It's not greed. It's just capitalism.
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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I like this because it references the concept of greed correctly.
Greed is when self interest gets irrational. Greed doesn’t maximize one’s own profit; greed maximizes one’s own profit today.
Real long term self interest means serving others consistently to create those healthy relationships that in turn serve oneself.
Greed is killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
So this is obviously McDonald's but manufacturing suffers a similar path:
- Make high quality and respected product onshore
- Get purchased by vulture capitalist
- Lower standards to increase profit
- Product is offshored to cover up falling sales
- Quality nosedives
- Once the customer base catches on sales nosedives
- Lower quality even more and brand becomes a joke
- Get purchased by mega conglomerate who collects brands like Pokémon
- Rival product gets made onshore by a small team who used to work for you
See Doc Martin and Solvair or Hunter Wellingtons or any other of a large number of former halo brands. Filson is one going through this right now
Why do they let step 2 even happen? Is it just that the creators don’t actually give a shit about their product/brand, and just want an easy, big pay day? Screw their employees?
I'm proud of the work I do. I get immense satisfaction for a job well done and appreciate being appreciated.
If someone offers me millions of dollars to take over my job only to do a worse job, I will absolutely take the money and retire early. No hesitation. No regrets. I won't even take the time to pack up my desk.
Money. The answer is always money.
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.
Funny, the more I learn about corporate greed the even less I like it, in fact, I strongly dislike it.
Then don't buy the product
If you are talking about low competition industries that's a different story