We should all be talking about the annoyance economy. It runs on the simple principle that friction is removed for the wealthy and added for everyone else. The more you are willing to pay, the less friction there is, especially once you can hire people to absorb it. Everyone else has to metabolize it on their own, and it's exhausting. That exhaustion is itself a form of extraction, and the $35 tortellini tastes terrible.
100% - i love this. At a certain income level you can literally outsource the cognitive labor of being a consumer, while everyone else just has to absorb it.
When I see a $22 sandwich, I actually consider the entire business and try to calculate their gross and net profit margins, but that’s probably because I’m weird.
You are absolutely correct in your analysis, and I think the 3rd recommended action to leave when you have a viable alternative will make the most significant impact on achieving price/quality balance.
A 4th recommended action I would add is to shop small and patronize local businesses owned by members of your community if you have the means. It may cost 5-10% more in the short term, but the entire community will be better off in the long term.
I really like the small/local business point. It's similar to shopping at more eco-friendly brands, etc. I personally am happy to pay a premium to shop at a local business.
There's also a reference-point argument here, that it's often much easier to know what you're getting and whether the price makes sense when you're buying from someone who actually sets their own prices and can explain them.
Absolutely. It definitively demonstrates a consumer value premium for trust in a business relationship while enriching the local community, and it simultaneously disincentivizes the “enshittification” playbook you have exposed so well.
Like we're all not tired and stressed out enough. Perhaps the worst part is that we are all getting shorter fuses with one another. It's so hard to be patient and empathetic with your children, spouse, colleague, nevermind a complete stranger, if you're constantly on vigilance mode.
This is such a great read! You talked about the psychological risks of market concentration, but monopolies can create very real physical risks too. After Taylor Farms-gate, I tried to find safer alternatives but quickly realized just how concentrated America’s food industry is. When consumers have nowhere else to go, companies have far less incentive to maintain quality (even when the consequences can become genuinely life threatening). It’s maddening.
such a good example - when there's nowhere else to go, companies don't just lose the incentive to compete on price - they lose the incentive to maintain safety, quality, anything.
I went grocery shopping last week and was astounded at the prices. There were no chips, soda or candy on the list. Bread, fruit, meat, yes. Frozen pizza, premade pizza, (under $10, with coupon), and still with coupons, deals, I was over $200. I used roughly $14 in coupons. I know it is only food, there are only two of us, and we are ok. The fruits I get are not ripe, and when put on the kitchen counter to ripen, rot instead. Food simply lacks the quality I grew up with.
As a senior there is the medical system. Good, professional, care is getting harder to find and keep. Then there are the self serving “how did we do?” Surveys. Private equity has hit the medical community hard. Physicians are talked to if they spend too much time with a patient. Average time 9 minutes or less with a patient. This means critical medical information is missed. Which means the care received is half assed because they don’t have the whole story.
If you are considered poor, it seems as though you never break away from true poverty. People working two or three jobs, trying to get through the week or month is the reality. We as a diverse country have some real problems and until they are solved our standards of quality goods; pots, pans, building of homes, education, medical, is going to continue to decline. This decline is also known as AI slop, enshitification. Sorry to be negative.
"So what are you actually supposed to do with any of this?" Write your senators & congressman. Tell them you want to live in age of abundance where you have choices and businesses genuinely compete for your patronage. Where anti-monopoly laws already on the books are actually enforced, and transgressors get jailtime. Where the customer is King (like it was in days of yore, before you were born). There's nothing new in what's going on here, in fact it's very old. It's been fixed before and can be fixed again.
hey Fred: Can I give a recent example where political did work? Just skip if not.
It happens much of the year I live in Mexico. Before the recent election, the victory party promised to lower the price of propane. (usually sold in reusable tanks for cooking and heating water)
About election day, I purchased a tank for about 1200 pesos.
Sometime later, after the new administration came in, they addressed this and I refilled that tank: About 800 pesos.
That is results!
It can be done. However, in USA, they said about the same: The tariffs and war directly lead to higher (not lower) prices.
Yet, in USA, no one seems to care. No one seems to demand accountability. It appears USA will continue with the same political leadership.
Higher prices don't seem to matter when it comes to USA voting.
I was going to mention "Worse On Purpose" and then you namedropped them :) --the piece on the monopolization and enshittification of Pyrex/ Corning etc. "Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose" is long but amazing, a snapshot of how and why the products that once were durable and good quality have been (mostly invisibly) downgraded to concentrate profit for the psychopath class, aka 1% investors and CEOs. Worse On Purpose--and I'm a supporter and believer in author Keyana Sapp's mission--is worth supporting, b/c the guy is committed to independent review w/o ad revenue. As he should be.
Yes!! Keyana Sapp is doing really important work, IMO. Does such a great job of showing how acquisition → cost-cutting → quality degradation works. More people need to read it.
This week in Brooklyn, my cold brew at a coffee shop I had never been to (black without milk or milk alternatives) came to $8.33. I didn't ask the price and I will also never go back.
"I increasingly have no idea how much any of this is supposed to cost."
Bannon's "flood the zone with shit" political philosophy has this very economic component to it as well. It isn't surprising that the new ethos is popping up everywhere all at once. I don't have faith that this will be solved electorally, but I also don't love the alternatives.
100%. When there's enough noise (like pricing tricks, fake reviews, shifting terms, etc) we stop being able to evaluate any individual signal. And at some point the rational response is just to give up trying, which is also its own kind of extraction!
Folks who have tried to get access to public assistance have been going through this forever. It does seem that we run trials on the most vulnerable among us before rolling things out to the general population (cf. ICE tactics and the inevitable leak that will come/is already occurring).
Thank you for putting very eloquent words to what I have been feeling and simmering over. Every place you go, every leisure activity, every service, every household necessity seems to have reached ludicrous levels. I've stopped dry cleaning things, now altering things myself, reusing/upcycling where I can, and using my Buy Nothing group and secondhand stores more. I'll never stop buying things completely, but I am really trying to curb my consumption because the only viable competitors to price-gougers is just to simply drop out of the market.
I strongly support buying as close to nothing as possible!
I was hoping that in the delayed gratification part of this article, the feeling of disenchantment with the thing (the vacation, etc) would come up more. Yes yes, why save for vacation when the hotel costs so much more a year later etc. But also, this feeling of disenchantment IS A CLUE! It’s a signal! Worth pursuing! Namely, we are surplus consumers the same way there is such a thing as surplus labor. Overproduction of goods and services gotta go somewhere, let’s shove it their throats.
The big silver lining of everything being a scam now is that it’s evident that much of it was always a scam. Even if a vacation or a pan was high quality, so what? Is life just about sweating for tokens to use at the company store? We just had more money to throw around for a while. But we don’t really need scarcely any of this shit.
My main budgeting thing, broke as I am, is - will this good or service confer dignity on me? The answer is almost always no.
I think somewhere along the way, the social contract(?) between what you pay and what what you get, ended up breaking. As a fellow Gen Z - albeit I live in London, not NYC - I'm inclined to say 2020 may have been that turning point, but I could easliy be wrong.
Hannah your last point about not asking people to shoulder systemic problems individually is SUCH an important one that needs to be on every piece of writing about, well, anything that is about our society. It’s particularly American too and women get the brunt of it and it drives me nuts.
Thank you! I think one of the most destructive patterns in how we talk about money is the reflexive move toward individual solutions to structural problems. It lets the systems that created the problem off the hook, and it makes people feel like failures for not being able to figure this all out themselves.
Just saw a TikTok of a dude at an employee-less store, self-checkout…. (I think a convenience store at an airport?) Machine asked for a tip. So it’s already here
This is a very informative article & I totally agree with you. I decide how much money I have and what I want to spend it on and that is how I make my decision to buy. If I cant find it at that price I use something else or do without. I am not going to be ripped off or robbed, simple. And if I see that a product has shrunk, that is me I'm done with it. I now make my own, or grow it myself. I am a minimalist and I refuse to enrich corporations. My next comment is that in my opinion capitalism has got to go. It is a flawed ideology. We need the economy to work for us or not at all.
Great piece as always! I have been thinking about this for years since COVID. Yes, around COVID there was geniune shortages but soon after companies recovered, they still ran with it to see how much more consumers are willing to pay for items. Corporations are constantly testing the price ceiling of a product/elasticity. They do this without improving an existing product, and probably while reducing the cost. Airlines is the most ourstanding example of this. The crazy part is... people keep meeting these prices so they are keep pushing it higher and higher. I know some items we have to buy but we can also acknowledge the insanity of social media driven consumerism psychosis. I don't want to sound like a nutjob because I do understand economy but inflation is pretty much driven up by corportae greed and noone is seeing it that way. We act like inflation is just falling from the sky and we just have to accept it beacuse it is the state of things.
We should all be talking about the annoyance economy. It runs on the simple principle that friction is removed for the wealthy and added for everyone else. The more you are willing to pay, the less friction there is, especially once you can hire people to absorb it. Everyone else has to metabolize it on their own, and it's exhausting. That exhaustion is itself a form of extraction, and the $35 tortellini tastes terrible.
100% - i love this. At a certain income level you can literally outsource the cognitive labor of being a consumer, while everyone else just has to absorb it.
When I see a $22 sandwich, I actually consider the entire business and try to calculate their gross and net profit margins, but that’s probably because I’m weird.
You are absolutely correct in your analysis, and I think the 3rd recommended action to leave when you have a viable alternative will make the most significant impact on achieving price/quality balance.
A 4th recommended action I would add is to shop small and patronize local businesses owned by members of your community if you have the means. It may cost 5-10% more in the short term, but the entire community will be better off in the long term.
I really like the small/local business point. It's similar to shopping at more eco-friendly brands, etc. I personally am happy to pay a premium to shop at a local business.
There's also a reference-point argument here, that it's often much easier to know what you're getting and whether the price makes sense when you're buying from someone who actually sets their own prices and can explain them.
Absolutely. It definitively demonstrates a consumer value premium for trust in a business relationship while enriching the local community, and it simultaneously disincentivizes the “enshittification” playbook you have exposed so well.
Like we're all not tired and stressed out enough. Perhaps the worst part is that we are all getting shorter fuses with one another. It's so hard to be patient and empathetic with your children, spouse, colleague, nevermind a complete stranger, if you're constantly on vigilance mode.
truly the underappreciated dimension of all of this. Hypervigilance is exhausting, and exhausted people are worse to each other.
Such a great point! And what else is life for? Happy people are people with good relationships (of all kinds). The relationships are the point.
This is such a great read! You talked about the psychological risks of market concentration, but monopolies can create very real physical risks too. After Taylor Farms-gate, I tried to find safer alternatives but quickly realized just how concentrated America’s food industry is. When consumers have nowhere else to go, companies have far less incentive to maintain quality (even when the consequences can become genuinely life threatening). It’s maddening.
such a good example - when there's nowhere else to go, companies don't just lose the incentive to compete on price - they lose the incentive to maintain safety, quality, anything.
I went grocery shopping last week and was astounded at the prices. There were no chips, soda or candy on the list. Bread, fruit, meat, yes. Frozen pizza, premade pizza, (under $10, with coupon), and still with coupons, deals, I was over $200. I used roughly $14 in coupons. I know it is only food, there are only two of us, and we are ok. The fruits I get are not ripe, and when put on the kitchen counter to ripen, rot instead. Food simply lacks the quality I grew up with.
As a senior there is the medical system. Good, professional, care is getting harder to find and keep. Then there are the self serving “how did we do?” Surveys. Private equity has hit the medical community hard. Physicians are talked to if they spend too much time with a patient. Average time 9 minutes or less with a patient. This means critical medical information is missed. Which means the care received is half assed because they don’t have the whole story.
If you are considered poor, it seems as though you never break away from true poverty. People working two or three jobs, trying to get through the week or month is the reality. We as a diverse country have some real problems and until they are solved our standards of quality goods; pots, pans, building of homes, education, medical, is going to continue to decline. This decline is also known as AI slop, enshitification. Sorry to be negative.
"So what are you actually supposed to do with any of this?" Write your senators & congressman. Tell them you want to live in age of abundance where you have choices and businesses genuinely compete for your patronage. Where anti-monopoly laws already on the books are actually enforced, and transgressors get jailtime. Where the customer is King (like it was in days of yore, before you were born). There's nothing new in what's going on here, in fact it's very old. It's been fixed before and can be fixed again.
hey Fred: Can I give a recent example where political did work? Just skip if not.
It happens much of the year I live in Mexico. Before the recent election, the victory party promised to lower the price of propane. (usually sold in reusable tanks for cooking and heating water)
About election day, I purchased a tank for about 1200 pesos.
Sometime later, after the new administration came in, they addressed this and I refilled that tank: About 800 pesos.
That is results!
It can be done. However, in USA, they said about the same: The tariffs and war directly lead to higher (not lower) prices.
Yet, in USA, no one seems to care. No one seems to demand accountability. It appears USA will continue with the same political leadership.
Higher prices don't seem to matter when it comes to USA voting.
I was going to mention "Worse On Purpose" and then you namedropped them :) --the piece on the monopolization and enshittification of Pyrex/ Corning etc. "Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose" is long but amazing, a snapshot of how and why the products that once were durable and good quality have been (mostly invisibly) downgraded to concentrate profit for the psychopath class, aka 1% investors and CEOs. Worse On Purpose--and I'm a supporter and believer in author Keyana Sapp's mission--is worth supporting, b/c the guy is committed to independent review w/o ad revenue. As he should be.
Yes!! Keyana Sapp is doing really important work, IMO. Does such a great job of showing how acquisition → cost-cutting → quality degradation works. More people need to read it.
This week in Brooklyn, my cold brew at a coffee shop I had never been to (black without milk or milk alternatives) came to $8.33. I didn't ask the price and I will also never go back.
"I increasingly have no idea how much any of this is supposed to cost."
Bannon's "flood the zone with shit" political philosophy has this very economic component to it as well. It isn't surprising that the new ethos is popping up everywhere all at once. I don't have faith that this will be solved electorally, but I also don't love the alternatives.
100%. When there's enough noise (like pricing tricks, fake reviews, shifting terms, etc) we stop being able to evaluate any individual signal. And at some point the rational response is just to give up trying, which is also its own kind of extraction!
Folks who have tried to get access to public assistance have been going through this forever. It does seem that we run trials on the most vulnerable among us before rolling things out to the general population (cf. ICE tactics and the inevitable leak that will come/is already occurring).
Thank you for putting very eloquent words to what I have been feeling and simmering over. Every place you go, every leisure activity, every service, every household necessity seems to have reached ludicrous levels. I've stopped dry cleaning things, now altering things myself, reusing/upcycling where I can, and using my Buy Nothing group and secondhand stores more. I'll never stop buying things completely, but I am really trying to curb my consumption because the only viable competitors to price-gougers is just to simply drop out of the market.
I strongly support buying as close to nothing as possible!
I was hoping that in the delayed gratification part of this article, the feeling of disenchantment with the thing (the vacation, etc) would come up more. Yes yes, why save for vacation when the hotel costs so much more a year later etc. But also, this feeling of disenchantment IS A CLUE! It’s a signal! Worth pursuing! Namely, we are surplus consumers the same way there is such a thing as surplus labor. Overproduction of goods and services gotta go somewhere, let’s shove it their throats.
The big silver lining of everything being a scam now is that it’s evident that much of it was always a scam. Even if a vacation or a pan was high quality, so what? Is life just about sweating for tokens to use at the company store? We just had more money to throw around for a while. But we don’t really need scarcely any of this shit.
My main budgeting thing, broke as I am, is - will this good or service confer dignity on me? The answer is almost always no.
Thank you for this—upsetting and enraging but also a relief to see the experience(s) delineated and explained so clearly.
Great article, and well researched!
I think somewhere along the way, the social contract(?) between what you pay and what what you get, ended up breaking. As a fellow Gen Z - albeit I live in London, not NYC - I'm inclined to say 2020 may have been that turning point, but I could easliy be wrong.
Hannah your last point about not asking people to shoulder systemic problems individually is SUCH an important one that needs to be on every piece of writing about, well, anything that is about our society. It’s particularly American too and women get the brunt of it and it drives me nuts.
Thank you! I think one of the most destructive patterns in how we talk about money is the reflexive move toward individual solutions to structural problems. It lets the systems that created the problem off the hook, and it makes people feel like failures for not being able to figure this all out themselves.
adding one more layer: tipping culture!
so not only did the most basic item (true cost minimal) just sell for $20. I'm also supposed to tip for the labor?
I'm waiting for self checkouts to start asking for a tip.
then I'm waiting for them to stop asking and automatically add it unless you change it to zero.
then I'm waiting for them to stop allowing you to opt out.
Just saw a TikTok of a dude at an employee-less store, self-checkout…. (I think a convenience store at an airport?) Machine asked for a tip. So it’s already here
you know it!
AI glasses - oh you want to use a feature on them ? subscription
the future is here: regular humans (99.999 % of people) are just cash cattle for politicians and the top ooo1%
starter house : 1mil with 100year mortgage,and $100 sandwiches will be a thing.
This is a very informative article & I totally agree with you. I decide how much money I have and what I want to spend it on and that is how I make my decision to buy. If I cant find it at that price I use something else or do without. I am not going to be ripped off or robbed, simple. And if I see that a product has shrunk, that is me I'm done with it. I now make my own, or grow it myself. I am a minimalist and I refuse to enrich corporations. My next comment is that in my opinion capitalism has got to go. It is a flawed ideology. We need the economy to work for us or not at all.
Great piece as always! I have been thinking about this for years since COVID. Yes, around COVID there was geniune shortages but soon after companies recovered, they still ran with it to see how much more consumers are willing to pay for items. Corporations are constantly testing the price ceiling of a product/elasticity. They do this without improving an existing product, and probably while reducing the cost. Airlines is the most ourstanding example of this. The crazy part is... people keep meeting these prices so they are keep pushing it higher and higher. I know some items we have to buy but we can also acknowledge the insanity of social media driven consumerism psychosis. I don't want to sound like a nutjob because I do understand economy but inflation is pretty much driven up by corportae greed and noone is seeing it that way. We act like inflation is just falling from the sky and we just have to accept it beacuse it is the state of things.