descriptions of lung disease/cancer on cigarette packs and WON. Against the entire fucking government of Australia.
the song is about debt bondage from last century lol look up Company Towns
the song was about company towns where the laborers were paid in store credit instead of wages. you'd work, but never pay off debts, since it all went back to the companies who set the prices for everything you buy, and so they were able to keep you on a tight leash.
That's how it feels like things are going now. a few companies own everything, pay our wages, and set our prices. we cannot get ahead.
16 napkins
I love Joe Vs. The Volcano (where this song is featured) because it really encapsulates the idea of the song.
Because stocks kept trading at higher and higher P/E ratios essentially saying "the market thinks this company can make much more money in the future than they are making now."
The problem is, most companies couldn't, and as we have hit a recessionary phase those companies are now scrambling to try to show continued growth justifying their price.
The way they do that is by cutting off their limbs and selling them for short term cash at long term consequence.
So you see them cutting costs in all kinds of ways that screw over their customers but can show quarterly profits. Even though it means customers may not stay customers if better options appear.
So we are in this sort of pendulum swing period where large corporations suck because there's effectively no competition that doesn't and sucking is the last way for them to squeeze water from a stone. The natural solution is that we'd see competition rise up that doesn't suck to take their customers away and force pro-customer changes.
This likely will eventually happen, but it's going to take time. There are emerging tech trends that will accelerate it, but are still a few years away from practically changing the equation.
In about a decade things should suck less, and a number of the crappy companies around right now may no longer be around, but in the meantime it's still going to suck for a while yet as things adjust to the dying of the old guard and birth of the new.
I don't really agree with this. It is the answer that I think classical economics would give but I just don't think it's useful. For one, it ignores politics. Large corporations also have bought our government, and a few large wealth management funds like vanguard own a de facto controlling share in many public companies, oftentimes including virtually an entire industry, such that competition between them isn't really incentived as much as financial shenanigans and other Jack Welch style shit.
Some scholars (i think I read this in Adrienne bullers value of a whale, which is basically basis for this entire comment) even argue that we've reached a point where it might be more useful to think of our economy as a planned economy, but planned by finance instead of a state central authority.
All that is to say: why would we expect competition to grow, as you suggest, when the current companies already won, and therefore have the power to crush competition? They've already dismantled so many of the antimonopoly and other regulations standing in their way. The classical economics argument treats these new better companies as just sorta rising out of the aether but in reality there's a whole political context that is probably worth considering.
Good point well made. I think it's usually naive wishful thinking (for a "just world" that makes sense and is going to be OK, actually) that allows a liberal capitalist apologist to point to classical economics and say "see the companies are hurting," but the companies don't have feelings, and the owners and shareholders are feeling just fine.
I woukd say it's even worse than that: Free Market only works if humans behaved in a certain way (the so called homo economicus) which has long be disproven by Behavioural Economics and in Markets with low barriers to entry (i.e. teddy bears or soap, not railways or internet service provision) and even then it can't deal will systemic problems (basically any Negative Externality such as Polution or Greenhouse Gas emissions, or over consumption of share resources - a.k.a. Tragedy of the Commons - such as with overfishing or in depletion of mineral resources).
People have been fed by politicians and think-tanks with shaddy funding an oversimplified theory that sounds amazing if you do not at all dig into the details, whilst not actually working in reality, not even close, but of course you're never be told that by the people who win the most from the system built on top of this theory.
(It's actually funny how this is the Capitalist mirror of Communism: beautiful high-level theory, never worked and can't work in practice - because people are as they are, the physical world is as it is and human systems work as they work - and the people whose priviledges come from the system created to implement said theories will never ever tell you they don't work and never will even after a half a century experiment: in fact they'll just tell you it's only not working as expected because it has not been done with enough "purity" and hence we need to double-down to make it work)
I disagree on your expectations for improvement, though agree on the rest.
There are lots of markets with natural barriers to entry were there isn't any realistic chance for a new competitor to arrise and even if one did thanks to, say, some new technology, they'll almost certainly only "disrupt" until they became well established and then do the same as all the rest because that maximizes profitability (just look at Uber a decade ago and look at Uber now).
Then there are lots of markets were crooked politcians (which nowadys seems to be most of the ones in the mainstream parties) make sure there are artificial barriers to entry so that well-connected companies are protected from competition - pretty much any market were an operating license is required, such as Banking and Mobile works like that - and that too means no costumer-friendly competitors will arrise in such markets, ever, because the gatekeeping which is in the hands of said crooked politians stops them before they even start, and said political gatekeepers couldn't care less about consumer-friendliness of market participants and they'll only change their ways if forced to politically and that's not going to happen in countries with voting systems designed to maintain a political duopoly such as the US were the politicians rarelly fear losing their positions, especially on complex hard to explain things like how consumers suffer from them "maintaing high artifical market barriers to entry"
In the old days, before neoliberalism got entrenched, you might have such natural or artificial monopoly or cartel markets occupied by a Public company, which due to the lack of competition quickly grew inneficient (in my professional experience the same happens in Private companies in such a situation, by the way), though cheap, and on which there was often political pressure to improve. Now you have them occupied by Private companies who are driven solely by profit-seeking, so it's still shit (because they cut costs) only it's also expensive for customers rather than cheap (because they try to squeeze costumers with high prices) and suffers zero political pressure because the politicians hide behind the "It's a Free Market" to refuse to regulate whilst secretly waiting for their Non-executive board memberships as rewards for being "friends of business" - a wonderful example of all this are Railways in the UK.
Huggies went up in price, but their cost of manufacturing actually went down.
It's got nothing to do with profit margins, it's just pure greed. Also, the law requires that publicly traded companies be greedy.
The law doesn't actually state you need screw over your customers and maximize profit. It says that executives have a fiduciary duty, which means they must act in the best interest of the shareholder, not themselves.
That does not mean they have to suck out every single dollar of profit. Executives have some leeway in this and can very easily explain that napkins lead to happier customers and longer term retention which means long term profits.
It's purely a short-term, wall street driven, behavior also driven by executive pay being also based in stock so they're incentivized to drive up the price over the next quarter so they can cash out.
Yeah sure, but then you could also say the same about a private business. The CEO works for the business owner, whether the owner is private or public stockholders.
But the reality is that publicly traded companies end up being far more greedy and profit driven than private businesses. In particular, the greedy private businesses tend to taget an IPO, while the more conscientious ones remain private.
???
Maybe I should have said "it's nothing to do with maintaining profit margins" against rising costs.
How does the law require them to be greedy?
I just assumed that it was shareholders.
Maybe not an exact law to be greedy but aren't they legally responsible for acting in the interest of the shareholders not the consumer
Not technically a "law"...
"The shareholder wealth maximization doctrine requires public corporations to pursue a single purpose to the exclusion of all others: increase the wealth of shareholders by increasing the value of their shares. However, a company should be committed to enhance shareholder value and comply with all regulations and laws that govern shareholder's rights."
The" however... " part is largely ignored, except for when it benefits shareholders.
The "however" part you quoted explicitly mentions following the rights of shareholders. From what you described, there's literally nothing else in the doctrine to ignore.
Yeah, your right. I guess I got to the part where it said "comply with regulations and laws" and laughed through the rest.
Lack of competition against an embedded brand name. Change brands.
The brands shuffle their designs to stay ahead of IP laws. Gillette made the definitive shaving razor in 1901, the patent subsequently expired and anyone could make it, now they make new razors every few years to stay ahead of the curve.
With nappies, the correct answer is reusable nappies. It sounds gross, but when you're a parent you quickly learn to deal with all kinds of shit.
You also get funky designs and stuff. The insides are interchangeable, the oustides are fashion.
Depends if you have a second washing machine because you’re now creating a new waste and different expense. Also depends on how much time you have and every dual income family answer the same. None. So no the generalisation that reusables are the solution is not accurate at all. I’d prefer biodegradable nappies any day. The washing machine goes over time as it is with the 14 outfit changes every day.
2nd washing machine?? How many people do you know with 2 washing machines???
"Biodegradable" is a marketing term.
I'm not knocking people who use disposable (biodegradable - HAH) nappies, but that doesn't mean that washing reusable nappies is something impossible for most people. If anything, disposable nappies are a relatively new invention.
Maybe with current electricity prices the maths has changed, but washing reusable nappies worked out far cheaper for me when my kids were using them.
Actually at least two families who have small children AND reusable nappies.
I don’t care for the “marketing” I mean it from the actual definition. Plus where I live companies are held to account for label based claims. So sounds like a US problem tbh.
So you have small children and both parents are working? Notice the plurals. We found with one baby it’s easy enough however the moment we both went to work and even more so with two babies it was impossible extra workload. Out of the friends and families in my circles the ONLY (2 families) that use reusable are the ones with a dedicated stay at home parent. Which is becoming rare more than ever.
Unregulated capitalism.
I cant wait to be arrested for not noticing the napkin dispenser is empty fast enough
there wasn't even a dispenser lol felt like i was going crazy
I'm incredulous.
You're right in that taco bell wants to maximise profits, but surely the provision of napkins allows them to produce more profit.
I mean a lot of companies are doing a lot of shitty things worthy of criticism, but I don't think that this is one of them.
const_void fighting the good fight at…checks notes… lack of napkins…….
We've let our companies grow too large, giving them the ability to put the screws on us. Also competition isn't really happening in many fields, as ask the companies are owned by pretty much the same people.
Why do you think there isn't more competition? I was wondering if it was too much red tape/legal risk to start up a business. Everyone is saying how greedy these companies are, so they must be charging way more than a fair price, which means an average Joe should be able to step in and provide the same stuff for a fair price.
For a lot of cases the answer is lobbying, e.g. in medical/healthcare there's practical 0 competition for a lot of products because of anti-competitive laws like really shitty intellectual property laws that let prices be controlled by few (collaborating) companies. Plus there's a lot of things that are technically illegal, but in practice laws only apply to the poors so they're not really illegal for corporations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices#Types
quite a few of them are “natural monopolies”. for those unaware (source):
ie, cable companies, electricity suppliers, amazon. it’s really complicated and really expensive to build the infrastructure needed to meaningfully compete in those industries.
another relevant concept is the “network effect”, defined as (source):
this kind of thing is more applicable to things like social media companies (they’re more appealing the more users they have). this makes it hard to compete with social media companies because convincing people to use your new app is really hard if the usefulness of it depends on everyone’s friends already being on it. (this is also part of the reason twitter is taking so painfully long to die)
both concepts illustrate the different barriers to entry that exist when trying to compete with these giant companies. these barriers are also what allow these huge companies to get so complacent.
(i’m not happy about quoting investopedia or wharton, but they do give simple definitions of both concepts so i did it just this once.)
The Average Joe rarely has enough capital to start a promising enterprise and when they do manage to, they get bought up by the very same corporations they were trying to compete against.
We've reached a point where corpos can just buy out the competition and do whatever they please to it.
And it's not even a greed issue, really. The system is kill or be killed, a corporation that doesn't do this sort of shady thing won't make as much money and will be bought out by others that do.
We have to change the rules of the game.
Competition goes way down when all the different companies are owned by a very small set of huge companies. And for these companies it's easy to setup cartels and just simply not compete and jack up the prices. Competition happens when the companies must make a profit or die, not when conglomerates can trust that they're the only game in town.
because somehow our economic system says that a company is only successful if it's growing, not if it's regularly turning a profit every quarter. at least, that's my understanding of it. so, they have to do something to generate something that looks like growth somehow
It's pretty simple. Because we are all so spoiled and entitled that we won't even consider NOT buying their shit anymore. It's the same reason the video game market has grown rampant with micro transactions. They keep pushing the boundaries, and we keep giving them our money regardless of what they do. I'm actually curious to see how far they can push this insanity. They already slap a new year on sports titles every year and somehow sell the same game to the same people annually.
PUT YOUR WALLET DOWN.
The amount of people on Reddit who shill for companies like EA and Activision is shocking.
Once wrote a comment on the lines of 'sadly, British gamers mostly have terrible taste in video games, 90% of us don't give a shit about anything unless it's GTA, FIFA or Call of Duty. We literally reward companies for shitty consumer practices.'
Most of the replies I got were calling me an asshole and were acting like I'm trying to police what people can like/dislike.
But still, Electronic Arts make record-breaking profits because... EA Sports: It's In The Game (you bought last year)
Any platform you find corporate asshole lickers. They are the worst.
We also all (in the US especially) collectively choose Chinese made products over domestic options as if the only consequence is that we pay less money and are thus a savvy customer ... helping destroy a huge portion of the middle class that worked in manufacturing.
Maybe the robots would've gotten things where they are now eventually, but nowhere near as fast.
Best one of the newest releases is Street Fighter 6. Not just a full price game with a yearly season pass, which is fair for a service game and additional content, but also more frequent battle passes and the cherry on top, not only you pay for additional costumes as before, but each character has only 2 colors available. How much for a simply different RGB value you might wonder, a whopping over $100 for all colors. Didn't buy this well executed game, because I refuse to partake in this.
This set the precedent for Mortal Kombat 1 DLC which is also filled with high cost and still charges outrageous money for new Fatalities.
At this point thought can we really victim blame? Like were all just advanced moneys and it turns out almost every monkey in this environment will get addicted and capitilists are happy to use that maliciously.
It issue is systematic at the least, and I can almost gaurentee won't be solved in the next century by a couple people voting with just their wallets
It's both. We are both simultaneously capable of free will, yet are also products of the universe that created us. So my answer to your question, in my humble opinion, is yes. Yes, we can victim blame while simultaneously lamenting the corporate landscape.
Let's make this simpler. This corporate greed is a problem, yes? What actions have you taken to remove this problem?
Total and unquestionable revolution.
Just take a peek at history and the times things changed 'peacefully'
(ghandi didn't go on a hunger strike to look skinnier that's for sure)
Agreed. This is why I download mp3s and buy CDs still. Radio and Spotify streaming is good, but honestly, a better idea or service would be free group book reading events and coffee, help those budding writers etc to share ideas and increase the entropy and size of our universe lol
They were probably just out and too busy to restock or something. It happens. Never been to a fast food place where they don't provide napkins and I steal napkins from the taco bell I live near regularly. What a weird overreaction.
Ya, this whole thread is unhinged. Very strange.
Welcome to lemmy. I hate big corporations but some of the people on this site will blame amazon when they stub their toe.
A lot of people are responding to the title, not to the body of the post.
Why was there no napkin dispenser? Dunno could be a lot of things.
Why does everything get progressively shittier under capitalism? It's probably not related to the napkin dispenser specifically, but everything under capitalism gets progressively shittier.
Maybe. But there's a lot of "They're coming for your napkins to maximize profit!"
in dodge v ford the supreme court ruled that publicly traded companies must put profits first above their workers and the the build quality of their products.
That's a bad take. The case actually affirmed business judgement rule: the idea that the guy running the company knows how to run it better than the shareholders. It's part of why post-war America is considered the golden age of American manufacturing: Publicly traded companies invested in their employees and wages exploded across the board. A 100 year old court decision isn't the primary driver on a problem that's really only developed in the last forty or fifty years.
Jack Welch of GE really set the current tone of "all that matters is stock price". The 80s saw greed transform into a virtue
There's a great behind the bastards podcast episode about this guy!
I think it's come about due to the state of universities and the stringent belief that a pursuit of knowledge above all else would somehow land you a good job. You've got to want to do the job or genuinely enjoy the work first.
Just consider that the same people in the Middle East who are matchmakers and run big data collection corps also run the whole breakups shake up.
Interesting....
Workers rights is against capitalism to just give you everything needed to decide if this system is good or bad.
My satellite TV (Sky TV ... UK) subscription ended recently and they would not give me any sort of deal to sign a new contract, Come black Friday they a spamming me by email and every type of advert for great deals for NEW Customers only!
I called SKY to cancel and they offered me a better deal but we're going to charge me an admin fee to sign a new contract, they wanted me to pay them to sign a contract with them!
I told them that it was not acceptable and cancel my service, having been put through to "my manager" they eventually waived the admin fee...
How has it come to this, I'm an easy customer, I am happy with the product, I'll sign a contract if it's a good deal, but they went out of their way to lose me
Because for every person like you that jumps through hops to get a new deal there are lots of people who just passivelly let the renewal happen under inferior conditions that they could have got if they tried.
That's also why they put stupid hindrances in your way: such things cause many people to give up and just go along with a suboptimal renewal, ergo they make more money from acting thus than they lose from clients who say "enough is enough" and drop them (notice how you did not drop them - they lost nothing from giving you the run around and could've gained if you had given up and renewed with the shit conditions: it's pretty much a can't-loose situation for them)
I lived in then UK for over a decade and one thing that stood out when I moved from the The Netherlands to the UK (already more than 15 years ago) and from the UK to Portugal is how much more the larger consumer-facing companies in the UK did the most that they could to take advantage of people's mistakes or laziness than in those other countries - I remember a particularly sleazy gym membership contract from Virgin were per-contract (I always read those things) the only way to cancel it before the yearly auto-renewal was to contact them during a specific week before renewal (2 weeks before end of contract if I remember it correctly), not before nor after.
Over the whole time I was there, a handful of the most outrageous abuses when it came to consumer contracts were plugged (the one I remember the best was the creation of a rental deposit insurance to stop tenants from losing their deposits at the end of the rental agreement, as before that landlords would often just keep it all for no reason and then the only option the tenant had was take it to Court) but the whole posture of taking advantage of costumer laziness and normal mistakes (auch as, forgetting a date for canceling and auto-renewal) was widespread in the UK compared to other countries I lived in.
As it so happens, people themselves were also to blame: I remember how amazed the rental agency guy was that I actually read the Rental Agreement and even demanded corrections before I signed anything - "Nobody reads these", he said - when even at the massive daily rate I was paid back then for my work it was still worth it to spend the 1 or 2 hours reading a contract were I was assuming a commiment of at least £15k (at the time a "reasonable" London rent for a year).
Me in your position would've just said "fuck this", cancelled SKY and gone without (and I have done it for some things were I felt the other side had abused my trust, such as closing my account with my first bank in the UK the one and only time I was charged an overdraft fee), mainly because my early adult years happenned mostly in The Netherlands so I have their style of demanding consumer rather than the more passive and willing to overlook these things style common it the UK.
Absolutely terrible news bro I feel for you.
So don't shop there! They'll do the bare minimum that still brings people in; the only remedy is to show them they'll lose customers.
Wile this is something that can be generally applied to fast food restaurants, this is a problem with basically all industries, many of which exist in a space where their customers are stuck with them. EG a lot of people are stuck with walmart because they are often literally the only place around or the only place around people on the lower half of income can afford.
Same with those dollar stores. They come into poor areas and drive out the small local grocers, then you get a worse product and it's your only choice.
For the masses Dollar General is not a dollar store. That place blows.
Dollar Tree is the closest large chain that still adheres to cheap as fuck goods but the quality is super shit as expected often with quantity reduced to essentially match regular goods when bought in bulk anyway.
Family Dollar next best with discounts but not great.
Dollar General is often more expensive than regular stores.
Yes, they also work in a fashion where they don't truly step on the toes of walmart, lest they also be crushed.
It's past Thanksgiving and I don't even celebrate it, but I'm so fucking thankful to live in a European suburb. There is a small general store just down the street, two bakeries, a butcher, a car mechanic, a tire service shop, a bike service shop, two schools, two playgrounds, and too many smaller businesses to count. All within ten minutes on foot. Also three stops for six bus lines, safe sidewalks, and safe bicycle paths, so basically /c/fuckcars's wet dream.
I'm in Canada. I'd love to be able to say I can totally ditch Maxi or Super C and stop supporting Loblaws and the Weston family, or Metro or Sobeys, but that would mean choosing either buying shittier produce from one of the large discount alternatives (Walmart, Super C, or similar) meaning I'd be encouraging another of those large super vertically integrated grocery chains that are driving up cost regardless, or accepting to pay 1.5x the price for all of my groceries.
Fresh produce I can get for not too expensive from farmer's markets while in season, but for the rest, I have to choose between expensive local grocery, expensive grocery chain, or budget grocery chains that are owned by one of the expensive chains anyway.
My local grocery chain is a lot better quality than Walmart in some respects. But, the price tag is usually much steeper. Thank God for Aldi's.
I like to support the little guy when possible but when it makes your monthly grocery bill $1,200 instead of $900, that's a tough pill to swallow. That $300 wouldn't necessarily break the bank for me but it's a lot of money to a lot of people.
This is also a big reason that many Americans have poor nutrition. Processed junk food is cheaper than healthy food. Presenting better lifestyle or diet "choices" is an illusion when you have to have money to make those choices.
Even they are pricy, once the competition is quashed.
More importantly, don't work there. Giving your labor to these businesses is just as bad, if not worse as spending your money there.
These are both really easy sentiments to have. In the real world, we eat the food we can afford and work wherever will hire us.
100% this. Lots of people don't have options.
This is why we need UBI stat if we want to reverse this trend. People everywhere are being backed into corners by the unaffordability of everything and their desperation is being exploited by places like Taco Bell, Dollar General, Walmart, Amazon and is effectively forcing people to panhandle and do crime. By having the leeway to look past how the heck you're going to feed and take care of yourself and people close to you, it opens up opportunities that the middle class takes for granted and things that weren't even a question to the upper and elite classes.
The problem then becomes a lack of shelter, in addition to quality clothing and quality food.
those greedy bastard taco bell employees
Because you won't do anything to hurt their bottom line, basically.
Stop eating at Taco Bell and make your own damn tacos at home. Better yet, go buy some from a family-owned taco truck instead.
Yeah, I don't eat at Taco Bell when I'm in the mood for tacos from a street truck. It's like two entirely different types of food.
There is Mexican food, there's Tex Mex, then there is Taco Bell. They're not really all comparable 1:1:1. I love me an al pastor taco from a truck, but some days I'm not in the mood for a real taco but rather the ersatz tacos they have at Taco Bell.
See my stoned Canadian ass doesnt have any taco trucks nearby, but the bell is always there
(but I gotta agree its far from authentic, its like a good smoked burger vs bigmac)
That's a shame. I live in an area where I have access to authentic food of so many different ethnicities, and it is wonderful.
I can't imagine how boring life would be without multiculturalism.
Extra points for ersatz
Taco trucks are so good right now. They're not wasting money on unused dining room space so lots of meat!
Do you really have to ask? Capitalism, when it goes unchecked, turns everything shitty. Capitalism has been relatively unchecked in the US for the last 50 years, so everything is shitty. That’s starting to change as unions become more powerful again, but they’re still a fraction of what they were in the early 20th century. Late stage capitalism, baby!
mArXiSm
go actually read Marx, dude was smart af.
Anything in particular? He has boocoos of books.
beaucoups
Capital 1, if you can hack it.
It's very long. Seems interesting, though. As someone that has lived in communism, I can say with first hand that it doesn't work en mass. But, then again, capitalism doesn't work either...
It's more of a treatise on economics.
Oh ok cool. I added to the reading list yesterday, and plan to get to it after the one I'm reading now.
The Manifesto is literally 20 pages.
Not only are unions enjoying a resurgence holding employers to account, the FTC under Lina Khan is doing antitrust for the first time in most of our lifetimes. It's bad now, but it will get better if we fight for it like we did back then.
Unions have nothing to do with companies enshittifying their products and services
Free the beers and we might see some novel inventions like the Japanese toilet bidet )
Because your rights have been eroded by decades of deregulation and lobbying. And because publicly traded companies are legally required to maximize profits at all costs.
Taco bell has switched their demographic from dining in, to take out and drive thru. Started with the pandemic, that's why most stuff that used to be readily available isn't put out anymore. All the taco bells in my area did this, same with several other fast food chains.
Why I don't eat out as much is because of the shrinkflation. Back in the mid 90's you used to be able to get a whopper for a dollar. Now they're pushing $6 and they just aren't the same anymore. More if you get a meal.
We're in a modern gilded age. There are no consequences for modern day robber barons.
To add to this -- Cory Doctorow, the very guy who coined the term "enshittification," has written about this. (Been meaning to read some of his books to see his explanations on how to fight it but I'm still getting through another book right now so I've only seen vids and read a sample.)
It’s the enshittification of the entire country.
See enshittification.
Because the corporations write the rules. Literally; laws are written by corps and presented to lawmakers along with "gifts" and "campaign donations" - and implicit quid pro quo. They then present them to be voted upon, sometimes without even bothering to read them.
Exactly that. We are run by corporations more so than our elected officials. A lot of people fail to fully understand this fact. Corporations and capitalism is the answer to why everything sucks.
And no matter how well documented it is, people just go "nuh uh" and call you a socialist if you bring it up.
Did you ask if they had some napkins? Yes we are living in a post capitalist nightmare but honestly, seems more likely the wage slave in charge of putting out the napkins either hadn’t had a chance to do so or forgot.
If there's an empty napkin dispenser, that would be my assumption. But it's been happening more often and at more places that no, they don't even have dispensers, you need to ask for napkins.
I'm with you, OP: for some reason, it's the little things I notice.
I'm in grocery stores a lot. It used to be, there was a nice little seating area there to sit, drink my coffee and work. But now, because homeless people dared to duck inside a public-facing area to briefly escape the elements, they removed many of the tables and chairs and they're now a big, empty space. Heaven forbid they add more seating, actually staff enough people to enforce a time-limit, etc; no, instead we all are worse off for it. But corporate profits have never been higher, so worth it, right!?
Take a trip to PA, all the grocery and convenience stores have added seating areas so that they can legally sell beer and wine lmao.
They piloted this in Nashville at Kroger and something changed for them to turn around and remove them.
Theres a few problems
A big one that you missed is
Capitalism is the answer. Greed, unchecked profits.
People haven't learned to vote with their wallets
As was once said(something like): if vote with your wallet, the people with bigger wallets get more votes.
Capitalism: a short story.
Yep that's true, but I think in the long haul appealing to more people is better than just one
Sounds like a weird saying.
It assumes that the people with bigger wallets also use a larger portion (absolute money, not percentages) on the "thing" to begin with. If the billionaire and the middle class man uses 10€ on the same thing a month, and both stop doing it, then they both got the same amount of "votes". Much more fitting would be: "if you vote with your wallet, people who spend more money get more votes".
Of course this only applies if you're talking about boycots etc, and not about buying stuff.
And yes, people with bigger wallets probably have more sway and power when it comes to get getting their way if they want to, but when people talk about voting with your wallet, they're not talking about this.
as i said "something like", but overall it's the same idea, semantics.
It applies in both cases, for example the design of a product (game Diablo 4) or the process of gentrification.
No, this line of thinking is wrong, I wish people would stop saying this. Voting with your wallet never works when 1% has >50% of wealth. It’s easier for 5% of people (wealthy, top execs) to agree on milking the rest than 95% of people to agree on boycotting a certain brand. That’s why we have regulations, we wouldn’t need them if “voting with wallets” actually worked.
Free market capitalism got us to this point, it cannot take us out of this.
1% might have 50% of the wealth, they do not account for 50% of the spending. Especially not at Taco Bell.
Pure capitalism is broken af, but companies like this will feel it if 10% of costumers stops going there. The increase in price can recover some of it, but only to a certain extent. It's a simple supply and demand issue.
That being said, I'm not from the US, so take my opinion on local issues with a grain of salth. And I definitely don't mean to imply that wealth inequality is not an issue. On the contrary.
You mean well and I wish you were right, but capitalism proves you wrong time and time again. Remember when everyone cancelled their Netflix subscriptions and the company went bankrupt because they disallowed account sharing? Yeah, that was the sentiment on all social media.
Nobody did that in net change numbers.
If your theory was right, Netflix is succeeding because Saudi billionaires from the 1% bought up thousands of Netflix subscriptions to make up for the average Joe from the 99% that unsubscribed.
What really happened was that when they added household restrictions they saw a net increase in subscriptions, not from the 1%, but from the 99%.
While the concentration of wealth has significant effects on opportunity and access to capital, it means pretty much jack shit to access to revenue, which is dictated by mass spending and very susceptible to voting with your dollar.
We literally just saw a company hit hard by people voting with their dollar, with one of the largest alcoholic beverage companies taking a significant loss because they pissed off two sides of the market with their behavior, with effects still going on today.
We're in a generation of complacency. Nobody cares and our to busy consuming to care.
A sizeable chunk is too busy surviving.
The system is working as intended.
Hard to do that when everything is a fucking oligopoly. If you don’t like Taco Bell, have fun also avoiding KFC, Pizza Hut, and The Habit, all owned by Yum! Brands.
Go to your locally owned Mexican restaurant instead.
Stop letting advertising direct your purchasing intent towards mega-corp brands.
Oh it's even more complex.
Who sells those napkins?
(Answer; Sysco. If a place is short on napkins, Sysco is turning the screws on the franchise owner).
We're going to through the "enshittification" as a society. There was the Great Recession, the DotCom Bust, the Great Inflation, etc.
What is going to matter, is can we use this "enshittification" to benefit society by increasing wages, encouraging social mobility, protecting and enshrining rights for marginalized communities, etc. Building a more inclusive society.
We're at the end stage of capitalism.
A late stage, but not the end. It can get much worse.
We'd all like to think the times we exist in are the most important, the most momentous times. But really everything will probably circle the drain, getting worse and worse for centuries(?) before any real "collapse" happens.
That would probably be true if climate change wasn't about to fuck everything up.
Nah you're just dramatising because you've downsized
this is the ultimate result of shareholder theory. after a company hits their efficiency stride based on its resources and theres no more innovation to fuel profit, what else can it do but make shit smaller/less effective/worse. we just need an economic theory that includes broader society in the scope of fiduciary duties that businesses will actually take seriously.
Google can always try to to space lol
Your hopeful I like you
Simple things are going backwards but in a few hundred years Starbucks is gonna start giving handjobs. So thats kinda nice
I don't think we have time for lattes.
I'll start worrying when we get a TV show about a guy that likes getting his balls kicked, I could totally go for a latte!
Yep.
Corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. They have to make money. And how much money do they have to earn? MORE.
To grow, they offer good food at a reasonable price. It seems cheaper to put the drink machine out for customers to make their own drinks choices… but then we need those extra pennies, so behind the counter it goes, so customers don’t get free refills… then how can we source cheaper stuff, beef beans etc. there will be c constant demand to squeeze every penny from the system… Bob is making too much; better fsck his schedule until he quits so we can hire Alice as she make only minimum wage.
I’m not sure where napkins fall in the chain but yes the quality likely will continue to spiral down.
There are very few companies who recognize that there is a quality floor they should not go below. Where they acknowledge that we can’t get any worse, but they have to raise prices. And depending on the managers this cycle will continue back and forth
Can we stop with the myth that "corporations/board members have a fiduciary duty to share holders for maximum profit"
It's not true and never has been! It's just some bullshit that was said in the 80s that sounds good but has no basis in reality
I mean, they do though? I'm totally against that, but hear me out: if we infiltrated for instance, and tried to do the opposite approach of only screwing the shareholders while providing maximum value to workers and consumers, we wouldn't last long enough to bring it to a vote at the corrupted board. If you don't provide a solid plan on how you're gonna fuck consumers in the coming quarter, they won't even let you stay on as CEO. It's literally not possible to do good in this system, you can either not participate and keep getting fucked as consumers/workers, or you can trade class and provide value for shareholders, there is no in between anymore. The only option that will change this without another Teddy, is revolution. Hopefully a peaceful one.
According to your statement there must be someone getting fucked. An trade where all parties are satisfied does not seem possible.
Isn't that because at the root of greed is the inability to be satisfied? Why don't billionaires, when they have literally money beyond avarice, more than they could possibly spend in a thousand lifetimes, just say "nope, I don't need any more, everything else I earn can go to charity"?
But they don't. They get richer. And despite the public image of them, they'll still try and screw the regular workers out of as many toilet breaks as they can get away with in order to maximise how much they earn.
It's almost beyond evil.
I think that's two different things. Billionaires can and do get continuously richer also when there are napkins in a restaurant to satisfy customers.
Actually, satisfied customers are return customers, which every businessman knows are the best customers. Amazon certainly knows that. The reason why Amazon is so succesful is because they focus intensely on customer satisfaction. They're fucking their employers, yes, but they wouldn't need to. They just do because the regulations allow for it.
No?
As long as upper level management receives bonuses based on share price, and the board reenforces that…
The stock market is a voting machine not a weighing machine.
I simply disagree Management generally must keep increasing ARPU average revenue per user or else the market punishes the stock price
Dumb question: did the laws change or was it a change in trends to maximize shareholder returns?
There was a cultural shift in the 1970s:
See https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/08/22/so-long-to-shareholder-primacy/#:~:text=The%20shift%20to%20shareholder%20primacy,increase%20its%20profits.%E2%80%9D%20Subsequently%2C
Why did that change?
I think it was a self-beneficial fad. All the rich shareholders think it's a great idea, as do many on boards (since the shareholders elect them), so it becomes dogma. All fads eventually lose their shine, as this one is.
But I'm neither an economist, nor a historian, so take my guess with a big grain of salt.
A shift in corporate mindset to maximize growth and profit. Go research Jack Welsh.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/part-one-jack-welch-is-why-you-got-laid-off/id1373812661?i=1000612309266
Not at all is that a dumb question.
See the other comments.
It is much more cultural than anything else.
As the stock market moved from buy and hold for the long term to the more manic trading we see today where shit like robinhood allows everyone to trade options
Well you know all those boomers retiring ? They not doing work anymore but that's not the worst of it. Now they are spending that retirement money instead of stashing it.
So they're selling their stocks and now the companies need cash or demonstrate profit growth or else their share prices will tank.
Got a source for the claim that a boomer stock sell off is driving factor? I would have just made greed the motivator.
Spending money is good for the economy. Retiring is good for the economy, that means someone else gets that higher pay job slot. Retirees should be living off of dividends, 401ks and IRAs, not volatile stock sell offs.
If you're only going to live another 10 or 20 years but you have $1M stashed... do you take the $1M now and buy a fancy house? Or do you keep that $1M going for the... checks math ... few tens of thousands of dollars it'll earn in yearly dividends? Meanwhile your daughter needs a new hair-do, your son is living in your basement again, and your wife... well she's your wife. And she wants that new car that you promised you'd get her when you retire.
I guess it's back to the grind instead.
First: Don't take financial advice from randos on the internet. Second: What you said is not a person who is financially ready to retire. It's a number, not an age, as they say. You should not be retiring with $1M solely in stocks. That's bad planning (and too low of a number these days). You need multiple millions spread out over stocks, bonds, your residence, and retirement accounts like 401Ks and IRAs. A million dollars is a number we need to have a conversation about in this country, because everyone wants to hate on millionaires. Want to know what a million dollars is? $430k house that you bought when it was $250k. ~$270k in retirement savings, each, for 2 people. 2 paid off 10 year old cars. How rich does that sound? They're technically millionaires with their assets. Not so rich when you put it like that.
No, you don't buy a fancy house when you are retiring, that's when you downsize so you don't have a huge tax/utilities overhead, a big yard to take care of, and a huge house to maintain that you may have a hard time getting around in as you age. Your daughter is an adult, she needs to get her shit together. Son needs to pay a share of all utilities and whatever other expenses he's costing if he's not disabled. Wife needs to be on board with the finances or everyone in this scenario is a dumbass.
If you have a straight million dollars invested and earning 5% you'll make $50k a year to cover all your bills. $50K someplace really cheap to live (which probably won't be desirable or near qualty services like hospitals as you age) will get you by with no frills. 5% is conservative, a lot of optimists choose higher numbers or historic averages, but this is when you hae no job and are getting old, you need to be very conservative with estimates. $1.5M in straight interest bearing accounts at 5% gets you $75k, a much more reasonable number with a paid off house in a decent area. Got house payments still? Might want to grab that WalMart greeter job to keep that expense at bay. $2.0M will let you live a nice lifestyle, fly to visit the grandkids once in a while, have a small bass boat or whatever to go fish in you spare time, and live in a pretty nice place.
These are my numbers. There are boing to be plenty of people with different opinions and targets, but I thing $2.0M+ is a safer number that will still cover you even if the market rolls back on you for a while.
Tell the girl to pay for her own haircut, get her a salon gift card for her birthday. Tell the son to get a job at Starbucks.
Just a conversation, man :)
I didn't even know someone could borrow against securities. Sounds like I need to have a discussion with my finance guy...
... speaking of finance guys, I should find one.
Sure, let's talk about that.
People who hate on millionaires are making arguments a million hours too late (for many of the reasons you stated). The rage these days is to hate on billionaires.
Nah I think if you took a short holiday stay camping you might think of a good middle ground. People are often not as short sighted as you would expect them to be, otherwise society would not have become as gloriously complex and full of unsustainable systems as today
Meh, if they're selling it, the company will have certain people simply set up a trust fund with beneficiaries being key employees or research and development team players, then strategically buy back shares at low prices and use the company shares as leverage for their next big idea at whatever company meet up happens. Think Defcon but limited to internal players. Even at a loss, the company will generally become self sustaining so long as the players on the team have a minimum degree of commitment
Also everything breaks in five years at best. Doesn't matter how much you spend, basically everything is shit quality minimum viable products.
This is why I never buy anything with lithium batteries, and my career is a computer repair technician. When the batteries die, they are often irreplaceable even by an expert. The entire inside of so many "smart" and wireless devices are drowned in industrial adhesive and can only be destructively disassembled. Watch ifixit's videos on air pods teardowns, they are impossible to repair.
Same. I won't buy anything that isn't repairable unless it's like a one time need
Lol I wish I had that luxury.
I do actually
Wood working tools
Thankfully on most laptops the battery is easy to replace. The keyboards though...
Oh yeah the keyboards are almost always rough. Sometimes if the laptop is old enough you can simply undo a couple screws and the keyboard will pop right out. Nowadays they are all riveted in so you have to buy the whole lower assembly and gut the machine and transplant it to the new assembly.
It always hurts to tell customers that fixing a single broken key is like 200-300$ (often on cheap laptops).
Planned obsolescence keeps us consuming.
I also think there's a general lack of QA. Whether it's a bug or a feature, they're trying to push things out so fast now that shit breaks even if they don't intentionally plan obsolescence.
Planned obsolescence is definitely a modern travesty though. It really ought to be illegal
Republicans. They have blockaded any possible reform.
It's because of the napkin gnomes. Nobody can ever catch them.
We really can vote with our dollars. The issue is that we don’t (I’m point right at myself here).
Don’t buy the things, we probably don’t need em.
Maybe they just didn’t restock the napkins? Dude went to Taco Bell and almost had an aneurysm
look at all these comments, they think Taco Bell CEO himself sent down a decree that there will be no napkins.
Cut him some slack. He's dining in at a taco bell. Not exactly a high point in his life, nor a mark of stability
The US has not set up a system that compensates properly. Most European countries have a security net in place when capitalism squeezes regular people. The US does not. You're on your own.
It's a shame so much time has passed for the public to even recall how much Teddy fought for the average Joe blow public with his first deal. He fought the corporate overloads and they couldn't believe he couldn't be bribed like those before him and since.
And he was even a right winger, iirc.
"WE" don't. You all might. Playing my role as a "consumer" I expect a certain level of customer service. If it doesn't meet my standard, I stop consuming.
If it isn't meeting your standard, stop.
BRB gonna stop buying groceries now.
Ask for napkins, if they won't give you any, pour a soda out on the counter and steal some of the paper towels they use to clean it up. (Actually don't, this method isn't nice for the workers)
It's going to be a fun next few years. Corpo dickheads keep trying to make another nickel next quarter, but more and more people have had enough. If food is too expensive, people will start stealing it, and the police can't be everywhere. Better hope there isnt 't some global pandemic or something that would suddenly make it acceptable to wear a mask in public.
The trick is they do this because "you" keep showing up. Spend literally 30-45 minutes to make a pile of taco fixings that will taste better, be healthier, and be cost competitive (if cooked in bulk).
Exactly, why would they even put napkins out if the customers still come.
Its shitty only for the poor. Rich has the best life there. If you're rich , move to US Of A
To be fair, lots of poor people move to the USA, I think it's just a high competition space is the issue
Yea better than living in 3rd world countries.
Everything is cheaper and made of thinner materials. But I can't tell if it tastes worse because it's of lesser quality or because of the covid I had.
Ngl think it's this too, read somewhere that dyes used in commercial products were strained so some products started literally looking thinned out. Personally I saw it in our lab gloves, the blue dye was looking....not uniform. Everywhere there is probably some strain on production and people being stressed tf out.
It's the natural end for a free market. The big players take over and squeeze every drop of blood they can from the consumer class until the inevitable collapse or B&L buys the government.
No, there's another ending. J&J buys the government.
What do you expect from a place like Taco Bell? You are enabling their behavior by giving them money.
Napkins seem like a pretty normal thing to expect at any eating establishment.
Particularly one with the grease content of Taco Bell.
They're starting the transition to the three sea shells
Yep! If everyone keeps buying shitty pastries that come from plastic bags at Starbucks then they're going to keep making them. Enjoy.
bruh they just didn't have napkins, the employees probably just didn't give a shit
I mean things are getting shittier but you're complaining about napkins?
I think the point is more that we live in a time where "because we cut napkins to add pennies to our bottom line" is an answer we have to seriously consider. Even if it isn't the case, it's plausible enough to be awful.
You are all foolish and thought global suicide was NOT their primary objectives. Corporations, Wealth, Religion, etc. etc. are all thing you would call bullshit but the God of the Dead is sick of your shit.
because people swallow. stop going to that taco bell or taco bell in general. likewise for other things.
The napkins thing is a thing at McD near me.
You have to stand there and wait for about five minutes to flag down a member of staff (they’re all in the back now due to the self serve kiosks). The same for sauces. Which to me says that my time is meaningless to them. They don’t trust us to not take too many but they’re also too lazy to put some in every customers bag.
I will no longer eat there due to this and the crazy prices for the same mediocre food.
Fucking ghouls. Yet we have debates at work all the time and I’m seen as some weirdo for not wanting to be fleeced by every company on the planet.
Be like me and steal what you can from these companies. Commit delivery fraud (item never arrived when it did). Raise chargebacks etc. take what you can as that’s what they’re doing. Just don’t do it to sole businesses.
Nah, don't do this.
Imagine being an Uber Eats or Deliveroo driver trying to make an honest living and getting sacked because some absolute bloomy rind dick cheese told people on the internet to submit fraudulent non-delivery claims.
Now imagine they alert other businesses that you steal from customers and now you're unemployable because of what I stated above.
You're suggesting something that will seriously fuck over the average wagie but still keep the board of directors in their comfy black leather seats. Just don't give them your business.
I'm willing to bet you never actually worked in a customer facing job, otherwise you'd have more empathy for the average worker...
I’m not stealing food from Uber eats bro. I’m talking orders from Amazon and claiming they sent an inferior item.
Edit: also I ain’t ever ordering Uber Eats. Paying double for someone to bring me soggy food.
Stealing from Amazon will never not be ok.
For sure. Steal from the till of a megacorp who gives a shit, get a gig worker fired for a free burrito? Thats a huge dick move
Also, every job I’ve had until my current one has been customer service. Either facing or over the phone. Should have taken that bet.
because it is not designed to be good but just to make money
I think it's less that we're expected to sympathize, and more just that they've realized enough people will tolerate it. With OP's example, Taco Bell has clearly decided that whatever business they may lose due to people deciding to not go to Taco Bell anymore because of the lack of napkins will be less than whatever they save by not stocking napkins anymore.
And they're right.
Don't get me wrong, it's a shitty thing to do, but between people in general not realizing that this place doesn't even have napkins anymore, and people deciding they still want semi-delicious garbage tacos anyway, they're really not going to see a big dip in revenue. They've simply realized that they really can just make their presented experience a little shittier just to save some money.
Well first off have Taco Bell stopped providing napkins? One person couldn't find napkins in one store and suddenly it's greed driven corporate policy according to OP?
It seems unlikely that a food chain would completely abolish napkins. It is possible they're no longer freely available because people were taking them "for their car" whatever that even means!?
Perhaps I should have clarified that for the sake of discussion I was taking OP's comment at face value, but the essentials are the same either way. Whether it's a chain-wide declaration that napkins are done, a single store doing away with them, or just a sufficiently casual attitude to restocking them that allowed them to run out in the first place, the math in the end is all the same. They can and will let their service get a little shittier, because they know they'll save more money than they lose.
If you've never operated or owned a restaurant before, it's because the top 3 expenses in a restaurant are: food, labor, and paper. Controlling paper usage helps control costs significantly. That's why.
Maybe they are out of them because some ghoul took all of them to clean their car? One self entitled customer.
Fiduciary responsibility, number has to get bigger
Are you sure they didn't just conscript the napkins for TP? It is Taco Bell after all...
3 sea shells about to be placed in the taco bell washrooms as cost saving measures.
Stop your consumerism, vote with your wallet
Its hard to believe a fucking nobody bank like SVB collapsing could do this.
It’s all disgusting out there.
My wife and I kicked all fast food 2010.
We use a crock pot for beans. Buy tortillas etc. We can beat Taco Bell burritos with zero worry about disease.
We transmuted our disgust for corporate hegemony into carefully crafted campaign designed to rise above it as much as possible.
And we’re not saints. Still using abuser Amazon because fuck. But we try and I ride right in by fast food faces feeling so good not to give them an effing dime.
It's a pretty complicated economics question why inflation is happening. They're working on it by adjusting interest rates, I guess.
As for why the average American isn't doing so well, it's basically the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer. If this same inflation was happening with a 70's distribution of wealth (and IIRC it actually did) it wouldn't be fun but it wouldn't be pushing so many people to the brink, either.
Taco Bell will just put out a "napkin tipping" jar and blame lack of tips for not providing napkins.
Shareholders. Part of me thinks they see the writing on the walls of climate change and want to just get the most they can out of the rest of the short time we have left.
I was just thinking how captured the basic necessity of hydration has become. So many people have become fooled into emptying their pockets to buy soda etc. and the idea of merely drinking normal water is not enough. Plus the lack of enforcement to regulate a universally clean water supply to all areas. I mean… clean accessible water is a super basic foundation of civilisation. Now corporations have diverted that need into profit and almost certainly helped derail any plans to ensure that water is safe and drinkable.
It’s because the rate of profit has a tendency to fall.
$$$$$