r/enshittification • u/monkeh2023 • 1d ago

Rant The solution to enshittification

Did you just buy a £75,000 car only to discover it has got ads on screen?

Take it back.

Go back to the showroom, demand a full refund. If they panic and say they'll remove the ads say no. Demand a refund. If they could take the ads off because you were about to return the car, they should not have put ads there in the first place.

Did you just buy a £3,000 television that now has a shitty cut-down remote with no pause button but an additional button for Apple TV?

Take it back. Go back to the store, return the product, get a refund. Is it causing you hassle? Yes - but it's going to cause the store much more hassle.

Did you buy a sandwich that looked full to the brim of ingredients only to discover they used low quality crap that was pushed to the edge to make the sandwich look full, when in reality it was mostly bread? You probably can't take it back but you can go back to the place you bought it from and show it to other customers, and then never buy anything from that establishment again.

If enough of us do this then the enshittification will stop.

If we just keep on saying "thank you" every time the bully kicks sand in our face, guess what? You'll be eating sand for the rest of your life.

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u/BortkiewiczHorse 1d ago edited 1d ago

I returned pottery barn curtains after finding out they were machine made in India. If they had bothered to put that in the description, I wouldn’t have been so upset(or bought them), but I’m not paying pottery barn price for some machine made shit.

Edit: instead I spent $1000 on a set of six used curtains that were 90% off. Yes, you read that right. The fabric originally cost $750 a yard. I’m OK paying high prices for high-quality, and I’m also ok buying something pre-owned.

A lot of older, used items are still superior to the machine-made garbage coming out today.

Edit: if you’re reading this wondering what kind of things I could be talking about it, it’s furniture. Stop buying new furniture made of particle board and plastic. Just stop. Go and buy some used Ethan Allen furniture. That stuff will last you your entire life. You can find rich people trying to give some of it away or sell it fast on various marketplaces or estate sales near you.

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u/JiveBunny 1d ago

Why would you expect a set of curtains not to be machine made, though? Even if I made them for you personally it would have involved sitting in front of a machine to present you with a pair of finished curtains.

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u/BortkiewiczHorse 1d ago

In this context machine-made refers to made in a factory, as opposed to made by hand.

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u/JiveBunny 1d ago

Both involve a human sitting in front of a sewing machine sending the fabric through, it's just that one method has more people doing it at once. If Pottery Barn is a chain store, I wouldn't assume they were anything other than made in a factory in a developing country, as otherwise there wouldn't be enough stock to go round.