Corporate Greed

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?
- Money. The answer is always money.
- 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.
- I think most would gladly retire if they were offered millions or billions.
- If it's a publicly traded company they don't have a choice. Fall in line or hostile takeover and get replaced.
- The latter every time. It's made much worse as it's almost always achieved via a leveraged buy out, saddling the business with huge debt and absolving the vulture from most of the risk. It's used as a one way ticket to stripping the company of any value.
- 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.
- Let's say you own a company you work at and made. When do you quit and realize all your wealth? Maybe you keep it forever but your children don't want it but want access to the money.
  At the end of the day people are sell outs eventually
Craftsman was the first brand that came to mind.
- Tool brands were exactly my first thought as well.
Vulture capitalism will continue to erode everyone's lifestyle till we develop neofeudalism, and it's all according to plan.

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.

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.

Bro droppin Ferengi wisdom
- Acquisition Rule.
- Rule of Acquisition #10. Greed is eternal.
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.
- Even then we're starting to a see a situation where people just don't have money and end up not buying things even if they need them.
Difficult when you're in the R&D department and you know that cost-cutting measures are the primary directive, but you still have to do your job in spite of the harm it could cause. I've met a lot of people with burnout in the food industry. I'm one of them.

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.

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.
- You’re probably right. It was just such a drastic drop in a short time. I’m sure some of those cuts stuck around elsewhere. It was just nice to see things bounce back at a place we otherwise frequent.
- 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.

Funny, the more I learn about corporate greed the even less I like it, in fact, I strongly dislike it.

Then don't buy the product
If you are talking about low competition industries that's a different story
- I'll make my own graphics cards thank you!
  Can someone help me make the chip things and the pcb?
- Low competition industries
  Like most of them?
- Food worldwide is controlled by mostly four megacorps, so, maybe some awareness of the topic you decided to comment on?

gotta love corporations making everything shittier, smaller and more expensive and then wondering why people aren't buying their stuff

It's because they've gotten away with decades of consumer abuse and just figured we were acclimitized to it.

It's not greed. It's just capitalism.

Capitalism is a belief system where greed is encouraged as a central virtue.
If it doesn't include copious amounts of profiteering, it's just sparkling market economies.
- No, capitalism is not a belief system. That’s just marxists’ image of capitalism.
  Capitalism is when a free market results in some people deciding to get wage jobs instead of being entrepreneurs. When you get a worker class, who accepts the trade of more income security for less potential profit, ie when there are “jobs” in the private sector, then you’ve got capitalism.
  Because capitalism is based on free markets, ie markets where people have choice of how they engage, a successful capitalist is one who resists short term greed in favor of long term profits.
So... greed
- Greed is an individual characteristic - it has nothing to do with capitalism, which is a global system of ravenous and genocidal exploitation which would function in the exact way it does even if it's main beneficiaries weren't "greedy" at all.
  Greed is how liberals protect capitalism by pretending it's individual behavior that is the cause of our problems and not the global system of ravenous and genocidal exploitation that it actually is.
Capitalism without meaningful regulation is just crapitalism and leads to enshittification. Regulatory capture is a real bitch.
- Capitalism without meaningful regulation is just capitalist inevitability.
Those are the same thing, and you cannot prove otherwise.
- Then why does all the bootlcikers use the term "greed" instead of talking about capitalism?

But they made those changes over two years, and the last one was months ago. Clearly it can not be those executives' decisions. There must be someone else to blame.

I bet it's the workers' fault.

Yep. HP sauce did this. Used to be ubiquitous on restaurant tables in Canada. Then they changed the recipe, white vinegar instead of malt, no rue flour, orange juice concentrate instead of tanarind puree, new version was sharper, more astringent, less sweet n smoky. Everyone just quit buying it without even really noticing why. Then the old recipe started showing up in "ethnic food" aisles in areas with high dutch and English immigration.

I think that's because the HP franchise their recipes, and different locations have "regional" variants. Here in the UK, it's never significantly changed so you're probably getting the English import - so, of course, there's a shipping cost on top.
- That's what I said. In the late 90s, the recipe for Canada was changed. Lately the original has been appearing in the Import aisles. What Kraft was selling as original HP since then is closer to the UK "fruity" HP variant.

Do people really buy less though?

That's the best part: they don't!
- This is irrational cynicism. They absolutely do.
Someone please tell our friend here about the concept of shrinkflation

I'm lovin' it

Their stock is up though, I don’t see them changing their ways if stock price is unaffected. That’s all they care about.

Oh hey lets lower prices by 50% of what we marked up and then pat ourselves on the back all over social media for being saintly and lowering prices for the struggling masses.

It ultimately harms them in the long run. I can't really feel bad for them.

I dunno. I feel like the missing slide is "retire on beach at age 35 and give 0 fucks" or "pivot to new exploitive model for profit"
- You still don't need to subscribe to companies. Just use a product that works good and is the right price. If it stops being good move on.

I’ve mostly stopped buying middle isle grocery store items for this very reason. On the plus side I have been cooking more to make up the snack deficit. Tastes better for sure.

When I started low carb I began to realize just how much of the middle store aisles are just different forms of starch and flavorings at a ridiculous markup.
I’ve started buying precut, frozen hash browns (loose, not patties). Take a few minutes to cook them but I can have a big old plate of hash browns with salt, pepper, and ketchup any time I want. It’s like having a diner in my kitchen.

Harvest Moon Joghurts - I loved them, but now I'm heartbroken.

Yoyos