r/enshittification

I live in a somewhat rural area (used to be very rural) and in the last 2-3 years almost every business has started locking their bathrooms. This wouldnt be so terrible if you could get them unlocked, but 90% of the time I ask an employee will say "both bathrooms are out of order" "they're for employees only (these bathrooms were previously for customer use specifically)" or "we don't have the key". The other day I stopped at 3 different places trying to find a functional bathroom before giving up and going home. In two of these places I made a purchase before asking about the bathroom.

I'm not mad at employees that don't get paid enough to deal with the bathrooms, but I AM mad at employers that won't staff their businesses well enough to maintain bathrooms for customers. I'm also mad at people who have no respect for others and trash public restrooms to the point that businesses would rather just close them down.

Bathroom locks and codes have been a thing in cities for a while but it's now crept through the suburbs into rural areas I guess, except you can't even get a key or a code most of the time! What am I supposed to do? Go home to piss in the middle of my errands? It feels like people are being discouraged from being in public except strictly to purchase things.

What I am essentially saying the "social media big tobacco moment" is going to further solidify Meta's agenda by justifying pushing identity verification.

This happened today:

I searched on for three different items between 10 und 20 euros each. Each item said "FREE delivery Wednesday, 1 April on orders dispatched by Amazon over €35. Order within 5 hrs 37 mins".

All three items were shipped by Amazon. In the sidebar of each item it showed "Your order qualifies for FREE Delivery" once all three items were in the shopping basket.

After proceeding to checkout and choosing a payment method, the summary of costs still showed "free shipping", but the delivery date for the order had changed to April 20, so almost three weeks later than advertised at the individual product page.

On the same page they then offer free Prime shipping for March 31 or Prime shipping for the costs 4.99 Euros at the same date.

IMHO this is borderline illegal.

What other decades did it occur in and how was it stopped?

Excellent article by a legacy relative of Reese's who found out his family recipe is no longer using cocoa in their peanut butter cups or anything else they produce. This seems to be a trend with other food manufacturers. Replacing cocoa with sugar and oil makes it unhealthy and inedible, in many consumers' opinions.

I ordered pizza hut delivery earlier today. they used door dasher for the delivery this time. The delivery driver shows up without the 2 liter that was part of my order. They don't speak English were going to leave and they show me that the app doesn't even show what's in my order. So i try to call the store. But of course it only lets me call a pizza hut CALL CENTER which puts me on hold until they finally answer. THEN they transferred me to the store which answers immediately. the person at the store doesn't speak Spanish so they try to find someone there who does. The poor delivery driver finally says that she will make an exception (using her phone to translate with me) and go to the store to get the 2 liter. the dasher isn't going to get paid for the extra trip so when she got back i gave her a small cash extra tip.

At least the pizza was good this time! otherwise, i think id probably never get pizza hut again after THAT experience.

The downside to having brand and product continuity is that enshitification becomes more difficult to hide.

Picking up long-time favorites is more and more depressing these days. For example, their pizzas are smaller with more crust now, or completely overhauled to new vendors. The fig cookies changed their formula for the worse. And their sparkling water bottles are much skinnier now, too.

Anyone have a TJ's favorite that changed recently?

18 years ago I picked up a PS3 and online play was free so could play online games like CoD or GTA with friends no problem and no fee, while the PS+ service cost a small amount and would give you 3 monthly games for free and cloud saving.

Then in the PS4 era they thought fuck it, make them all pay for ps+ if they want to play their online games, so now to continue playing the games I bought for online play that I could play for free, now I needed a 40 euro a year PS Plus subscription for the right, also 3 "Free" games, most of which I had 0 interest in playing even for free.

Then they ramped it up in the PS5 era, offering no extra benefits but the price went up, also included 2 higher tiers of PS+ for even more money, then the price went up again.

Then today, I download the "totally free and not 70 euros a year" game and it's PGA 2K25, a golf game... so I thought, I'll give it a try and maybe play online with friends a few rounds, then before the main menu I'm hit with a QR code and a link with a 6 digit code and a 30 minute countdown telling me I MUST make a 2K sports account with my real email that I have to confirm, in order to play online, offline, tutorial, ANYTHING.

So I'm now at the point that I pay an increasingly high amount to play games online with friends and these games don't let me even fucking play them unless I sign up to their services so they can sell my details to skim a bit more money off the top.

FUCK OFF! I miss when playing a game was jamming a cartridge into my N64 and enjoying my life... for free.

Demoralizing. Should not happen. Discourages me from using it.

I don't know what the actual changes were, but there has been a dramatic, shitty change in between the last two times I've sampled from a can of spaghettios.

My autistic son was not eating the can we had for lunch, so I looked more closely. The sauce is noticeably more watery than it ever has been before, very similar to the dirt-cheap generic brand we tried once. I taste-tested one bite, and there was no comfort in this comfort food. It tastes completely different. He was right to reject it.

That is pretty much the only option we've had that he'll reliably eat for something that can be carried with us without refrigeration for when he wouldn't eat a meal wherever it was we were going. And now he won't eat that. Going out to dinner or out to a restaurant with him now carries a huge risk that he won't be able to eat anything, and we no longer have a backup option.

Fuck enshittifcation.

I feel like since 2020 store websites have just stopped being convenient. I'm willing to admit that I'm an old body that still likes to go into stores and I'd rather just buy it and take it home the same day vs staying home ordering it online and waiting on it for about a week or two. I go to somewhere like Walmart and they don't have it in store okay fine, they have it online. But now every single store has a marketplace on their website because we have to all act like Amazon now and the filtering system feels worse too like less options for sort and filter (depends on the site) so it forces you to scroll through dozens of extra crap that's not relevant. Speaking of irrelevant, it will also put in items in your search that aren't remotely related at all at times! Horribly slow loading times is a new thing I've noticed.

Like I know store websites haven't always been the best, but online shopping feels so, so much worse and irritating now.

Their Sausalito cookie sucked and their Newport was like a Chips Ahoy cookie!! Terrible!

"Thank you for being a Prime Video Ad Free subscriber. We're writing to let you know that on April 10, 2026, Prime Video Ad Free will become Prime Video Ultra with enhanced viewing features, and your subscription price will increase to $4.99/month."

It's like Bezos read Doctorow's book as a "how to" guide

Sony is reportedly testing dynamic pricing on its PlayStation storefront that changes the price tag of over 190 games | TechRadar

Edit -Link and notes from the updated source article.

The last 3 out of 4 times I've purchased milk, it has been sour straight from the store. Different stores each time too (Two times from a Kroger affiliate and once from Walmart). Don't know if I'm just having bad luck or if this is a trend.

When I was younger, I played Plants vs Zombies. When it first came out, the game would let you play till the second adventure and then demand you pay to keep playing. My parents never let me pay for games back in the day, so I never finished the game.

Years later I found out that the game had been fully released on mobile. So I downloaded it and finished the entire game. There were options to watch ads and stuff for some things like the zen garden which probably didn't exist when it first released. But it wasn't very intrusive and I had a good time playing a game I hadn't seen in like 10 years.

I uninstalled it after the first time I finished playing it. But recently, I wanted to replay the game and lo and behold there were ads everywhere. You finish a level? Watch an ad. You want to play a mini game? Watch an ad. And that wasn't even the worst part. There is a last line of defense in the game where each lane has lawnmowers that are rigged to go off if a zombie steps on it. You now have to watch ads to have those lawnmowers

What are they even trying to do here? This game was fully released ten years ago. All they had to do was migrate the code to a mobile platform. Once they did that, their job was done. Why on earth do they need to make such shitty changes that only make the player experience worse?!

I know this is on the very low end of issues. But it annoys me that even my nostalgia is being milked by companies.

Like, you could ACTUALLY find reposts and IDENTICAL copies of images ??? They fucking got rid of it for… lens bullshit that finds similar but not really images ??? Ohhh but its better at identifying products for you to buy because thats what we fucking used it for 🙄 ALSO it fucking stops working out of principle if it detects nudity or violence. wanna see if anyone is reposting your artwork? lol go fuck yourself idiot

Google used to keep legacy search hidden but it was still there.. then they quietly axed it. Yandex and bing img search worked for months after google’s was gone but now they are using the same ai fucking stupid bullshit lens search.

I'm buying a television for only the second time in my fairly long life, and I'm paralyzed by enshittifear, to the point I've put it off for months; and other devices will follow, as a lot of units I've had for a long time are reaching end-of-life.

It would be great if each time I bought something, I could tell company X (Samsung?), "I was going to buy your [device] but bought another because of your [bullshit]", and then buy something less enshittified (whatever the fsck that would be).

Maybe we should be starting systematic boycotts, with hash tags and things, against particularly bad companies? Start a little list, like a petition? "I bought X rather than Y, because Y is enshittified"?

Just spitballing.

If I am forced to participate in consumerism, I want to get some additional mileage out of it.

It's funny that years ago I used evaluate such products almost entirely on positives: reliability and other features. But with some exceptions, modern tech is pretty uniformly reliable; and features are pretty well on par between the top three to five brands in any given sector.

Today I evaluate many gadgets based on the avoidance of negative features: how actively the manufacturer is trying to fsck me over, by showing me ads, spying on me, or requiring a subscription; and yet this is never even in the specs, you have to do detective work.

Sigh.

not exactly a new or novel complaint, but online shopping was cool for literally a few years and then dropshippers came and pissed all over it. i often wonder what percentage of small, local, home-grown clothing businesses online are actually dropshipping fronts because it honestly seems like it's the wide majority of them. having to cross-reference the photos and do a bunch of extra research just to make sure i'm not being sold polyester temu landfill at a 600% markup by some fuckhead who probably learned dropshipping from andrew tate's paid course (seriously, that's a thing) is such a pain in the arse that i don't bother any more.

i can normally clock dropship fashion brands when it's their own website because the sweatshops only churn a finite number of pieces and you start to see the same ones pop up everywhere (and their web design is normally abysmal because... they're not real brands, so why would you put any effort into it) but even apps like vinted and etsy, they have people pretending to be frail old ladies doing handmade crafts in order to trick you into buying bootleg slop. they know what they're doing is just flat-out making the world worse for a few bucks, so they go to increasingly convoluted lengths to hide it. so now i'm on Vinted cross-referencing photos and zooming in to look for signs of AI to check if the individual who claims to have designed the piece even fucking exists. i should not have to do this!

it's outright fraud. in any sane universe it would be illegal. i'm lucky in that i possess the skills and knowledge to be able to identify and verify the tell-tale signs of a cynical dropshipping scheme (usually. most of the time) but let's be honest, it's not supposed to fool me. it's supposed to fool grandma while she's trying to buy a present for her grandson. it's supposed to fool the technologically illiterate, young children, and people looking to get into new hobbies who won't yet know what's good and what's bad.

fuck dropshipping and fuck anyone who does it. if you engage in this practice, you are little more than a travelling snake oil salesman for the digital age. you are morally on par with a call centre scammer.

First time back at Disney World in 15 years. Born in ’78, been maybe five times growing up — enough to have some feelings about the place. My wife had never been, and I was excited to see her reaction. Wanted to watch it land on her the way it did on me as a kid.

It didn’t.

She was polite, but her honest take was basically: people still pay for this? Without the nostalgia baked in from childhood, she couldn’t figure out what the hype was actually about. And honestly, watching her experience it fresh, I get it.

She’s not wrong either. Take away the childhood memories and you’ve got a really expensive, really crowded collection of IP showrooms with short ride times and a $22 churro.

The newer stuff is interesting in a frustrating way. Rise of the Resistance, Tron, Guardians — technically impressive, but they all feel kind of small? The old park sold you on scale. You walked into the Haunted Mansion and the building itself was the ride. Now it’s a screen on a track. Lots of production value, not a lot of wonder.

The classics are mostly held together with duct tape and good vibes at this point. Half the charm of Pirates of the Caribbean is that it still faintly smells like 1973.

What I keep wondering is whether Disney has any plan for when the last people who remember these rides as new get too old to make the trip. The whole thing feels like it’s running on the gap between what people remember feeling and what the park actually delivers these days. That gap is doing a lot of work.

I run a small construction contracting and design business (just myself as the only employee) and in my 8 years of running this business everything has become shittier and shittier. Needed someplace to rant about it.

All of Dewalt's tools, like the drills and saws, have been switched to circuit board switches instead of mechanical switches, meaning everytime one of my tools stops working, there's no way to fix it. Literally have to throw it away.

Started my business using Quickbooks Self-Employed but they intentionally broke the mileage tracking feature of the app last year, in addition to other features, to essentially force everyone over to Quickbooks Online, a much higher cost subscription service which is horribly spammed with ads and AI (despite the fact that I'm paying for it!!!) and is constantly being "upgraded" to break every other feature left. And this is in addition to QB being a putely subscription based service now with no option to buy the software.

Same is true of everything under the Autodesk umbrella including Revit, Autocad, and Civil 3D. You can no longer own a copy of these programs, instead you have to subscribe, which would cost my business over $3500 a year, each!

And the last straw for me which I just found out the other day after doing a firmware update on my HP printer (big mistake), was that HP has now blocked 3rd party ink cartridges from working at all in their printers!

It's hard enough to run and maintain a profitable business without these companies doing everything they can to screw me more and more every year. There's gotta be a breaking point for us as consumers at some point. I'm trying to find alternatives but some of these companies are basically monopolies (Intuit and Autodesk). Anyway, thanks for letting me rant, Reddit. Back to the grind now

Last week after a stomach bug I just wanted a comfort food from my childhood/poor college days. The small single serving Banquet chicken pot pies were what came to mind for some strange reason. They were a big treat since we rarely got them growing up. In our house, my mom thought only “bad moms” served frozen dinners. And we were poor. Other than the occasional frozen pizza if a babysitter was watching us for the evening, she didn’t buy any frozen meals, snacks, or soda. In college we could get maybe 20 for 10 bucks on sale and eat for weeks. After I could eat again, my spouse went out and bought 2 chicken and 2 turkey pot pies. They had the turkey, I had the chicken, both baked in the oven. OMG were they AWFUL! The meat was a gray mystery. The gravy was super runny and just ick. The veggies were diced so tiny and completely flavorless. And they were so tiny. Maybe I’m exaggerating but I swear the diameter of the top wasn’t much bigger than a coffee cup. Had they been the way I remembered I might not have minded the size. As it was, it was just insult to injury. We both were disgusted. My heart goes out to anyone who must eat these things for actual sustenance. Are our memories that bad? Were they always this awful and I just romanticized them from childhood? Or just another beloved product like Progresso soups and Reese’s Cups that have gone to total shit?