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Capitalism went from allowing competition to drive down prices to companies incrementally increasing prices that everyone follows and repeats.
I can recall this very thing "working well" with retail rewards systems. Best buy would revamp their rewards program actually making benefits worse and raising more spending to hit different tiers, and other similar retailers followed. The "Geek squad" services increased, so did competitors to remain competitive while increasing profits.
Automotive repair shop's cost of hourly labor goes up while the actual mechanics hardly see an increase in pay.
Slowly but surely things have gone up in price while what you're spending money on buys you less. Physical media that you OWN never "expires" but streaming services and buying digital copies in services like Apple TV lose the rights. Games disappear because severs shut down or rights expire.
YOU WILL OWN NOTHING AND BE HAPPY! and the way big tech is treated, well, if buying isn't owning, than piracy isn't stealing.
That was intentional...
Large corporations don't undercut small businesses because vertical integration allows them to take smaller profit shares
They intentionally lose money in some markets so that small businesses get run out of business.
Then, after the small businesses are gone, they raise prices higher than the small businesses were to begin with.
It was a problem when large corps "drove down prices", because that was them running everyone else out of the marketplace.
It's why I hate the term "enshittification", it starts identifying the problem after it's too late to fix. That's why companies are fine doing it, but the time shit gets worse, there's no other alternative.
We don't roll back to before it got shitty, we need to roll back to "when there was competition".
Good point! Well explained!
Amazon is the end result...
Amazon "guarentees" the lowest prices, and that's true.
If a product is sold on Amazon, that's the lowest price.online. The manufacturer can't even sell it for lower on their own website.
Because Amazon uses AI scrapers to constantly check, if it detects a lower price, it will "you may be overpaying for this item" in big red letters next to it, or even removing the buttons that let someone buy it.
So before they can lower the price anywhere, they have to lower it on Amazon. Because they need the volume that comes with Amazon sales.
Amazon's "lowest price guarantee" just ends up meaning they keep people from getting it cheaper anywhere else. But for an individual, each individual purchase is a better deal at Amazon.
To win we need a drastic boycott where everyone just toughs it out and pays a little more for slower shipping to buy direct again. The manufacturers will make more per unit, and eventually will be able to stop playing Amazon's game.
And that would leave Amazon with just Temu slop, and actually financially impact Bezos.
All we gotta do is get people to think big picture, we could bankrupt Bezos in less than a year.
Piracy literally isn't stealing, the idea that it is is 100% propaganda.
Piracy is copying things that are copyrighted. And is a copyright infringement. It is not theft or stealing.
With stealing the original owner loses what he had when the thief steals it.
With copying the owner obviously still has ownership and possession of what was copied.
Unchecked capitalism on the other hand is very much stealing, where the rich take from the poor. So the rich have more and the poor have less.
Which is why capitalism needs to be heavily regulated, exactly contrary to widely spread propaganda in USA about deregulation being better for all, when in reality it only benefit the rich.
Thanks! And I've seen a lot of people shit on the modern copyright system as it is, because you're essentially paywalling for no real reason. I forget how it was explained, but another comment a few weeks back made better sense than I can recall here.
It's why I've switched to a lot of FOSS apps. Contributions to community driven apps make loads of improvements, and if there needs to be different solutions or goals, they can be forked off to meet different needs. It helps keep applications lightweight vs cumbersome and heavy trying to be a sloppy Swiss army knife.
Literally why the phrase “late stage capitalism” exists.