Having cereal for breakfast daily is akin to using soda for hydration.
Well, I was born in the 1960s and honey coated chocolate sugar bombs were already the cereal of choice among my kindergarten classmantes - and soda for hydration was pretty standard then too.
In foods especially, they have substituted corn syrup for sugar, steroid+antibiotic pumped milk and meat for "real" meat (typical market chicken is a travesty these past years), GMO crops sprayed with extreme weed killers and pesticides for simple sun and water grown food. They like to say our food bills are going down in real dollars, but they're not, not if you buy organic GMO free - which is what most food used to be not so long ago.
Shrinkflators can go F themselves. That shrunken package with the same, or often higher, price is a major incentive for me to buy their competitors' products instead.
In the 70s it felt like brands actually meant something. Since the 90s, they haven't. Brands have milked their loyal followers for every last penny of profit while cheapening their products as much as they possibly can. Brands have become an anti-pattern for me, if a particular brand is "commanding a premium" that's a sign to me to A) dig DEEP on pre-purchase quality information and if that's hard to come by (which it usually is) B) walk away from the recognized brand name - assume it to be of inferior quality to go with its higher price.
I shopped in the same grocery store chain my grandparents and parents shopped in my whole life since the 1960s until about 8-10 years ago. At that point they started milking their brand loyalists and literally jacked our monthly food bill 2x, +100%, and that's not industry wide inflation, that's how much they inflated relative to the competition. We went from spending 90% of our food, soaps, pharmacy/drug store purchases there down to less than 5% in the first year after we quit them, and since then they now get less than 1% of our budget, only catching our purchases when they're the only store open or other cases of extreme convenience purchasing. During the pandemic, we had instantcart deliver groceries from a competitor and a $120 delivered order, including $10 tip and delivery fees, were still far less expensive than the same products from the "leading" chain.
me as well - although, I'm generally logged in. The change is supposed to require you to log in, so... deleting your account in response is a bit of a strange reaction.
people in general will put up with an astonishing level of enshittification
If they didn't, it wouldn't happen (so much). It's like: we get the government we deserve...
That would be my future, if you make me king. Since the offers for absolute unflinching loyalty are a bit thin on the ground for the past couple of decades, I'll assume it's probably not the future we're getting.
This sounds like a real application for Doctrow's "Chuffie" from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom... scan the "how's my driving?" QR code on the lid of the bot and downvote... company's bots gets enough downvotes it gets restricted out of the places it's receiving the downvotes from.
These are the kind of things that could run on a lane built over the sidewalk...
expected to tip the fucking robot?
I think that's more commonly like a sheep.
The world really needs transparency like that - tip your cook, tip the farmer that grew the amazing tomatoes, or stiff 'em all but at least know who they really were. Before placing your order, get a readout of where the fish was caught, and when... identify how close the chocolate's cocoa was grown to toxic lead contamination sites - before you take it off the shelf.
This was the big eye opener when we ditched our near-monopoly chain grocery for a smaller competitor. Smaller stores, but they had more employees stocking the shelves and more cashiers so you waited less to get out. And in the jelly aisle they had 4 flavors instead of 84. Six kinds of cereals plus six more granolas to choose from, not an endless aisle of $8 wafer thin boxes of sugar coated puffed grains with familiar cartoon characters on the front. Five flavors of ice-cream, not 205. 20 types of yogurt, not 386. It took a little while to get used to the idea that I couldn't get my preferred brand and size of grape jelly, but after I tried their one option - organic and half the price per ounce of the chain competitors - I decided: grape jelly is grape jelly, this one is fine.
P.S. - I feared I may have been exaggerating, but the above numbers are accurate - I overestimated a little on jelly at first, but pretty much nailed the ice-cream and yogurt first try.