The enshittification of boomer things

[Unfathomed]

Keep seething, Indians will take over the world and genocide your worthless race and there's nothing you can do about it.

That's amusing. This is the deep thoughts forum, but your thoughts are shallow puddles. No substance remains when I step in them.

 

[Betonhaus]

Keep seething, Indians will take over the world and genocide your worthless race and there's nothing you can do about it.

A demoralized white guy half-assing things is still more productive then ten jeets working together. Once the stock market starts to correct natural selection will do it's thing.

 

[The Lawgiver]

Going to stores is an unpleasant experience due to all the third worlders that shouldn't be here.

For me it's more unpleasant because they never stock anything you actually fucking want and this extends to Internet shit now with the rise of increasingly aggressive and retarded scalpers with seemingly bottomless pockets. And nobody fucking hires for shit so like what's the fucking point? ALREADY BEAT TO IT I KNOW

Oh but there is ONE good reason to go to stores and it's some shit the online places refuse to stock properly for reasonable rices. see: my autistic ass hunting down reissues of hotwheels cars from 20 years ago because it's like the one thing I can afford right now and it's cool. Still have not located the blue bitch people want 19 dollars with 9 dollar shipping on ebay yet though and it's pissing me the fuck off since the things apparently came out last year.

I walk past a table of discounted sweaters and think "Oh that one is nice"; I can try it and buy it and know it fits in 10 minutes. Online, you order 3 items in 2 sizes each and don't get charged until you send back the ones you don't want. Great!.. Except you need to pick up the package, try them, rebag them, do a bunch of shit in the app and send it off again. And they still charge you for the transport.

This also. Jesus fucking christ I just got some fucking walmart brand rubber work boots for a job I gotta do for family at the end of the week and the sizing on the things was so fucking schizophrenic I had to eventually settle on one that was too loose but not too loose instead of too tight and too long or too loose but right length. Sizings getting weirder for both generic and brand name stuff the last few years somehow.

At this point the main reason to walk around physical places is the experience of walking and not sitting on your fucking ass all day.

You're a bored consumer who misses the old ways of consuming things. How unique, how deep that is. You're like the cat in your profile photo. You have the milk on the table, but you won't lap it up because you want it in your bowl.
Fix your diet. Stop drinking milk and don't eat from troughs. Hunt your food instead. Create your meals. That means leaving Nintendo Power in the treefort you had in the 80s, and replacing it with useful books and writing.

It breaks my heart that people feel nostalgia for their old troughs.

Nyeh, what's the problem with MILK huh? You lactose intolerant? Also why the fuck would you leave a magazine in a treehouse it's gonna get moldy there!
Anyways if we're gonna do a treefort analogy here wouldn't the best outcome be to maintain the treefort for future generations instead of leaving everything to rot further?

Keep seething, Indians will take over the world and genocide your worthless race and there's nothing you can do about it.

Only indians I'd be fine with taking over the world would be ones like the chill normal people ones and not the street shitter kind they're mass importing for cheap labor. They won't though because they're becomign a rare breed int he US and the cheap labor ones aside from management positions won't really be able to get in charge of the world I don't think. They're gonna implode eventually with the path they take.

 

[nycifer]

Going to stores is an unpleasant experience due to all the third worlders that shouldn't be here.

You're not wrong at all here. Everytime I go to work or even bother shopping where I work, there is a large majority of foreign babblers than actual english speaking people. It's jarring but at the same time, aggravating.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

all three of these categories of business have a huge advantage tailoring their business model to the local area but none of them ever do

everybody agrees that if local cinema was a place where they can watch old movies with their friends then they would go to the theaters. people would read the local newspaper if it wasn't just a syndication of USA Today. People would watch the news if it actually talked about local issues or had a local style instead of a bunch of plastic-surgery obsessed bozos trying to pretend they live in los angeles and do ACTION NEWS! People would go to brick and mortar stores if they actually had what they needed in stock instead of a bunch of empty shelves and tv screens.

i think this is the boomer problem people speak of - why the fuck are all of these things the exact same? that's why nobody engages with them. We all know the culture is different in Missouri and New York so why is the tapestry of all of this stuff designed to convince you that it is?

Exactly, my thesis is that these things aren't dying because they're inherently outdated, it's because they've made bad decisions that people aren't interested in. I'm sure there's at least one analyst who genuinely thinks that multiplayer video games are falling out of fashion because no one is investing time and money into the latest overhyped diversity-quota hero extraction shooter.

And nowadays it is hard to know if a store sells quality goods. Those traditional mid range retailers used to always sell you decent quality for a decent price. But a few times I got a alibaba flipped product (or at least, the quality was similarly poor). If an electric kettle from my local retailer is just as likely to light my house on fire as one from alibaba, but costs 5x as much, I'll take the alibaba one. Which is a shame, I don't want a 300 euro goldplated premium kettle, and I also don't want a 5 euro fire hazard, but the 30 euro "works but doesn't try to kill you" option is gone.
Worst part is that online shopping is ruined too. Now you get flooded by dropshippers trying to earn "passive income" flipping temu shit.

I've heard this is why a lot of direct-to-consumer retailers are popping up because they have knowledge of their product, as a lot of stores are getting hit with problems where an item, even things like yarn, are "returned" but are actually counterfeit.

You're not wrong at all here. Everytime I go to work or even bother shopping where I work, there is a large majority of foreign babblers than actual english speaking people. It's jarring but at the same time, aggravating.

There are some things that we can't really fix without major changes in society and the economy and probably never re-achieve what we once had. At the same time, there's an obvious market for this sort of thing and clearly underutilized. Could there be multiple new department stores that provide merchandise people want at a price they like in a clean, well-maintained store? Probably not. Is there a market for one? Yes. Unlike some posters in this thread, I'd rather see the world and society heal rather than people try to retreat from it.

 

[big pauper]

Exactly, my thesis is that these things aren't dying because they're inherently outdated, it's because they've made bad decisions that people aren't interested in. I'm sure there's at least one analyst who genuinely thinks that multiplayer video games are falling out of fashion because no one is investing time and money into the latest overhyped diversity-quota hero extraction shooter.

they're hotellings' lawing things that effectively don't have a real estate cost in the weirdest fucking way. when you have to buy a physical location in some fucked up game theory way it actually makes sense to just build your store right next to your competition because then you're leveling the playing field. but with something like Online Multiplayer Video Games there is no playing field to be leveled you do not have environmental factor to hedge your bets on when appealing to consumers they have full control in this scenario.

now that these things are failing so badly they can't even get a thousand people to play them at the same time, then why in the fuck do they keep trying to make the exact same kind of games over and over again? you would think one of them would go "shit why don't we try and reboot that hovercraft racing game trend from 15 years ago" or "uhh why dont we remaster that old atari game that sucked" because at some point someone's gotta just do the napkin math that literally anything else is lower risk.

 

[Thiletonomics]

I'm not sure how boomer of an interest cars are today, but those have gone down the toilet in recent years too. Engines are being more and more homogenized (usually 2.0T engine because of fuel emission limits and displacement taxes), transmissions are becoming more shit also in the name of fuel economy (i.e. CVTs and other problematic automatic transmissions), interiors are becoming more like computers than cars, the crossover boom is making sedans more of a dying breed, and the Chinese are trying their hardest to dump their shitty ass EVs to countries that don't tariff them to oblivion.

Casinos have also gone down the drain, as the ones in Vegas continue to tack on more and more fees, which makes them even less affordable. Also, there are a lot more ways to gamble that don't require you to fly out to the Strip, i.e. Native American-ran casinos in various states, online gambling that is being shoved more and more in your face in sports (of both the stick & ball and electronic varieties), and video games have turned into gambling outlets with things like DOTA 2/CS2 skin crates, Gacha games as a whole, and card game modes in Sports Games like EA Sports Ultimate Team, MLB The Show's Diamond Dynasty, and NBA2K's MyTeam and WWE2K's MyFaction.

 

[Waffle Iron]

now that these things are failing so badly they can't even get a thousand people to play them at the same time, then why in the fuck do they keep trying to make the exact same kind of games over and over again? you would think one of them would go "shit why don't we try and reboot that hovercraft racing game trend from 15 years ago" or "uhh why dont we remaster that old atari game that sucked" because at some point someone's gotta just do the napkin math that literally anything else is lower risk.

To be fair, sometimes copycats do managed to capture an audience. When fortnite and player unknown battlegrounds were huge, apex legends came in. It felt like a desperation move, EA telling respawn to make one of those darn battle royale FPS since titanfall wasnt doing well. In the end AL did well and even outperformed PUBG. They even manage to make money selling skins even though their characters are fugly and diverse.

Riot's CS clone did well. Smite and paladins did pretty well for a while even though MOBAs were a hard genre to break into and OW clones were also tough to launch.

I think high profile failures are obvious. A few years after WOW you had a ton of copycat MMOs with the same leveling experience and class design, all given lavish budgets. It's obvious when KOTOR copy-pasted half its abilities from WOW and quest design from WOW. That EA gave their hit RPG studio the starwars licence and told them to give EA a WOW.

 

[big pauper]

To be fair, sometimes copycats do managed to capture an audience. When fortnite and player unknown battlegrounds were huge, apex legends came in. It felt like a desperation move, EA telling respawn to make one of those darn battle royale FPS since titanfall wasnt doing well. In the end AL did well and even outperformed PUBG. They even manage to make money selling skins even though their characters are fugly and diverse.

Riot's CS clone did well. Smite and paladins did pretty well for a while even though MOBAs were a hard genre to break into and OW clones were also tough to launch.

I think high profile failures are obvious. A few years after WOW you had a ton of copycat MMOs with the same leveling experience and class design, all given lavish budgets. It's obvious when KOTOR copy-pasted half its abilities from WOW and quest design from WOW. That EA gave their hit RPG studio the starwars licence and told them to give EA a WOW.

During the WoW craze was when the pie kept growing every quarter so every company legitimately did the math and had accountants tell them that they had a mathmatical chance of beating WoW's subscription numbers. apex legends came out six years ago at the height of the battle royale craze when it was pretty fucking obvious that the crown was being contested because pubg was made by chinks and they kept dropping the ball. fortnite was never trying to contest the crown and just became second fiddle by default.

everybody had their own approach to the battle royale genre trying to be the next big thing. right now everybody is desperate for a new thing and they're just making overwatch over and over again

 

[Waffle Iron]

During the WoW craze was when the pie kept growing every quarter so every company legitimately did the math and had accountants tell them that they had a mathmatical chance of beating WoW's subscription numbers.

Yes, and now they're doing the same thing with other genres.

apex legends came out six years ago at the height of the battle royale craze when it was pretty fucking obvious that the crown was being contested because pubg was made by chinks and they kept dropping the ball. fortnite was never trying to contest the crown and just became second fiddle by default.

PUBG only started fucking up bad after apex legends was already out, and apex was already in production when PUBG was too new to get screwed up. Fortnite definitely tried to contest. It was quickly turned from a PVE zombie game to a PVP battle royale (or more precisely, they created a second gameplay mode). It is also extremely successful and funded the epic game store.

everybody had their own approach to the battle royale genre trying to be the next big thing. right now everybody is desperate for a new thing and they're just making overwatch over and over again

The other overwatch clones also all try out new things.

You see the same dynamic in the past as you see now. Something becomes unexpectedly big, and every big publisher tells one of their studios to try and make a rival. Maybe it fails, maybe it can get 20% of the population, maybe it can usurp the throne.

 

[Stella d'Oro]

I've heard this is why a lot of direct-to-consumer retailers are popping up because they have knowledge of their product, as a lot of stores are getting hit with problems where an item, even things like yarn, are "returned" but are actually counterfeit.

The higher end brands sell customer experience as much as the product and DtC model gives the brand complete control of that experience. A lot of higher end brands are shifting to either separate "boutique" sections within department stores with their own staff or to complete standalone stores. They have no way of controlling the customer experience when their product is sitting on a shelf comingled with everyone else's and relying on an untrained, uninterested cashier. Someone spending thousands on a purse, pair of shoes, piece of jewelry, a watch expect to be treated a certain way and want the buying experience to be something special.

That kind of segues into another point about the state of the economy post-pandemic. The retailers that have been failing have been the traditionally middle class while the low end and high end are both thriving. The average middle class family is being squeezed from every direction and just doesn't have the same amount of discretionary income anymore and have been pushed to the lower end retailers. The person who once shopped at Sears and occasionally splurged on a nice dress from the Macy's clearance rack is now shopping at Wal-Mart while those in the upper class have seen their wealth skyrocket.

 

[big pauper]

The person who once shopped at Sears and occasionally splurged on a nice dress from the Macy's clearance rack is now shopping at Wal-Mart while those in the upper class have seen their wealth skyrocket.

this was the consequence of the 2008 financial collapse, which is why those companies went bankrupt.

what's happened post-pandemic is the people who used to shop at Target got squeezed into shopping at wal-mart which is why they had to up their ante from stewie griffin graphic t-shirts to vaguely wearable commodity fashion like flannel and hawaiian shirts. It's also why old man wrangler jeans came into style for women

 

[Buttigieg2020]

it's not like the entire economy was structured as a ponzi scheme to benefit the cannibal elite. It's like a cycle dude, just don't ask me to find a single example before 1900.

It’s just serfdom again lmao, that’s most of history.


Harley Davidson making shit Chinese bikes and relying on boomer nostalgia fucked them, now that their customer base is too old to ride them.

 

[Black Man Underwear]

It’s just serfdom again lmao, that’s most of history.

Serfdom was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude with similarities to and differences from slavery. It developed during late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in Europe and lasted in some countries until the mid-19th century<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom#cite_note-urlVilleins_in_the_Middle_Ages_|_Middle_Ages-1"><span>[</span>1<span>]</span></a> and became the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism and similar systems.

Techno-enslavement of entire continents masquerading as free choice for the benefit of some 1,000 literal cannibal pedophiles is quite different than normalized indentured servitude of tenant farmers between 900 and 1400 AD.

Certainly not most of history. This hardly parallels anything, the tools and systems we have today allow the people who use them to make you think you are free, when you actually have fewer rights and abilities than slaves in Libya.

At least a slave knows who his master is. Eventually in this system we'll just be slaughtered like a pigs, no explanation and no justification. Nobility viewed serfs as human beings, although used for manual labor. The Epstein adjacents literally view you as less than a cow.

 

[Do Not Touch Me Pls]

Techno-enslavement of entire continents masquerading as free choice for the benefit of some 1,000 literal cannibal pedophiles is quite different than normalized indentured servitude of tenant farmers between 900 and 1400 AD.

Certainly not most of history. This hardly parallels anything, the tools and systems we have today allow the people who use them to make you think you are free, when you actually have fewer rights and abilities than slaves in Libya.

At least a slave knows who his master is. Eventually in this system we'll just be slaughtered like a pigs, no explanation and no justification. Nobility viewed serfs as human beings, although used for manual labor. The Epstein adjacents literally view you as less than a cow.

The part where "the middle ages is better than the late modern era with nobility having better respect towards humanity" is just not true. I don't know how are people romanticizing the Middle Ages but it must be all the hollywood propaganda and Christian apologists who are willing to justify and romanticize mass rape-murder. If we were to treat the Medieval Era dead seriously it would be one of the worst nightmares in human history on par the likes of Pol Pot. The past isn't any different from the present, the more things change the more they stay the same.

Long story short if you think the late modern era is hell then you have never seen true total death before.

But otherwise yeah, this is not the great awakening, this is the great cooking alive. Whatever comes next will be the most brutal era in human history period, so brutal and evil that humanity might as well as forget being anything but slaves of one of the many Islamic caliphates and anarcho-warlords when the pedo-billionaires are done raping the entire world without lube. The techno feudalism alone will be viler than any other communist revolution that happened on the face of the earth, but as horrible and brutal as it is, is far from the end and never will be.

And the beginning of the end is just one democrat president and one ill-managed civil unrest away.

 

[AirMail]

What I think is - we should have rejected communism. We partially rejected it, but also unfortunately we partially accepted it. We've got all sorts of taxes and schemes to give people free stuff. Free food, free houses, free medical treatment.

Since we partially accepted communism, we partially get the same collapse you always see with communism. We're in a super slow motion communist collapse.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

The higher end brands sell customer experience as much as the product

That's what made brick-and-mortar retail a thing in the first place. Places like Sears and Montgomery Ward built stores not just because it was a convenience to get your product NOW instead of waiting a few weeks, it was the whole experience with a cast of hundreds to help you find something, services, and restaurants. "The customer is always right" wasn't designed as a way to bully poorly-paid retail employees into submission, it was a promise that the higher-end department stores held (and paid quite well) that gave the consumer the benefit of the doubt. (It also worked in a higher-trust society, it doesn't work when half your "customers" are there to scam you in some way).

this was the consequence of the 2008 financial collapse, which is why those companies went bankrupt.

what's happened post-pandemic is the people who used to shop at Target got squeezed into shopping at wal-mart which is why they had to up their ante from stewie griffin graphic t-shirts to vaguely wearable commodity fashion like flannel and hawaiian shirts. It's also why old man wrangler jeans came into style for women

Target's woes are partially self-inflicted, and this was going on before 2020 (DEI shit was part of it, but not all of it). It doesn't have to be this way, though. Reading on a historic perspective, innovation and improvement comes from good economic times, but in downturns, that's when the gimmicks are pulled out, where you want to sell papers or otherwise get people through the door.

During the WoW craze was when the pie kept growing every quarter so every company legitimately did the math and had accountants tell them that they had a mathmatical chance of beating WoW's subscription numbers. apex legends came out six years ago at the height of the battle royale craze when it was pretty fucking obvious that the crown was being contested because pubg was made by chinks and they kept dropping the ball. fortnite was never trying to contest the crown and just became second fiddle by default.

everybody had their own approach to the battle royale genre trying to be the next big thing. right now everybody is desperate for a new thing and they're just making overwatch over and over again

World of Warcraft's big break was getting released right as broadband Internet was starting to become more and more common, but the success of the game was something that never really been seen before. (In 2005, WoW hit 1M subscribers, while Eve Online, released just a year before WoW, was around a tenth of that) and the market was growing.

Harley Davidson making shit Chinese bikes and relying on boomer nostalgia fucked them, now that their customer base is too old to ride them.

Harley Davidson is a bit of a unique case in that it didn't self-immolate like a bunch of other institutions (at least not the same way), it's by sticking too closely to their aging boomer demographic. Cheap Chinese motorcycles probably sealed their fate but they were doomed either way. But I'm not talking about individual brands, I'm talking whole institutions that are not only doing their aging base a disservice by actively getting worse, but refusing to even offer a similar experience to a new generation.

 

[Thiletonomics]

World of Warcraft's big break was getting released right as broadband Internet was starting to become more and more common, but the success of the game was something that never really been seen before. (In 2005, WoW hit 1M subscribers, while Eve Online, released just a year before WoW, was around a tenth of that) and the market was growing.

World of Warcraft also was a lot more forgiving of a game, in comparison to other MMOs at the time like EverQuest, which had much more severe penalties for dying, i.e. losing your gear and needing to get back to your corpse to recover it.