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That’s the end result of a capitalist system once corporations have superseded governments in power.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.
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.
Certainly the end result of financialised capital.
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.
this sort of talk will get you killed in the revolution, fair warning.
🙄
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.
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.
nothing to do with profit margins, it’s just pure greed
???
Maybe I should have said “it’s nothing to do with maintaining profit margins” against rising costs.
Gotcha, that makes sense.
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.
when you’re a parent you quickly learn to deal with all kinds of shit.
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…….
Yes… capitalism…and not consumers who just don’t care.
This is by far the biggest problem - most people don’t put up with that shit and will publicly murder a company that tries it on.
It’s just this one country, you know, the one with the guns, that rolls over to get their bellies scratched when the billionaires come knocking
The billionaires are just like us folks, they drive honda civics and sleep in 50k tiny homes next to their rockets.
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
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.
quite a few of them are “natural monopolies”. for those unaware (source):
A natural monopoly is a type of monopoly in an industry or sector with high barriers to entry and start-up costs that prevent any rivals from competing. As such, a natural monopoly has only one efficient player. This company may be the only provider of a product or service in an industry or geographic location.
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):
a business principle that illustrates the idea that when more people use a product or service, its value increases.
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.)
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.
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
I assume because some fucking ghoul noticed people liked taking them for their cars so now we just don’t get napkins!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even they are pricy, once the competition is quashed.
those greedy bastard taco bell employees
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.)
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.
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!
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.
mArXiSm
go actually read Marx, dude was smart af.
Free the beers and we might see some novel inventions like the Japanese toilet bidet )
Theres a few problems
- Companies trying to maximize profits
- Corrupt political systems lets companies exploit their workers and customers alike
- Supply chains have been getting disrupted more and more. “Just in time” and getting “just enough” supplies no longer works well. A lot of stuff gets delayed or out of stock
- We expect unlimited resources on a finite planet. Whether its plastic junk, useless tech, or food we expect it to be available 24/7/365
A big one that you missed is
It’s socially acceptable and even encouraged for companies to fuck their customers. People assume that not being fucked over by a company means that company isn’t doing well.
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