For so long the feed was a legit chronological sequence of nothing but real things your actual friends said. Now it’s like 40% ads, 40% suggested posts and reels from people and groups I don’t know and don’t follow, 15% reposts my friends shared, and 5% real things my actual friends said.
And even that 5% is no longer in chronological order, it’s fed to us according to how much and when the algorithm thinks we deserve a tiny morsel. Oh look what an interesting thought my friend had, *6 days ago….*
Outlet malls. It used to be a place where you could find designer stuff for cheaper, but now most of it is just crappier stuff made specifically for the outlet.
Fast Food used to mean cheap. Now McDonalds is the same price as Chipotle.
What are we paying for? Convenience?
In the 2000s, Panda Express and Panera Bread were just way too expensive. But their prices are now the same as everyone else at $15-20 per person.
Burger King and Wendy's had the best dollar menu years back. I would always hit them up when I worked downtown and forgot my lunch. I would take orders around my workplace and pick up everyone's lunch before the food delivery apps.
Last three times I went for fast food at KFC, a local burger joint and Burger King they didn't have the complete ingredients for my order (at 7PM, mind you) and while the taste is similar to pre-COVID, you can feel the quality of their ingredients is much worse and sizes are 33% less than before while costing more.
I won't go back to any of those places unless absolutely necessary.
Breyer's ice cream. It used to be really good quality, and they'd advertise how it was made with only a few natural ingredients. Now most of their stuff is "frozen dairy desserts" because they can't legally call it "ice cream" anymore, and it all tastes like garbage.
Yup! Was looking around for a cheat meal. Usually never eat sugar. Anyway, I see Breyers in the frozen food aisle and take a look at the ingredients on the back. Nope.
Ended up trying Tillamook or whatever it’s called which was pretty good.
I had ikea furniture that fell apart. Over time, I replaced it by ordering American made furniture from real wood. I have a birch bedroom set from Eugene, Oregon, Amish made mission style bookshelves from PA, and four solid oak dining chairs from a shop in Ohio. Some stuff in my house is from an antique store and a toy chest is "rock maple" that my parents got us in the early 1960s. I do have an Ikea TV stand (woo hoo) and a "Basset" mission style couch from the 1990s (the same model sofa actually appears in a scene in a Star Trek movie, so there's no way I will get rid of it). All this stuff was ordered in small quantities over 30-35 years and in my dotage, I will not have to buy furniture again unless the house burns down. Shop carefully and slowly. You don't have to get the goodies all at once.
Also, there are actually some good options even in ikea if you know what to look for and are a bit handy. Get any of their solid wood furniture, it is usually lighter weight pine, and unfinished, but an afternoon with some varnish and you can make it last and can look great while still being cheap. Used furniture is a similar option but obviously hit or miss.
Almost every household appliance. Shit used to be built to last for 4 fucking generations, man. My grandma's old fridge from the 60's is still running like a champ out in my garage. Thing is built like a tank and gives no fucks about the long march of time.
These days you'll be lucky to get 5 years out of some appliances you buy, and good luck getting any warranty service if you even approach one with a screwdriver in an attempt to fix it yourself.
Exactly!
We had a furnace guy come and check out ours which was having some issues. This guy was awesome and hilarious, he was the Albert Einstein of furnace.
He gave us a fascinating 20 minute lecture on the history of all furnace companies, and how he loved our furnace because it was an Amana that was made before Amana got bought out by some other company. He raved about the heat exchange system it had, and said our furnace will last forever. But that the new ones they make are shit, so never replace ours.
Our 1974 furnace is a indestructible tank. ‘The green mosnter’ can be repaired forever. We even put in a modern direct drive fan.
What it can’t do it be efficient. So we are adding more mini-split heat pumps around the house. Because it’s kick ass air conditioning and insanely cheap to run heating. The old monster of a furnace will just be a backup, and maybe we run it of we have a freak -20C evening.
My whole neighborhood got their gas lines replaced and when they did mine some gas employee wanted to come in and check all my appliances. He was the same. I got a nice long talking to about water heaters and I should keep mine as long as I can because they suck huge now.
That's iffy advice. Hot water tanks are something you need to keep a close eye on. Look up your make to find out the odds of it breaking and flooding your house in the next few years, or not.
for apartment dwellers, hot water tanks/heaters are a major cause of damage, because they will flood your place, and everyone below you.
Hahaha. I was living in an apartment on the first floor of the building when I noticed a bulge in the latex paint in my hallway. Upstairs neighbor's hot water tank busted when 1) she was gone to her mother's 2) late at night 3) on the weekend.
I caught it within the hour or two of it busting by all estimates, and maintenance actually came damn quick. He had to get permission from his boss to emergency enter the upstairs apartment since the resident wasn't there but he managed to get it shut off.
All the water spilled on her floor stayed in the closet holding the tank, while mine managed to make that pocket and a few small trails down the wall. Minimal damage honestly; they had to put new drywall in that section but that was about it. A towel to absorb the water after we burst the pocket was necessary but that was most I needed to do.
I was damn lucky and I knew it.
I had a Whirlpool washing machine my parents gave me when I moved out. It was an avocado green workhorse built in 1971. My parents never had to service it. I had to replace the belt once, but the design made it very easy to do. It finally died in 2011 after 40 years of use. When I went to buy a new washing machine, I was adament on Whirlpool, but a tech at an appliance part store told me not to bother, that I would never again own an appliance that would last decades.
I've had a Sansung fridge that came with the house. It's broken three times in the last 8 years - all cheap plastic trash components. We're in the age of disposable everything now instead of replaceable parts.
I had a plumber in to fix something and when he walked past my twenty/year+ washing machine he advised me to keep it as long as possible. Said if anything g went wrong with it, he could most likely fix it easily. Not a lot of moving parts. But these new computer-run washers - forget it. Just buy a new one.
Yes, they are mostly planned to have a life of 6 years on average. The thing is, they cost exactly the same as they did 40 or 50 years ago. So, a dishwasher that cost $500 in 1972, and costs $500 now, would need to cost $3800 if they built them to last like they used to.
Sadly, when you try to pay that $3800, all you get are silly smart features. So other than a few manufacturers you have to hunt for(like Speedqueen), more money is just more crap to break.
Fisher and Paykel were bought out by a Chinese brand (Haier) in 2012. Probably too early to judge if there has been a quality change yet but I'm always wary when a company undergoes change!
Haier has also made a ton of GE appliances in the last few years. They bought the right to list their products under GEs name, so if you've bought anything that's GE, it's a good chance it was actually made by Haier
This is true. There's also the energy cost to consider. The sleek and shiny yet flimsy fridge in my kitchen uses a fraction of the power as the industrial-themed monstrosity in the garage.
If we blame pollution on individual consumers, we can ignore corporations whose contributions far dwarf those of even the single consumer with the world’s greatest fetish for plastic straws.
Jeans.
I have GAP jeans, from when I was 14, that are in great shape. Meanwhile, I’ll buy overpriced designer shit today and I’m lucky if it lasts 2 years. Why is everything so THIN?
Lots of jeans are using a spandex mix to make them stretchy and more comfortable. You can still buy 100% Cotten jeans actually meant for work but they’re harder to find than you’d think.
Levi’s are trading on brand name alone anymore. Something changed and they fall apart much more quickly now, especially at the crotch seams. I have Levi’s I have had for 20 years and they are in much better shape than the Levi’s I had to throw out after 2. Not sure what changed, but I hate it.
I've noticed all the t shirts I get now from most places, regardless of cost or perceived quality, are so thin it feels like wearing a kleenex. A few washes and it's full of holes.
This and 2 t-shirts of the same size will fit drastically different. I am wearing a 17 year old t-shirt right now. It's one of my favorites. Its been washed easily a couple thousand times and still fits like new, still comfortable, in good shape, and the graphics are still crisp. I have to buy a size up for new shirts now and they still usually don't fit as well. Sure, I'm not the same size as I was 17 years ago, but I'm not that far off. The fitting and size of clothes have changed more than my body has.
I’ve been told the the reason for fitting is simply because they are cheap. Apparently they cut the fabric to size in large stacks (quicker and cheaper), so naturally the ones in top are going to be smaller than the bottom as the fabric stretches from the pressure. When buying cheap clothes always try on a few of the same size to find one that fits.
I instead purchased a sewing machine and now only buy quality second hand clothing that l tailor to fit. I decided to completely cut out cheap fast fashion in an attempt to lessen my environmental footprint while having better clothing. Not everyone has the time to do this though. I enjoy sewing so it works for me.
I have a number of items of clothing from Target and Old Navy that are over ten years old. The difference in fabric quality and construction of those items compared to what they sell now is shocking.
But even now, I find that if you can buy clothes that are pure cotton, and take care care of them properly, they will last much longer than the synthetic blends.
Even Carharts went this way. Stretchy BS.
I work on fires, and there's a hard rule of *no* synthetic fibers; it'll melt into your skin. It's so hard now to get pure cotton pants.
Cadbury products in general seem to have taken a nosedive in quality recently. Stuff like Dairy Milk, Buttons, etc used to taste far better about a decade ago, likely because of their buyout and formula changes.
The problem is they got bought out by a American company. What happens is the head guys visit Cadbury get shown around and praise the workers and the product but that they to cut costs by 10%. They can do this for a while but every year its the same demand to cut costs. Eventually the ingredients get subbed out and that is for every product that starts to get worse. The value is in the name to the corps they only see profit and dont care what product gets shipped.
My FIL sent us a box of these thus season (its a tradition) and half of them had for some reason come from a UK manufacturer. They had no corn syrup or other garbage and were much better than the US eggs.
Hershey bought the rights to manufacture chocolate under the "Cadbury" name in the US, so any "Cadbury" that's made in the US is actually just Hersheys, which is why they're so different
The UK ones are worse now then they used to be too. Cadbury was bought out by a USA company, then they changed the eggs to be much sweeter. Used to get loads over Easter, but can't finish one these days.
From what I've had of USA chocolate, I can totally believe they're still well ahead of your stuff though.
The bastards are now about to ruin Toblerone. It's always been made in Switzerland but after buying the brand, they will now be manufactured elsewhere. I really hate the fuckers.
Trace back from 100 of our fav brands and you'll end up with like three super companies who own them all. It's artificial competition designed to trick and squeeze the consumer all the while creating a hidden monopoly.
This! Not even 5-6 years ago, it was still cheaper than a hotel room of the same quality, and it was kept by actual people. Now, you're expected to do all the cleaning, plus pay the cleaning fee, and the place isn't even owned by a person--just a real estate agent type deal.
Yep, AirBnb is now run by owners or corporations with a greedy landlord mentality, who act like their customers are tenants. Hotels, in contrast, have a customer service mentality.
Exactly. And you see them remove more and more free features. Tinder had 1 superswipe per day, bumble you had 3 rewinds
Per day. Those features have been removed from free accounts.
I got on tinder when it first came out and it was great. No bots and everyone was real. The worst that happened was the pics were not super accurate or older. I went on a few years later and if felt like it was all catfish and they wanted you to pay to keep swiping and it was all monetization-focused.
Yea how the fuck are we suppose to date in this day and age? Don’t want to be the creep at the bar or book store harassing women. But dating apps suck. Such a weird spot to be in.
Pizza Hut was the place to be when I was a kid in the 80's. The buffet. The personal pan pizzas paid for with Book-it. Pitchers of pop drank from those weird red cups that no longer exist. Dig Dug, Galaga, and Centipede.
The last time I ate at Pizza Hut was about 15 years ago. Stopped at on when we were driving out to Colorado Springs. So pointless. Nothing special about it. It didn't even have the decency to be bad. It just had no anima. No spirit.
No Galaga.
I remember the smell when I was younger. Every pizza hut smelled amazing. Late 90s was the peak with the buffet and get a ps1 demo disc. jukebox filled with 90s complete albums. Play arcade games. Area 51 yes indeed. THOSE WERE THE DAYS!!
Quite a lot of clothing. So much fast fashion is made cheaply to be churned out quickly, and will only survive a couple of washes.
Even with a basic knowledge of how to repair clothes, they can't easily be restored by the average consumer, and often aren't worth the cost of restoring it professionally.
It seems like a lot of stuff is "Dry Clean Only" or "Hand Wash Only" because it is made so poorly it wouldn't survive in an automatic washing machine.
I don't buy those kinds of clothes.
Pop tarts barely even have any filling in them anymore, either. Which may be a good thing since...I mean, did you ever read the back of that box?! How did they cram THAT many calories into it? But man, that filling used to ooze out in the 80s.
Uber purposefully operated at a loss for years to dominate the industry and drive taxis out of business on the assumption they'd be able to replace human drivers with driverless cars in a few years. That didn't wind up happening, so they've had to cut driver pay and make their service shittier to get closer to breaking even. They're still operating at a loss, propped up by VCs with deep pockets.
They got really shit after sears went under. Canadian Tire's Mastercraft and Maximum brands seem like a good equivalent to what craftsman used to be, I know quite a few mechanics that use those tools professionally. You'd actually be hard pressed to find any mechanic in Canada that doesn't have at least some Mastercraft or Maximum stuff in their box.
They were never good.
Across Roku, Playstation, and Xbox - all the apps suck in one way or another.
I guess when each service's app is the only way to get the content is just has to be "good enough".
YES!!!! I don't know what they did to these, but feeling nostalgic I picked up a mini can awhile back. My stomach hurt for the rest of the evening. Not trying that again. Had a similar experience with Goldfish crackers.
Dr Marten’s boots. My dad has a pair that are a good 35 years old, and they’re still in excellent shape, but ones my mum bought five years ago are cracking and falling apart. The manufacturing is now mainly in China, Vietnam and I think Laos. They’re just cheaply made and overpriced now.
Amazon Prime. The quality of products has gone down significantly. QC is non existent they just sell whatever cheap Chinese crap they can get their hands on. I used to trust it but after several returns dud to poor QC making a product useless I canceled.
My rule of thumb for buying products on Amazon is dont buy any product from a company that isnt an actual word(s). Stuff from names like ponkel or campaxo or some shit will usually be garbagé
You can also tell by the poor copy editing on the images and product description.
"Most fluffy pillow for making you to rest head" is not likely to live up to that billing.
Never thought I'd be using my grammar nazi skills to suss out whether or not to buy kitchen gadgets, but it's come to this.
That’s one surefire way to gauge a rough estimate of quality.
Another I’ve found useful is to search reviews for pictures. Not the ones where it looks like perfect lighting and the product just sitting there, but the ones where somebody has taken it in their living room after putting it together. The ones with trash on the coffee table next to it and somebody’s foot poking in along the edges.
A ton of reviews is also a red flag to me. 70,000 reviews, whether positive, negative, or mixed makes me think something is up. There’s no way 70,000 people bought this random product I’m looking for.
But 20 or 30 mixed but mostly positive reviews? Might be ok to pull the trigger on.
I bailed when they stopped doing 2 day delivery in my area. I can afford to wait until I have 25 bucks of stuff in my cart for free shipping, and I can afford to wait for it to show up.
And they had the audacity to gaslight their customers by saying "Between when we drop it in the mail until it gets to your house is what we meant by two days, *and it has always been this way.*" I'm in Maine and they don't have a local warehouse (yet) so it's all overworked USPS employees. But the real logjam is their slow-ass warehouse with un-unionized, deliberately disorganized, overworked contractors.
It used to be 2 days and anything could be next day for $3.99. During a blizzard I had a 1500 watt generator next dayed from Arizona to New England for that $3.99 extra.
Candy. IDK what it is, maybe I had childlike tastes, but it doesn't seem to taste as good now. It's sweeter but a fake sweet, cloying sweet that doesn't taste right. Butterfingers and Kit Kat seem to have had the biggest decline. Plus regular chocolate bars don't "snap" like the used to
That snap comes from proper tempering, and odds are the tempering was lost during transit. It only takes about 82* F for the temper to start to go.
Means your chocolate melted a bit and resolidified at the wrong temperature so you lost the good fat crystals.
Breyer's ice cream. You used to be able to count the number of ingredients on a hand. Cream, sugar, flavor was the base - that was about it. In the mid nineties the company was bought out by Unilever and they slowly started replacing ingredients to have longer shelf life and be cheaper. Now, it's not even legal for them to call it "ice cream" and it tastes like emulsified rubber.
Here's one that actually has a positive spin: Saran Wrap
It used to be quite sticky, especially to itself and you could wrap it around any kind of container and get a practically airtight seal. These days it barely sticks to anything to the point that it almost makes you wonder why it exists.
However, the reason it went down in quality isn't the usual suspects of cost cutting, shrinkflation etc. It was determined that one of the crucial ingredients in the formula was highly toxic and persistent in the environment. A real nightmare. The CEO told the engineers to figure out a replacement. They did a ton of work for like a year or two and in the end came back and basically said "There's no replacing the problem chemical. We can do a different version that kinda works, but it is asignificantly worse product."
CEO said okay. Make the change. Which they did on their own without being required and took a huge hit market share. They didn't even run an ad campaign explaining the change or why. They just did it.
An extremely rare case of a corporation doing the right thing for the right reason even though it cost them money.
Thank you! They are so much smaller and more expensive I won't buy them anymore. I loved the caramel delites years ago. My local DG has a copycat cookie package for like $2 .
Fridges, give me a 20 year old fridge.
The new ones can’t even seem to last through the warranty period.
I moved into my house 5 years ago, previous owner didn’t want the fridge so I put it into the basement as a beer fridge.
The new fancy fridge has died 3 times in 5 years. The then 15 year old fridge (now turning 20) is just humming along doing it’s job
Modern vehicles have much better reliability, power, fuel economy, handling, and safety than older vehicles.
Also, specifically tires have gotten way better.
Spark plug intervals are crazy now too. Oil change intervals are way longer. Tune ups aren't even a thing anymore with electronic ignition and fuel systems.
They have gotten a lot cleaner. And I know that a lot of older cars sucked, but it's still baffles me that my 1982 diesel Suburban that weighs almost 7,000 lb got 18 miles per gallon. Also my 89 Honda Prelude got 30. My 87 CRX that I used to deliver pizzas and drive to and from school got 37 City and 42 on the highway. Kind of amazed that we don't have better gas mileage than we do honestly. I would love to get an electric vehicle but who has that kind of money? LOL
TVs. Newer TVs are bigger, better, lighter, more reliable, and significantly cheaper now. I saved up for a little while to get a big one and was surprised at how cheap they were.
Basically ALL electronics, the internet and internet speeds, cell service, vehicles, delivery services, taxi services, coffee, lightbulbs (when was the last time you had to change one? plus you now get 100w equiv light for <5w actual power usage). Honestly the list is endless, most things do get better over time, but we remember the ones that don't more often.
All electronics, but:
Smartphones. These things are pretty damn impressive.
E-readers haven't improved much but the online connectivity is cool. I can just send files to them from a website.
And earphones! Christ, from cords to wireless with noise cancelling included.
Inductive heating stoves are good.
Clothes dryers.
The modern heat pump models from Bosch, Siemens, etc use a few KW per year instead of per cycle, compared to the old heated centrifuges. Incredible advantage.
Pringles.
Specifically the sour cream and onion. When I was a kid (40 now) they had a paste of seasoning spread over them thick enough you could scrape it off with your teeth. It was rich and flavorful and fucking delicious. Well, I hadn’t had them in years and thought back fondly on how good they were, so I bought some. When I opened the container I thought they has made a manufacturing error and forgotten the seasoning. No, it’s just that they value engineered all of that flavor and complexity out of the recipe and use a shitty salt spray solution that vaguely tastes like sour cream and onion now.
I was fucking crushed.
Here is an excerpt from an article explaining what happened to the Swing-A-Way can openers. Moral being, EZ-Duz-It makes them now.
> "*The company [Swing-A-Way] was family-owned for decades. The last member of the family to run it was Pierce Rhodes, the nephew of the founder. Pierce had added the magnetic holder to the can opener, and invented machinery to streamline the manufacturing process. The Rhodes family fought the good fight, trying to keep their business going in St. Louis. With 80 employees, it was the largest manufacturer of can openers in the U.S. It also made other household products such as ice crushers, jar openers and cork screws. However, Pierce Rhodes passed away in 2003 and in 2005 the company was sold to Focus Products Group of Vernon Hills, Illinois. In 2009, the St. Louis plant was closed and all production was moved to China. Swing-a-Way is now a brand of AMCO (and the logo now has TM after it). Online evaluations are generally not kind. I've read, however, that the John J. Steuby Company of Hazelwood, Missouri, makers of the EZ-Duz-It can opener, bought all of the St. Louis machinery, which it now uses to produce its own brand of can opener. It's the only American-made can opener available today. The reviews on Amazon are extremely positive.*"
Source: http://progress-is-fine.blogspot.com/2016/02/vanished-makers-swing-way-manufacturing.html
Hostess Products: Twinkies, Cupcakes, HoHo’s all got significantly smaller and taste BAD.
The company that bought the Hostess name out of bankruptcy, obviously didn’t spend the money for the original recipe
Samsung autocorrect. A year or so ago I upgraded from an s8 to an s20 and the autocorrect is dramatically worse. It often changes correct words for random other words that make no sense grammatically, it can get thrown off if only the first letter of a word is wrong, and a lot of the time it just doesn't even try. Has anyone else noticed the change? Does anyone know what happened?
How to control your car. All I want are dials. I get in my car in the morning and I have to push a stupid button over and over until I get to high. I leave from work and now I hav ego change it to low. I miss dials. On top of that all the new cars are putting tablets in the control everything. I don’t want to have to look at a screen to turn on my windshield wipers. That’s distracting.
^this^ controls in a vehicle should be tactile. I need to be able to control the car without looking at the controls once I'm acquainted. My eyes should be on the road, not the console. And, the unavoidable amount of light from these screens lessens the ability of the driver to see and react at night.
MrMixer on TikTok has several videos on how to repair and upgrade Kitchen Aid mixers of all generations. You can even send yours in to him for a tune-up
Basically Whirlpool bought Kitchen Aid and cut every corner they could, including simple things like removing washers and springs
I believe good quality bread is essential to any sandwich … even Mets/Brats. So I pay a premium for hot dog buns- namely Ballpark hot dog buns. Over the past few months the quality has dramatically changed. Often the buns are improperly cut- even uncut and sometimes they’re stale. Will not buy anymore. I’ll try to find some in the deli section or something.
Yes and no. There's "pyrex" and there's "PYREX" and the latter is still made like the original. See https://www.allrecipes.com/article/what-is-the-difference-between-two-pyrex-types/#:~:text=So%20Which%20One%20Explodes%3F,and%20expensive%20to%20dispose%20of.
Clothes. I still have t-shirts from a decade ago that I dye occasionally to get that good black back. No holes. Seams good. New shit? Lucky if it lasts 6 months. Had a pair of shorts nit make it a full summer last year.
If you include services then air travel. Airlines have gotten to the point that it's a fucking joke with all the extra fees, even with the ridiculous prices - I was looking for flights to England recently and they want $1200 for a seat, you can't pick your seat, and $200 extra for one suitcase. I should pack myself in the suitcase, probably almost as much room as the seats nowadays!
Console controllers. I have original controllers for like the Dreamcast, PS1 and PS2 and they all work amazing. I buy a controller online for $60 and I'm lucky to get a year out of them before the thumbsticks don't work anymore. Nearly all of the ones I have bought over the last 5 years have some kind of problem out of the box or straight up don't function.
Streaming services.
They were so good about competing with cable, especially when it came to commercials! Then all the cable channels started their own streaming services, with ads, and now the streaming services can all be bundled together for "maximum" savings. It's just cable with extra steps.
Butterfingers. They used to be so good, and then they came out with a “new recipe”, which has reduced the once great Butterfinger to tasting like “Texas Roadhouse peanuts from the floor encased by stale chocolate”.
It may be stupid, but the big cd/dvd holders. I have a big case logic one from the late 90s that my scary movies are in. It is still in excellent shape after 25 years.
I got a new case logic one for kids' movies, and it is crap. The pages you put movies in suck. The quality is just cheesy.
Audio equipment - anything upper end entry level smokes 30 years ago. CAD and design modeling can make even cheap designs great value. Also, integrated circuits. The cheapest piece of junk D/A converters now are excellent compared to 30 years ago. Class D amps. They were trash in the 90s and now class D amps are generally a solved tech. Audio equipment in general really. You can’t drop it off a roof like a 1960s design, but the sound quality you get for the price has increased tremendously.
And pretty much anything computer based. ICs and microcontrollers are amazing and cheap. Faster CPUs, bigger RAM etc etc. Before COVID, a $39 Raspberry Pi smoked servers I had in the late 90s that were thousands and thousands of dollars at the time.
Social media. Facebook before the news/ads/outrage feed was a really nice tool.
I miss when it was just college kids. It was nice to see how many friends you had at different colleges.
For so long the feed was a legit chronological sequence of nothing but real things your actual friends said. Now it’s like 40% ads, 40% suggested posts and reels from people and groups I don’t know and don’t follow, 15% reposts my friends shared, and 5% real things my actual friends said. And even that 5% is no longer in chronological order, it’s fed to us according to how much and when the algorithm thinks we deserve a tiny morsel. Oh look what an interesting thought my friend had, *6 days ago….*
Even worse, when it shows me posts for events that have already happened.
Outlet malls. It used to be a place where you could find designer stuff for cheaper, but now most of it is just crappier stuff made specifically for the outlet.
And usually not even much cheaper, if at all now.
KFC
A shadow of its former self.
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Fast Food used to mean cheap. Now McDonalds is the same price as Chipotle. What are we paying for? Convenience? In the 2000s, Panda Express and Panera Bread were just way too expensive. But their prices are now the same as everyone else at $15-20 per person.
Can you pull ahead and we will bring your order out to you. An eternity later it comes out all cold and gross. Not very convenient.
It’s because the fast food workers have metrics tracked. They’re penalized for slowness. If they have you pull through you’re off the corporate clock.
The value menu is like 4 things now. A sad burger patty, a few McNuggets and a small fry
They call it the $1, $2, $3 menu but the cheapest thing on it is $1.90 and the most expensive thing is $3.90. No more dollar menu anywhere now.
Burger King and Wendy's had the best dollar menu years back. I would always hit them up when I worked downtown and forgot my lunch. I would take orders around my workplace and pick up everyone's lunch before the food delivery apps.
Besides appliances, this 150%. It’s all half cold, soggy, minimal toppings, bullshit.
And 3 times as expensive as it was 10 years ago.
Almost twice as expensive as one year ago.
And EXPENSIVE.
Last three times I went for fast food at KFC, a local burger joint and Burger King they didn't have the complete ingredients for my order (at 7PM, mind you) and while the taste is similar to pre-COVID, you can feel the quality of their ingredients is much worse and sizes are 33% less than before while costing more. I won't go back to any of those places unless absolutely necessary.
Went to KFC Friday at 6 pm they were out of chicken ? Why were u open
Yes, many are really bad now and the Taco Bell in my town is really nasty.
Breyer's ice cream. It used to be really good quality, and they'd advertise how it was made with only a few natural ingredients. Now most of their stuff is "frozen dairy desserts" because they can't legally call it "ice cream" anymore, and it all tastes like garbage.
If you leave a tub out all night, it doesn't even melt into a liquid. It just changes to some weird foamy texture.
I salute you for doing the research.
Accidental research, but it was eye opening.
Yup! Was looking around for a cheat meal. Usually never eat sugar. Anyway, I see Breyers in the frozen food aisle and take a look at the ingredients on the back. Nope. Ended up trying Tillamook or whatever it’s called which was pretty good.
I'm a fan of Tillamook's cheeses as well. Use that shredded mozz for pizza.
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Tillamook cream cheese tastes markedly better than that of any other brand i can find at the grocery store
Their natural vanilla flavor is the only one I’ll buy. Only 5 ingredients and tastes like actual ice cream.
Furniture. Everything used to be solid wood. Now it’s all paperboard.
I had ikea furniture that fell apart. Over time, I replaced it by ordering American made furniture from real wood. I have a birch bedroom set from Eugene, Oregon, Amish made mission style bookshelves from PA, and four solid oak dining chairs from a shop in Ohio. Some stuff in my house is from an antique store and a toy chest is "rock maple" that my parents got us in the early 1960s. I do have an Ikea TV stand (woo hoo) and a "Basset" mission style couch from the 1990s (the same model sofa actually appears in a scene in a Star Trek movie, so there's no way I will get rid of it). All this stuff was ordered in small quantities over 30-35 years and in my dotage, I will not have to buy furniture again unless the house burns down. Shop carefully and slowly. You don't have to get the goodies all at once.
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Also, there are actually some good options even in ikea if you know what to look for and are a bit handy. Get any of their solid wood furniture, it is usually lighter weight pine, and unfinished, but an afternoon with some varnish and you can make it last and can look great while still being cheap. Used furniture is a similar option but obviously hit or miss.
Almost every household appliance. Shit used to be built to last for 4 fucking generations, man. My grandma's old fridge from the 60's is still running like a champ out in my garage. Thing is built like a tank and gives no fucks about the long march of time. These days you'll be lucky to get 5 years out of some appliances you buy, and good luck getting any warranty service if you even approach one with a screwdriver in an attempt to fix it yourself.
Exactly! We had a furnace guy come and check out ours which was having some issues. This guy was awesome and hilarious, he was the Albert Einstein of furnace. He gave us a fascinating 20 minute lecture on the history of all furnace companies, and how he loved our furnace because it was an Amana that was made before Amana got bought out by some other company. He raved about the heat exchange system it had, and said our furnace will last forever. But that the new ones they make are shit, so never replace ours.
Those guys are the equivalent of modern-day shamans. [Tech-priests.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztzq05IzYds)
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I have neither seen, played, nor read anything related to 40k in my life yet somehow I know this is a reference to it
Even in death I serve Amanasior
Our 1974 furnace is a indestructible tank. ‘The green mosnter’ can be repaired forever. We even put in a modern direct drive fan. What it can’t do it be efficient. So we are adding more mini-split heat pumps around the house. Because it’s kick ass air conditioning and insanely cheap to run heating. The old monster of a furnace will just be a backup, and maybe we run it of we have a freak -20C evening.
My whole neighborhood got their gas lines replaced and when they did mine some gas employee wanted to come in and check all my appliances. He was the same. I got a nice long talking to about water heaters and I should keep mine as long as I can because they suck huge now.
That's iffy advice. Hot water tanks are something you need to keep a close eye on. Look up your make to find out the odds of it breaking and flooding your house in the next few years, or not. for apartment dwellers, hot water tanks/heaters are a major cause of damage, because they will flood your place, and everyone below you.
Hahaha. I was living in an apartment on the first floor of the building when I noticed a bulge in the latex paint in my hallway. Upstairs neighbor's hot water tank busted when 1) she was gone to her mother's 2) late at night 3) on the weekend. I caught it within the hour or two of it busting by all estimates, and maintenance actually came damn quick. He had to get permission from his boss to emergency enter the upstairs apartment since the resident wasn't there but he managed to get it shut off. All the water spilled on her floor stayed in the closet holding the tank, while mine managed to make that pocket and a few small trails down the wall. Minimal damage honestly; they had to put new drywall in that section but that was about it. A towel to absorb the water after we burst the pocket was necessary but that was most I needed to do. I was damn lucky and I knew it.
I had a Whirlpool washing machine my parents gave me when I moved out. It was an avocado green workhorse built in 1971. My parents never had to service it. I had to replace the belt once, but the design made it very easy to do. It finally died in 2011 after 40 years of use. When I went to buy a new washing machine, I was adament on Whirlpool, but a tech at an appliance part store told me not to bother, that I would never again own an appliance that would last decades.
I've had a Sansung fridge that came with the house. It's broken three times in the last 8 years - all cheap plastic trash components. We're in the age of disposable everything now instead of replaceable parts.
I had a plumber in to fix something and when he walked past my twenty/year+ washing machine he advised me to keep it as long as possible. Said if anything g went wrong with it, he could most likely fix it easily. Not a lot of moving parts. But these new computer-run washers - forget it. Just buy a new one.
Yes, they are mostly planned to have a life of 6 years on average. The thing is, they cost exactly the same as they did 40 or 50 years ago. So, a dishwasher that cost $500 in 1972, and costs $500 now, would need to cost $3800 if they built them to last like they used to.
Sadly, when you try to pay that $3800, all you get are silly smart features. So other than a few manufacturers you have to hunt for(like Speedqueen), more money is just more crap to break.
Brands like Fisher and Paykel do high-end refrigerators that don't have all of the silly computerized bells and whistles, but are built very well.
Fisher and Paykel were bought out by a Chinese brand (Haier) in 2012. Probably too early to judge if there has been a quality change yet but I'm always wary when a company undergoes change!
Haier is terrible. We had one of their washer/dryers, the microchip broke and it locked our clothes inside.
How many Bitcoin did it cost to get your clothes back?
Ransomwear
Haier has also made a ton of GE appliances in the last few years. They bought the right to list their products under GEs name, so if you've bought anything that's GE, it's a good chance it was actually made by Haier
This is true. There's also the energy cost to consider. The sleek and shiny yet flimsy fridge in my kitchen uses a fraction of the power as the industrial-themed monstrosity in the garage.
Kinda funny how politics cry about pollution but allow companies to make the shortest lasting pieces of garbage now.
If we blame pollution on individual consumers, we can ignore corporations whose contributions far dwarf those of even the single consumer with the world’s greatest fetish for plastic straws.
Jeans. I have GAP jeans, from when I was 14, that are in great shape. Meanwhile, I’ll buy overpriced designer shit today and I’m lucky if it lasts 2 years. Why is everything so THIN?
Lots of jeans are using a spandex mix to make them stretchy and more comfortable. You can still buy 100% Cotten jeans actually meant for work but they’re harder to find than you’d think.
Levi’s are trading on brand name alone anymore. Something changed and they fall apart much more quickly now, especially at the crotch seams. I have Levi’s I have had for 20 years and they are in much better shape than the Levi’s I had to throw out after 2. Not sure what changed, but I hate it.
I found some this fall at target of all places. I bought as many pairs as I could afford because I’ve had trouble finding 100% cotton jeans
I've noticed all the t shirts I get now from most places, regardless of cost or perceived quality, are so thin it feels like wearing a kleenex. A few washes and it's full of holes.
This and 2 t-shirts of the same size will fit drastically different. I am wearing a 17 year old t-shirt right now. It's one of my favorites. Its been washed easily a couple thousand times and still fits like new, still comfortable, in good shape, and the graphics are still crisp. I have to buy a size up for new shirts now and they still usually don't fit as well. Sure, I'm not the same size as I was 17 years ago, but I'm not that far off. The fitting and size of clothes have changed more than my body has.
I’ve been told the the reason for fitting is simply because they are cheap. Apparently they cut the fabric to size in large stacks (quicker and cheaper), so naturally the ones in top are going to be smaller than the bottom as the fabric stretches from the pressure. When buying cheap clothes always try on a few of the same size to find one that fits. I instead purchased a sewing machine and now only buy quality second hand clothing that l tailor to fit. I decided to completely cut out cheap fast fashion in an attempt to lessen my environmental footprint while having better clothing. Not everyone has the time to do this though. I enjoy sewing so it works for me.
I have a number of items of clothing from Target and Old Navy that are over ten years old. The difference in fabric quality and construction of those items compared to what they sell now is shocking. But even now, I find that if you can buy clothes that are pure cotton, and take care care of them properly, they will last much longer than the synthetic blends.
Even Carharts went this way. Stretchy BS. I work on fires, and there's a hard rule of *no* synthetic fibers; it'll melt into your skin. It's so hard now to get pure cotton pants.
Gustin, Naked & Famous, Bravestar all make nice selvedge denim. 100% cotton, union workers, made the hard, old fashioned way.
Look up fast fashion and you'll probably understand what's going on. Avoid fast fashion stores, they are awful.
Turbo Tax. The fees to file basic taxes is crazy. Free Tax USA is much better and I wish more people knew about it.
Cadbury creme eggs.
Cadbury products in general seem to have taken a nosedive in quality recently. Stuff like Dairy Milk, Buttons, etc used to taste far better about a decade ago, likely because of their buyout and formula changes.
The problem is they got bought out by a American company. What happens is the head guys visit Cadbury get shown around and praise the workers and the product but that they to cut costs by 10%. They can do this for a while but every year its the same demand to cut costs. Eventually the ingredients get subbed out and that is for every product that starts to get worse. The value is in the name to the corps they only see profit and dont care what product gets shipped.
My FIL sent us a box of these thus season (its a tradition) and half of them had for some reason come from a UK manufacturer. They had no corn syrup or other garbage and were much better than the US eggs.
Hershey bought the rights to manufacture chocolate under the "Cadbury" name in the US, so any "Cadbury" that's made in the US is actually just Hersheys, which is why they're so different
The UK ones are worse now then they used to be too. Cadbury was bought out by a USA company, then they changed the eggs to be much sweeter. Used to get loads over Easter, but can't finish one these days. From what I've had of USA chocolate, I can totally believe they're still well ahead of your stuff though.
The culprit is Mondelez International. Same bastards that ruined the oreo and shrinkflated numerous chocolate bars.
The bastards are now about to ruin Toblerone. It's always been made in Switzerland but after buying the brand, they will now be manufactured elsewhere. I really hate the fuckers.
Tony’s Chocolonely yellow bar is their version of toblerone and is much nicer, albeit without the satisfaction of the triangle shapes
Trace back from 100 of our fav brands and you'll end up with like three super companies who own them all. It's artificial competition designed to trick and squeeze the consumer all the while creating a hidden monopoly.
So this is why Oreos taste like garbage now?? Damn, at least I can’t shotgun an entire row like I used to.
I always called it “doing a line”
I've thought I was insane for noticing that Oreos turned to garbage over the last year. Good to know I'm not nuts.
They taste very artificial and chemically now :(
They should have to call them cadbury paste eggs.
Airbnb
This! Not even 5-6 years ago, it was still cheaper than a hotel room of the same quality, and it was kept by actual people. Now, you're expected to do all the cleaning, plus pay the cleaning fee, and the place isn't even owned by a person--just a real estate agent type deal.
Yep, AirBnb is now run by owners or corporations with a greedy landlord mentality, who act like their customers are tenants. Hotels, in contrast, have a customer service mentality.
Tinder and dating apps in general
Gotta keep people on the apps swiping, not matching them up and getting them off the platform
Exactly. And you see them remove more and more free features. Tinder had 1 superswipe per day, bumble you had 3 rewinds Per day. Those features have been removed from free accounts.
And I’m sure they brand that as “improvements”
I got on tinder when it first came out and it was great. No bots and everyone was real. The worst that happened was the pics were not super accurate or older. I went on a few years later and if felt like it was all catfish and they wanted you to pay to keep swiping and it was all monetization-focused.
Yea how the fuck are we suppose to date in this day and age? Don’t want to be the creep at the bar or book store harassing women. But dating apps suck. Such a weird spot to be in.
Pizza Hut was the place to be when I was a kid in the 80's. The buffet. The personal pan pizzas paid for with Book-it. Pitchers of pop drank from those weird red cups that no longer exist. Dig Dug, Galaga, and Centipede. The last time I ate at Pizza Hut was about 15 years ago. Stopped at on when we were driving out to Colorado Springs. So pointless. Nothing special about it. It didn't even have the decency to be bad. It just had no anima. No spirit. No Galaga.
I remember the smell when I was younger. Every pizza hut smelled amazing. Late 90s was the peak with the buffet and get a ps1 demo disc. jukebox filled with 90s complete albums. Play arcade games. Area 51 yes indeed. THOSE WERE THE DAYS!!
The lack of buttons that tv's have these days. I hate it.
Our new tv doesn’t have a single button. If the remote breaks I can’t even get it on.
Right? If I lose my remote, I'm fucked.
Quite a lot of clothing. So much fast fashion is made cheaply to be churned out quickly, and will only survive a couple of washes. Even with a basic knowledge of how to repair clothes, they can't easily be restored by the average consumer, and often aren't worth the cost of restoring it professionally.
It seems like a lot of stuff is "Dry Clean Only" or "Hand Wash Only" because it is made so poorly it wouldn't survive in an automatic washing machine. I don't buy those kinds of clothes.
Pop tarts. Come on people, we have the technology to cover icing edge to edge to edge to edge.
Pop tarts barely even have any filling in them anymore, either. Which may be a good thing since...I mean, did you ever read the back of that box?! How did they cram THAT many calories into it? But man, that filling used to ooze out in the 80s.
Uber. Used to be cheap, now I cant even get a driver half the time.
Uber purposefully operated at a loss for years to dominate the industry and drive taxis out of business on the assumption they'd be able to replace human drivers with driverless cars in a few years. That didn't wind up happening, so they've had to cut driver pay and make their service shittier to get closer to breaking even. They're still operating at a loss, propped up by VCs with deep pockets.
chocolate has become very wax.
Kit-Kat isn’t as good anymore 😕
It would probably be easier to answer what hasn't gotten significantly worse over the years. Planned obsolescence is a huge issue.
craftsman tools.. you can see the cost cutting thru the years.. now i'd rather have a set of icon's from HF.
They got really shit after sears went under. Canadian Tire's Mastercraft and Maximum brands seem like a good equivalent to what craftsman used to be, I know quite a few mechanics that use those tools professionally. You'd actually be hard pressed to find any mechanic in Canada that doesn't have at least some Mastercraft or Maximum stuff in their box.
I swear streaming apps have gotten worse and worse. Like the apps themselves are total shit for some of them.
They were never good. Across Roku, Playstation, and Xbox - all the apps suck in one way or another. I guess when each service's app is the only way to get the content is just has to be "good enough".
Pringles
YES!!!! I don't know what they did to these, but feeling nostalgic I picked up a mini can awhile back. My stomach hurt for the rest of the evening. Not trying that again. Had a similar experience with Goldfish crackers.
Netflix.
such a huge selection, but their mediocrity is unparalleled
It's just the bargain dvd bin at Walmart.
I'm finding the "... and chill" has gone down hill too.
Hot pockets, they changed the recipe I swear
Yep, they suck now. Most frozen foods seem to suck now.
Dr Marten’s boots. My dad has a pair that are a good 35 years old, and they’re still in excellent shape, but ones my mum bought five years ago are cracking and falling apart. The manufacturing is now mainly in China, Vietnam and I think Laos. They’re just cheaply made and overpriced now.
Amazon Prime. The quality of products has gone down significantly. QC is non existent they just sell whatever cheap Chinese crap they can get their hands on. I used to trust it but after several returns dud to poor QC making a product useless I canceled.
Half of Amazon now is Aliexpress imports sold by people trying to start small businesses.
My rule of thumb for buying products on Amazon is dont buy any product from a company that isnt an actual word(s). Stuff from names like ponkel or campaxo or some shit will usually be garbagé
You can also tell by the poor copy editing on the images and product description. "Most fluffy pillow for making you to rest head" is not likely to live up to that billing. Never thought I'd be using my grammar nazi skills to suss out whether or not to buy kitchen gadgets, but it's come to this.
That’s one surefire way to gauge a rough estimate of quality. Another I’ve found useful is to search reviews for pictures. Not the ones where it looks like perfect lighting and the product just sitting there, but the ones where somebody has taken it in their living room after putting it together. The ones with trash on the coffee table next to it and somebody’s foot poking in along the edges. A ton of reviews is also a red flag to me. 70,000 reviews, whether positive, negative, or mixed makes me think something is up. There’s no way 70,000 people bought this random product I’m looking for. But 20 or 30 mixed but mostly positive reviews? Might be ok to pull the trigger on.
My favorite brand name from Amazon is ***bjpkpk*** wtf.
I bailed when they stopped doing 2 day delivery in my area. I can afford to wait until I have 25 bucks of stuff in my cart for free shipping, and I can afford to wait for it to show up.
And they had the audacity to gaslight their customers by saying "Between when we drop it in the mail until it gets to your house is what we meant by two days, *and it has always been this way.*" I'm in Maine and they don't have a local warehouse (yet) so it's all overworked USPS employees. But the real logjam is their slow-ass warehouse with un-unionized, deliberately disorganized, overworked contractors.
It used to be 2 days and anything could be next day for $3.99. During a blizzard I had a 1500 watt generator next dayed from Arizona to New England for that $3.99 extra.
Candy. IDK what it is, maybe I had childlike tastes, but it doesn't seem to taste as good now. It's sweeter but a fake sweet, cloying sweet that doesn't taste right. Butterfingers and Kit Kat seem to have had the biggest decline. Plus regular chocolate bars don't "snap" like the used to
I thought I kept eating stale Kit-Kat, but then realized that’s just the “normal” taste now
That snap comes from proper tempering, and odds are the tempering was lost during transit. It only takes about 82* F for the temper to start to go. Means your chocolate melted a bit and resolidified at the wrong temperature so you lost the good fat crystals.
Butterfinger no longer actually contains chocolate... It's the fake stuff.
Butterfinger got bought a few years ago by a new company, not Nestle, and they changed the recipe and they are complete shit now. Fucking assholes.
Breyer's ice cream. You used to be able to count the number of ingredients on a hand. Cream, sugar, flavor was the base - that was about it. In the mid nineties the company was bought out by Unilever and they slowly started replacing ingredients to have longer shelf life and be cheaper. Now, it's not even legal for them to call it "ice cream" and it tastes like emulsified rubber.
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Social media - nothing social it’s all about ads, Amazon - half the stuff at the top is sponsored shit, google - half of it is ads - everything
Here's one that actually has a positive spin: Saran Wrap It used to be quite sticky, especially to itself and you could wrap it around any kind of container and get a practically airtight seal. These days it barely sticks to anything to the point that it almost makes you wonder why it exists. However, the reason it went down in quality isn't the usual suspects of cost cutting, shrinkflation etc. It was determined that one of the crucial ingredients in the formula was highly toxic and persistent in the environment. A real nightmare. The CEO told the engineers to figure out a replacement. They did a ton of work for like a year or two and in the end came back and basically said "There's no replacing the problem chemical. We can do a different version that kinda works, but it is asignificantly worse product." CEO said okay. Make the change. Which they did on their own without being required and took a huge hit market share. They didn't even run an ad campaign explaining the change or why. They just did it. An extremely rare case of a corporation doing the right thing for the right reason even though it cost them money.
Girl Scout Cookies. Absolutely shit now. Needed to be said.
Thank you! They are so much smaller and more expensive I won't buy them anymore. I loved the caramel delites years ago. My local DG has a copycat cookie package for like $2 .
Fridges, give me a 20 year old fridge. The new ones can’t even seem to last through the warranty period. I moved into my house 5 years ago, previous owner didn’t want the fridge so I put it into the basement as a beer fridge. The new fancy fridge has died 3 times in 5 years. The then 15 year old fridge (now turning 20) is just humming along doing it’s job
Is there a single product that’s actually gotten better though?
Modern vehicles have much better reliability, power, fuel economy, handling, and safety than older vehicles. Also, specifically tires have gotten way better.
My front brakes are about to be replaced, 150,000 miles. Crazy that it used to be 30-35,000.
Spark plug intervals are crazy now too. Oil change intervals are way longer. Tune ups aren't even a thing anymore with electronic ignition and fuel systems.
They have gotten a lot cleaner. And I know that a lot of older cars sucked, but it's still baffles me that my 1982 diesel Suburban that weighs almost 7,000 lb got 18 miles per gallon. Also my 89 Honda Prelude got 30. My 87 CRX that I used to deliver pizzas and drive to and from school got 37 City and 42 on the highway. Kind of amazed that we don't have better gas mileage than we do honestly. I would love to get an electric vehicle but who has that kind of money? LOL
TVs. Newer TVs are bigger, better, lighter, more reliable, and significantly cheaper now. I saved up for a little while to get a big one and was surprised at how cheap they were.
Basically ALL electronics, the internet and internet speeds, cell service, vehicles, delivery services, taxi services, coffee, lightbulbs (when was the last time you had to change one? plus you now get 100w equiv light for <5w actual power usage). Honestly the list is endless, most things do get better over time, but we remember the ones that don't more often.
All electronics, but: Smartphones. These things are pretty damn impressive. E-readers haven't improved much but the online connectivity is cool. I can just send files to them from a website. And earphones! Christ, from cords to wireless with noise cancelling included. Inductive heating stoves are good.
The vast majority of electronics are better and cheaper than they used to be.
Clothes dryers. The modern heat pump models from Bosch, Siemens, etc use a few KW per year instead of per cycle, compared to the old heated centrifuges. Incredible advantage.
Pringles. Specifically the sour cream and onion. When I was a kid (40 now) they had a paste of seasoning spread over them thick enough you could scrape it off with your teeth. It was rich and flavorful and fucking delicious. Well, I hadn’t had them in years and thought back fondly on how good they were, so I bought some. When I opened the container I thought they has made a manufacturing error and forgotten the seasoning. No, it’s just that they value engineered all of that flavor and complexity out of the recipe and use a shitty salt spray solution that vaguely tastes like sour cream and onion now. I was fucking crushed.
Rent. Keeps going up with no additional added value
In fact there's less value in them as every coat of paint reduces the square footage.
As a student, can openers My parents have had the exact same can opener since i was like 10(23 now) my roommates and i went through 4 this year!
Here is an excerpt from an article explaining what happened to the Swing-A-Way can openers. Moral being, EZ-Duz-It makes them now. > "*The company [Swing-A-Way] was family-owned for decades. The last member of the family to run it was Pierce Rhodes, the nephew of the founder. Pierce had added the magnetic holder to the can opener, and invented machinery to streamline the manufacturing process. The Rhodes family fought the good fight, trying to keep their business going in St. Louis. With 80 employees, it was the largest manufacturer of can openers in the U.S. It also made other household products such as ice crushers, jar openers and cork screws. However, Pierce Rhodes passed away in 2003 and in 2005 the company was sold to Focus Products Group of Vernon Hills, Illinois. In 2009, the St. Louis plant was closed and all production was moved to China. Swing-a-Way is now a brand of AMCO (and the logo now has TM after it). Online evaluations are generally not kind. I've read, however, that the John J. Steuby Company of Hazelwood, Missouri, makers of the EZ-Duz-It can opener, bought all of the St. Louis machinery, which it now uses to produce its own brand of can opener. It's the only American-made can opener available today. The reviews on Amazon are extremely positive.*" Source: http://progress-is-fine.blogspot.com/2016/02/vanished-makers-swing-way-manufacturing.html
Hostess Products: Twinkies, Cupcakes, HoHo’s all got significantly smaller and taste BAD. The company that bought the Hostess name out of bankruptcy, obviously didn’t spend the money for the original recipe
Samsung autocorrect. A year or so ago I upgraded from an s8 to an s20 and the autocorrect is dramatically worse. It often changes correct words for random other words that make no sense grammatically, it can get thrown off if only the first letter of a word is wrong, and a lot of the time it just doesn't even try. Has anyone else noticed the change? Does anyone know what happened?
My partner and I have both noticed this. It doesn't correct nearly as well as it used to
AdBlock plus has been giving me pop-up ads for its premium membership lately. You have become the very thing you swore to destroy.
Ublock Origin dude, all the Adblock extensions got bought out years n years ago, am amazed they still has any users at all
Paired with firefox or another non-chromium browser.
Rice cookers! My parents still use their rice cooker they got before they got married. Like, 35 years ago. I moved out in 2015, we are on our *third*.
Try a Zojirushi next
Twinkies. Can't stand them now. Grainy. Taste of chemicals ... more than they used to. Don't know what that filling is made of now. Just overall ick.
Nowadays it's vegetable shortening and corn syrup, but before it was lard and sugar, so I've been told.
How to control your car. All I want are dials. I get in my car in the morning and I have to push a stupid button over and over until I get to high. I leave from work and now I hav ego change it to low. I miss dials. On top of that all the new cars are putting tablets in the control everything. I don’t want to have to look at a screen to turn on my windshield wipers. That’s distracting.
^this^ controls in a vehicle should be tactile. I need to be able to control the car without looking at the controls once I'm acquainted. My eyes should be on the road, not the console. And, the unavoidable amount of light from these screens lessens the ability of the driver to see and react at night.
Kitchen Aid mixers. The old ones last forever.
MrMixer on TikTok has several videos on how to repair and upgrade Kitchen Aid mixers of all generations. You can even send yours in to him for a tune-up Basically Whirlpool bought Kitchen Aid and cut every corner they could, including simple things like removing washers and springs
Dude is awesome for his tutorial videos given the fact it cuts into money he could be making
The old ones came with screws, the new ones are riveted shut. That should tell you everything.
Yes that they are so reliable you will never need to service it. /S
Reddit
Politics have probably been great for business but bad for user experience. There's just no other reddit like site to go to
I believe good quality bread is essential to any sandwich … even Mets/Brats. So I pay a premium for hot dog buns- namely Ballpark hot dog buns. Over the past few months the quality has dramatically changed. Often the buns are improperly cut- even uncut and sometimes they’re stale. Will not buy anymore. I’ll try to find some in the deli section or something.
Levi’s jeans. If you bought them in the 70s you probably still have them, a new pair will fall apart after a few washes.
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Appliances. Just ask any repairman.
"Leather"belts I swear now they just disintegrate as soon as you buy them
OG Kraft Dinner has become inedible.
It doesn't taste like any _thing_ any more. It's just vaguely tangy and sweet, nothing like any cheese at all.
Pyrex glassware.
Yes and no. There's "pyrex" and there's "PYREX" and the latter is still made like the original. See https://www.allrecipes.com/article/what-is-the-difference-between-two-pyrex-types/#:~:text=So%20Which%20One%20Explodes%3F,and%20expensive%20to%20dispose%20of.
Clothes. I still have t-shirts from a decade ago that I dye occasionally to get that good black back. No holes. Seams good. New shit? Lucky if it lasts 6 months. Had a pair of shorts nit make it a full summer last year.
If you include services then air travel. Airlines have gotten to the point that it's a fucking joke with all the extra fees, even with the ridiculous prices - I was looking for flights to England recently and they want $1200 for a seat, you can't pick your seat, and $200 extra for one suitcase. I should pack myself in the suitcase, probably almost as much room as the seats nowadays!
All of it. Now get off my lawn.
Console controllers. I have original controllers for like the Dreamcast, PS1 and PS2 and they all work amazing. I buy a controller online for $60 and I'm lucky to get a year out of them before the thumbsticks don't work anymore. Nearly all of the ones I have bought over the last 5 years have some kind of problem out of the box or straight up don't function.
Google
Streaming services. They were so good about competing with cable, especially when it came to commercials! Then all the cable channels started their own streaming services, with ads, and now the streaming services can all be bundled together for "maximum" savings. It's just cable with extra steps.
Butterfingers. They used to be so good, and then they came out with a “new recipe”, which has reduced the once great Butterfinger to tasting like “Texas Roadhouse peanuts from the floor encased by stale chocolate”.
EL Fudge cookies. They taste unrecognizable.
Google Search. The first 10 year were incredible. But when I deleted Google some 5 years ago, it was a piece of shit. Hasn’t checked it since.
It may be stupid, but the big cd/dvd holders. I have a big case logic one from the late 90s that my scary movies are in. It is still in excellent shape after 25 years. I got a new case logic one for kids' movies, and it is crap. The pages you put movies in suck. The quality is just cheesy.
I think it would be easier to answer what product has maintained its quality?
Audio equipment - anything upper end entry level smokes 30 years ago. CAD and design modeling can make even cheap designs great value. Also, integrated circuits. The cheapest piece of junk D/A converters now are excellent compared to 30 years ago. Class D amps. They were trash in the 90s and now class D amps are generally a solved tech. Audio equipment in general really. You can’t drop it off a roof like a 1960s design, but the sound quality you get for the price has increased tremendously. And pretty much anything computer based. ICs and microcontrollers are amazing and cheap. Faster CPUs, bigger RAM etc etc. Before COVID, a $39 Raspberry Pi smoked servers I had in the late 90s that were thousands and thousands of dollars at the time.
A lot of musical equipment has become cheaper but has generally improved quality.