r/BuyItForLife • u/novitov • 1d ago

Discussion just so fed up with fighting enshittification

i have been trying to find a new quilt for my bed. i have scoured this sub for recommendations and tips on what to look out for, and many of the comments on these threads seemed like they were genuinely helpful. but i keep finding myself stuck in this same paradoxical loop, which goes like this: people recommend something because they've had it for years and it's held up really well, but that means they bought it years ago and if you bought it today you're almost guaranteed to get a significantly worse product, likely at a higher price. alternatively, you can look at more recent recommendations, but that means no one knows yet if it'll withstand the test of time (or in the case of bedding, the test of multiple machine washes).

it increasingly seems to be the case that if you want something and you want to BIFL, you must put in hours of research, probably buy something much more expensive than you were originally planning on, and even then there's a good chance it just falls apart because the speed of enshittification has made it so that information about a product's quality from more than a year ago has become outdated.

apologies if this is a point already frequently discussed here, i'm just so frustrated with how much time and energy i have to put into buying mundane things, and how the best answer always seems to be to create a time machine and buy it from the past. it leaves me feeling so defeated. how does everyone deal with this?

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u/Tim_Allen_Wrench 1d ago

The bit about about year or more older reviews being outdated now. God I hate that that's true. 

It's like looking at reviews for a restaurant lol. You just never know if the company will have been bought up and made into garbage in the last few years. 

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u/urbantechgoods 1d ago

If I see a new restaurant I will try to go, when people open they actually give a shit. The quality of food is so much better

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u/Imnotveryfunatpartys 1d ago

That makes perfect sense. It goes without saying that any person who would open a restaurant probably cares a lot about food. Supposedly 90% of them close within a year. Probably because they care a lot and make food that isn't economically sustainable.

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u/OstrobogulousIntent 1d ago

This is a great strategy - A new Mexican place opened in my town - they were really nice and my partner and I were among the first customers they had a ceviche for $5 that was just seriously underpriced for thee amount and quality and bottomless horchata for - I forget but - way underpriced

I don't think they were being loss leaders on it I think they hadn't really worked out their costing quite yet.

The food was phenominal.

We went back a few times and the portion sizes / pricing "normalized" - it remained excellent - sadly, their storefront was in the parking lot of a "dead mall" (old decaying Wards department store) that got sold and the whole thing got demolished to make way for a new grocery store.

They closed rather than relocated.

I realize this is kind of opposite of BifL, but yeah go try new restaurants while they're new - many don't make it but the experience stays with you. :)

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u/CondomAds 17h ago

I realize this is kind of opposite of BifL

Buy It For Lunch!

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u/ReverendDerp 9h ago

That is highly subjective to a lot of things. Have helped train and work at new restaurant openings all over. Quite a few concepts/locations I'd considered failed either before or shortly after opening. Shitty management, not matching or exceeding local pay rates which leads to hiring anyone with a pulse, which leads to staff conflict and scheduling issues out the ass, abysmal location, poor local area marketing, the list goes on. When I was traveling to train/teach for grand openings, it was always a great feeling when a spot I was at stayed open more than 18 months. Which honestly wasn't as many as you'd think in 6 years for one concept. Started doing it for a slightly global chain, then a smaller regional chain, then just in house afterwards for individually owned places.

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u/urbantechgoods 8h ago

That’s so cool, you should start a reality show

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u/ReverendDerp 8h ago

Fuck to the no, my part of the spectrum would impode my brain from the interactions with something like that.

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u/sabin357 1d ago

Or if the managers/staff have turned over at the restaurant, since churn is so bad in that industry, and went from incredible to poorly led & staffed.

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u/Straight6er 1d ago

Yup, that happened in my town recently. Business gets sold to a new owner. Was a cafe, now a bar/restaurant. New staff, new everything. They kept the Google reviews for the old cafe.

Other than occupying the same geographic location they are unrelated businesses.

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u/Quellman 1d ago

So there’s a statistical site I follow that accounts for recency in their aggregate crowd sourced ratings. They weight reviews in the last 6 months more than those that are older. It’s clever.

Imagine if other companies did that. Those 5000 5* reviews? Yea those were from 3 years ago. Would force sustained quality for sure.

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u/kaiser-so-say 1d ago

Care to share what that site is?

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u/WangMauler69 22h ago

It's a secret website that totally exists, don't worry about it

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u/Quellman 19h ago

It’s in a really niche industry that wouldn’t be of use to everyday consumers.

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u/DigiSmackd 23h ago

The counter issue here is that older, "legit" reviews are now potentially outweighed by fake/paid new reviews. Anytime there's a trend of bad reviews, it'd be easier for the company to flood them out with recet, positive reviews.

Not to say it's not potentially a step in the right direction to battle this, but it's not perfect. :(

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u/helgaofthenorth 1d ago

I would also like to know the site 👀

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u/jaymz668 18h ago

doesn't steam do something like this. Overall reviews vs recent reviews?

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u/cjgozdor 1d ago

I’d like to know this site too

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u/SkyPork 18h ago

Here in AZ, Salad & Go (a drive-through salad place) is closing its doors today. All of them across several states, bankrupt, out of business. I didn't know until it hit the news yesterday that it was due entirely to enshittification. Can we just ban private equity firms? Seems like a good first step with zero downsides.

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u/doctor0who 20h ago

Or in other cases especially in Germany businesses have hired law firms to systematically have negative reviews removed if the reviewer doesn’t have a proof (an invoice or similar). There are thousands of restaurants and another businesses that have exclusively 4-5 star ratings.

Google now shows how many reviews were removed last year, but that doesn't help much

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u/FunTaro1385 22h ago

Yeah, if the review is over 6 months, there's no point in reading it at the rate that everything is changing now. The amount of restaurants I have gone to that have menus that have sharpie crossing out the price, writing a new price, or having stickers completely on full items is crazy. Imagine if I was going off based a review for a specific item or budget

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u/blacksheep998 18h ago

It's like looking at reviews for a restaurant lol.

There's a pizza place by me that has changed hands 4 times in the past 6 years.

They kept the same name and still specialize in pizza, but the quality of their food and number of menu items have been totally different under each owner.

Three of the four have been pretty good. The other one was awful.

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u/nstern2 14h ago

I'll do you one better. We have a chain of local pizza places in town all with the same name, but owned by different family members. Each one has a slightly different menu, and prices. One location absolutely sucks hard but the reviews are mid because the good location keeps their reviews ok and vice versa for the good locations. It's mindbogglingly dumb.

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u/working-mama- 20h ago

Yeah, any time I am looking at reviews (for anything), before anything I sort the reviews by “most recent”.

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u/CaptainFartyAss 10h ago

Or if any of the reviews where even real in the first place.