Ask Lemmy

The need to constantly show growth makes me wonder if it's worth doing crazy stuff that tanks the business just to show growth by getting it out of the ditch back to where it was before.

Book stores come to mind. Barnes and Noble killed local book stores and then Amazon killed Barnes and Noble which left an opening for local independent book stores to come back

Coffee perhaps. I think previous generations were more apt to just get a tub of Folgers or Maxwell House and not care too much about what they were drinking. Then third wave coffee shops started emphasizing quality, process, and flavor nuances. These days, you can find specialty coffee in most areas or get high-quality beans delivered and brew it yourself.

academic publishing. It used to be monopolized by a couple publishing company with unreasonably high fee for access on both the side of researcher and reader.

Now, through hard works of the academics and funding from the public, now many publishing company are non-profit governed by working academics. And in many fields, open access has become the default.

Beer?

In the beginning was European beer, and it was good. They created the American brewing industry and it was ok. Then they said “let there be swill” and that’s all we knew. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep.

Then Jimmy Carter said, "Let us make breweries in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the drinkers in the sea and the imbibers in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild party animals, and over all the pedestrians that move along the ground. And there was beer

Jimmy Carter saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

Edit: Jimmy Carter was the US President who signed into law deregulating beer. Since then we were legally able to start brewing our own, and it jumped-started the rise of craft brews here

I'd say American car companies. Due to market consolidation and car brands being a symbol of national pride, they were able to enshitify in the 1970's and 80's, producing low-quality expensive cars. Competition from Japan in the late 80's and 90's forced them to improve. American cars still trail behind Japanese cars in quality, but they've gotten much better.

Free and fair competition is essential to any economy. The gutting of antitrust laws in the USA is partly to blame for whatever you call this system we have now (I can't confidently say it's capitalism anymore).

Very briefly, after the CEO of United Health was killed, insurance companies were accepting claims they otherwise would have rejected.

Video games

Had a huge crash around the Atari era due to an overwhelming amount of shovelware being published. Games were also extremely expensive then

Nintendo famously reversed this crisis with the introduction of the NES and their “Nintendo seal of quality”. Consumers were able to access a curated collection of quality games, and it really turned things around and basically launched the modern gaming industry

In some ways shrinkflation is "cyclical" in that inflation rises costs, companies try to cheat consumers by shrinking products, but wages go up and "premium" products launch that are a decent quantity again. Those do well, but then inflation hits again, they shittify and shrinkflation happens again.

The long standing "big" brands never recover, but new stuff does come along. Good example is the "premium" chocolate bars that come along, their selling point being they had more cocoa in them. The established mass market brands used to have cocoa in them, but reduced the proportion to save costs. Now some of those "premium" brands have reduced the cocoa content and new even more expensive chocolate brands are available.

I got curious and did a bit of searching since I couldn't really think of anything. Apparently Fender (guitars) was originally amazing, was sold to another company and really degraded in overall quality, and then was purchased back by some of its engineers and returned to a better quality. Pretty nice to see that people who were actually passionate about something regaining control and saving something they loved.

https://www.soundunlimited.co.uk/blogs/articles/fender_timeline

Bowling Alleys, at least some of the ones I've seen lately. There was a period in the late 00s where bowling alleys thought they were the shit and started charging upwards of $20/player/lane, plus $30+ dollar pizzas. Not to mention the arcade jumping from quarters to dollar-credits.

The last couple I've found have all but dropped that, basically back down to the $15/lane/2 hour model with however many players and complimentary shoe rental. One even had $5 personal pizzas (that yes were just Totinos or similar heated up, but hey it's better than $30 for a red baron).

I guess the ones that survived covid realized no one was willing to spend a nice dinner's worth of cash on a night at what should be the second cheapest type of third space available to people.

Apple products. They were considered junk until Jobs came back and revived their style. They are currently in the round 2 of the enshitification process.

Cash. Currency exchange. Used to be a tourist trap, intransparent and bad rates, commission on top; take only mint banknotes. Now often we see: No commission, rates with low spread (same as the best bank rates available to consumers). Takes bank notes and coins at no surcharge, no discussion.

This is for countries where cash is still king and practically required. It's competition at work; there are multiple local shops and they advertise their rates publicly. With internet in everyone's pocket, there's little room for cheating. Just enough spread for this to be a profitable business without robbing the customer.

Compare to ATM operators, which are usually a oligopoly charging growing fees to foreigners. Because they can.