Dollar Tree.
It used to have been an unreal experience witnessing the existence of these stores when they came out. Everything for a $1. No joke. The quality of some things have had corners cut and the quantity might’ve been laughable, but there was a good solid purpose for these stores.
And then I started seeing the signs after a few good solid years of shopping there. The first sign was how they stopped selling eggs. This was before the Bird Flu. They stopped selling eggs because they simply couldn’t afford to buy stock and then the price hike to $1.25 happened.
And now they’ve hiked the prices again to $1.50 for some products in a handful of stores. Additionally, they’ve incorporated items going from $2 ~ $15 so they have long lost the role and title of being the most affordable places to shop.
Gone were the days.
People using real words instead of saying things like “skibidi” and “enshittified.”
Bro got zero rizz FR and that’s on God.
“enshitification” is an objectively fantastic word. Coined by the great Corey Doctorow, I feel it truly describes our era. Word of the decade.
Most of the examples given aren’t enshitification though.
Well, I’m not going to go to the mat for every comment in this thread… but some of them are good examples of enshitification.
Oh no, you’re definitely right on both counts, just raising the point that sometimes words kind of become meaningless sometimes.
That’s not very cash money of you bro
If everyone gatekept language like you then no one would ever speak.
You’re not impressing anyone, you’re just annoying. It’s Ohio as fuck.
It’s Ohio as fuck.
Jesus Christ that’s hilarious, I’m stealing the shit out of it
Better Ohio than Indiana…
That’s not just bad, it’s Fort Wayne bad.
It’s looking real Gary in here
Re: Dollar Tree. Even in the pre $1.25 days or $1.50 or whatever they are now, it was well known that they made ends meet by deliberately padding certain items and in the process, preying on the poor people who shopped there who would be unable or unwilling to go to two different stores to complete their shopping trip.
This was primarily on packaged food products which are easy to comparison shop for if you have the means. Canned goods from them were the worst. They’d charge $1 for lots of things you could get at the grocery store at the time for 59 cents or 79 cents or whatever. And if that wasn’t the play, if you checked the quantities on stuff you’d find that the $1 version they sold was inevitably a smaller can, bottle, or jar versus the $1.79 version from the grocery store. So even if one container appeared less expensive, it was actually a worse deal per ounce.
I think they also propped up their business an awful lot with disposable party supplies: Balloons, plates, cups, paper hats, napkins, and all that kind of stuff. I imagine that definitely was not a winner for them during Covid.
Dollar Tree has essentially always been like that. It was never really there for “deals” because of what you mentioned. Usually the items were just smaller packages of things which is why they cost less to begin with.
But it has always been fantastic for certain kinds of items:
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Birthday/greeting cards. They are always simpler and of lesser quality than at other stores. But is anyone really going to keep your card for a prolonged period of time? If they do, it’s probably because of what you wrote in the card to personalized it, not because the card was fancy. I’ve seen greeting cards go for up to $10 in some drug stores which is pretty wild to me. Yes, they are more elaborate, but does it really matter when the cheaper one suffices?
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Gift bags. Same dealio as above.
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Wrapping paper in very particular circumstances. They have significantly less wrapping paper in the package than at other stores. But I find sometimes it’s a good thing if you only want to wrap a present or two with that style of wrapping paper. If you want to wrap many things or if you want to use more of the same paper in the future, then I’d buy elsewhere to get a larger quantity.
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Letting kids pick out some cheap crap from the toy aisle.
For basically anything else, it’s not worth it imo. But the above have always been where it shines.
Dollar Tree is also great for getting things that are absurdly marked up in price everywhere else. Like Scissors, office supplies, some toiletries and even great for getting things you do intend to dispose of because you don’t want to ruin the better quality version of that item.
Getting food from Dollar Tree is more misses than hits. Yeah you’ll see frozen vegetables but almost no frozen fruits. Tons and tons of freaking junk food like chips, energy drinks, soda, candy and other junk. But I still don’t knock them because some of the food available at all, are good to make dinner meals out of to stretch rations with.
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A clean toilet.
Enshittified public toilet
It cheats you in through a back door, looking like an ad-covered kiosk. The main entrance is on the other side.
In stalls, there are two screens playing ads, sound coming from the one you’re facing.
Toilet paper brands advertise on dispensers.
Softest toilet paper has printed portraits of the toilet company’s political enemies.
Facial recognition measures usage, you pay at exit.
Exiting after 5 minutes is expensive, but a monthly plan is cheaper.
Granted it’s a bit niche, but: skiing + snowboarding.
I learned to ski as a kid back in the 90s, and have always loved it. Used to be you could get a lift ticket at alpine meadows (where I learned to ski) up in Tahoe for like 40 bucks. Palisades Tahoe (the merged resorts formerly known as Alpine Meadows and
Squaw ValleyPalisades) now costs between 2-300 a day (surge pricing, ofc) if you buy a ticket day-of - not including rentals/demos/parking/food/etc that a snow enjoyer might also opt for.Yeah, fine, it’s a kinda bougie sport, but it’s kinda awful that all these PE firms who are gobbling up all the mountains in the country are not even pretending to keep the prices even remotely reasonable. I don’t need a “curated resort experience”. I just want to slay some gnar pow.
What’s even worse is that even with these prices, Palisades is absolutely swamped with people on most days that are worth skiing (especially holidays).
So, unfortunately, the market can clearly bear these prices…
I definitely miss skiing in Tahoe when I was younger. Much different vibe now with all the crowds :(
What percentage of the market is daily pass vs seasonal pass, I wonder? I think it’s close to half at the big resorts. I feel like mountains (and mountain ownership groups) are pushing hard into the subscription model which means a lot of those people are paying less than the surge cost for the day, but a lot of people are also paying for a year pass but are sitting on their butt at home b/c they don’t actually have time to get out.
On peak days, both people with onesie-twosie passes and the people with annual passes are out there, I bet.
Yeah this is a tough one. I think I read something like 70% is pass holders. Stowe, a mountain in Vermont, used to charge $2,000+ for their season pass. Now Epic is ~$700-800 and gives you a bunch more. The lines suck, they treat their workers like shit, they charge for parking, but skiing has generally become more affordable with the mega passes in some regards. I prefer passes like the Indy pass myself anyway.
Hitting a button and the TV turns on.
can you not do that? or are you talking about it playing something immediately and not picking something?
I guess it’s the difference between the TV turning on and immediately doing TV things vs. having to boot up the TV, then after a wait getting dumped into some terrible smart TV interface.
I can but the elderly struggle. They’ve got these satellite reciever boxes from dish that give them too many options.
Idk what your setup is, but one of my favorite things about my TVs (and most newer TVs) is that they have HDMI-CEC enabled, so if I hit the power button on my Chromecast or PlayStation, the TV turns itself on/off too and I didn’t even have to program the remote, or worry about pointing the remote toward the TVs IR receiver like back in the day.
Peace
For most of the 2010s I was optimistic about how cool cell phones were going to be. Instead they’re almost all basically the same phone/camera/web browser and I can’t find anything that even has the same features as my 2016 model let alone new ones. There’s foldables I guess but from what I’ve seen that’s not particularly useful.
Foldables easily fit in all your pockets. Whether it’s worth paying twice the price is not immediately obvious to me.
Getting the previous generation foldable or a refurbished one can make sense.
I worked in support for a phone manufacturer that has made some foldable. From what I’ve seen they seem to be noticably more fragile than the chocolate bar form factor. Seems the screen technology needs more time to mature
I’m using one that was gifted to me (Samsung Z Flip 3). It’s not a format that I would have deliberately picked, but after a little over a year, I can’t say I find it especially fragile. However, the provided screen protector has to be changed fairly often (I did it twice already and I’m overdue for a third), which is a bit of a bother. Apparently some people just remove it. I’m not sure if I’d be comfortable doing that though.
As for the form factor, it is slightly more convenient than a full sized phone, although it certainly doesn’t justify the markup.It’s simply novelty design and oh look, they’ve got you going to spend more money having to replace screen protectors.
I cannot imagine what it’d be like the day those models start lagging and chugging because of planned obsolescence.
My phone fits in all my pockets.
Is this enshittification or the convergence of objects into the same design due to regulation/demand/function/etc. (I’m sure there’s a name for this but I can’t recall it)?
Cell phones are certainly enshittified with planned obsolescence or incompatible text messaging protocols or ‘walled gardens’, but what else should a cell phone be besides a cellular networked pocket computer with a camera?
What features (besides a dedicated headphone jack) is missing from a modern cell phone that your old one had?
Here’s a list of things my phone has:
Headphone Jack
IR Blaster
SD Card Slot
Removable Battery (there is literally a button that pops the back cover off)
HI-FI DAC
FM Tuner
A secondary screen you can use to access app shortcuts and see the time without having to turn the main screen onThere’s plenty of stuff dropped, a lot of it is dubious tbh.
My older phones had: IR blaster for controlling TVs FM radio tuner Replaceable battery’s Headphone jack (as you noted) Expandable microsd storage Physical Keyboards (no real loss imo)
Probably some others I’ve forgotten. Honestly, I slightly miss the IR blaster on occasion. I haven’t listened to FM radio in ages, but could see it being useful. Replaceable battery’s would be nice from a longevity perspective, but I prefer battery packs to device specific batteries for longer life in general and battery life is more than a day for me anyway unless I’m going nuts. The lack of SD storage is the one that bothers me the most.
Keep in mind phones have gained at least a few things in that time. Simple reliable waterproof is a huge one.
I remember these beautiful times when “updates” were not forced and therefore planned obsolescence didn’t happen.
Both Apple and Samsung have been fined for this and yet they carry on.
Google Search. Or search in general. Now it’s all shit and you have to convince it that you actually want to search what you want and not what it thinks you want. Which is sometimes hard and other times impossible. I miss Google Search, it seriously was the best.
I’m sorry I came to this late, but this one’s really the best answer.
We talk a lot about how kids are struggling to recognize fake news, find reputable sources, etc… but I also think about how hard it is to find decent sources these days! I honestly can’t comprehend how kids are learning to do research projects and so on without the ability to easily search for stuff on the internet.
And while there’s lots of stuff on this threat that was cool while it lasted, I think search engines are one of those things where we never even considered the possibility it would change. Businesses fail, prices go up, experiences get skimped on, but search engines were goddamn magic. They just were. Why would anyone ever want to make them worse? The idea never even crossed out minds.
Definitely did not take this for granted. Between 2004 and 2010ish it was remarkable how effective Google was. It’s still alright, just not as good as before.
Man, Google search back in the day was great. No search categories like images, shopping, videos, etc. Just give it a query and you get what you wanted. God had no idea what was on the second page of results because the first page had what you wanted in the first half. Your ability to find what you wanted depended on your ability to use the search terms and modifiers.
The week I changed from HotBot to Google was a revelation. The jump from barely scraping the surface of the web to being able to find anything was like finally getting the full promise of the internet. Can’t be undersold how great Google was from 2001-03 until around 2013-16.
Wow, I recalled AltaVista, Lucia and Excite but have not thought of HotBot in forever.
It was so good that “googling it” is still in common parlance, even though the phrase has baggage and isn’t used in the same case-closed tones as it once was.
I haven’t used Google in a few years (in fact all Google servers are blocked on my network) but I still can’t stop saying “I’ll Google it.”
Oh man, and when all the Boolean operators were revealed to work on search, doing some “Google-Fu” was laughably easy, but blew people away. Back before there was so much noise, anything online was possible to find.
I know they took away my negative operator, which is the main one I used. The anger is still fresh years later.
Yeah, that was the last straw TBH.
I occasionally have to do some OSINT-ish research online, and it keeps getting harder and harder to get what I nerd from Big G. So much noise and trash. 2019 was the year they jumped the shark.
Kagi Krew represent
Haven’t had the time to try it yet, but really doubt it’s better than Google at its peak performance.
Is Kagi the AI powered thing? Or am I mistaking it with something else?
No, not AI powered. Just a great search engine. The closest you’ll get to OG google.
It goes deeper IMO. Search no longer respects the user as an autonomous individual with self determination. It has stollen your digital citizenship.
Yeah it’s just starting to look like where no matter what search engine you use almost, they just spit out garbage results. And they try way too hard in being the swiss-army knife of everything.
I have switched from google to a SearXNG instance and i am more than satisfied. For german stuff i use another instance which gives me more local results. I am thinking about hosting my own instance in the future.
Education.
Google. It used to just work, and really well
Private messaging. We used to all use an open protocol to message each other (email) and now everyone is fractured into proprietary closed centralized messengers.
That goes for avout any service. Taxis should be using a public protocol but instead we have evil über and that’s it.
Cadbury chocolates, Fuck Kraft Carmelo doesn’t taste good at all, and their eggs have gone from the size of a chicken egg to the size of a Robin’s egg while somehow tasting worse
In that time period the costs of cocoa have skyrocketed due to blight, climate change, and legal efforts to reduce slavery in the harvesting of cocoa. Most mass market chocolate brands were harmed by this.
OkCupid used to be the best for finding matching people: they crowdsourced thousands of relevant multiple choice questions from which you built your search filter: which answers you accept, how important each is to you, and a voluntary explanation. The questions and match results were factored into friendship, dating, and sex.
Then Match Group bought it. First they let it be, but then they:
- removed the factoring - no more looking for friends or sex, only complete packages
- removed search - no more finding the best matches anywhere on the planet, now you just swipe like Tinder
- removed the search filter - now everything has to be the same to match: both of you must have or not have tattoos for example, never mind what you like - one of my likes went from 95% to 50% match
- deleted the voluntary explanations without warning, so no one could back theirs up
- deleted ~95% of the match questions without warning
- deleted all accumulated likes, which were my best matching people around the world with the maximum couple/friend/sex partner potential except location for now. I had the links saved, but they broke all of them.
- they delete matches (mutual likes) if they haven’t been messaging in a while, as if that meant they’re not a match - no, we’re just distant for now
- they police inconvenient statements in the users’ introductions as the political situation evolves - the day after the mass murderer CEO got shot, the section in my profile containing “fuck the healthcare system - make a better one” was deleted without sending me a copy to edit
Avoid the whole Match Group.
Since I started using Lemmy, I’ve wondered if a federated dating platform could ever work. Obviously you would have to solve the problem of low user numbers though…
There’s an open source one called Alovoa. I haven’t tried it yet myself, but it’s there.
I know it’s on FDroid, though I haven’t checked any other app store for it yet
Unless it is a dating platform for tech savvy gay/bi men specifically, it would also have to solve the problem of even lower numbers of women who are users. Even non-fed dating platforms struggle to reach a 10:1, men:women ratio of active, non-bot users.
As a woman (just have to phrase it that way), good luck to any who try. Personally, I can’t think of anything that would entice me to sign up for a federated dating platform.
Make the men moderate each other’s first messages. You need 3 out of five thumbs up before that first message even goes through. You have to rate five messages before you can try to send one. Make them see how many fucking weirdos there are and hopefully make them behave a little better to begin with by being self conscious about what five other dudes are gonna see. You want five other dudes to see your dick pic on the off chance 3/5 will upvote it? Good fucking luck. Don’t listen to me I just worked for a week in a hospital without running water my brain is a smoothie.
I don’t hate this.
You have way more faith in humanity than I do. I think after 1-2 and the novelty wears off, a lot of people would just thumbs up without reading.
And even if people stay diligent in rating first comments, it will take 0.2 seconds for bad actors to realize they can just save their bullshit for message #2.
What do you think about vetting to make a profile, or having a chat that exists for the folks that have matched or spoken with a guy in the past?
Oh snap, I met my wife on OKC before these changes. I believe Match had already bought them out but it was before the changes like you mentioned.
I remember it being the superior online matchmaking service at the time.
RIP
Democracy
In the us they used to be called 5&dime stores. A big chain known as woolworths was one but had to raise prices of the decades.
Inflation happens .
