Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yACrMqN5Qao&start=169

Your toaster dies the second you unbox it. Pants rip on day one. The quality of everything is trash now. This is what bigheaded people call enshittification. Companies deliberately design products to break right after the warranty. This is due to the so-called “Hunt for Infinite growth.”
Steady profits ain’t enough. They need MORE, so they skimp, shrink packages, and shove everything behind subscriptions. Infinite growth is a plague, and it hurts your personal finance.

Disclaimer: This video is satirical commentary and for entertainment purposes only. It does not constitute financial, legal, or investment advice.

Disclaimer: This video is satirical commentary and for entertainment purposes only.

Really lets you know the veracity of the information contained therein.

A while back I was at an event with a huge coffee urn. At the end of the event I took home a mostly empty plastic container of Folger's coffee. Instead of throwing it out when I was done, I kept it and used it for years to hold tea bags. It finally died when I left it on the stove and the open fire melted it.

About the same time I brought a plastic measuring cup. That thing exploded the first time I dropped it.

Under capitalism, garbage is eternal, and things you pay for self-destruct.

I like how in the video they still want to shit on communism. If thats the case then we will never improve. Capitalism is the problem. Everything these days is half truths. Still kinda funny.

I think this is due less to planned obsolescence than people want to believe. I'd argue it's as much due to market pressure. People want to buy cheap things so companies start making things cheaper.

This is why, you don't need a whole video to explain it: 🖕

Naww... it's about the infinite growth. "Shrinkflation, planned obsolescence, and enshittification" all describe aspects of it.

There are very few (you can probably count them on your hands) companies that don't do it, such as Arizona tea. The worst offenders are publicly traded companies because they need to show that "infinite growth" to investors.

AI slop

Elons trash can on wheels prime example of that!

...empty plastic container of Folger's coffee... ...I kept it and used it for years to hold tea bags.

Off topic, but WTF? How did the tea taste?

You're mostly right, but I think you have cause and effect backwards.

The real problem is advertisers training everyone to seek instant gratification and treat everything as disposable. People have been brainwashed to want things cheap, and to want them right now.

You can still get appliances that will last decades, but they're more expensive. Back in the "good ol' days", home appliances were a major purchase that you usually budgeted and saved for. If it broke, you hired someone to repair it. When you bought a toaster, the price was the equivalent of $100 to $300 adjusted for inflation.

Not to mention that there's heavy survivorship bias on the topic. There were garbage quality appliances made back then that didn't survive.

Salaries are so low it’s a race to the bottom for every product. Anyone can design a toaster that works, but it takes an enshittification engineer to make one that barely works.

A lot of the "planned obsolescence" perspective is tainted by survivorship bias. The whole "they don't make things like they used to," bit is ignoring the fact that garbage quality appliances existed back in the day too.

You can still buy high quality appliances, but not many people want to drop over $200 on a toaster (the adjusted price in 1950). And not many people want to get appliances repaired when they can just get another garbage product for $20.

I highly doubt most appliance manufacturers are intentionally designing their products to fail at a certain point. It's more likely that the engineers are given a profit margin goal and have to use parts with a lower MTBF to fit within it.

But companies are responsible for training people to think that way.

Fine.

I washed the container out before I used it.

Are you still confused?

I think not.

I remember the last time I went to the store to get a toaster.

They were all in the same price range and all about the same quality. There was no option for an expensive toaster that would last fifty years.

And you could look for an appliance that is supposed to be quality, and costs even more than other "quality" brands.
Then that thing you paid that much for lasts even shorter than the cheap appliance.
And then when you take it to get repaired, because it cost so much of course it can be fixed, they tell you the entire [main active unit] needs replaced because the mfg doesn't provide the [small bit of active unit that's actually bad] which happens to cost only twice what the cheap appliance in whole costs.

Salaries are low, but this is a trend that's been going on for decades. Since long before the current affordability crisis.

Wealth inequality has also been a long slow march. The fact is almost nobody can afford a basic standard of living from minimum wage in the 70’s: American-made cotton clothing, appliances that last 30 years, real local food that doesn’t make us sick, on and on… It’s not even that the products are cheaper it’s that they’ve also become less ethical. If you shop for a regular organic cotton USA-made T-shirt it’s like $80. What was once within reach is now a luxury with a cheap surrogate.

Companies don’t make anything new anymore. All the amazing leaps in design and technology we’ve enjoyed over the last multiple decades are finished. They cost too much…a negative expense on quarterly report.

What’s cheap and effective? Shrinkflation. Cutting employee benefits. Stagnating wages. Decreasing quality. Removing employees and replacing them with AI or other automation. Cutting customer service. Forcing people to use apps. Finding new ways to unbundle, insert fees, or force another middleman between customers and what they want.

It’s a perverse Matrix, the “coppertop” is us, and they’re extracting everything they can from us to keep their system going and the line moving up.

You were shopping at a store with cheap products then.

My friend got me this alarm clock for my birthday last year or the one before. Big battery that charges automatically, you can set your own alarm audio file, sounds good right? The display is already non-functional.

Meanwhile, the LCD display in my alarm clock from the 80s is still as bright as ever..

Life is more expensive for poor people. What you say might be true, but can most people actually afford the $200 toaster? Maybe they can in the most literal sense, there's $400 in their account, but they can't justify the expense.

Good ol Sam Vimes put it fairly well in the book Men at Arms:

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.

-Men at Arms

Whenever some device breaks, I try to get a replacement from ancient times so I'll never have to buy another shitty one again.

When my desk lamp broke, I got a medical lamp from the 1930s. It's made out of steel and aluminum and will never fail.

When my fan broke, I got a desk fan from the 50's - it needed just a few drops of oil and has been running continuously for a week during the European heatwave. Everything down to the gears that make it turn from left to right is made out of solid metal.

The next thing will be an analog scale. I have an electronic one from amazon that partly melted when it was sitting a little bit next to my stove (it didn't even get that hot). And I secretly hope my toaster will break soon, because ancient toasters look fucking awesome and I want one.

I also have an eBook reader from 2008, when Sony went crazy for a bit and actually produced models with a metal shell. All of these things will definitely last longer than me, as it should be.

The only thing I cannot replace are my fridge and my washing machine. :( You just cannot get those old ones - and even if you do, sellers will not ship them and without a car or driving license, I simply can't get them. But I do what I can to minimize having to spend a shit ton of money every few years to replace my failing devices.

That's the thing, though. People in the good old days often couldn't afford expensive appliances right away either. They budgeted and saved until they could, or relied on it being given as a gift (small appliances were a common wedding present)

But the brainwashing for rampant consumerism has largely made that a thing of the past. People won't just toast their bread on a skillet for a few months until they can afford a quality toaster.

This hasn't really been my experience, even as someone who often buys the cheapest available product. There's some notable exceptions but for the most part all my basic tools and appliances have just worked as they are supposed to and still work after years of use, and are as good or better than what was available in the past (love my lithium battery drill, mower, staple gun, plumbing tech that lets me do basically any upgrade or repair without soldering, air fryer, silicone cooking utensils, etc).

There are aspects of the typical design of old products that are objectively worse than what is standard now, for instance comparing my drill to the decades old one my parents have, aside from the clear improvement not needing an extension cord, it has a button on the top of the handle that can be pressed from either side to switch modes between clockwise, counterclockwise, and locked, which is directly next to where your thumb and index finger are. This is really good design imo and most modern drills seem to use it, but the old one does it a worse way, iirc there is a switch on the side in a less accessible area that you need to use your other hand to reach. It was also much more expensive. There are lots of subtle improvements like this that have gotten standardized, including safety features (ie. space heaters that will turn off if they tip over).

Enshittification is real, but I think it mostly applies to online services, and the products most affected are the ones that rely on them.

Are you still confused?

Yeah, how'd you manage to finish a whole can of Folgers?

Make cold brew with it.

Quick question, what does the d in LCD stand for?

"empty plastic container "

It was in your own message.

Don't you read your own posts?

So name it.

What is this store that sells high durability consumer products?

Liquid crystal display

I say it EVERY DAY now, and my family is sick of it, but they know it's true: NOTHING works any more. Products, systems, etc., nothing works the way it's supposed to, including customer service, which is worse than it has ever been. These days, corporations consider an AI chatbot to do ALL of their customer contact to be high quality customer service.

I work for a small (nearly big) company and we still do things with actual people. I'm fully prepared to push back as soon as that becomes an idea. They're already leaning towards AI bullshit for data crunching, which is fine as it is, it's helpful, but I can see the writing on the wall. I will not be words on that wall. I have faith the people I work with will do the right thing, but it's not unshakeable.

Actually my wife used to work at a Vietnamese restaurant and they'd fill a pot with probably 1/3 of this Folgers container and do a slow drip through it in the morning to make Vietnamese coffee base for the day. Shit was delicious despite its roots.

An appliance store...

Not sure how much of this channel is AI generated but they do seem to use a fair bit of it at least.

So LCD display is redundant.

What does pedantry mean?

I agree with you aside from applying that to electrical devices. The lamp is probably ok since you can use a new bulb but the fan might pull more electricity than a modern one, maybe I am wrong about that one though (not an electrician!). Other stuff like a fridge I would 100% not want to get an "ancient" one as it will seriously drain your budget with the electricity wasted by it.

Unbelievably ironic given the topic of the video...

I think it's both. Otherwise trash shipping companies like TEMU wouldn't have become so incredibly popular. A lot of people are basically NPCs which like to mindlessly consume stuff. The cheaper the better.

You think the ancient eBook reader from 2008 with a metal shell will survive you?

Let's go to an atm machine and you tell me the pin number of your credit card and I'll tell you 🙃

Look them right in the face and use the broken shit.

My phone is not physically on fire? I'm still using it.

My pants are ripped? Don't look.

You can't MAKE shit obsolete enough that I won't suffer through using it out of sheer spite.

This is what bigheaded people call enshittification

Thank God someone else is saying it. I agree with th sentiment but Christ the people who use this term are pretentious AF.

Rememberers will miss the superior tin cans they were massive and our parents used them to store all means of things.

Agree. People buy shit for close to nothing and are then shocked that it's worth nothing.

There’s a secret code built in too that if you buy the extended Warrenty, it lasts just beyond it

True story.

I was on vacation recently. After a tour our guides gave us coffee and cookies. I took the cookie tin home with me, because I hadn't had a proper sewing kit for a long time.

You're going to have to give a detailed explanation of your process here.

What store did you imagine I went to?

Kind of like you and the person who posted the video.