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.
McDonalds sells hamburgers for $7
I can beat that. Let me sell you a hamburger for $1
Capitalism approves… the government does not
I’m not allowed to sell you a hamburger. Not without a permit, and an inspection, and a place designated as a business to sell that hamburger from. What, you think you can just cook a hamburger on a grill and sell it to someone?
So I get a business license, find a place of business, get my permits, get my inspection, and open the doors… except all that cost money so I have a $12k loan and a building that costs $3k a month and I still need electricity, water, and wifi. Once all that is paid for I still need to earn enough money that I can go home and pay my own bills and survive
At $1 a hamburger, I’ll never sell enough hamburgers to survive so I have to raise the price. My hamburgers are now $9
McDonalds knows this. They got a stranglehold on the market and while anybody could technically compete and that competition is suppose to keep product quality high and prices low people can’t actually compete
Now McDonalds can make their burgers smaller, the quality worse, and jack up the price… what are you going to do about it?
You think Wendys will save you? Burger King? Nah, they do the same thing
Now apply this to literally everything. Clothes, washing machines, dish washers, etc… I guess in theory I could make a better TV that doesn’t come with a bunch of bullshit advertisements built into it and sell it to you for less, but the government won’t let me
An early-2000s talk radio host in consumer advocacy & economics coined the term, “death of the pricetag”. Big business will strategically hide the true $1-$9 hamburger excess cost and successful sell a $0.99 hamburger. It’s far worse today. Not just hiding cost across other menu items – they implement: peak\demand pricing, seasonal \holiday pricing, they barrow huge loans and hold debt, and the worse discharge\writeoff debts.
I love your comment because it still holds evermore true today. Who even has huge capital, huge advertising, on-call debt lawyers, and teams of accountants. The big businesses whom all are standardizing and normalizing these “strategies”. Leaving zero chance small business survival. And permits, rent, employee pay, tax, etc would be nominal instead of impossible.