So this is obviously McDonald’s but manufacturing suffers a similar path:
- Make high quality and respected product onshore
- Get purchased by vulture capitalist
- Lower standards to increase profit
- Product is offshored to cover up falling sales
- Quality nosedives
- Once the customer base catches on sales nosedives
- Lower quality even more and brand becomes a joke
- Get purchased by mega conglomerate who collects brands like Pokémon
- Rival product gets made onshore by a small team who used to work for you
See Doc Martin and Solvair or Hunter Wellingtons or any other of a large number of former halo brands. Filson is one going through this right now
Why do they let step 2 even happen? Is it just that the creators don’t actually give a shit about their product/brand, and just want an easy, big pay day? Screw their employees?
I’m proud of the work I do. I get immense satisfaction for a job well done and appreciate being appreciated.
If someone offers me millions of dollars to take over my job only to do a worse job, I will absolutely take the money and retire early. No hesitation. No regrets. I won’t even take the time to pack up my desk.
because workers don’t collectively own the means of production.
not to be like that, but once some new hotness graduates from 2 people in a garage, the controlling interest is never the workers who have a vested interest in products, daily work (and a brand) they can be proud of, but investors with only short term profit on their mind. innovators- and inventors-turned-C suite executives jump ship when bought out, leaving the real meat and potatoes, the real work behind the brand, to be offshored, profit prioritized and picked clean.
buy from worker-owned co-ops. buy from local crafters and people deserving of the label ‘artisan’. flat out refuse to buy from brands that are a sad, hollowed out husk of their former selves. more importantly - most importantly - do what you can to keep your retirement investments away from quartly-profit mills who couldnt care less about workers or customers beyond raw sales numbers. and definitely, definitely never agree to work for them.
I love reading the ads, “now lower prices!!!1!”
So… That was an option all along? Cool. Glad it’s only a product people use to live.
Inflate prices for profit
Give buyer less product
Lower quality
Brag about savings to shareholders
Get higher paying job as CEO of different company
Profit
Replacement CEO at first company: Why did people stop buying my product?
Yeah, at no point do they care about the customer. They have a recipe for profits and CEO bonuses. When they’re done they’re fuck over the next company.
American capitalism is all about killing business for profit right now BECAUSE nothing is more profitable.
Maybe the fashion will change in the future… but there’s nothing the small folk can do about it
They don’t even care about the company. Somehow shareholders keep voting for absurd incentive structures for executives.
It’s as simple as the people making the decisions (executives, directors, etc.) and the people driving their decisions (shareholders) have something that the employees and the customers don’t:
The ability to cash in their chips and move on quickly when the time is right.
Employees can certainly leave and find another job, customers can certainly catch on to lower quality and change buying habits…but both of these tend to be slower processes than the ones that put money in the accounts of the first two groups.
I like this because it references the concept of greed correctly.
Greed is when self interest gets irrational. Greed doesn’t maximize one’s own profit; greed maximizes one’s own profit today.
Real long term self interest means serving others consistently to create those healthy relationships that in turn serve oneself.
Greed is killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Unless there’s (close to) a monopoly or all players in the market are acting accordingly. For products where simply not buying it anymore is not really a viable option, that greedy approach works out quite fine unfortunately.
It has been working out fine for the greedy so far, but is that really sustainable in the long term? At some point if greed isn’t checked, there WILL be violence.
Unless the greedy ones are also those with the biggest army and most effective weapons.
I saw this happen with a local chain restaurant recently. They started cutting on ingredient quality and it was noticeable. Noticeably smaller tortillas; you could no longer opt out of onions because toppings were all combined; chips went down hill. They started losing profits, had to close a few locations, and the negative reviews started rolling in.
The end result was positive though. They saw the response and reversed the changes. They’ve gone back to their previous quality and turned things around at least a small amount. They made good with the customers—the people that are the reason they exist in the first place. I wish more places would have a similar response instead of doubling down on the enshitification.
Not to be pessimistic, but this is also a somewhat common strategy to test how shitty you can make something. Basically, intentionally make things worse to test the impact on revenue. If profits don’t drop keep it that way. If the bottom line starts going down, slowly increase the quality again until they stabilize. It’s likely that changes were not reversed, they were just improved over the trash they made them for awhile. Chipotle has mastered this process. Raise prices, reduce quality, raise quality slightly but not to previous benchmark, repeat.
The fact that they had to close locations mean they changed too much, too fast, though. I doubt that was part of the plan.
I mean, sure. If a drop in “quality” doesn’t result in a drop in sales, then that quality wasn’t something the consumer actually cared about.
That’s true, but that’s not what a drop in the bottom line means in this context. If you reduce quality, you also reduce your cost of production. So you’re right if there’s no change in sales numbers at all, you were spending too much on something you didn’t need, and you made a good adjustment. But more often, these adjustments weigh the drop in sales vs the increase in profit that results from the lower cost. If the expected drop in revenue is offset by the increase in take home, they don’t care and keep it that way. What’s really shitty is that once the revenue trend stabilizes and customers adapt to the new lowered quality, there’s nearly always a price increase.
Customers tend to view quality more holistically than that, though. Not a lot of people are going to flip their conception of product quality on a single change, but will after a long series of changes. Once a company gets that reputation for poor quality, it’s not as simple as reversing the last corner they cut. It’s a hole that takes a lot of changes to dig out of. More than most companies are willing to reverse.
