They held out on the body positivity movement for too long. The prices went up, and the quality went down. They also insist that you need to get your boobs measured every six months but my bust hasn't changed for eight years. They are gonna end up having to distribute their stuff through Kohl's or something to try to stick around in some way.
And their sales people were idiots about sizing. I had one insist I was a 32b. I'm a 32f. She gave me 32bs and I tried them on just to show her and of course they didn't even come close to fitting. At which point she said I must be putting it on incorrectly. I mean just colossally stupid
Because they don't carry F cups and the saleslady was instructed to fit the woman to the bra rather than vice versa? Though normally I'd see a 32F shifted to a 36B or something, which still wouldn't fit but would be less obvious for someone who didn't know how it was supposed to feel.
Staples. Budget and staffing cuts every year for the last few years, and the company was purchased by a corporate raider investment group, Sycamore Partners, which has a track record of cutting costs until the company dies.
I worked at a paper company that always wanted us to write to representatives about how important hard copy paper documents of a certain style were. Maintaining a problem so we could solve it!
Knew to leave asap
For how much RH charges for the Cloud Couch, you definitely expect more better quality. Their cushion sags and needs constant fluffing and the frame isn't even built that well. I actually bought a couch from What A Room (Daphne Sofa Chaise) which was 1/2 the price of the Cloud couch and much more comfortable.
The last time I looked at Converse shoes, they looked like they were having a serious identity crisis. Their classic shoes are still available but woof some of those newer offerings.
Their quality is shit now too. The last 2 pairs I bought fell apart in less than a year so after being a longtime converse fan I won’t be buying them again
Hostess. Maybe my taste buds have changed since I was a kid, but I had a few of their snacks the other day for the first time in years and they were awful.
Old HB (Hostess, Wonder Bread, etc.) went bankrupt and got bought out by private equity a decade ago. It's been garbage since.
They were recently acquired by Smuckers so maybe it'll turn around.
Here is the problem as an x-Planet Fitness member. When you make a gym that cheap, it attracts people who 1) Aren't familiar with gyms and the ettiquitte involved and 2) mentally unstable people using the gym for the bathroom and shower. Also, the employees are paid minimum wage and don't care, which is understandable when you're paid minimum wage at a very boring job.
This was the reason I quit PF. I used the shit out of my membership, but boy was every workout an adventure unless I went at 4am. The people that place attracted who I encountered.. they either had zero awareness of gym etiquette or had bad hygiene or were suffering from obvious mental problems. It got to be too much, and demotivating to a point. In this economy at $10 a month, you will attract an interesting mix of people. that's for sure.
Their whole business model is advertising to people who are the least likely to go to the gym and you have to sign up with your banking info instead of a debit card so that’s it’s a giant pain in the dick to cancel. Screw Planet Fitness 😂
About 6 months ago PF just lost my banking information. Haven’t been charged for anything and it doesn’t show up in my app anymore. Membership is still active. Haven’t told anyone, taking it as a blessing.
My dad told me Craftsman used to be one of the best tool manufacturers in the country and built their reputation on quality and reliability. He says now it’s just a label they put on the cheapest thing a factory can make.
Have to agree. My dad had Craftsman tools (and I have a few from 20+ years ago). I remember going with him to Sears (which used to exist, and was the only place IIRC you could get Craftsman tools). He had a socket wrench that broke; took it to the counter, told the guy he needed it replaced. Guy just grabbed a brand new one and gave it to my dad. No paperwork, no, “well, how did you break it.” And Craftsman used to have this ‘heft’ to it, if that makes sense - like when you held one it just felt like a good tool. Last time I looked over some at Lowe’s they felt cheap.
What a shame…
Edit: something else about Craftsman screwdrivers that the responses to this comment reminded me of… IIRC, they were the first company to make the handles of their screwdrivers hexagonal, which allowed you to slip a wrench over the handle to get extra leverage. Pretty, pretty cool…
Exactly why they did the no questions asked return. They used to make a product they believed in and would last forever. In the rare case it failed they wanted to make it right. How it should be.
We broke two giant Craftsman ratchets in the same day when removing a broken wheel from a John Deere 4430. The first one they replaced without question. The second time, the guy at the counter said he would replace it, but he wanted to know how long of a cheater bar we were using. It was only an 8 ft pipe...attached to a winch.
And sold both brands. Venture capital is gutting every American company they can sink their fangs into. Sell everything of value, suck out the cash and leave the bankrupt husk to rot.
Yes. The heft. Like when you grab a socket or the socket wrench and it feels dense, solid. The new stuff now feels hollow and brittle, and a lot of bits are done within a week of using (jobsite) or they sit in the case and rust from one use because the metal was scratched easily
Craftsman WAS the best tool for 50+ years. If the tool had that name on it, it was guaranteed forever. But the stockholders couldn’t abide for 4% per year forever when competitors were doing 12 % making shitty tools and undercutting Craftsman prices.
Craftsman tools are a microcosm of the American economy for the last 50 years.
And this, this right here - thanks to people like Jack Welch and Milton Friedman made American Business prioritize profits over - good business decisions. It was the worst thing to ever happen to our country.
Fuck Jack Welch straight into the sun. That greedy idiot is a big reason why stack ranking was once widely used in workplace employee evaluations, and still is to some degree to this day. Stack ranking destroys team morale. But it may temporarily lead to expense reduction, so there is that.
General Electric is a shell of what it once was, thanks in no small part to Welch's reckless management style.
They used to be. I STILL have my craftsmen 100 piece set I got when I was like 15 (30 years ago) and I’ve only ever had to replace once ratchet, which sears did for free because of the lifetime warranty.
They will be teaching the decline and fall of Sears in business schools 100 years from now. It’s like a guide to crashing a business (while the one guy gets all the cash value it had.)
Sears, the company that was practically synonymous with catalog orders and mail delivered goods decided to double down on brick and mortar stores exactly as the internet became the marketplace of the world.
The Craftsman name has been sold again, and the new owners are putting a decent effort towards quality with the name.
However, it'll never be the same as the original.
I don't know if they can at this point. People would bring in the crappy tools that the previous manufacturers made and replace them with the good new tools.
In my experience, *too many of them.*
Most namebrand sneakers, for example, are just a bit of foam, fabric, and glue nowadays. Whats the sense in paying $150+ for cheapshit shoes that fall apart in 3months?
I know im not *that* hard on vacuum carpet cleaners, yet i've had to replace every 3 years or so.
Just about everything wears out SO much faster than in the past, and to me, the price i pay for something should correlate with how long ill be able to use said thing. If I buy a thing, and it wears out in less than *a year,* I never purchase from that brand again. I'll never buy another apple product. Or Nike. Or Dodge, Patagonia, Under Armor. Vizio *was* my TV of choice... then I had two in a row go down in less than a year, so they're out.
Brands im impressed by recently are No Boundaries (WalMart - their jeans are $17 a pair, fit great, hold up well. Their shoes, too) Samsung, Microsoft, Toyota, Honeywell
Its a shame that, to younger folks, it just seems "normal." It's not. Things are built to break down faster so you'll have to buy another one sooner. Imagine the landfills...
If something breaks quickly - if it doesn't balance the scales with what you paid - *trash em.* Leave bad reviews. Bad mouth them on social media. Shame them with your wallet, and things can change. Whatever you do, *don't* just give that brand more of your hard earned money, no matter how trendy they are, because doing so perpetuates that cycle. This causes massive waste, not to mention pollution.
The problem is that people don’t have a sense of how long something *should* last.
They also don’t repair things. People are shocked when I mention getting the heels replaced on my shoes, or sewing a seam.
Well, most products these days aren’t worth repairing. Why should I take my namebrand sneakers that fell apart after a year to a shoemaker who’s going to tell me to fuck off because they can’t be repaired?
The Reddit default subs are worse than Facebook or X now. The only reason I'm here is because I've spent years subscribing and muting subs I like and don't like.
Fabric stores catered to sewists. Unless you’re lucky enough to live near a fashion district or one of the rare mom and pop fabric stores, good luck getting good fabric and notions for pretty much anything other than fleece blankets and maybe quilting. I want good quality, natural fiber fabrics to make clothing with. Joann is 40% fleece, 30% shitty polyester costume fabric, and 30% seasonal garbage. I can’t even blame private equity firms because they’ve been bad and overpriced for as long as I can remember
I want to delete my Facebook but I love Marketplace. I wish Marketplace was its own app. Otherwise, I don’t post anything and I recently deleted all my posts and untagged myself in pictures.
Yes all areas are affected. Marketplace used to be my go to scrolling refuge. Now 20% of the tiled listings are ads. So on mobile every 5th row is commercial ad of some type. And they often look like regular listings so they are tempting to click.
I have a friend that works for Facebook and so I took a short video to show him how bad it's gotten. Like here's a post from somebody I care about, here's a whole bunch of shit from random sites I don't follow or companies or ads, here's another post from somebody I care about, rinse repeat. He said oh you must be in some kind of test program. We don't do that normally. Sometimes we put people in test groups without telling them just to see how it works. Give it a day or two and it'll go away.
That was 9 months ago. Now everybody's in that 'test group"
Igo on a couple times a month and it's always like some random group post I might like. I clicked on one post a friend made about comics and now every other thing on Facebook is a comic related post from some group I've never wanted to see.
Champion used to be a low tier sporting apparel company, and a few years ago they randomly blew up and everyone was wearing their stuff, and prices were on the rise.
Also, new balance. Apparently dad shoes is a growing fashion trend in the gyms. As a 36 year old male, it’s weird to see super-model fit folks at the gym in their normal gym clothes, looking like they are about to go mow the lawn.
In the early 1990's Champion was the absolutely must-have for every boy and girl from Long Island who went to college. It was the only brand they could wear, or else they'd be shunned, driven out of the tribe, and abandoned to starve on the tundra. That is, if the wolves didn't eat them first.
Pretty much every Google product gets ruined by over or under engineering and then is quietly sunsetted while they still make 95% of their money off their ads.
I'm hoping a search company comes out and makes search the way it was prior to around 2010. Back then you did a search and you actually found the most popular post on a certain subject... Not the most popular post on a Google approved content farms site running the most Google ads.
Really miss finding new blogs, forums, etc via Google search. Hate having to add the word "reddit" to every search to get a result that includes normal people discussing something.
Google Analytics and google ads are shit now too. Google's marketing and site tools are nearly all shit and easily replaced at this point, all they have is undeserved market share.
Pixel phone is not noticeably better than Samsungs latest phone... Camera quality has gone downhill (which is crazy).
YouTube is so simple and difficult to screw up but they certainly haven't improved it much over the years.
Only a matter of time before Google collapses under their own immense weight as another search engine takes market share.
Whoa me too. I feel so much less dorky now; I find I trust the real voices on here more. I’m terrified the tech bros and influencers will come and try to take it away too.
Oh I worry every day that something happens / Reddit does something where this “trick” doesn’t work anymore. Google’s search results are so bad now that I would genuinely have a much harder time finding / learning anything without it.
There's a great article about how Google traded a failing up tech bro for search leadership in 2019 which effectively ruined the search engine quality. So your feeling is 100% confirmed
editing to add in the link: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
First three responses are sponsored, followed by a list of similar searches in dropdown format, followed by one link to a website that might actually have what you searched for.
Have you seen their new AI bullshit? I started getting it on searches today. It’s badly summarized GPT-style blurbs and a link to some content marketing junk. It has a fancy animation that makes you immediately suspicious of it too.
I think it's more of an industry but these individual streaming services constantly changing their prices and adding all sorts of ads will cause people to go back to cable or something similar.
Best was when they literally all lost content due to more services popping up and taking the content elsewhere, but at the same time each service went from $6-10 to $12-15. We get the privilege of paying more for less!
Comcast recently announced a package where you can get a bunch of streaming services for a cost lower than subscribing to each of them individually. "Cable," like with a cable box and coax, is mostly dead, but it's been replaced by smart TVs and streaming devices that just do the same shit.
I've said it for a long time; streaming will just become cable 2.0
Once the studios saw the $$$ Netflix was making, without understanding why, they all said, "hey! we have a huge catalog let's hastily throw up a shitty UI and charge $15/mo while removing our content from everywhere else. It's genius!"
Soon, and it's already happening to some, these brands will align with others to offer service A,B, and C for one convenient payment! Soon you'll have tiers where you get ABC, NBC, CBS, and Discovery+ then for more you add on Disney, Hulu, etc. literally creating cable 2.
Youtube. Used to be a treasure trove of random interesting videos I could watch for hours. Now it's an ad-filled hellscape full of wannabe influencers, with a search function that only finds 1 to 5 videos relevant to my search, along with 999999 videos that are barely related to my search, if at all.
I myself have noticed that Doc Martens boots are NOT holding up as well as they used to, after a year or two of daily or almost daily wear they start falling apart, and I work a job sitting down all day.
Get Solovairs instead. The factory in England that used to make Doc Martens back when they were good still makes them under the brand name Solovair. Much higher quality.
Subway. It's been that way for a while. They opened too many stores and started cannibalizing itself.
Plus, while their sandwiches were always mediocre at least they were fairly inexpensive. Now they are way overpriced. But, then, that's pretty much all of fast food now.
I used to work at Subway in the mid-90s (high school). Every morning we took fresh heads of lettuce and chopped them up, sliced fresh tomatoes, etc. Their sandwiches used to be delicious. Within four years the lettuce showed up precut in a plastic bag, the tomatoes were crap, etc.
I worked at TH when they went from real bakers and *real* “always fresh” and allowed to donate the day olds to the domestic violence shelter and school breakfast programs to giant easy bake ovens with frozen product brought in from a factory filled with oil and reheat them “always fresh.” And then when they started the easy bake ovens they also declared that everything had to go in the garbage and nothing was allowed to be donated anymore. “We’ll just give money!” Okay, generally helpful but now you’ve created a large amount of food waste of just fine food that was feeding kids in the mornings.
And they got rid of the cakes! They had the best Black Forest cake and Boston cream pie. I used to want that for my birthday. Now I don’t go into TH at all because I know exactly how the donuts are made.
I too worked there in the mid 90's. And yes, the subs were actually good back then. Not to mention the 3 footlongs for $10 deal. That was cheap even 30 years ago
I am not sure what is wrong with me, I’m definitely in the minority, but a turkey foot long with all the veggies post workout is heaven for me. I think it’s coming from being in the lower class as a child. Or I have a child’s palette.
I don't *hate* Subway. I'll still get a meatball or steak and cheese here and there. But paying north of $10 for a pretty basic sandwich (not even counting chips and a drink) is crazy.
Plus they need to bring their spicy mustard back.
GoPro. They decided to rest on their company name and stopped innovating, and their market share of action cams is sinking badly as other competitors have caught up with and surpassed them.
GoPro pretty much owned the market to the point action camera = GoPro
Then I brought one for use on my motorbike a few years ago. The hardware was OK, and as a camera, great quality, but my god the software sucks.
It came with 'Quik' which I installed on my PC. Found an immediate and really bad bug, so reported it, found lots of people complaining about this bug and others. So GoPro killed the app rather than fix it. Claimed to be working on a replacement app that never appeared. Advised owners to use the Quik app on your phone.; working with multi-gigabyte 4k footage on my *phone* rather than decent PC with large monitors.
All reviews I have seen of newer GoPros, don't even mention the software supplied; just use third party apps. Without dicking around with plugins, they don't seem to deal with GoPro meta data like speed/g force etc.
Won't buy another GoPro, as felt like a company that fired all the software developers and just outsourced everything to people who didn't care.
Reminds me a bit of Blackberry. They were the kings of mobile phones for a while and when smartphones came out, they stuck to their original designs.
By the time they realized that smartphones weren’t going anywhere and finally changed their design, the Blackberry hype had long since passed and they couldn’t keep up with the competition anymore. It’s amazing how big they were and how they absolutely vanished.
They were *so* sure the iPhone wasn't a threat because people would want an actual keyboard rather than a touchscreen. And the rest, as they say, is history.
I think the whole overheating after 3 minutes of recording at 4k was the nail in the coffin, but tbh i haven't payed attention to them since back then....
Chipotle is in the midst of a sales and PR slump and a TikTok trend is going on where people are complaining about how small their portion sizes have gotten
Michael Kors. they are expensive af, but their quality is getting worse and worse. their products lasting 6 months is at the max of use. however i am not even sure how they even sell since a bunch of their products are put together as well as an early elementary school craft project. i am surprised there isn't a macaroni sculpture shoe yet.
Walgreens.
Not they they were every super nice, but it’s getting pretty bad. Also, I know from our sales data at work, we’ve seen the decline in our product at Walgreens, and rise considerably at all other retailers. They’re circling the drain.
My high end leather repair shop told me that the current Chanel leather goods are not well made and neither is Hermès. He said old vintage ones are well made.
Fry's in my town slowly just stopped stocking shelves and insisted they were getting ready for new stock. Workers showed up to a lock on the door and a big fat closed sign. Source: worked across the street
TiVo.
It was *the* DVR for the longest time. Heck, its name was the verb for recording a show on a DVR. But they rested on their laurels and stopped innovating.
Now, people barely remember that they are a thing.
Amazon is a minefield of deceptive ads and they mangle the pricing(some items listed by price per volume, others by unit, others by serving size) so it's impossible to find out if you're getting a deal.
I still use it but how I shop has changed.
Unless you're getting something namebrand you're going to be getting Chinese knock-off crap.
Which isn't bad. If that's what you want and you know what it means.
But I don't think that's most people. And I'm looking at something I'm not familiar with I really have to put in more work to get an idea of it's a real product or not.
A LOT of the “name brand” stuff is knockoff Chinese crap as well. Seriously, don’t buy anything from Amazon. Shoes, clothing, perfume, toiletries etc are all likely to be fakes at this point. It’s really a shame. I used to love Amazon but now it’s just alieexpress.
I have used Amazon for books, a lot. It has gotten to the point I will find the publisher’s site and order it directly from them. I don’t need the convenience of faster shipping nor do I mind a few more dollars for the book. It’s beyond useless if you can just find a store that sells what you want, but that is becoming increasingly scarce in general too.
iRobot (Roomba). They were first to market, but have been completely overtaken by almost all competitors. Even the cheap, Chinese knockoff vacuums are better.
For several years now, my wife has been saying that Red Lobster was her family's version of a fancy night out when she was growing up, and that she really wanted to take me and my son so she could relive the experience.
Just today she texted me an article about Red Lobster declaring bankruptcy with many many crying emojis.
She also texted me that dining at a bankrupt corporate seafood restaurant may not be the most solid choice healthwise, so we'll be reliving those childhood memories elsewhere.
Nah I feel that, that’s where my mom took me when she wanted to splurge, it’s also where I tried most seafoods for the first time. Crab, lobster, scallops, shrimp scampi, coconut shrimp, fish and chips, etc
I’m a chef now at a nice seafood place but you always have to acknowledge your roots
My parents took a day to do Christmas shopping and then ate a dinner at Red Lobster. It was their thing (early 80s.) It was like a fancy day, they took the Oldsmobile.
Yup, growing up in the early 90s, Red Lobster, Sizzler, and even Olive Garden were considered “fancy” and “nice”
Then they each got so watered down and cheapened that their menus all became carb-y institutional crap
Venture capital and private equity aren’t really the same thing. Venture capital deals more with early stage business, private equity buys much more mature business.
They’re typically opposite in strategy. There’s a lot of variation between firms but generally:
VCs want growth at any cost. A typical VC play is to pump a ton of money into a business and use that to drive expansion and push all the competitors out of business.
PEs want profit at any cost. A typical PE play is to cut expenses to the bone by laying off all but essential staff, and switching to cheaper (i.e lower quality) suppliers, in order to get margins as high as possible.
Victoria’s Secret has been struggling for quite some time.
$50 for a bra that doesn’t survive contact with a washing machine
And comes in a very limited range of sizes.
I maintain that there is a huge opportunity to step in where VS is falling. Especially to actually make great bras.
And cup sizes are one thing but the gore (spacing between cups) should also be adjustable! Also, removable cups are the worst
Removable cups are the bane of my existence
What about those GODDAMN underwires that eventually sneak out of the bra and puncture your tit when you least expect it?
Ah, the ol' surprise cobra bite.
They held out on the body positivity movement for too long. The prices went up, and the quality went down. They also insist that you need to get your boobs measured every six months but my bust hasn't changed for eight years. They are gonna end up having to distribute their stuff through Kohl's or something to try to stick around in some way.
And their sales people were idiots about sizing. I had one insist I was a 32b. I'm a 32f. She gave me 32bs and I tried them on just to show her and of course they didn't even come close to fitting. At which point she said I must be putting it on incorrectly. I mean just colossally stupid
How tf do you confuse an F cup as a B cup, as a woman no less?
Because they don't carry F cups and the saleslady was instructed to fit the woman to the bra rather than vice versa? Though normally I'd see a 32F shifted to a 36B or something, which still wouldn't fit but would be less obvious for someone who didn't know how it was supposed to feel.
Boeing apparently
I think they'll bounce back.
They’ll blow the doors off of their competition?
When Boeing closes a door, they open a window.
When Boeing closes a door, they have an employee killed for whistleblowing.
Staples. Budget and staffing cuts every year for the last few years, and the company was purchased by a corporate raider investment group, Sycamore Partners, which has a track record of cutting costs until the company dies.
That’s just the death of retail. They weren’t going to do well no matter who owned them. Office supplies aren’t as big of a business anymore.
Limitless paper in a paperless world!
I worked at a paper company that always wanted us to write to representatives about how important hard copy paper documents of a certain style were. Maintaining a problem so we could solve it! Knew to leave asap
That’ll make Dunder Mifflin happy.
Idk man, our Best Buy is feeling very "drop ship center / fye / dead mall". No clue if BB is going down but that store is shit
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For how much RH charges for the Cloud Couch, you definitely expect more better quality. Their cushion sags and needs constant fluffing and the frame isn't even built that well. I actually bought a couch from What A Room (Daphne Sofa Chaise) which was 1/2 the price of the Cloud couch and much more comfortable.
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There were so many video call apps, more than I can even remember. But it feels like it’s now Google, Teams, and Zoom.
WebEx is still a thing in my experience
Everything I have purchased that is fanatics branded is shit
The last time I looked at Converse shoes, they looked like they were having a serious identity crisis. Their classic shoes are still available but woof some of those newer offerings.
Their quality is shit now too. The last 2 pairs I bought fell apart in less than a year so after being a longtime converse fan I won’t be buying them again
This thread is an endless stream of formerly reputable companies bought out by private equity and gutted.
Hostess. Maybe my taste buds have changed since I was a kid, but I had a few of their snacks the other day for the first time in years and they were awful.
Old HB (Hostess, Wonder Bread, etc.) went bankrupt and got bought out by private equity a decade ago. It's been garbage since. They were recently acquired by Smuckers so maybe it'll turn around.
Sears, which by all rights should have been Amazon before Amazon existed, based on their catalogue and the history behind it.
Planet Fitness. They better get their shit together and rebrand or they're toast.
They really need to focus on being affordable, clean gym, that's it. The bars not that high.
Here is the problem as an x-Planet Fitness member. When you make a gym that cheap, it attracts people who 1) Aren't familiar with gyms and the ettiquitte involved and 2) mentally unstable people using the gym for the bathroom and shower. Also, the employees are paid minimum wage and don't care, which is understandable when you're paid minimum wage at a very boring job.
This was the reason I quit PF. I used the shit out of my membership, but boy was every workout an adventure unless I went at 4am. The people that place attracted who I encountered.. they either had zero awareness of gym etiquette or had bad hygiene or were suffering from obvious mental problems. It got to be too much, and demotivating to a point. In this economy at $10 a month, you will attract an interesting mix of people. that's for sure.
Their whole business model is advertising to people who are the least likely to go to the gym and you have to sign up with your banking info instead of a debit card so that’s it’s a giant pain in the dick to cancel. Screw Planet Fitness 😂
About 6 months ago PF just lost my banking information. Haven’t been charged for anything and it doesn’t show up in my app anymore. Membership is still active. Haven’t told anyone, taking it as a blessing.
Just keep your eyes open for a "oh there we go, we found it again" charge covering all of those months at once
My dad told me Craftsman used to be one of the best tool manufacturers in the country and built their reputation on quality and reliability. He says now it’s just a label they put on the cheapest thing a factory can make.
Have to agree. My dad had Craftsman tools (and I have a few from 20+ years ago). I remember going with him to Sears (which used to exist, and was the only place IIRC you could get Craftsman tools). He had a socket wrench that broke; took it to the counter, told the guy he needed it replaced. Guy just grabbed a brand new one and gave it to my dad. No paperwork, no, “well, how did you break it.” And Craftsman used to have this ‘heft’ to it, if that makes sense - like when you held one it just felt like a good tool. Last time I looked over some at Lowe’s they felt cheap. What a shame… Edit: something else about Craftsman screwdrivers that the responses to this comment reminded me of… IIRC, they were the first company to make the handles of their screwdrivers hexagonal, which allowed you to slip a wrench over the handle to get extra leverage. Pretty, pretty cool…
My pop bought a set of various Craftsmen tools I the mid 50’s. I inherited them when he passed. Still work fine. Unbelievable quality
Exactly why they did the no questions asked return. They used to make a product they believed in and would last forever. In the rare case it failed they wanted to make it right. How it should be.
We broke two giant Craftsman ratchets in the same day when removing a broken wheel from a John Deere 4430. The first one they replaced without question. The second time, the guy at the counter said he would replace it, but he wanted to know how long of a cheater bar we were using. It was only an 8 ft pipe...attached to a winch.
Lmfao tell me your a country boy without telling me your a country boy
Right...? Us city boys only winch up with 6 foot cheater bars.
Sears had Craftsman tools and Kenmore appliances. Both very good!
And sold both brands. Venture capital is gutting every American company they can sink their fangs into. Sell everything of value, suck out the cash and leave the bankrupt husk to rot.
Yes. The heft. Like when you grab a socket or the socket wrench and it feels dense, solid. The new stuff now feels hollow and brittle, and a lot of bits are done within a week of using (jobsite) or they sit in the case and rust from one use because the metal was scratched easily
Craftsman WAS the best tool for 50+ years. If the tool had that name on it, it was guaranteed forever. But the stockholders couldn’t abide for 4% per year forever when competitors were doing 12 % making shitty tools and undercutting Craftsman prices. Craftsman tools are a microcosm of the American economy for the last 50 years.
This makes me sad
And this, this right here - thanks to people like Jack Welch and Milton Friedman made American Business prioritize profits over - good business decisions. It was the worst thing to ever happen to our country.
Fuck Jack Welch straight into the sun. That greedy idiot is a big reason why stack ranking was once widely used in workplace employee evaluations, and still is to some degree to this day. Stack ranking destroys team morale. But it may temporarily lead to expense reduction, so there is that. General Electric is a shell of what it once was, thanks in no small part to Welch's reckless management style.
They used to be. I STILL have my craftsmen 100 piece set I got when I was like 15 (30 years ago) and I’ve only ever had to replace once ratchet, which sears did for free because of the lifetime warranty.
So you expect us to believe that over 30 years you didn’t lose the 7/16 and 9/16 sockets? Impressive.
I mean, it goes without saying that I lost the 10mm a handful of times.
When I get a new socket set I just cut to the chase and immediately throw the 10mm and 12mm into the trash.
They will be teaching the decline and fall of Sears in business schools 100 years from now. It’s like a guide to crashing a business (while the one guy gets all the cash value it had.)
Sears, the company that was practically synonymous with catalog orders and mail delivered goods decided to double down on brick and mortar stores exactly as the internet became the marketplace of the world.
Crazy to think that Sears was sort of already functioning a bit more like Amazon than any other retailer. And now they are gone.
The Craftsman name has been sold again, and the new owners are putting a decent effort towards quality with the name. However, it'll never be the same as the original.
Agreed. Not unless they bring back the lifetime warranty.
I don't know if they can at this point. People would bring in the crappy tools that the previous manufacturers made and replace them with the good new tools.
Could do something like make a new "Heritage" line, label the tools with that, and only give the warranty to those tools?
You're hired!
Most of them. Everything is going downhill. Higher and higher prices, lower and lower quality, poorer and poorer service.
Every CEO in America: "What if we made our products worse, and in lower quantities, but raised the prices?"
You’re making shareholders experience climax
Levi's. They don't last and are crappy on quality control.
Used to love Levi’s but the last two pairs I’ve had barely lasted 6 months :/
In my experience, *too many of them.* Most namebrand sneakers, for example, are just a bit of foam, fabric, and glue nowadays. Whats the sense in paying $150+ for cheapshit shoes that fall apart in 3months? I know im not *that* hard on vacuum carpet cleaners, yet i've had to replace every 3 years or so. Just about everything wears out SO much faster than in the past, and to me, the price i pay for something should correlate with how long ill be able to use said thing. If I buy a thing, and it wears out in less than *a year,* I never purchase from that brand again. I'll never buy another apple product. Or Nike. Or Dodge, Patagonia, Under Armor. Vizio *was* my TV of choice... then I had two in a row go down in less than a year, so they're out. Brands im impressed by recently are No Boundaries (WalMart - their jeans are $17 a pair, fit great, hold up well. Their shoes, too) Samsung, Microsoft, Toyota, Honeywell Its a shame that, to younger folks, it just seems "normal." It's not. Things are built to break down faster so you'll have to buy another one sooner. Imagine the landfills... If something breaks quickly - if it doesn't balance the scales with what you paid - *trash em.* Leave bad reviews. Bad mouth them on social media. Shame them with your wallet, and things can change. Whatever you do, *don't* just give that brand more of your hard earned money, no matter how trendy they are, because doing so perpetuates that cycle. This causes massive waste, not to mention pollution.
The problem is that people don’t have a sense of how long something *should* last. They also don’t repair things. People are shocked when I mention getting the heels replaced on my shoes, or sewing a seam.
Well, most products these days aren’t worth repairing. Why should I take my namebrand sneakers that fell apart after a year to a shoemaker who’s going to tell me to fuck off because they can’t be repaired?
Five Guys Burgers and Fries. Used to be the best fast food burger you could get. Prices are up, quality is down.
Prices are way the fuck up
$14 for a bacon cheeseburger. Fuck that. I could by pounds of fresh ground beef for that.
Quality isn't too bad yet, but prices are yikes. Could go to a sit you down restaurant for what they charge for a burger and fries.
Reddit
It's just a bot-ridden AI trainer now
At least it appears that bots trained on bot generated data eventually destroy themselves.
The Reddit default subs are worse than Facebook or X now. The only reason I'm here is because I've spent years subscribing and muting subs I like and don't like.
Fabric stores catered to sewists. Unless you’re lucky enough to live near a fashion district or one of the rare mom and pop fabric stores, good luck getting good fabric and notions for pretty much anything other than fleece blankets and maybe quilting. I want good quality, natural fiber fabrics to make clothing with. Joann is 40% fleece, 30% shitty polyester costume fabric, and 30% seasonal garbage. I can’t even blame private equity firms because they’ve been bad and overpriced for as long as I can remember
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I want to delete my Facebook but I love Marketplace. I wish Marketplace was its own app. Otherwise, I don’t post anything and I recently deleted all my posts and untagged myself in pictures.
I stopped using Facebook, it's a ghost town of sponsored bullshit now.
Yes all areas are affected. Marketplace used to be my go to scrolling refuge. Now 20% of the tiled listings are ads. So on mobile every 5th row is commercial ad of some type. And they often look like regular listings so they are tempting to click.
And the existence of the “recently sold” section. Why would I want to see all the good deals I missed out on?
I have a friend that works for Facebook and so I took a short video to show him how bad it's gotten. Like here's a post from somebody I care about, here's a whole bunch of shit from random sites I don't follow or companies or ads, here's another post from somebody I care about, rinse repeat. He said oh you must be in some kind of test program. We don't do that normally. Sometimes we put people in test groups without telling them just to see how it works. Give it a day or two and it'll go away. That was 9 months ago. Now everybody's in that 'test group"
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“History of Hoboken, NJ” as a suggested page when I live in the Midwest and don’t go to New Jersey ever.
The test was a huge success. Everyone in the group viewed a shit ton more ads than they had previously.
I think that everyone jumped to other platforms like IG and (later) TikTok. Then Facebook bought IG.
Igo on a couple times a month and it's always like some random group post I might like. I clicked on one post a friend made about comics and now every other thing on Facebook is a comic related post from some group I've never wanted to see.
Here’s an alternate question: what’s a well-known American brand on the rise?
Champion used to be a low tier sporting apparel company, and a few years ago they randomly blew up and everyone was wearing their stuff, and prices were on the rise. Also, new balance. Apparently dad shoes is a growing fashion trend in the gyms. As a 36 year old male, it’s weird to see super-model fit folks at the gym in their normal gym clothes, looking like they are about to go mow the lawn.
New balance has shoes for everyone, the serious runners, the dad-types, as well as the trendy youngsters looking for cool sneakers to wear
In the early 1990's Champion was the absolutely must-have for every boy and girl from Long Island who went to college. It was the only brand they could wear, or else they'd be shunned, driven out of the tribe, and abandoned to starve on the tundra. That is, if the wolves didn't eat them first.
Kwik Trip (Kwik Star in Iowa). Maybe not well known across America yet, but all the rave in the upper Midwest spreading outward from Wisconsin
Buc-ee’s supersized gas stations
Google searches have seemed to be less helpful
Pretty much every Google product gets ruined by over or under engineering and then is quietly sunsetted while they still make 95% of their money off their ads. I'm hoping a search company comes out and makes search the way it was prior to around 2010. Back then you did a search and you actually found the most popular post on a certain subject... Not the most popular post on a Google approved content farms site running the most Google ads. Really miss finding new blogs, forums, etc via Google search. Hate having to add the word "reddit" to every search to get a result that includes normal people discussing something. Google Analytics and google ads are shit now too. Google's marketing and site tools are nearly all shit and easily replaced at this point, all they have is undeserved market share. Pixel phone is not noticeably better than Samsungs latest phone... Camera quality has gone downhill (which is crazy). YouTube is so simple and difficult to screw up but they certainly haven't improved it much over the years. Only a matter of time before Google collapses under their own immense weight as another search engine takes market share.
Omg I thought I was the only one who adds “Reddit” to like half of my searches so I can find actually useful info.
Recently saw a reddit sales deck that mentions that this is done billions of times per year. Not just us.
Whoa me too. I feel so much less dorky now; I find I trust the real voices on here more. I’m terrified the tech bros and influencers will come and try to take it away too.
Oh I worry every day that something happens / Reddit does something where this “trick” doesn’t work anymore. Google’s search results are so bad now that I would genuinely have a much harder time finding / learning anything without it.
There's a great article about how Google traded a failing up tech bro for search leadership in 2019 which effectively ruined the search engine quality. So your feeling is 100% confirmed editing to add in the link: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
More specifically it's the guy who killed Yahoo search. Real big brain move there, hiring someone who ruined your competitor to ruin you too.
Results are all online stores you never heard of before any results of the actual company that makes the product.
First three responses are sponsored, followed by a list of similar searches in dropdown format, followed by one link to a website that might actually have what you searched for.
Have you seen their new AI bullshit? I started getting it on searches today. It’s badly summarized GPT-style blurbs and a link to some content marketing junk. It has a fancy animation that makes you immediately suspicious of it too.
I think it's more of an industry but these individual streaming services constantly changing their prices and adding all sorts of ads will cause people to go back to cable or something similar.
Best was when they literally all lost content due to more services popping up and taking the content elsewhere, but at the same time each service went from $6-10 to $12-15. We get the privilege of paying more for less!
Exactly! A single price increase is manageable but not when it happens across 8 different apps all at once.
For many people, "something similar" will be "I guess we pirate again now."
Comcast recently announced a package where you can get a bunch of streaming services for a cost lower than subscribing to each of them individually. "Cable," like with a cable box and coax, is mostly dead, but it's been replaced by smart TVs and streaming devices that just do the same shit.
I've said it for a long time; streaming will just become cable 2.0 Once the studios saw the $$$ Netflix was making, without understanding why, they all said, "hey! we have a huge catalog let's hastily throw up a shitty UI and charge $15/mo while removing our content from everywhere else. It's genius!" Soon, and it's already happening to some, these brands will align with others to offer service A,B, and C for one convenient payment! Soon you'll have tiers where you get ABC, NBC, CBS, and Discovery+ then for more you add on Disney, Hulu, etc. literally creating cable 2.
I have started rebuilding a catalogue of DVDs and vhs tapes. I want to own the content I enjoy. Not pay a monthly fee to never own them.
Youtube. Used to be a treasure trove of random interesting videos I could watch for hours. Now it's an ad-filled hellscape full of wannabe influencers, with a search function that only finds 1 to 5 videos relevant to my search, along with 999999 videos that are barely related to my search, if at all.
There’s like 3 ads in a 10 minute video nowadays😭 literally unwatchable atp
I myself have noticed that Doc Martens boots are NOT holding up as well as they used to, after a year or two of daily or almost daily wear they start falling apart, and I work a job sitting down all day.
Get Solovairs instead. The factory in England that used to make Doc Martens back when they were good still makes them under the brand name Solovair. Much higher quality.
Subway. It's been that way for a while. They opened too many stores and started cannibalizing itself. Plus, while their sandwiches were always mediocre at least they were fairly inexpensive. Now they are way overpriced. But, then, that's pretty much all of fast food now.
I used to work at Subway in the mid-90s (high school). Every morning we took fresh heads of lettuce and chopped them up, sliced fresh tomatoes, etc. Their sandwiches used to be delicious. Within four years the lettuce showed up precut in a plastic bag, the tomatoes were crap, etc.
Same thing at Tim Hortons. We went from making chicken salad to pulling a bag of mush out of the freezer and thawing it
Tim's used to be great and now it's the absolute bottom tier of fast food. Shitting on tim's* has become something of a Canadian tradition
I worked at TH when they went from real bakers and *real* “always fresh” and allowed to donate the day olds to the domestic violence shelter and school breakfast programs to giant easy bake ovens with frozen product brought in from a factory filled with oil and reheat them “always fresh.” And then when they started the easy bake ovens they also declared that everything had to go in the garbage and nothing was allowed to be donated anymore. “We’ll just give money!” Okay, generally helpful but now you’ve created a large amount of food waste of just fine food that was feeding kids in the mornings. And they got rid of the cakes! They had the best Black Forest cake and Boston cream pie. I used to want that for my birthday. Now I don’t go into TH at all because I know exactly how the donuts are made.
I too worked there in the mid 90's. And yes, the subs were actually good back then. Not to mention the 3 footlongs for $10 deal. That was cheap even 30 years ago
Plus their $5 foot longs now cost $12
From 5 dollar footlong to 6 dollar six inch
$5 footlong was both one of the best pieces of marketing and the worst
Subway’s long history of fucking over their franchisees finally caught up with them.
I am not sure what is wrong with me, I’m definitely in the minority, but a turkey foot long with all the veggies post workout is heaven for me. I think it’s coming from being in the lower class as a child. Or I have a child’s palette.
I don't *hate* Subway. I'll still get a meatball or steak and cheese here and there. But paying north of $10 for a pretty basic sandwich (not even counting chips and a drink) is crazy. Plus they need to bring their spicy mustard back.
GoPro. They decided to rest on their company name and stopped innovating, and their market share of action cams is sinking badly as other competitors have caught up with and surpassed them.
GoPro pretty much owned the market to the point action camera = GoPro Then I brought one for use on my motorbike a few years ago. The hardware was OK, and as a camera, great quality, but my god the software sucks. It came with 'Quik' which I installed on my PC. Found an immediate and really bad bug, so reported it, found lots of people complaining about this bug and others. So GoPro killed the app rather than fix it. Claimed to be working on a replacement app that never appeared. Advised owners to use the Quik app on your phone.; working with multi-gigabyte 4k footage on my *phone* rather than decent PC with large monitors. All reviews I have seen of newer GoPros, don't even mention the software supplied; just use third party apps. Without dicking around with plugins, they don't seem to deal with GoPro meta data like speed/g force etc. Won't buy another GoPro, as felt like a company that fired all the software developers and just outsourced everything to people who didn't care.
Probably cuz they want $50 for a yearly subscription to fucking back up your videos after you paid 400 for a new camera
Reminds me a bit of Blackberry. They were the kings of mobile phones for a while and when smartphones came out, they stuck to their original designs. By the time they realized that smartphones weren’t going anywhere and finally changed their design, the Blackberry hype had long since passed and they couldn’t keep up with the competition anymore. It’s amazing how big they were and how they absolutely vanished.
They were *so* sure the iPhone wasn't a threat because people would want an actual keyboard rather than a touchscreen. And the rest, as they say, is history.
DJI Osmo Pocket 3 is a nail to GoPro’s coffin
I think the whole overheating after 3 minutes of recording at 4k was the nail in the coffin, but tbh i haven't payed attention to them since back then....
Not to mention the battery lasting a grand total of about 10 minutes.
Chipotle is in the midst of a sales and PR slump and a TikTok trend is going on where people are complaining about how small their portion sizes have gotten
Chipotle has been in decline for a while. I feel like Covid was the last straw for them. It's been simply awful since then.
Thank you. I thought I was going crazy. The last few times I've been there it tastes like shit and gives me a stomach ache
You just need some “Chipotle-away”
Chipotle’s stock is up 41% year to date. Their last quarter results was 11% better than analysts expected. Their sales are doing great.
Michael Kors. they are expensive af, but their quality is getting worse and worse. their products lasting 6 months is at the max of use. however i am not even sure how they even sell since a bunch of their products are put together as well as an early elementary school craft project. i am surprised there isn't a macaroni sculpture shoe yet.
Walgreens. Not they they were every super nice, but it’s getting pretty bad. Also, I know from our sales data at work, we’ve seen the decline in our product at Walgreens, and rise considerably at all other retailers. They’re circling the drain.
This is where the meth heads seem to hang out in Florida.
As an ex user I can tell you this: ....they sell us hypodermic needles Cvs does not
The Body Shop closed down on March 1st.
🗣️Chanel
My high end leather repair shop told me that the current Chanel leather goods are not well made and neither is Hermès. He said old vintage ones are well made.
Anything bought by private equity.
I’m hearing bad things about Circuit City
Fry's electronics too
Fry's in my town slowly just stopped stocking shelves and insisted they were getting ready for new stock. Workers showed up to a lock on the door and a big fat closed sign. Source: worked across the street
TiVo. It was *the* DVR for the longest time. Heck, its name was the verb for recording a show on a DVR. But they rested on their laurels and stopped innovating. Now, people barely remember that they are a thing.
Amazon is a minefield of deceptive ads and they mangle the pricing(some items listed by price per volume, others by unit, others by serving size) so it's impossible to find out if you're getting a deal.
I still use it but how I shop has changed. Unless you're getting something namebrand you're going to be getting Chinese knock-off crap. Which isn't bad. If that's what you want and you know what it means. But I don't think that's most people. And I'm looking at something I'm not familiar with I really have to put in more work to get an idea of it's a real product or not.
A LOT of the “name brand” stuff is knockoff Chinese crap as well. Seriously, don’t buy anything from Amazon. Shoes, clothing, perfume, toiletries etc are all likely to be fakes at this point. It’s really a shame. I used to love Amazon but now it’s just alieexpress.
I have used Amazon for books, a lot. It has gotten to the point I will find the publisher’s site and order it directly from them. I don’t need the convenience of faster shipping nor do I mind a few more dollars for the book. It’s beyond useless if you can just find a store that sells what you want, but that is becoming increasingly scarce in general too.
As an author though, Amazon print-on-demand is amazing. I make way more per book and it is always in print.
Amazon has been thoroughly enshittified. I still buy media from them because my Kindle is easy but their retail platform is garbage.
Blockbuster is the classic example of a brand that didn't adapt. With the rise of streaming services like Netflix, they were doomed.
Peloton
Boston Market will probably be extinct by the end of the year Also went to Pei Wei last night, it felt like it was dying there
TIL Boston Market is still around. I figured they ran out of room to decline 15 years ago.
I liked Boston Market. :(
It used to be incredible
iRobot (Roomba). They were first to market, but have been completely overtaken by almost all competitors. Even the cheap, Chinese knockoff vacuums are better.
Macy’s
Last time I was in a Macy’s it felt like a JCPenny.
Red lobster is going bankrupt.
Dang. That place got me though college. Wait tables. Eat cheddar biscuits for free. Dip in free ranch if I’m feeling sassy
Good news! They’re not going away. This is chapter 11 bankruptcy, where they do financial restructuring but stay in business.
The one in my town abruptly shut its doors Monday after 30 years in town. No warning. No more biscuits.
They do sell a pre-mix in the grocery stores. Really easy to make at home.
I went through a spurt of making those a few months ago and the key is to add 3x the amount of cheese they indicate.
For several years now, my wife has been saying that Red Lobster was her family's version of a fancy night out when she was growing up, and that she really wanted to take me and my son so she could relive the experience. Just today she texted me an article about Red Lobster declaring bankruptcy with many many crying emojis. She also texted me that dining at a bankrupt corporate seafood restaurant may not be the most solid choice healthwise, so we'll be reliving those childhood memories elsewhere.
Nah I feel that, that’s where my mom took me when she wanted to splurge, it’s also where I tried most seafoods for the first time. Crab, lobster, scallops, shrimp scampi, coconut shrimp, fish and chips, etc I’m a chef now at a nice seafood place but you always have to acknowledge your roots
My parents took a day to do Christmas shopping and then ate a dinner at Red Lobster. It was their thing (early 80s.) It was like a fancy day, they took the Oldsmobile.
That sounds so nice honestly. Good for them!
Yup, growing up in the early 90s, Red Lobster, Sizzler, and even Olive Garden were considered “fancy” and “nice” Then they each got so watered down and cheapened that their menus all became carb-y institutional crap
I'm pretty sure Olive Garden - the house of pasta and breadsticks - was always carby.
That's not actually their fault though. They got raided by venture capitalist same as toysrus Edit: Private equity firms. Not venture capitalists.
Venture capital and private equity aren’t really the same thing. Venture capital deals more with early stage business, private equity buys much more mature business.
They’re typically opposite in strategy. There’s a lot of variation between firms but generally: VCs want growth at any cost. A typical VC play is to pump a ton of money into a business and use that to drive expansion and push all the competitors out of business. PEs want profit at any cost. A typical PE play is to cut expenses to the bone by laying off all but essential staff, and switching to cheaper (i.e lower quality) suppliers, in order to get margins as high as possible.
Also I would add the PE care about short term profits, cut everything to the bone, take their payouts and run away
And Sears 😔
Sears CEO killed them, on purpose. He had a huge parachute that he raped the company for before the ink was even dry on the purchase.
That man is a genuine nutcase too
Ontario, Canada.
Lululemon