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.
It’s not greed. It’s just capitalism.
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.
Ash without flame is just flame’s inevitability.
This does not mean that going straight to the ash is the way to get heat. When you see the ash, that material has released its heat.
A free market processes information to distribute resources, but it’s a finite-lifespan system. As that money moves around, directing resource flows through individual choice, it steadily accumulates at the center.
Capitalism degrades into oligarchy. During its finite lifespan, it’s useful.
You can extend the lifespan of capitalism by adding UBI which redistributes the money back out from the center.
If you don’t do that, then the capitalism eventually degrades into a centrally-controlled economy like the soviet union. If you don’t like “late stage capitalism”, then you’re a free market lover at heart because “late stage capitalism” is where the other, non-free-market economic systems start out.
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 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.
No, capitalism is not a belief system. That’s just marxists’ image of capitalism
False. Not that it matters since you’re wrong, but I’m no Marxist. Not a fan of authoritarianism.
Capitalism is when a free market results in some people deciding to get wage jobs instead of being entrepreneurs
Nope. People being employed by other people is MUCH older than capitalism and present in most economic systems.
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.
Wrong again. Do you eb know what the word “capital” means? 🙄
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.
You almost couldn’t be more wrong.
Under-regulated capitalism, which is the purest form and the kind dominant in for example the US, inevitably leads to the already powerful consolidating and abusing their power, taking away the choices of workers.
It also leads to exactly what you say it doesn’t: chasing short term gains at the expense of everything else, including the long term survival of humanity.
Who defines permitted contracts in a free market? Some right libertarians suggest that “free” markets include the “freedom” to sell labor by the lifetime or sell voting rights in the state.
“The comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would.” – Robert Nozick
The theory that invalidates such contracts is the theory of inalienable rights. It has recently been shown to apply to capitalist employment
Then why does all the bootlcikers use the term “greed” instead of talking about capitalism?
Because too many morons like you do not understand they’re the same, so immediately do not think of shitty economic systems when they hear “greed”, and do not think “greed” when they hear capitalism.
I’m lovin’ it
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.
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.
Customers tend to view quality more holistically than that, though. Not a lot of people are going to flip their conception of product quality on a single change, but will after a long series of changes. Once a company gets that reputation for poor quality, it’s not as simple as reversing the last corner they cut. It’s a hole that takes a lot of changes to dig out of. More than most companies are willing to reverse.
That’s true, but that’s not what a drop in the bottom line means in this context. If you reduce quality, you also reduce your cost of production. So you’re right if there’s no change in sales numbers at all, you were spending too much on something you didn’t need, and you made a good adjustment. But more often, these adjustments weigh the drop in sales vs the increase in profit that results from the lower cost. If the expected drop in revenue is offset by the increase in take home, they don’t care and keep it that way. What’s really shitty is that once the revenue trend stabilizes and customers adapt to the new lowered quality, there’s nearly always a price increase.
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.
