Joke's on them, I ate them all and now my tummy hurts
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2025
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AssholeDesign
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This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.
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I really don't get the point of these stunts. All they do is erode consumer trust and give negative reputation to brands as stingy assholes. I got ripped off a couple of times in that way and guess what? Now I don't buy their products. They have lost me as a customer and I hope it was worth saving a fraction of a cent per packaging.
It's consultants. Consultants that advise both the investors and the corporations.
It's why they cut office snacks. It's why we have return to office. It's why they keep doing waves of layoffs. It's why everything must be a subscription.
The consultants tell the investors shrinkflation is so hot right now. They tell the companies to do shrinkflation. If they don't, the board gets upset you're not listening to the expensive consultants. If you do, the stock price jumps, even though you just lost customers, and you get to blame the consultants if it doesn't work
It's a very stupid system, McKinsey is probably the worst offender if you want to do some further reading
The business of deferred responsibility (coroporate sin eaters) is a big one.
Not just deferred but diluted. No single person in the company is responsible for the orphan crushing machine, it’s just the consequence of hundreds of small, logical decisions made at by dozens of people at all layers in the hierarchy.
While this is absolutely also true, I'm talking about the people who openly advocate for orphan crushing for the sake of orphan crushing
These days companies don't care because a small handful of conglomerates own everything and don't have much in the way of actual competitors to lose business to.