I wanted to ask for long time this question, Why does this keeps happening?

Apple, Kagi, Vivaldi, news companies and even Google.

I started seeing a good amount of people who stopped caring about consumer rights/freedom and started to think and advocate for companies.

Even in non-brands cases, a lot of people buy the product with the highest price, because they think that it has a higher quality despite the fact that there is no necessary correlation between both.

How do I know that? I know a shop that buy cheap products and sell them with very expensive price tag, to my surprise they are making insane profits.

What is happening?

  • stinky@redlemmy.comEnglish
    6·
    4 days ago

    you’ve got two important ideas I want to separate; people moving towards concern for welfare of company over people, and product pricing.

    Enshittification (platform decay) describes the pattern where products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, passionate developers create things that match their vision, and consumers benefit from this labor of love. Eventually they degrade their services to maximize profits for shareholders. Inside the company, it’s because the owners get rich and money is more important to them than their vision. Outside the company, customers favor big corporations because they think small companies aren’t successful companies. Many people would be surprised to learn that small businesses employ 45.9% of American workers, or about 59 million people. It’s not that the small companies “haven’t made it yet”. They’re literally the backbone of our economy.

    As for product pricing, I’m with you 100%. Buy dollar store shampoo that smells good, it’s the only bottle in my shower. It’s exactly as effective as the pricey stuff.

    • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      4 days ago

      As for product pricing, I’m with you 100%. Buy dollar store shampoo that smells good, it’s the only bottle in my shower. It’s exactly as effective as the pricey stuff.

      No, the cheapest stuff is not as good as the pricey stuff. The midrange priced stuff is as good as the expensive stuff, but the cheapass shampoo and other grooming products are absolute trash and likely to have lead or other contaminants.

      Take canned vegetables at a factory. Yes, the factory sells to different companies with different reputations and who each enforce different quality control. A can of green beans from the same factory sold by the expensive company will never have stems or leaves in their cans, but the cheaper ones might. Is the price difference worth it? Probably not. Are some canned foods like kidney beans indistinguishable between cheap and expensive? Probably.

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        71·
        4 days ago

        Relevant to your point:

        The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

        Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

        But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

        -Terry Pratchett

      • Tehdastehdas@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        There’s optimal cheap and too cheap. Someone always wants to be the cheapest in its class, and they’ll compromise on quality to get there.